Also a nice example of buzzword-bingo right there!

A 10000% agreed with the above advice.
There's no shame in seeking help, both personally in processing trauma or professionally in resolving issues. Feel good for making your best and well-intentioned effort in every aspect of your life!

On the practical level: muster up your confidence/poker face to plainly/without bias tell the honest truth: you are stuck for reasons beyond yourself and have made every effort to resolve them (be it asking for help, getting more/better documentation, ...).

As a small extra: I have found it helpful in the past to explicitly and literally state "I cannot proceed on X until I get Y (from Z, if it applies and ideally if Z or their proxy is present)". That way there can be no doubt that you clearly signalled you stepping away and no longer taking full responsibility for success. Now everyone who was present and could have helped is co-responsible ;)

You can also always add more ways for the user to "fix" the error, chalk it up to "user experience improvement" and bill them for it. (I don't know what your situation is and if this is a client project or in-house or whatever...)

Well, if it's just the one user among many... (Assuming this one user isn't a big decision maker or influencer, you gotta hate politics in software development) just ignore it. As long as they don't break the system, which it sounds like they can't by submitting invalid data...

@witchDev That's actually a natural effect of the "feeling safe and appreciated" environment. People start to want to "sacrifice" when they feel like that. But it might also just be bad habits ;)

Hey, no judgement if you want to overextend yourself. Many do now and then and when it actually matters to you and your coworkers, they'll appreciate you for it. As long as it's not a habit or expected from you you're all good!

@Lor-inc I hear you. So many times people ask for a custom design/feature-set... Every time I warn them they're asking for something unique and it's gonna take some more time than the average run-of-the-mill website. And almost always - halfway through - people get impatient and go "so, I've heard from some other people who could help speed things along. It would have to be wordpress though..." Arghbglbgrl!@%#!

Don't forget to remove his commit and replace it with the extracted files, rather than pushing the files as an extra commit. Otherwise that zip's gonna stay in got history forever

@magicMirror Yes, I figured I'll have to go in ass-covering mode. I hate it though, to realize that I'm now working for a company where this type of back-office politics is part of the day-to-day

You do realize that the weeks topic *is* about "coding" all-nighters, right?

@ParkCity it does look like a spoof of the iron throne doesn't it!?

Based on the Dunning-Kruger effect, you could think you're (enough of) an expert once you start feeling that everyone else should be able to do the same as you, but better. Expertise correlates to underestimating oneself/overestimating others...

And mostly, I side with what's been said above: if you don't try, you don't know...

What are you working with?

@AlgoRythm That strategy would get expensive fast.

Update: I apologised for my outburst yesterday evening, but also mentioned I really want to be able to put up post-its because they help me with my work. I suggested we try to find a way I can do that that's less annoying to her.

Fast-forward to today: she picked up some old whiteboards she had lying around at her parents place so I can stick my post-its to them instead of the closets.

I love my girlfriend :)

Thanks everyone for chiming in. I've been at work all day but definitely going to apologize for the outburst when I get home. I'm also gonna calmly explain that the post-its are part of my work and would appreciate she didn't mess with that...

Belgian here... Where would that meetup go down? If it's not too far from the border, maybe I'd make the trip...

The same... On a conceptual level maybe...

You should frame it.
I'd call it: "adoration of the queen"

Yeah, sucks wasting time. Even worse when you're fully aware it's wasting while you're in it

I hope they get billed for the overtime...

Have a talk with the GM and throw some numbers at him. Like, we've been to client X times, changing the scope of the project causing us to redo Y hours of work and/or extending our estimates by Z each time. Then make a rough guess as to the cost of those manhours. Also, don't forget the shadow cost of any other work you could have been doing if the client hadn't changed scope midproject.
I find that when you start to reason about it, there is usually little a manager can say to defend a "for-free" stance.
Or at least you could have a talk about how this floating-scope affects your work.
Crappy-feeling peeps do crappy work...

Wouldn't you automatically be in violation of any agreement "to behave ethically" if you don't report their unethical practices to the relevant authorities?

Could be extensions and background apps...

Not sure if I could work like this everyday, but If it works for you, that's great on 'ya!

(I can imagine it working though, just maybe not every time for me...)

That already takes quite some self-discipline, to be able to work your way up in the preference-chain. Props...

@runfrodorun ++ for the monty python reference

I think there are some varying responses from the broad spectrum of possible views here.

Yes, some people think that degrees are everything (they aren't). A degree might prove that you're capable of working hard for a few years in acquiring knowledge and passing exams, although it might also just prove that you're mostly good at short-term memory "stuffing".

Also yes, public projects could prove that you have passion for the field and/or some experience and/or are capable and willing to learn and try out stuff on your own. Then again, there's a lot of crappy half-baked tutorial following goin'round on GitHub.

We (@smallish scale-up) try to stay in the middle of this spectrum. Yes, having a good degree speaks in your favour, but having a side project where you can show valuable contribution says something great about you as well.
We'll almost always ask a candidate to do some kind of test or do a code review with us. Can you code and talk about it? That's what we're looking for...

@itch96 @byte and how about inflating that balloon? Can you make it in the shape of a kitten?

I started at 14, but nowadays I teach computational thinking (using scratch) to kids starting at 8+. That works out fairly well, although it's not for everyone (as is any subject) and it is my experience that some proficiency in reading is a big factor.

Go back to xubuntu. It's fairly lightweight and has all the same hardware-/driver-support as the heavier Ubuntu variants. Also, pretty much the same community to get support from for most problems you might run into.
If you have trouble with wine on that, you'll probably have trouble with wine on many other systems (assuming you can get them to run on your specs)