So I inherited this buggy application my company developed to process state rosters for health care. The daily process fails often and I haven’t been able to figure out why. Then I notice one little thing... it’s essentially using SQL injection as a method of updating records from a file that we receive from outside... there’s no checking for validity of the statements or making sure they’re safe to execute. Just a for in loop and calling a sp to execute the query text under elevated permissions.

Cheese and crackers this is the worst code I’ve ever seen... i hated visual basic before but when it’s written by incompetent devs it’s 1000 times worse. Brb going to go tear my eyes out before trying to debug this shit code.

Getting real tired of having to reteach the basics of relational databases to the same 2 people. You were brought in as the expert in databases and SQL Server, I shouldn’t have to teach you about effing primary keys, secondary keys, many-to-many relationships, and how to join the damn tables in a basic query. Your 5 years of experience are obviously a waste if all you did was select * from bullshit. This is the 2nd week and 22nd you’ve asked the same damn questions. Get your crap together and study your ass off if you don’t know. Google the error messages if you don’t remember how to solve it before coming to me with the same question a 23rd and 24th time. I’m not going to get any work done if all you do is ninja up behind me with your laptop in tow and just spout off the question that could be done over IM or a quick duckduckgo/google search. Headphones in = do not disturb ya rude mother duckers 🦆.

Looking for music to help focus. And finding which types work best to listen to.

Looking at new jobs in my area. This company is looking for an entry level full stack developer with “eights” years of experience. And preferred to have a masters degree. Probably only paying half the normal rate I bet too.

Forgive me Linus for I have sinned. It has been since the dawn of time since my last confession.

I hardcoded naming conventions for file names into a script that is used to remove incorrect lines of text that are created during our process to create the files that we send out so that healthcare claims get paid correctly and copy and pasted the code for each new state’s health plan since the users(who are supposed to be technically inclined as they’re in IT as support analysts) can barely figure out how to set up the excel file to remove the lines. There are now 18 files of the same python script with different US States’ names.

This is odd for me to say this.. but Microsoft is kind of impressing me right now. I haven’t had many issues, and kind of testing out visual studio team services and liking what I’m seeing. Started out with VS code at work and here I am using it on small projects at home and seeing what else MS has to offer. Granted I’m still using my linux boot more but it’s been 8 days since my Win10 partition hasn’t crashed and that’s 8 days longer than when I first got this computer a few months ago when it was crashing hourly even after a fresh install and updates.

When everything just “clicked” when making my first program.

What the hell is the point of this small projects team spending 2-3 months on developing extensive logging system for an internal application for inside and outside customers to use if your application isn’t going to log any of the fucking errors. Sure you write the failure status to the database, but it just says failure with an even more vague explanation than microsoft’s errors. “An error occurred”. No shit, that’s why I’m looking in the logs and database to debug the application to get these files on their merry way so our company can stay in compliance with the state, feds, and not pay out the wazzoo in fines. All our other applications state where the error occured such as “failed to connect to the email server”, why can’t this one.

Not finding my passion for programming prior to college. All that time wasted playing WoW in high school.

I mean besides the basics of HTML to edit my MySpace page, I knew nothing for anything computer related.

Got kind of lucky. Previously worked in the company I am at now as an analyst. I then left to freelance/ try starting my own business. After a while I then decided to go back working full time as I got tired of always being broke. Applied for a position and interviewed, then told I was just waiting on the approval to start from the execs as every position as 3 rounds of approvals all the way to the VP’s of this massive organization(which is why they struggle to find decent talent as well since no one wants to wait 3 months to hear back). Well after 2 months of still freelancing the hiring manager calls me and says the position fell through due to a company wide hiring freeze.

Fast forward 6 months of still freelancing, the hiring manager calls for a different more senior position to ask if I was still interested in working for the company. Gave me an offer which I accepted and took 3 weeks to get started.

Time to switch to offline and hide in some dark corner to get work done. Tired of all the IM’s and coming over to my desk from 1 person for “critical” work. If they’re all critical then none of them are truly critical. If you sit on the data for 2 months, and then today is the day it becomes critical and the compliance issue is because of your ineptitude then its a you problem not an IT problem. Then on top of that you submit your data to be loaded in the incorrect request form and spreadsheet format you can go fuck yourself asking this be done in an hour. It could be done in 15 minutes if you had it in the correct format as specified in the 20 meetings over the past year which removed all manual analysis and automated the entire process you idiot. Now I have to get it into the correct format in that hour so I don’t have to do the analysis for you.
I have other things to do besides your etl tickets, like finding the actual problems in our actual critical applications. You know the ones where the VP’s of this giant corporation start calling if they go down.
Sorry for the rambling guys.

So I get these spam messages all the time, but correct me if my math is wrong. 15 years of combined experience / 155 employees = 0.096 years experience per employee which is about a month experience each assuming everyone has the same amount of experience. (15 / 155) * 12 = 1.152 (rounded of course). Now I know having the least amount of experience isn’t always a measure of quality since I have about the least in my team yet have been teaching some of the more experienced coworkers of mine some things but if I am trying to sell services I would probably pump up the collective years of experience a bit. Especially if there’s 155 of you.

Helping a friend study for a midterm for a web development class at the university I went to. They have a new teacher this semester and I’m reviewing his slides about javascript to see where the confusion is...

First slide: based off of Java, hence the name JavaScript, but is not Java. Borrows most syntax from Java.

And they wonder why employers comment on the surveys: “unprepared for the workforce”

Looked up the professor.. no experience teaching or any background in cs. And people pay 6-12k / semester for this state university.

Not really a programming rant, but how fucking hard is it to spell someone's name in an email correctly. There is no single key for 'ph' and if there were it would be no where near the letter 'V'. But then again I'm just trying to help you out with your simple SQL script which you can't find out why you're not inserting data and you're only the director of informatics. And your script is horrendous with multiple joins which are unnecessary. Create one source table instead of 4 inserts from one table and use one insert from one table ya idiot.

Apparently we're playing musical chairs at work... I work from home for one day and now my chair is missing. If you borrow a chair put it back where you found it. It's common courtesy.

Only Windows would give me crap with Dual Boot... fresh install on a separate drive for my ancient Macbook pro and Win10 needs to Repair Disk every time it starts up... might have to buy an actual windows computer again just to use the software to read computer codes on Vw's before selling my car.

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

Sometimes I really hate offshore desktop support... yes I know Visual Studio 15 was installed, and works. But now Python tools was uninstalled in a forced update that corrupted my VS and now I can't install PTVS(not that I need VS has the vim emulator that I can install at work, it's a whole mess of weird security policies.) fucking hate windows and visual studio. Fucking listen what Im telling you the issue is. I need your dumbass to uninstall this shit software so I can do a clean install since the shitty as software management system doesn't so shit when it say's "uninstalling".

On a side note, this fuckwit just tried to explain what the screenshot tool and how to use it... it's only pinned to my taskbar and menu for shits and gigs since I don't use it everyday to tell the stupid data entry analysts I deal with to fuck off.

Received a new HP Probook 640 G2 laptop for work, everyone else has theirs as 64bit machines. Yet the idiots who handle hardware and software installs installed windows for a 32bit machine. Well at least I get waste half a day and do nothing while they redo everything and then I have to still get shit done later.

Okay, just because I'm the only one under 35, single, and only white/hispanic guy on this team doesn't give you the right to interrupt me mid sentence IN my meeting. No disrespect to the developers from India and this may just be a culture conflict where I am outnumbered in my company but I don't understand the how some of these guys can't just be polite or respect others opinions(this is just from my experience with 90 or so developers from India and I don't believe in blanketing all Indians as this way just these 90 plus I do love the food).

Don't hijack MY meeting and then completely derail where I was going and disregard my solution without listening to the whole thing for an idea that isn't even solution but adds more work for both parties involved. You may have been working here for 5 years, but I worked in the actual department where we're building the new process and solution to a problem I've worked on. I understand the user since I WAS ONCE THAT USER for a good 8 months. And on top of that you can barely code efficient, or complex SQL statements. You're nothing more than fucking script kiddies and this whole IT department is joke. I apologize if the rant isn't really that coherent, I'm not very good at typing rants with my adrenaline running hot.

So I went out to a country bar with some friends to dance... and my friend told some random dude I was a developer for some reason and he approached me with his grand idea for an app...😂

If you're going to request CRITICAL changes to thousands of records in the database, and approve it through testing which is done on an exact replica of production, then tell me it was done incorrectly after the fact it has been implemented and you didn't actually review the changes made to the data or business logic that you requested then you are an idiot. Our staging environment is there to ensure all the changes are accurate you useless human. Its the data you provided, I didn't just magically pull it from thin air to make yours and my job a pain the ass.

So I started working at a large, multi billion dollar healthcare company here in the US, time for round 2,(previously I wasn't a dev or in IT at all). We have the shittiest codebase I have ever laid eyes on, and its all recent! It's like all these contractors only know the basics of programming(i'm talking intro to programming college level). You would think that they would start using test driven development by now, since every deployment they fix 1 thing and break 30 more. Then we have to wait 3 months for a new fix, and repeat the cycle, when the code is being used to process and pay healthcare claims.

Then some of my coworkers seem to have decided to treat me like I'm stupid, just because I can't understand a single fucking word what they're saying. I have hearing loss, and your mumbling and quiet tone on top of your think accent while you stop annunciated your words is quite fucking hard to understand. Now I know english isn't your first language and its difficult, I know, mine is Spanish. But for the love of god learn to speak the fuck up, and also learn to write actual SQL scripts and not be a fucking script kiddie you fucking amateur. The business is telling you your data is wrong because you're trying to find data that exists is complex and your simple select * from table where you='amateur with "10years" experience in SQL' ain't going to fucking cut it. Learn to solve problems and think analytically instead of copy fucking pasta.

I hate when meeting hosts ask who joined after every beep when the meeting just started on the phone. Just wait 2-3 minutes then ask who is on the line.

The education system is a fucking joke. How do you get through all the required courses and get to the capstone course where your one goal is to build a simple prototype of a project(like a simple website) for a real world client and not know HTML or CSS when you spent a whole fuckboy semester on a class dedicated to HTML, css, JavaScript and the teacher gave you the PHP. Not only that but you can't even figure out how to use a simple google search to look up the documentation on any of these topics or even the easy to follow tutorials littering the internet on how to use Bootstrap which is what we're fucking using to make it faster to develop the core logic of our app but all you fucking want to do is take shortcuts and create a PowerPoint presentation in google slides and make an easy project look like shit and make me and yourselves look like shit. But don't fucking worry, I'll code the whole thing in a fucking night because you didn't do your part of taking care of just the front end and planned for your incompetence and lack of questions or help. I know you're busy looking for a job for after you graduate but you can't even answer a simple programming question. Let me give you the solution on how to reverse a string, cuz you don't remember c# but it literally takes 30 seconds to google the solution that is everywhere. My project team is why no one takes a degree from this university seriously.

After fighting with Kali I was finally able to boot into it and install it on a 2nd hard drive on my 2010 MBP...

When I first started down the path to becoming a developer, I was a "business analyst" where I managed our departments reports and ended up migrating all the reports from daily query run in MS Access with Task manager and emailed out to all the managers including the VP of the entire business unit, I created
Views in the database and sent out the same spreadsheet with the view in excel daily since management didn't want "change". Granted this was at a large health care company in the US and didn't want to invest in a real dashboard for their reports. The only thing that was changed in the email and file was the file name with the current date. I left the company a while ago and recently applied for a similar position for the shits and gigs. Interviewed with the It manager and they're still using the same excel macro I wrote 3 years later.

While being self employed as a programmer may have its ups and downs, at least no one will judge you(except yourself maybe and your clients if they know) when you code drunk and it's Wednesday night/Thursday morning.

I may not be the guy who 'sudo rm -rf /' for a company but I dang near came close and had a heart attack...