I have discovered a fresh hell

Some guy I’ve never met or heard of in the office lobbed a comment at one of my *approved and merged* pull requests. He doesn’t say anything specific, only that my REST urls are not in line with naming convention. That’s all he says, and I’ve already walked the URL consumers through the code and given them the URLS.

I’m really annoyed that this guy won’t just say what he has in mind, but fine whatever this is a professional environment and developers are not known for being a diplomatic people. Let it go and get your work done!

I do some googling and find an obvious change that needs to happen- I implement it, open a new pull request and inform my URL consumers of the change.

This rando still isn’t satisfied and still won’t say what needs to change. I am on round 3 of this wonderful cycle and this guy is acting all fuckin HAUGHTY about it. “Here is a list of conventions I found googling, you should read them even if it takes 4 hours because it will benefit your career”

Sure dog you’re probably right on that one but we are in a professional environment and at this point you are holding up production so you can wave your dick around! Just SAY WHAT YOU MEAN SO WE CAN MAKE THE CHANGES AND GET OUR WORK DONE

I’m sick of having a manager that doesn’t know how to code. His expectations are continually unreasonable.

Yesterday, one of the consumers of my web service complained that I had made a lot of work for him by changing the schemas for said service.

Today, I was about 20 minutes from hitting ‘commit’ and mailing him the final details for the service & declaring it done.

He comes by to ask me to put a feature back in that I took out earlier at his request. I commented it out last week and just this morning finally deleted the comments in preparation for submitting the final build

Web service consumer: hey I need you to add new methods to this service

WSC: hey I need you to change the functionality

WSC: hey here are four new lists of fields to return from your service.

WSC: hey what are you doing the schemas are completely different now!! This has caused a lot of work for us

What follows is an email I want to send very badly right now:

RE: please provide new date format

There is no new date format. You have the day and month switched. In the sample you've provided.

You've been getting away with it up til now because the digits were small enough to be either a month or day.

Then, as soon as you hit a snag you immediately gave up and assumed it was me changing things. You came to me before even making a guess what could be wrong.

Learn to fucking troubleshoot PLEASE. I am sick of your lazy shit coming to me with an issue every time you stub your toe. You are professional developers and I am your junior.

I am working on a webservice that some other consultants upstairs are set to consume.

Last week, monday, the consultants send multiple emails and one of them comes downstairs to find out why the service isn't working correcrly. My manager tells them in email that it is still being developed and won't be ready for ten business days.

However in the meantime the service has some barebones functionality that they can try out.

And wouldn't you know it, I get emails and visits every other day along the way asking why the service is down or doesn't function.

When is the service going to be down? Why isn't this working? Hey you need to fix this

IT'S NOT DONE YET

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

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

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

I'm still wet behind the ears as developers go, and about a month ago I cobbled together a webservice. After many bug fixes I somehow got it working as intended, held together by tape and shoestring and creaking all the while.

This week, one of the consumers of the service wanted me to open it back up to change the name of the request .xsd. no functionality changes, just a name change.

I protested, worried my service would fall apart if I breathed on it. But he insisted so I made the change.

I just tested it and... it's working as intended.

But I still want to be mad about this!!

Me, two weeks ago, adding yet another function onto an increasingly complex webservice: "hey uh this is getting pretty confusing, why don't we structure the request this other way so at least it makes more sense."

Manager: "just leave it as is, let the other team worry about how confusing it is. It's their problem now, I want you to move on to a new assignment."

Now- the other team is confused by the webservice and does the requests wrong, resulting in failures. Does it become my problem again when they report that my webservice isn't working?

Yes, it does.

My manager calls in to the morning stand-up meeting while driving to the office.

This is dangerous, not just for him but for other drivers.

I want so badly to say something but he's my manager and I'm afraid of reprisal.

He wouldn't listen to me anyway.

I don't understand how my leads are so bad at estimating time.

"I'll message you in five minutes" = they'll message me in an hour

"Give me ten minutes" = I will sign off for two hours and not respond for another 45 the next time you see me on and message me

Seriously, stop saying things you don't mean. It's rude and insulting.

Just a quick one:

Testing team: hey your webservice isn't returning the id number of this customer we used it to look up, fix it

I take a look and sure enough the test customer doesn't have an id number *screenshot of blank field*

I add an id number to the customer and test it out again. Lo and behlod, there's the id number! *screenshot* *send reply*

Seriously wtf this is basic

I was told to build a logging app for one of the work streams on my project. The lead briefly brainstormed about the data fields they'd need to log and told me to go make it.

I am handing off the app and they ask me what they are supposed to put in each field.

Me: oh [team lead] just told me to put in these fields, but you guys are going to use it so why don't you tell me which fields you need and I can change it easily.

They refuse to tell me how to build the app they're going to use and will definitely complain about it not doing what they want later.

I can and will complain about my dev job til I'm blue in the face.

However, nothing compares to the feeling I get when MVP lurches to life from its slab. I feel like a mad scientist and I love it.

Me: *submits design document to manager, who sends it to client for review*

Client: "everything is good, except one line here mentions a function that has since been removed" *send email to manager*

Manager: Correct this one line *sends email to me*

Me: uh, ok *deletes line, sends updated document in new email*

Is there any reason in the world the client OR manager couldn't have corrected the line and moved on?

Did we need to get two more people involved and send 3 more emails?

Still new to development buy holy dang I had no idea clients could be so fickle.

It seems like every time I turn in my one project- which I've been on for a month because of this nonsense- they think of two more major features they wanted all along but never mentioned

Me: junior dev

Assignment: build a REST search service that also does (thing x)

Me: gosh I just can't figure out how to make (thing x) work! Nothing I try works and there are no online resources!

*goes to meeting with client*

Client: (thing x) is impossible in our application, so we are expecting (much more manageable thing)

Me: awesome! I think I can build that

Manager who can't code: what are you talking about, (thing x) is clearly better and it should be possible to do

Manager: *sends email outlining shifted requirements after the meeting, including (thing x)*

I'm a junior dev working with some very proprietary applications. The point is, I can't Google for code solutions at all.

The seniors are all very put upon and too busy to offer much actual help unless it's urgent.

I beg for assistance until I'm blue in the face and eventually stumble my way to something resembling the solution.

I get one of them to review my code, and while they do I point out all the places I STILL need help.

They don't answer any of those questions but damned if they don't have opinions on how my comments should be formatted.

Aaauuuuggghhhh