Your tasks are going slowly, let's have a meeting about it

My boss insists that we shouldn’t lock or password-protect a particular system because, in her words, remembering or write down a password is hard and email as a concept is confusing. I tried to explain if people who don't know what left versus right-clicking do have full admin access, it’s only a matter of time before something goes terriblely wrong. She listened but ultimately decided to keep everything open, confident that everyone would use it responsibly.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened, it never has been and never will be. The problems started, just as I feared, and now I’m stuck cleaning up the chaos, one issue at a time. I do have a backup and automation snapshots, but things got so tangled up that it will still be a hassle.
I tried soft lock so everyone could only access the section relevant to them. The reaction was immediate—they were confused and stressed, saying they’d be unable to do anything if it stayed that way. They didn’t get the idea that keeping them from touching certain things (that they shouldn't be touching in the first place) wasn’t the same as blocking their whole work. But since they’re all my superiors, I had no choice but to remove the restrictions and leave the system wide open again.

Nothing serious came out, just really annoying because something like this happens all the time.

Stack Overflow has really gone to shit. I had a bad experience with a recent Qt6/Python question, or really two questions both of which were closed and deleted!

I was just going to ignore it, but some recent talk on the Fediverse made me write up a full post about it:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

Want to know a sad story? I had a great idea for an internal application that would optimize a process in the company. My idea gets approved and.. guess what? Later it gets cancelled because Change Management didn't see a reason for me to get API rights on the company pipeline, which was what I needed to get my application going. I pitch my idea and they don't care and shut me down quickly because it's just another ticket they want to close asap.

Another guy in my company, openly incompetent but big buddies with the higher-ups gets his idea approved without effort. They open the doors for him and talk to Change Management to get him in. Then he's seen as Mr. Big Ideas while this guy doesn't even know how to use a terminal (I'm not joking). Even the girls admire him but he's a complete idiot who just smiles a lot.

It's whom you know, apparently. And bureaucracy is a piece of shit. So are cronyism and corruption.

Speed, quality, scope. Why managers dont understand that they can pick only two and expect all three?

Reading google revies of hospitals is one of my pet peeves. Like it is certainly not an indication to the hospitals quality. As there are mostly people reviewing who had a bad experience. Also a lot of hysterical people who are like: "Walked into the ER with minor headache. Was appalled at the wait time and left. Never going back there again. Worst service everrrr" or "The service woman at the front desk could neither give me a precise diagnosis nor where I had to go to get my second lobotomy."

I'm currently exporting the designs & the scrapped iterations i had to make for my job in the past 4 years.

My first boss wanted to have an iteration saved per design and have already multiple 'final' options available per design meeting.

Now my current boss is asking to export them all but the bulk export functionality is broken. Never realised I spend so much time designing this shit application. There are over 16.000 designs to be exported by hand.

They now want to get rid of this tool since nobody else will do designs.

Let's get ready for another rant. I work at a new company now which claims to be "fast paced" and startup-like culture. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen a place with more rules and bureaucracy when it comes to engineering.

By the looks of it, my manager seems to value process a lot more than actual outcome. Both my manager and another engineer in the team tend to nitpick over every line of code and will not approve anything until they believe it's absolutely perfect and up to their liking.

Every PR I create has to go through 5 cycles of review. On top of that, the comments that get added are rarely related to product impact, but rateher "let's rename this variable in a test file to this", "maybe we should have this many spaces in a config file". There's been actual cases where I had to go through different cycles and had my PR's blocked for days because of some minor comments about variable names and styling they "liked" more.

This is one of the main reasons why we lose critical time during the development of our features. There seems to be no sense of priorities or urgency. The other reason we keep losing time is because of the massive amount of team meetings we have. Our team has only 3 engineers. How many meetings can you possibly schedule in a day to "realign". We have technical meetings where it apparentely is necessary to all agree on every tiny detail, such as which types we're gonna use etc etc.

That's not all. Last week, weeks of my work was thrown out of the window, because it was slightly different from how "we" usually do it. Even though, I explained and motivated how my solution solved issues the other proposed solution did not, we ended up spending an additional two days reimplementing the same fixes more in line with "the rules".

I recently reviewed a coworker's PR pointing out actual functionality that was not working as expected. Real user impact...
I created an alternative solution that covered all cases, and sent it. It got basically ignored. Then we ended up having a meeting for hours with several engineers where they made me watch how they started fixing the same issues as I had already fixed.

Each week, I'm losing around 2-3 days of development time dealing with this nonsense. But then there's a deadline. Then the manager goes full-on wild and pushes everyone into overtime and will send you 700 messages a day in channels or privately to you if "you need help" and how things should be done.

I'm not looking forward to switching jobs again, but please tell me... how can I cope with this?

Thanks

Just heard that we don’t have testers anymore. There was already a low test capacity and now it’s full focus on clients and not on software building anymore.
Who needs testers any way right?
We need to just do everything right the first time!

Every day hour minute i have to work on these charts im getting more sad frustrated and annoyed.
I have a function which works perfectly in the mobile versie of the webapp. Copy paste it to the desktop, it’s not working. Something is wrong and i can’t get my head around it. Neither does AI.

Kendo is hell.

For fuck's sake, management is now asking us to provide data converted in % as to how genAI is actually making us more efficient as developers. How the fuck do you even measure that empirically?

It is already BS enough that they track how much we query these AI tools everyday in our development environments, but now they want genAI to produce most of the code templates in our SDK. It can barely produce a working regex or a working python script, let alone a small piece of code that won't stack overflow itself into oblivion. It sometimes takes more time to debug and refactor than to do it myself from scratch.

They ask for our professional opinion, we tell them, they don't give a fuck about it, proceed to think all is rainbows and unicorns, and still ask us the same moronic things as if they were the new messiah's on earth.

Don't get me wrong, genAI can be useful, but why the fuck does management think it will magically solve all our problems when they don't even understand how it works even on the surface.

The only thing that would make sense is a lot of them got money at stake in some AI investment sales pitch bullshit and they try to jam it up our collective throats because otherwise they will loose their investments like there is no tomorrow.

Fuck all of this, I just want to do engineering and build something useful to society. Is it too much to ask?

If you were a code antipattern, what would it be?

I'm definitely NIH -- "Not Invented Here".

I write everything from scratch. When I don't, more often than not, I don't install code deps -- I copy their code and modify it. I port it to my set of utils, my syntax preferences, optimize it, strip parts and modes I don't need, and at the end there's no clear line between what was my code and what wasn't. My code doesn't import, it absorbs.

Manager: Keep the debug logs
Me: I won't use them as I use the status report or run it manually to see the problem, but fine whatever.

1 week later

Manager: the debug logs are hard to read, the status report is hard to read too but it's a bit more concise
Me: Yes. The fuck you want me to do? I don't use logs and don't care. You can write code, make the logs more useful to you if you want to use them.

Don't you love it when the docs say that RTCDataChannel is a transferable object and then you try to send it to a service worker and your browser tells you it isn't transferable

I hecking looove web development 😇🔫

Which miracle do you think will occur first?

Will Google create a file manager for Android that isn't garbage, or will Microsoft add ext4 support to Windows?

God, i fucking HATE tech that involves running it through legal!

Our ex-employee wrote an amazing SQL SELECT-query consisting of 6449 characters. It has 11 JOINS and takes a solid minute to execute.

The table it fetches from has 16 records and the SQL query returns 46857 records and it was production code lmao

My project mananger let it slip during the sprint review that the upper managers are making plans to do lay offs / cut the fat.

What an ideal moment to hand in my resignation.

I don't understand CSS and am shit at it, moving forward I plan to treat CSS more like old legacy code I don't want to fuck with and preserving any existing working stuff.

Burned once trying to freehand off an example thinking I knew what I was doing versus preserving what was there.

A shout out to those considering deleting their dR account [esp. old timers here] and still on the fence. If you can -- don't.

If you're an old timer here, chances are you actually dev-ranted about real dev issues and possibly posted a solution found after all the frustration.

If you delete your acc, all these posts will disappear. Leave them be. Let them be a contribution to the community, to your fellow devs.

If this platform is no longer worth your time [can't blame you, really], you can simply log out and not come back here :)

15+ years in the "industry" and I'm slowly losing my ability to be self motivated. I'm tired of the grind most days.

But any time someone comes to me with a problem they're stuck on, I'm instantly motivated.

Am I burnt out or just transitioning?

Validating an input field while it's still focused is like a teacher repeatedly interjecting "this is no complete sentence" before the students have finished their sentence.

I've had to create a very simple frontend feature connected to an API. That part works flawlessly but we have rewritten a bunch of code in the system for a certain hardware device.

Now the person that was working on the backend just said today he has no device to test it on lab environment. Neither does any colleague apparently

And guess who got a meeting with the CEO, COO, sales people and the project manager for a demo of that said feature :D

> TeamLeader2: Ok we need this series of parallelized background processes. Each process must gain exclusive access to certain resources. How do we do that
> IHateForALiving: Redlock
> TeamLeader2: Enough Redlock! You propose Redlock every time! It's a wrong solution! Ask ChatGPT!
> Literally the FIRST ChatGPT suggestion: APPLICATION-LEVEL LOCKING (USING REDIS, ETC.)

Challenge for today: tell someone who micromanages that they are micromanaging and see what happens! I never saw our politically, culturally, morally, vibe'ly correct HR lady lose her shit so much :D funny how someone drops all masks when something vulnerable gets touched

Watching someone at a conference trying to play a video in their presentation on Windows PowerPoint. It’s painful to see. No audio. They then ripped the video from YouTube. It still wouldn’t play even in Windows Media Player. They’re still fiddling with it while the speaker and audience trade dad jokes. If I hooked up my Mac it would immediately work. How do Windows users live like this?

My company: "you don't have a choice what you work on"
My company on legal paperwork: "we've given them choice of what they work on to support and develop them as best as possible"

Both of those are verbatim quotes. I laughed. I mean, I now want to punch someone, but I laughed before the violence.

European hares and regular bunnies have nothing in common in terms of how they behave.

Hares will scream at you and attack you if you get too close. They're very fast and very agile, they even look like mini kangaroos. Sometimes they will open their mouth and jump at you full force, essentially using their body as a spear and their incisors as a spear tip. Their teeth are VERY sharp. Unlike carnivores' canines which are pointy, hare's incisors are flat like a razor's edge. They can totally bite your finger off.

They're big, strong and fierce enough to scare away foxes.

Just imagine dying of anaphylaxis all alone in the forest with no one to help you after getting bit by a not-even-rabid not-even-predator.

This really resonated with me. The last job I had before doing my work as a full-time independent freelancer had all sorts of infantilization strategies. Parties, nerf gun wars, big lunch once a week, etc. I'm introverted and all of that stuff sapped my mental energy for the day, so my productivity suffered. It's daycare for adults.

https://nmn.gl/blog/...

How can something called SOAP be such filthy shit. No wonder people wanted to build local-only software back then.