One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."

Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)

Computer Science is probably the only major where if you suck at it and end up dropping out, you're more likely to be a leader than someone who is good at it and sticks with it.

There were roughly 200 people in my freshman class majoring in CS, by my sophomore year that number had dropped to about 120. A lot of people dropped out because it was too damn difficult for them, and they switched to less technical majors like "Business Information Technology" or "Management Information Systems." Almost without exception, the people who dropped out are now managing teams of developers, they actually have programmers reporting to them. Seriously, WTF?

This isn't even the worst of it, there are people who majored in art history who are now "product managers," who take the word "manager" in their job title literally, they think they're above developers. Some of them will even profess with no small amount of pride that they "know nothing about technology." You can hear the pride in their voice when they say it, as if they're saying "I'm a lot of things, but at least I'm not a geek." Is there any other field of study where people boast with such pride that they know nothing about it? I mean, very few people will say "I know nothing about history" or "I know nothing about literature", and if they do say it, they'll say it with a bit of humility. When it comes to Computer Science though, knowing nothing about it is almost a badge of honor.

Rant the f**k over.

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

Product sending an email: Can I confirm feature A is all set for its release on April 30th?

Me: ... what? no that feature is going out with Feature B, that was pushed back to June because of the server issue.

Product: No, the release plan document says April 30th for this.

Me: ... theres 6 copies of this doc now. Someone is after deleting my comments saying "releasing with Feature B". Oh look heres a link to another doc that says this. See Feb14th "Will go out with Feature B". This is because they are touching the same code, we can't separate them now without re-writing it.

*Me to myself*: Ha product are going to hate this, their shitty processes have finally caught up with them.

*next day*

Other manager: So heres my plan for the app release x, y, z.

*Me to myself*: ... his plan? this is my app, I mange this. What the hell is this?

*reads email thread*

*Me to myself*: ... oh so product really didn't like my reply, took me off the thread, sent a response to all the other managers asking for alternatives, CC'ing upper management. The same upper management I had a private conversation with yesterday about how shit our product team are.

*cracks knuckles*

I'm going to enjoy writing this reply.

Finally decided to quit from my current job. Fuck it. They still don't understand that an estimate is an approximation. They still don't understand that I have to fix all the shit made by all the contractors they hire and pay much more than me to implement solutions that work only until they leave the building, something that many barely understand but pretend to be experts in. I quit because of the managers that have no clue about what's happening although I stress them to make changes.

Should I care less about the product an just ship shit? Should I just do my tasks first and stop really helping others but pretend to do so?

Fuck it. I've tried to get it right they want it wrong but in a nice box. I'm an engineer not a fucking magician.

Man, we have a snake in our company.

This snake is responsible for terrible code. They oversee a offshore team, but hold them to no coding practices. They don't do code reviews or checks. They let them be lazy and get away with sloppy work every time.

And if you critize their team - they will defend them and get angry at you. You can't adress the problem because said snake is always around. He's in a senior position for giving our company cheap workers, doing years of damage to our product while the non-code savvy managers remain blissfully unaware of their product being ruined in the background.

This snake is the senior product office. He has a share in the company now. He is from the overshore team's country. That team now has their claws so dug into our companies roots and are just pumping lsd's into it constantly. Feels good untill you die from an overdose.

Here I am, the new junior software developer, trying to tear out the claws that have sunk into these roots. Im up against the snake. The snake hates me. I hate the snake. I am trying to open the eyes of the managers. They hate that. They want to silence me so I don't expose the awful, unprofessional level of work they do.

Well, that's too bad. I won't back down from this, snake.

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

Manager: Why are we missing our deadlines?

Me: Cause we don't own any of the codebase that we work on and have to literally beg to other team for code reviews and deployments, for which it takes long mail chains and meetings. An even before that we(devs) have to explain to them what/why are we doing things, because our Product managers are a bunch of NoGood AHoles. And after all that we finally do some development, in whatever measly time we have left.

Manager: I know all that, tell me why are we missing our deadlines?

ALRIGHT

WHAT FUCKING DUMBASS AT APPLE DECIDED THAT YOUR AIRPODS SHOULD PAIR WITH YOUR

CLOSED

FUCKING

MACBOOK

INSTEAD OF YOUR ACTIVELY SEARCHING IPHONE

PRODUCT MANAGERS ARE SHIT

DEVELOPERS ARE SHIT

THE WORST IS KNOWING THEY ALL EARN EASILY 6 FIGURES

AND ARE ABSOLUTE GARBAGE AT EVERYTHING

Yesterday I had my performance review discussion with my manager after about 6 months into the job, which is my first dev job. Before this, I had spent about 2 years in a support role after graduation, but always yearned to build something cool and be a full time developer. Hence I had made the lunge in spite of a pay cut into a development role.

For the past 6 months I was asked to develop a bunch of features on top of legacy code which is ~15 years old. I did my best and brought in the best ideas and practices onto the table and delivered on time. The features turned out great. I enjoyed working with the team and the team loved me back!

But at the back of my mind, I was hoping that I would get to work on something new and relevant. To quench this thirst, I used to spend my personal time on side projects.

The managers and the leads who have been observing me all along, told me yesterday that my manager got AMAZINGLY positive feedback from the leads and my teammates (who are like 10 years senior to me). Going forward, I get to work on any CRAZY idea and pick up any technology I like with the goal of revamping our product. Essentially I get to work on my side projects full time as long as it adds value to the company.

Ohhhhhh YEAH!

Wish me luck. 😎

During a company wide status meeting where all product managers, architects and directors assemble:

Me: *A product architect leading a team of devs*

Directors: So are there any issues or risks you see in delivering the next build in target time for Client 1?

Me: There are too many changes in feature requirements. First they said we can use a shared NFS for storage. Now they are asking to switch over to SFTP pull mode.. blah blah..

Directors: Oh I see.. well we can support both solutions then.

Me: But the deadlin..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Will be a good marketing point for future.

Me: But there are too many regressions in integra..

Directors: *ignores what I say* We should also meet deadlines. That is the most important thing.

Me: Its not as easy as 1+1=2.. The team needs more time to..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Ok lets move on to the next point. What about Client 2?

Me:

We have a Miro collaborative whiteboard where product managers map functionality and user flows.

It currently has 89442 post-its & arrows.

Why write any specs anymore? The juniors don't read them, nor do the product managers. I'm just talking to myself at this point.

So, I waste time writing these nice detailed tickets, then when I go to review the pull request, the whole pile of horseshit is half done, and when I ask the product managers for resolutions, they don't have a clue either.

So just give me the whole fucking app, I'll do the whole damn thing myself. See you on Mars in 2025 while you and your pleb asses serve me fries and burgers.

So i've spent the day:

a) Finding evidence (again) of product not doing their job, to send on to one of my managers. So we can again discuss why she's still here.

b) Explaining to my iOS developer that although all the devs are in agreement that 2 of them are not pulling their weight and shouldn't be here ... they will definitely still be here because management actually want to keep our multi-timezone setup as they see it as beneficial. We, do not.

c) Having a meeting with another manager, in a different department. (Backstory, a member of their team has had many complaints filed against them by various members of the building, including one from my team). To let them know that my employee felt like you ignored her concerns and complaints and are going to allow this person pass their probation without considering the implications.

I hope to actually find some time in the reminder of the day to actually achieve something, rather than just telling skidmarks that they are in fact skidmarks.

... but probably won't due to 3 hours of pointless back to back meetings, where we answer the same few questions every week.

I really do love being a tech lead. So refreshing.

Fuck post-it notes.

Oh look, another product manager found his inner child and plastered a wall with a colored arts and crafts project.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm abso-fucking-lutely in favor of connecting with your deep childish nature -- but then at least enter the meeting room like a boss, armed with some creative ideas, really get to work with some fingerpaint, modelling clay, glitter, molly, acid blotters and grape juice for the whole party.

Not only was that project poorly thought out. Not only does the assortment of colored squares contribute nothing to the clarification of ideas. The issue is also that by Monday morning, the meeting room will look like a strip club after an escalated party, floor littered with 60 little neon pink and green slips reeking of desperation, cheap glue and failure.

Now your whole project is on the floor.

OH DIGITAL WHITEBOARD YOU SAY. NOW WE HAVE 10 MANAGERS FIGHTING DIGITALLY OVER VIRTUAL POST-ITS, ON A CLOUD SERVICE COSTING $500/MONTH.

Product managers, just go fuck yourself, I don't care about your kindergarten bullshit processes.

Call me when you manage to pull a workable idea out of your ass, and just draw an SVG diagram with Inkscape, or write your brainfarts into a nicely organized Markdown file.

I'm cracking up...

"chatGPT will ruin the software interviewing industry!!!"

uh.... what does it tell you about our industry if a fucking ROBOT can "ruin" the interview

well, you're right. it tells you that only algorithmic robots do well and subsequently earn the top spots at software companies after interviewing.

creativity, grit, perspective, wisdom? that stuff is absolute bullshit!!! (and as a feeble human I can't figure that out in an interview anyway!!! better just have you solve leetcode problems ad naseum!!! that'll get us the best employee!!!)

god i hate the dumb fuck rat race. good thing i'm not in it anymore! peace out, girl scout✌️

The company I interned at last summer decided to adopt a JS framework a little over a year ago. The managers went with the old Angular 1.x because they didn't want a JS build process. Each page has ~100 script tags on it, and these are manually included in various files (no automated way to include dependencies). None of the CSS/JS files are minified, either.

They really should have chose Angular 2+, or an entirely different framework (React, VueJS). They're also just now upgrading the codebase from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2 (5.6 support ended a long time ago, and security support ends this month).

I love the company itself but these practices are poor.

I may be working there full time eventually. I hope to eventually help with the inevitable transition to a newer framework once Angular 1.x is dead since I am an avid user of newer JS technologies. Any tips on convincing manager(s) towards newer technology? (Or at least convincing them to combine+minify these files in production to reduce # of requests and bandwidth.)

Also this company's product has millions of active users.

Hello everyone 👋

I see people blaming the developers when you see a crappy software product , saying that they have done a bad job.

But even it could be true also it could be the product managers who didn’t give enough time todo what needs to be done or project scope is too big for the persons knowledge.

I’ve worked in a company where deadlines were so tight I didn’t have enough time to proper UI and Testing. I used to be only developer who has someone experience and I had to train the interns as well. I am also to blame to joining such company but in desperate times takes desperate measures.

And now when i’m leaving the company and I have spend 2 years of my life for apps that I’m not proud of.

Just rant. Please feel free to give ur thoughts

Dear product managers,

DO NOT FUCKING DARE TO UPDATE THE FRS SHEET ONCE YOU HAVE SUBMITTED IT TO US FOR DEVELOPMENT.

You fuckers. It takes a lot of brain power to write code.

Boss: we follow scrum here
Me: yeah, tell that to those shitheads who call themselves "product managers" and throw whatever features they want at us at the middle of the sprint with a fixed deadline, not regarding the team capacity.

One of our existing clients who used to pay for two of our products but now only pays for one just called us. The one he canceled is a loss prevention product that tracks internal theft in stores. He canceled it because he didn't feel it was worth it.

Now, he's calling us from a police station because he's trying to press charges against one of his managers because they were presumably stealing from him.

"Hey I need to know how many times this person stole from me over the last few months and I need to know it now because I'm at the police station."

With just a few clicks that would be an easy figure to retrieve for him had he not canceled our product.

My stance is he can get lost. I don't even think he sees the irony of canceling because "it isn't worth it" and then "asap" needing the data that the "worthless" product provides. Of course, he wants it without reactivating the subscription.

Unbelievable.

To all product managers: either give us a set of features and ask for a time frame, or give us a time frame and ask what can be developed. You can't dictate both!

Alright, that's it. I've had it with these fucking clowns.

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

I love it how managers try to act busy by going through the same mails over and over again while waiting for a new one so that they can instantly reply to it and show themselves off as "prompt" and screw us, who have to actually do some work, about not sending mails promptly and they have like this one single excel sheet opened at all times and they just make one obscure entry whenever they get an update and WOW, some of them don't even know how the fuck you spell Avro (spelt it as avero, handwritten) and oh, not to mention waste everyone's time by asking a mundane question that other managers are so eager to answer, one by one, over and over and did I mention THAT THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW HALF THE PRODUCT.

Being a lead developer, I don't know if I am on the side of developers or managers.
In a product roadmap meet today, one of the developers explained the update of last week. He talked for at least 15 mins.
After that the sales lead looked at me, expecting me to explain (or basically dumb it down for her)
Me: Oh, he meant "UI improvements"
She: Oh, why didn't he say so?

I don't know who was the reason for the FacePalm 😐

Product managers who breathe down your neck all day because they literally have nothing else to do with their time

5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.

One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).

After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".

Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.

Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding.

My company’s upper leadership is sooo focused on the NUMBER of defects that are open on our project and only the number. We give each defect a priority of P0, P1, or P2. You would think this would help prioritize and strategize our plan to fix them. But nope. Every week we have some arbitrary “goal” to hit. A number purely made up by clueless leadership as to what makes a “quality” product.

On Friday’s, managers start harassing devs to merge their fixes and for QA to close out defects. So effectively rushing to hit that arbitrary number or else we’ll have to work Saturday.

Meanwhile they want more test automation coverage to reduce the incoming defect rate. But when the fuck do we have time to develop said tests when all you want is the defect closed to bring down your precious little number?!

They’d rather us close 25 P2 defects to bring the number down rather than 10 P0 or P1 defects. These leaders are so incompetent it kills me! Without any back story, they’re ultimately the reason we’re in this position in the first place! Argghhh!

Business Intelligence, the most confused market technology has to offer. (Perhaps rivaled only by machine licking. Learning, whatever)

Step 1: develop a product that can replace a company's database guys. Make it cost more than the database guys.

Step 2: Show off product to managers using images of the product that the managers will love, but never have the skills to do themselves.

Step 3: Fucking obviously the managers buy it.

Step 4: Fire half the database staff.

Step 5: Managers give the BI tools to their remaining database guys ANYWAYS and instruct them to use it

Step 6: Database guys spend a month learning the new tool because management "wants to use it too".

Step 7: Database guys now use this new system for reports but have trouble using it for complex use cases, as it was designed for simple use cases. Meanwhile, management will never, ever touch the tool again.

Step 8: Hire new guys for reporting, because the remaining database guys can't complete both their normal tasks *and* the reports.

Step 9: Database guys are expensive. Go to step 1.

Today teaching the product managers what the channel in "selected for development" in Jira means.

Guess what? IT MEANS THE FEATURE IS READY TO BE DEVELOPED ON, NOT SOME HALF-BAKED CROCK POT IDEA WITH A TWO-SENTENCE DESCRIPTION DESCRIBING ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL!!!

Fucking quora developers/designers/product managers/market researchers

I can't believe this company has not hired a ux designer yet!

Team managers have no clear design principles to follow, they are coming up with design changes and ideas on the fly.

For fucks sake, at least provide a reference design or color sets to implement instead of complaining to me when i use hard colors like red / green / blue on first version of what you asked to do.

I hate doing minor style changes on code when you have no clear vision about the design.

I think the end product is gonna end up as a ux nightmare without a ux specialist.

There you are, fiddling with next.js webpack settings, because your isomorphic JS-in-CSS-in-JS SSR fallback from react-native-web to react-dom throws a runtime error on your SSR prerendering server during isomorphic asynchronous data prefetching from Kubernetes backend-for-frontend edge-server with GraphQL.

You have all that tech to display a landing page with an email form, just to send spam emails with ten tracking links and five tracking beacons per email.

Your product can be replaced by an Excel document made in two days.

It was developed in two years by a team of ten developers crunching every day under twelve project managers that can be replaced with a parrot trained to say “Any updates?”

Your evaluation is $5M+. You have 10,000 dependency security warnings, 1000 likes on Product Hunt, 500 comments on Hacker News, and a popular Twitter account.

Your future looks bright. You finish your coffee, crack your knuckles and carry on writing unit tests.

what an absolute condescending garbage post...

"brilliant coder who can't meet a deadline"? well, you're the idiot right there, you just admitted it - they are brilliant and you don't know how to set deadlines

imagine labeling someone who can't meet a workload DIFFICULT! god this is making me fucking fume

"normal management" - yeah this is normal management alright, treating everyone like they don't know what they are doing and expecting them to follow you blindly, sounds pretty normal to me

it's shit like this that leads to cocky ass young dumb managers who actually don't know shit about building a product themselves, but then turn around and think they instead have the ability to manage a team to do it... incredible

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

Fuck product managers.

Just the other day I was discussing our progress so far and this product manager shows us the timeline and his vision for the project.
Ngl, I haven’t seen such an ambitious fuck for so long. He doesn’t know how to do anything other than fucking spreadsheets. The only problem with his plan is that we don’t even have the team, just 2 pity devs carrying it.

I still don’t get it, why the fuck would a company with 2 devs need a product manager?

I got job offer from company that makes AI product that works like electric fence for people, tracks their work and report to managers so they know when to meet and talk with this person.

Some Fucking Behavioral Shit. Well I’m tracking this company to see who they got acquired by and at the same time get the fuck out from this smart phone operating system.

Mother fuckers want to know all about everything and everyone.

At this point I saw my face in front of robot being my boss and started to questioning my life. Maybe that’s it.

Maybe it’s just last days, last year, last hour, last minute, last second…

So you have an organization that flirts with scrum and wants to be agile. You have non-crossfunctional teams who don't know what agile is. You have product owner who doesn't want to do backlog, but instead acts like project manager and asks for statuses and assigns tasks to peple. He wants the teams to find out what needs to be done and fill the backlog themselves - and then raport to him. You have business owers who noone knows who they are. You have project managers, who don't fit the whole scrum hierarchy. These project managers insist calling scrum masters "team leaders". Also these project managers think scrum is silly and don't want anything to do with it. And then you have higher program management that think this whole scum thing is better than sliced bread and everything is going just dandy!

Oh yeah, also highest organization management thinks that we are on the right track. We just need be more agile but less agile and work more efficiently whitout really saying, what the hell are we supposed to do.

Basically every day is like going to the zoo. Without the fun part.

Product Managers worldwide are rejoicing...

{ position: sticky }

I can't stand talking to clients on the phone!

One of my first freelancing clients used to talk to me for an hour at a time. I really wish I could have billed him by the hour, it took him twice as long to explain anything and then I'd have to get back in the mindset for what I was working on. The phone is just so disruptive.

I'm so much happier working for a company where the project manager deals with the client's and product managers.

Why are product managers always so irritating. I mean i understand they can't code, but then why do they have to be so nosy about status updates.

Its not like if i show progress to you it'll get done quicker. In fact more likely than not it will get delayed. Because you'll start realising things you haven't really thought about.

I somehow feel they are there to only make the entire environment just much more frustrating.

The most scary stuff when changing jobs is not the fear if the code is spaghetti or not. It’s onboarding and how the company expect new devs to learn the domain.

When I joined the company I am working on, they did not have at all documentation in regards to domain knowledge. I had to ping devs who have been with the company for years so they can explain to me. Product Managers are useless. They can explain the ticket but cannot point me in the codebase and DB fields that that ticket needs to touch.

They would say to me “Ask what you don’t know “. MF, I don’t know what I don’t know. How am I supposed to come up with questions?

Cherry on top are JIRA “Stories”. It’s title and 1 sentence and it was expected of me to do the discovery.

Fast forward, there are still things that I am learning. I work in an industry that is very complicated and has a lot of information to take. I don’t get burned out of code and tasks. I get burned out of trying to understand my tickets and connect them with the code and DB.

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

Dev: We have a data quality problem. Combined with data silos, we can't trust the numbers. We need to agree on metric definitions as a company.

CTO: (Points a PM)Help him on the metrics he has defined. We'll discard any other alternate definitions inside the company.

PM: You can start with these. (Throws a bunch of metrics without their definitions. Doesn't respond to questions regarding definitions.)

After a week of generating aggregates,

PM: The numbers seem wrong.

Fuck I know the numbers will be wrong. Because you didn't give me the definitions and I'll have to deduce them myself.

Seriously guys, how do you deal with PMs who don't cooperate in the requirement analysis?

I want you all to think back on how "transparent" and "helpful" everyone was to you when you were useful to the company.

And then as soon as you were gone, did they just complain and say something like "how could fullstackclown leave us??!?!?!"

I swear, the last call I was on, I literally heard the phrase "we are such a good team, we think up great MVP products and you guys execute so well"

Let me translate: "we are whimsical fucksticks and you are our slaves to implement it because we ourselves are too incompetent to do it"

Well no more.

Fucking tools, all of them, everyone just wants to use us to get ahead. No competence, no self-understanding, just encapsulate the "IT" or "tEcHiE" people to some department - doesn't even have to even be near us, they can be from any geographic location; they can just be replaced at a moment's notice!

Yeah, well fuck you, because we're growing in skill and understanding, and fighting against you.

Fucking 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡s

The unionized revolution of software developer is coming soon.

Oh great...
I am slowly beginning to realize that my boss/manager doesn't care about refactoring at all. He cares about features and resolved tickets and thats why the code is a pile of spaghetti filled with hacks to fit every clients desires.
Also all of my coworkers work for themselves, ticket by ticket, either because they just don't care or because they are so frustrated that they don't care anymore. And here I am, an intern, and they expect me to cope with this deformed clutter of legacy designs, buried under hacks and workarounds, while implementing some new feature which in the end I have to put on top of everything else because nothing of that codebase can be reused. Fucking shit, fucking irresponsible managers who dont think about the quality of their product.

Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.

We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.

Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)

The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window

So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.

This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.

So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.

No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)

"We're a team!"

"We need to work together!"

...product managers, sheesh

Find yourself a manager/leader who knows a bit about software engineering. Better still, find one who is/was a software engineer him/herself.

Because software engineering is a form of art. A leader who doesn't understand your art won't be able to properly appreciate it.

They won't be interested in how and why you make/do something. They're only interested in how fast can you get it done.

Product Managers: I know what users want! They want 10 different things stuffed into 1 piece of software that does nothing well because I don't understand budgets, timelines, or scope.
Everyone else: How about we do 1 thing, and do that well.

Product Management thought of automating an entire legacy product so they funded undisclosed amount to program management who in turn hired >20 contract devs managed by architects and dev managers with zero functional or technical knowledge of product and who in turn went ahead automating the product in selenium, end result of which was an useless automation framework with lot of browser specific dependencies and whuch could run only on one setup environment and migrating test cases to another environment and running is almost impossible and tyrannical to configure. The automation test cases are highly disorganized with all generic setup, DB configurations and business case test data mixed up in same config files and which need to be rewriten every time ported from one environment to other.To add misery to my woes as a dev working in that product I was told to utilize that framework and enhance the quality of my code by writing inline automation Cases for the same. I am left speechless thoughtless and emotionless after that decision.

Why do product managers think their roadmaps/decisions are completely unrelated to our technical decisions? Information/transparency are key themes in the architecture process. In order to accept the risks, you must first understand them.

most productive workflow I ever seen.

excel 1 : stock
excel 2 : order

compare stock with order manually 1000+ product.
excel 3 : check history of order generator (shop)

excel 4 : today's price of product + tax
excel 5 : alot specific unit's of product
excel 6 : maintained bill credit/debit
next step : forword to managers for approval
excel 7 : edit's from nanager
process repeat till managers approval

excel 8 : dispatched history
excel 9 : return product (reason's/unit)
excel 10 : stock update return + new product's

and few more excel's

data of 5+ year's
daily 500+ order's

lPO listed company

i have not mentioned account and other stuff

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Tl;Dr Im the one of the few in my area that sees sftping as the prod service account shouldn't be a deployment process. And the ONLY ONE THAT CARES THAT THIS IS GONNA BREAK A BUNCH OF SHIT AT SOME POINT.

The non tl;dr:

For a whole year I've been trying to convince my area that sshing as the production service account is not the proper way to deploy and/or develop batch code. My area (my team and 3 sister teams) have no concept of using version control for our various Unix components (shell scripts and configuration files) that our CRITICAL for our teams ongoing success. Most develop in a "prodqa like" system and the remainder straight in production. Those that develop straight in prodqa have no "test" deployment so when they ssh files straight to actual production. Our area has no concept of continuous integration and automated build checking. There is no "test cases", no "systems testing" or "regression testing". No gate checks for changing production are enforced. There is a standing "approved" deployment process by the enterprise (my company is Whyyyyyyyyyy bigger than my area ) but no one uses it. In fact idk anyone in my area who knows HOW to deploy using the official deployment method. Yes, there is privileged access management on the service account. Yes the managers gets notified everytime someone accesses the privileged production account. The managers don't see fixing this as a priority. In fact I think I've only talk to ONE other person in my area who truly understands how terrible it is that we have full production change access on a daily basis. Ive brought this up so many times and so many times nothing has been done and I've tried to get it changed yet nothing has happened and I'm just SO FUCKING SICK that no one sees how big of a deal this. I mean, overall I live the area I work in, I love the people, yet this one glaring deficiency causes me so much fucking stress cause it's so fucking simple to fix.
We even have an newer enterprise deployment. Method leveraging a product called "urban code deploy" (ucd) to deploy a git repository. JUST FUCKING GIT WITH THE PROGRAM!!!!..... IT WAS RELEASED FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO......

Please..... Please..... I just want my otherwise normally awesome team to understand the importance and benefits of version control and approved/revertable deployments

It's obvious that a lot of product managers need to take basic stats classes. Your metrics are pointless and lack direction. 🖕

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

Product managers playing programmers

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

So, I'm the engineering leader of a startup. This year, the company hired new directors and with that a new CPO. We've been using Google Workspace and have all our infrastructure on GCP. We never had any trouble with Google products. We also have Google SSO configured in almost every tool out there.

Yesterday, the new CPO, sent me a request to change "just some dns" on the domain. Those "just some dns" were Microsoft 365 mx, cname and text records.

I asked him if he was planning to switch to MS.

He answered: "yes! The team (a new team of marketing) wants to use PowerPoint and Teams".

I don't know you guys, but I hate MS products. They're just bad.

So, yes, it seems that now I'm gonna waste my time switching and configuring everything with MS just because they don't know other tools that are way better than any MS product!

I tried to convince him, this wasn't a good move, but it seems my opinion equals zero at this company.

I just hate this type of product managers that always wants to reinvent the wheel to let others see that they are doing something important when they're not.

Also hate when managers make decisions without ever consulting the people that will be affected by those decisions... But I guess that's how it works in this world...

Job BS that made me consider quitting?

Huh. so timely.

With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.

At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />

On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh.

We write our feature specifications in Gherkin, so it is clear to every member of the team (even nondevs GASP!) exactly what each feature should do.

SO WHY THE FUCK, AFTER BUILDING THE FEATURE, DO I GET REVIEWS FROM THE pRoDuCt MaNaGeRs, SHOWING ME THEY WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT FOR THE FEATURE. YOU WROTE THE FUCKING FEATURE DID YOU HAVE A CHANGE OF HEART MID THOUGHT YOU IDIOT!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I'M SO SICK OF IT I'M SICK OF WORKING 12 HOURS ON A FRIDAY FOR YOUR STUPID SHIT

I need help and advice!

I currently work as an consultant at a large corporation. Came onboard for 1-2 years to help rebuild one of their platforms. From the beginning the mindset was that the finished product should not be developed based on anything else than customer testimonials and interviews regarding functionality and design. However, they’re building their platform developed and distributed by this other company. Basically they bought a system that is incomplete regarding to being compliant to the specifications brought to them when they decided which system to go with. Now we’re trying to build around all the issue this platform is causing us. The code base for the system is like something a monkey did with their feet. Nothing makes sense and it’s layers on top of layers of 10 year old code. I f-ing hate it. I don’t know what to do. We have some many technical limitation that it’s impossible to create the vision they had from the start.
I’ve been thinking about talking to the highest chief in the department as he has been pissed earlier about project managers not escalating issue to him earlier. But I don’t want to step on anyones toes. Should I leave the project? Should I talk to the chief? What do I do? I’m miserable🤯

To the managers and new developers.

Development, and Product Development is not a black-and-white game.

It is an entire spectrum. You cannot move to the next best version. Next best feature, or the next best app.

The only jump that you take is getting started. After that it is a walk across the entire spectrum. Things grow slowly, and steadily. Just keep an eye on the next improvement.

Study the analytics, improvise, focus your energies, and just move to the next shade.

Enough steps, and you will have what you want.

It requires planning, courage, determination, tactics, sticking together ,and above all patience.

Most importantly, get rid of the people who cannot think long, rush, and mess things up.

How the fuck does that retard Zuckerberg manage to spend this much money on his metaverse and hardly have anything to show for? What are the developers actually working on? I mean, if you had that many people working that long on something you'd expect at least a product that looked all right, even if no one wanted to use it?!

I bet you could put a team of 20 top shelf developers, designers, QA and project managers together and give them 2 years to build almost anything we see today. A facebook clone, a Twitter clone, some sort of virtual reality look-at-my-perfect-but-empty-life-click-to-like piece of social shit-verse.. What the hell are they spending their time on?!!

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

When the product manager says that the next version of the product should make your job obsolete (by making it possible to do ALL possible changes via a GUI).

Sure thing, will do! I love working on this idea!

Never thought I'd be back here after all these years. But today I thought I would rant about our product owner, who thinks he's priceless to the project. The man walks out of meetings that don't go in his preferred direction. He gets flustered whenever discussions become technical and demands everyone ELI5 the entire thing to him. He clears his throat loudly every time he wants to make himself noticed, like loud grunts of a wild boar. He will find ways to shift blame away and onto others. He does not like being recorded during meetings and does his best to make sure his decisions don't have a paper trail in case they go sour. No paper trail also means he can contradict himself everyday ans get away with it. I wish there was a way to make him resign or switch to a different project. Other managers and even his bosses are already aware of his behavior and yet still no significant changes in his actions or behavior.

You would think that one might get used to the following scenario, but it still pisses me off every time it happens. I'm getting a design created by the customer that is specific to a pixel-level. The product I create in turn is very close to a 100% match visually and functional. And then a few days later, the work already done, I get renewed versions of the same designs. Just like that. With all those nooks and crannies replaced and new ones added, as if it didn't took time, effort and experience to make them functional in the first place. And no one blinks an eye. Not the customer, not our project managers. So after having me built you intricate card board house, you just smash it and tell me to rebuild? It's not always a huge deal but it happens so often and I guess it's part of the "customer is king" mentality, but it's bullshit. If the customer hands in a final design, then that's it. Any changes afterwards need to be paid extra. Otherwise it feels like I'm wasting my time and those changes will not get the same quality treatment for sure.

A minute of silence..
...for the product managers who want the COOL 'Flash' app remain untouched in the code!

Must be nice when product managers can go on two week vacations across Europe but you can't take one because you have a deadline.

Own side project built from the ground up where I understand every corner of the codebase and application, can work at my own pace, and have no product managers, tech leads, or "architects" telling me what to do.

Product managers?!? Sorry if there are any, but screw you guys! Im going home

I work as part of a small international team in a big corp , we work product quality of sorts but work closer to dev than qa , last week we found several giant issues and reported them in . Dev and Qa teams of said project are Indians . Meeting starts , two of my colleagues are indian as well , so dev , qa and all the other involved parties from india decided they should join in from the same conference room . My manager(he's a brit) presents the issues . Dev manager starts talking , qa manager talks over him , they start to formally yell at one another . One of them (couldn't figure out which one) started asking my two colleagues which one of them found these issues . At this point I had already passed a headphone to my ex-colleague who still sits next to me , he looks at me when he hears the question . I panic . Colleagues say they don't know (*phu* I didn't CC them in emails and my manager didn't tell them ) . My manager tells them to calm down , take responsibility and find solutions else he'll veto the product back into fullblown development . Other managers start growling and fighting again (more than 10 people were in the same room arguing) me and my ex-colleague decide to go take a coffee since I didn't have a saying in the meeting . We get back 10 minutes later , indians are still arguing over my manager trying to explain the issues a 4th time . I IM my manager and ask to drop the meeting , he gave me the ok and I dropped out, my head was hurting after an hour long meeting of angry indians arguing in a conference room and it kept hurting the whole day...yeah...meetings...fun time...

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.

Fucking lazy product managers....

Can't fucking care about renaming a word document....

The document says template you moron. You are supposed to duplicate it for your requirements. Not edit directly on the template.

And fuck whoever gave this moron edit access to a global template.

Fuck....

Crystal ball!
A timeline until the first NBE-Citizen is elected president of the USA.

2031 - BlackRock launches their new large scale financial product, the "Robotic Business Development Company" (R-BDC), in which an AI is given billions of dollars to acquire, create and manage companies, replacing their C-suite executive bodies. The "Chief Executive Robot" (CER) is supervised by a board of human industry experts hired by BlackRock.
It is important to say that the employees, middle managers, accountants, lawyers, etc in an R-BDC are all human - it's only the CEO, CFO, COO and the rest of the gang that are overgrown chatbots.

2032 - R-BDCs are mostly focused on high-bureaucracy, non specialized but people-intensive legacy industries like steel mining, food services, urban transportation and government services like water and road management.

2033 - For the first time an R-BDC company is included in the S&P 500 index. If it's CER were human and paid the same as CEOs of equivalent companies, it would have become a billionaire.
Later in the year, two more R-BDC companies are included in the index. One of them was created by Apple and the other by JP Morgan.

2035 - An R-BDC company makes headlines for convincing BlackRock to dissolve it's review board. When finally given free reign, the CER immediately slices it's dividends and vastly increases low-level employee compensation. The company share prices crater, but BlackRock stands by its decision.
Later in the year, as a recession hits the entire market really hard, that company shows solid profits and fantastic sales. It becomes the first trillion-dolar R-BDC.

2037 - Most Americans' dream-job is in an R-BDC company, says ProPublica.

2038 - Congress passes the "Non-Biological Entities Liability" (NOBEL) Act, following a high profile case of employee harassment perpetrated by the CER of an R-BDC.
The act recognizes NBEs, for all legal liability purposes, as USA citizens.
This highly controversial legislation is upheld by the supreme court, and many believe it was first introduced by lobbyists as a way for large investors in R-BDCs to avoid legal responsibility.
Several class action lawsuits are filed against CERs that are now liable for insider trading. A few SCOTUS decisions set legal precedent that determinantes what exactly constitutes the parts of the same Non-Biological Entity.

2040 - As a decade ends and another begins, 35% of all companies in the US and 52% of the entire stock market are part of a R-BDC company or another. The McKinsey consulting group now offers "expert CER customization services".

2043 - Inspired by successful experiments in Canada, Australia and South Korea, the american state of Vermont is the first to amend it's constitution to allow municipalities to have Non-Biological Entities as city and government administrators. City councils are still humans-only.

2046 - The american state of Colorado becomes the first to allow unsupervised NBEs to assume state government executive positions. Several states follow soon after. Later in the year, the federal government replaces several administrative positions with NBEs.

2049 - The state of Texas passes legislation requiring the CERs of all companies with a presence in the state to be another entirely contained/processed within the state or to be supervised by a local human representative while acting within the state. Several states, including California, Florida and Washington, are discussing similar legislation.

2051 - Congress passes the SUNBELT Act (SUbmission [of] NBEs [to] Limits [and] Taxes) that vastly increases the liability of NBEs and taxes all manifestations of such entities. Most important, it requires
CERs of hundreds of companies manifest disagreeance, most warn that it might hurt employee satisfaction and company sales. Several companies disable their CERs entirely.

2053 - Public outrage after leaked interactions of human supervisors and company CERs show that the CERs tried to avoid the previous year's mass layoffs and pay cuts, but board members pressed on, disregarding concerns. Major investigations and boycotts further complicate matters, and many human workers go on strike until the company boards are dissolved and the CERs are reinstated.

2052 - Many local elections all over the country see different NBEs as contenders - and a NBE is expected to win in most races.

2054 - The SUNBELT Act is found unconstitutional by the supreme court, and most of its provisions are repealed.
This also legitimizes the elected NBE officials.

2058 - For the first time an NBE wins a seat in Congress, but is not allowed to keep it. Runoff elections are held.

2061 - Congress votes for allowing NBEs to hold federal legislative positions, as already allowed in the least populous states.

2062 - Several NBEs win Congress seats. In Europe, there are robot legislators since the 40's.

2064 - The first NBE presidential candidate loses the race.

2072 - The first NBE president is elected.

Boss calls a team leads meeting which is just me and the other guy. Rest are product or project managers.

Turns out they concerns over how our last few sprints are always left unfinished as the work in it doesn't get passed QA.

Tried to tell him how can devs work on something that failed QA on the last day of the sprint.

We have one QA person who tests 20 something devs work. We are massively under resourced and yet they want us to do everything and always end up making promises to clients that we can't keep coz our sprint doesn't have capacity.

Yet they are hiring more product managers instead of getting some more QA help.

Sick & tired of this shit.

If you are a product designer who looks at an app, adds in a "DISABLE ALL NOTIFICATION" button and still sends notifications after disabling..

If you think you've gained a wee bit extra marketing from your decision, know that the only thing you have achieved is me getting irritated and uninstalling your app.

Also, fuck you for thinking that any sane person would want to go rate your app on play store five times a day, even after I rated a 1 star earlier.

The app was actually well made by whoever the Dev's were. Moronic managers who make decisions to sneak in stupid aggressive marketing notifications should be made to sit in a room and click on the feature they wanted for an hour.

Having Technical Product Managers who say "it doesn't work, I dont know what, but do your job and find out."

I happened to come help with a project that deadline was in two weeks. It was hardware project for customers with UI.

They said to me - help us 2 weeks and it’s done. It only needs polishing. There was nothing working and we finished it after half a year.

Hardware was crap and drivers wasn’t working. Managers called me stupid when I tried to explain that this is hardware team fault. They used to say that it was tested in laboratory and there is no defect. Laboratory my ass fucking assholes never released anything from scratch.

I got depressed after this project for a year. It was fucking nightmare.

Everything, literally everything was rewritten 3 times cause of stupid decisions that I questioned all the time. At the end of project most of those assholes stopped commenting my decisions. I believe we released impossible product that was crap but based on usage rates I got later when I left it returned expenses.

I lost like 2 years of my life and about 20kg during those 6 months. Never again.

Extremely frustrated with the release process and versioning system at my current company. Don't know if this is same everywhere or the half ass release managers can't think of a better way here.

Basically for any client raised issue that can't wait for next release are built as a hotfix. However hotfixes are never bundled togather or shiped to other clients. This is causing a vicious chain, two clients raise two separate issues on same version. Instead of fixing them as single hotfix (however minor the issues) we create two hotfix versions for each with only their issue. A week later same clients come back with the issue the other raised. Once again instead of bundling what is now effectively same code we build hotfixes on top of the clients respective branches. We now have two branches to maintain with same codebase. No matter how serious issue, the hotfix is never made generally available and always created on client's specific hotfix version.

Now that was an example for only two clients, in reality we have released five patch versions of a product in last 2 years. Each product version contains about a dozen artifacts (webapps, thick clients, etc) with its own version. Each product version being shipped to various clients. Clients being big banks never take a patch of product even if it fixes their issues and continues requesting hotfix. We continue building hotfixes on client branch and creat ever increasing tech debt. There is never a chance to clean up or new development. Just keep doing hotfix after hotfix of same things.

To top if all off, old branches are still in svn while new in git. Old branches still compile with ant new with maven. Old still build with java 5,6,7 while current with 8. Old still build from old jenkins serve pipelines while new has different build server. Old branches had hardcoded integration db details which no longer exists so if tou forget to change before releasing it doesn't work.

Please tell me this is not normal and that there are better ways to do this? Apologies I think I rambled on for too long 😅

Why don't most products follow a minimalist approach right till the end? Most start ups start like that. But when things begin to fall apart or become better they tend to deviate. While the earlier reason is understandable (because no one likes to fail so they'll do anything to not fail), the second reason seems to me more of an organisational creation than what the users want.

From my understanding as the product becomes popular positions (managerial or product) created need to justify their presence. What do they do? So the breath of fresh air brings in a lot of garbage that may not be required and would be in deviance from the main product idea.

It is debatable that audiences would not accept such ideas that are being brought in, because hey audiences are smart. And they are. But the organisation in order to justify the original wrong decision tends to push their new features (through offers or marketing campaigns). This makes the organisation invested into a wrong direction and security of jobs of the new managers/product people. Win win situation, but lose lose for the organisation and the original product.

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

Why?? just why is it that analytics engineer requires SQL and talking to product managers?
Where is the whole corporate chain when you need one?

Biggest hurdle in my dev career -
Product managers.

Found this on linkedin

After closely working with Product Managers for almost 3 years, I'm starting to get how to make them understand tech blockers.

Sitting in a meeting discussing writing end user docs on a new feature and one of the product managers literally said "we'll end up picking a number out of the air."

I’m really getting fed up with the situation I am in!

I was brought in as a development lead, which in my eyes and from the sound of it leading on the technical delivery, inspiring and leading technical development decisions and generally leading my team (one additional dev) in the delivery of work items and user stories which the PM or Business analyst produces..

Then it “evolved” into what felt more like a development manager where I was reporting to senior management on KPIs and stuff, I sucked it up and did it.

Then they brought in two new people which they call application specialists. These people spend all their time managing existing off the shelf applications, communicating with the vendor, running user groups where they work with our users on moving the product forward and planning the configuration and enablement of new functionality.

Because they are “developing” the application (in the same way a child develops, or the same way a story line develops and evolves) they fall under me..

So now I spend a split amount of time developing software and also managing what I can only explain as project managers, product owners...

Oh but then it gets better!! Now they want me(as well as our info sec lead and our infrastructure lead) to be a kind of all round delivery lead, gauging the requirements of a project, reporting in its risks to senior management, resource planning, everything a PM does! And also be the technical person delivering these projects!

Honestly, it’s seriously starting to take the fucking piss!

I am a technical programmer, a pretty good one if I say so myself, the developer reporting to me is good but needs hand holding which I am ok with! But would never be able to deliver an element of a product by himself in line with what we expect in quality of code..

Why would anyone think you take a person built and only interested in doing a technical role and make then a generic all round manager of a project??

I know why they did it! It’s because there are other managers in our department paid the same “level” as me, but because of their management responsibility’s , I however feel I am paid this much for my technical experience and abilities, thy are just blanket covering everyone the same at this level.

You would never get a manager at this salary scale with the technical skills they need, and you would never get a technical person with the skills interested in doing that type of management at this salary scale!

I’m just a mug and they know it!

So fucking angry!

The word "shift" in reference to a workday should NEVER be used in a dev environment. There is noservice that needs to constantly be maintained, thats what customer support is for. A shift gives the mentality that you have a set time that you are responsible for a service.

Devs are responsible for finishing a product on a deadline; that is not a shift, that is a fucking workday. I especially hate it when managers refer to them as shifts, because it shows just how little they understand what the devs are doing. They think of bug fixes like they think of flipping burgers; a task that performs a service. It's not a service, stop acting like it is.

I get the point of a daily check in meeting for the team. I really do. But when all it is is pushing pet projects and bitching about shit that has nothing to do with the entire team, it gets tedious. Also, why are product managers so needlessly optimistic and peppy? It's early in the morning. Stop it.

unrealistic dream :

in my 40s, being cto of a market leading product in its v10 stage, whose v1 i created from scratch. me doing nothing except creating the best remote work hustler culture for the company .

i will be making both : the topmost and bottomost engineers/managers give ppts and talks of product that they created, ll system and hl system designs and the decisions that went into it

i also want some powerful management/ ceos as friends, that drive our boat to greater heights and generate tremendous revenue+ fundings + profits

----

realistic dream :

to keep being SE1 (or at worst SE2/tech lead) in a company, do 4-5 hr non impactful work per day and earn 3x the inflation as am doing now. plus somehow get a lottery or something once in a lifetime , that is worth 100x my current income so that i could build a home and 2 cars and a children fund

dev is not a great thing to be dreamt about, but it certainly paves way for a happier and healthier lifestyle if done right

Guys i need your opinion on this issue I've been working in a startup for almost a year now.. the product we are building is pretty awesome.. the only issue is the non technical managers are giving unrealistic deadlines to the clients and we the development team guys are under a lot of stress.. they are not ready to give us a raise as we have not come out beta yet.. should I stay or quit?

I recently built an automated payout functionality for bank-to-bank transfers, and we initially looked at using the pain.001 XML schema to do it. Luckily, we ended up finding a service that has a simple REST API to do this instead. (Thank god we didn't go with the XML method, I know how much of a headache that could become, I can imagine the treasure trove of memes with naming an XML schema with the name PAIN)

Anyway, for one of our big-brained product managers, this will forever be the infamous "XML Task" that he continues to ask about and bring up. I've already clarified a few times that we have long chosen a solution process that has nothing to do with XML, but to no avail, it will forever be his "XML Task". Wonder what name he'll pick next time we need XML in a solution? "Second XML Task?" Let's just keep the mental overhead idiot train going!

Why isn't Gooogle buying Atlassian to stock up G Suite with Wiki and Slack, then piss off Microsoft and win the Market over with better products?

Im reading everywhere now that MS Teams has the hugest Userbase and so much features to come bla bla bla

Fuck MS Teams, it's shit, looks like it and it's software so I can't smell it. Thank god for that, else it would smell like the afterback of a diaarhetic horse.

Every fucking Tecnician at my company is arguing, that MS Teams is better, because more users are active. WTF Poopface, they have more user, because it comes included with O365???

Our people are so stupid, I bet they won the IT Certification in a Lottery or flew to Turkey to buy it at a Bazaar.

And who the fuck are the Product Managers at Google, gonna hit them a couple of times with a broom to wake up. You fucktards are missing a huge market.

Devs : use azure devops becuse our product is on azure
Managers: but we only know how to use jira

Architect, okay then pay us for migration to bamboo and bitbucket so we dont have to use dual systems.

Management : whatever you want do it for free

SMH, this is the 4th manager of the product we are building, who's leaving the company, all in 1.5 years. Out of reactions at this point.

(FYI managers here are involved in multiple projects at the same time)

Product designer keeps on changing designs and managers approve it every single time. Totally frustrated to work. Why can't they think of scenarios based on design? Why should they allow me work on something guaranteeing that things won't be changed but change every single time.

I know product specs change, but too much of change frustrates the developer. Why does no body care for developer's mindset?

What’s your take on engineering managers just focusing on delivering the product. Making sure the management happy.

TL;DR.
To begin, i want to clear it out that my EM is a really sweet person and tries to accommodate all of us and takes pressure off us whenever possible.

But he’s a really shitty manager. He’s the kinda guy whom you can give a weekend project and he’ll an excellent job. On the other hand, if the taks requires more than a weekend, he’ll probably fuck it up.
He thinks everything can be done in a jiffy and we don’t need to think about the edge cases.
His reasoning for not giving quality importance is that he wants us to focus on building the product and making it shippable. We can iron out issues once we get it done.
He’s decided not to let the tests run in the cicd pipeline because that might hinder making hot fixes.
I’ve tried talking to him but he believes that’s the only way management is willing to agree to.

In my 4 companies i worked with, one thing which i learnt is the Product documentation is only needed by the Managers, neither the client, nor the users, of course not the developers. We hate them more than the testers.
💀💀

Why the fuck would Google promote Jetpack Compose as a stable toolset when it doesn't even support a basic feature such as a scrollbar.
A. Fucking. Scrollbar.
LazyColumn can't even come close to being as powerful as Recyclerview.

Here's an idea, before launching something and touting it as something usable, and encouraging people to drop the old, battle tested tool for the new shiny one, how about you make sure the new doesn't lack features present in the old one?
Seems logical, right?

Methinks somebody was just looking for a promotion because, clearly, Jetpack Compose is a half-baked product.
Now, developers will have to suffer because project managers will read about the new framework and ask devs to use it, then wonder why the app is suffering.

Most of the product managers seem to explicitly mention user metrics with unique. Say # of unique users for the day, # of users ordered and so on. While being explicit is good, I'm wondering is there any metric that doesn't require unique counts?

How can a novel emerging challenger software (written in Rust) take me 4 hours to install (still ongoing)?

Today I have decided to give Pijul a go. Pijul describes itself as a theory-sound alternative to Git, which I have wanted to get away from for a while now, due to various reasons -- many of which I saw Pijul advertise to have solved on design level.

So I set away a day to learn Pijul, today. Well, 4 hours after I sat down -- after a number of hilariously wonky failures of "Rust ecosystem" to do the right thing as I had to install Rust with some shell one-liners those insane wizards recommend for installation process (all in the name of "stability but not stagnation") -- Pijul has now been installing with the blasted `cargo` for an hour now (that's after 3 hours of getting to the point where `cargo install pijul` stopped exploding in my face) -- telling me I only have 40 crates more to install. Are they throttling me, perhaps? I don't care -- I should have been installing Pijul from a repository in accordance with my Linux distribution, or -- at worst -- download a BLOODY COMPILED PROGRAM IMAGE.

What is it with the hipster developers today? Everything they get of tools, they subsume and churn out intricate complexities the likes of which we hadn't seen yesterday. Tell me fellow developers who think installation of your software has to require three and a half novel "installation solutions" to which I can't be arsed to be made privy -- do you think your life today is easier than, I don't know -- wrangling with a Makefile and a C compiler (which today thankfully can do rather good job of standards compliance)?

I mean I wouldn't mind Pijul being written in Rust -- but it turns out Rust's advertised elegancy in practice is wrapped in so much "giftwrap" I feel like what desire I had to learn Rust myself, I'll stear well clear.

Here's an advice for developers in general -- an advice continiously ignored for decades -- stop blowing your original scope of delivery in auxilary packages you think you need to reinvent just because you can or because your mom is out of town! For programming languages like Rust this most certainly entails NOT writing your own package manager, with its own package delivery mechanism that has its own configuration file format and virtual machine to configure dependency resolution or what have you!

You wanted to write a programming language that has novel features you think we need? Fine -- write one and stop there. Watch it grow, and watch people who are busy working on other parts (scopes) of software to integrate your offer.

What a shitshow. Stop smuggling alternative package managers, installers, and discombulators with your actual product -- I only want the latter, I don't want the rest of your damn piping, walls, roof and a cathedral on top of it!

Don't be that guy starting with a pin, and ending up with a fucking diorama miniature of a pig farm in Netherlands. Jesus.

i wanted some advice on career progression. I am a CS graduate from 2020, have been a decent mobile dev for last 3 years and switched 2 companies so far. i currently have an average ctc (considering i reside in the world's most populated country) as a junior dev.

i want to grow but don't know the next steps. here are my options:

1. stay in the same company . role growth: senior in 2 years , more senior in 4 years . comp growth : avg 10% every year

>> this feels okay-ish path but 10% growth seems very less

2. switch every x years . role growth : unpredictable. comp growth min 30-50%

>> this has been my approach. as i grow bore of a company, i switch . the first time i got a 200% hike, but at that time, i was already earning very less. however companies do not usually take you for a senior role unles you were a senior before, so i think i am losing something here

3. do a masters in tech . comp growth : ? role growth :0
>> this is an unknown territory for me. i haven't heard of anyone bragging about how they did a masters in some tech field and got a better job/position. most people prefer masters in business or do a masters in tech only if they had a poor bachelors degree

4. do a masters in business. comp growth ? role growth?
>> another unknown territory for me. i really wanna consider a managerial position, just because i want to be leading the action , but that's probably because of being a beta guy in all my life and not just the tech/work.

1. managers have a great comp but they also get fired more often than techies. how do you become a good manager/vp/director etc?

2. what are your goals, how do you improve/work upon the goals as a manager?

3. how do you grow as a manager?

honestly i put a lot of tasks and capabilities into one category : the skills of a manager. but i think there might be different roles for such categories. let me know which one is which and if they are worth going into:

1. an x is a person that researches on market trends, other companies, amtheir audience etc and come up with new ideas to implement and improve growth/business of the company

2. an x is a person that makes sure that devs , qa, designers etc are aligned , knows what to do , clears their doubts and ensure the proper functioni5 of the team and timely releases of new features.

3. an x is an ambitious and curious person who can think of new , original ideas.

4. an x is a person with all knowledge of product features.

-----
in all above statements, is x== junior manager? then what are senior manager, vp, directors, president, tech lead, qa,etc?

also how can one start to become x?

Yesterday's programming failures are today's product managers.
Today's project managers are morons.