There’s lay offs in my company.

So far:
- slackers and incompetents are staying
- Part of the leadership team is in holidays
- No one said the word lay offs but use the sentence “changes to come”

I am going back on monday and part of me hope I will be kicked out as I will have nothing to loose then, and a full month to say whatever I want.

Unix is so incredibly beautiful. Everyday I discover something new that makes me fall even deeper in love with it.

For real, I've become a huge YAGNI fan over the last few years and Unix is pure yagni. It's so beautifully pragmatic and simple yet flexible and powerful

Top bullshit message I have ever received would probably be:
'I wasn't asking 🙂'.
The fuck is this shit?
Are you trying to reprimand me, as indicated by the first part of the message, or be my fucking friend?
Best part - the message was sent by someone who had no authority to demand anything from me at the time, which I had to point out to the guy.

Wait wut?
Haven't been here for a while..

Had a rant. Someone replied to me in a new rant. And I thought, what a nut.

However... comments are broken? It just became normal to make new rants? How long already? Anyone already built an aggregator tool?

Team 'leads' who consistently introduce scope creep are so fucking annoying. How can they get the basics of project management wrong? It leads to more, constant, work stress ("why didn't you finish this on time?" Well maybe because you keep reviewing PR's last minute and instead of sticking to requirements, you ad-hoc make me 'fix' things that weren't even there).

so everyone seems to get brainwashed already and doesn't mind it

does it mean humans consent to brainwashing implicitly? 🤔

humanity, do I have your consent to brainwash you? 😁

why else would you let other things brainwash you? 🤔

How do you comfort a JavaScript bug?

You console it.

What‘s the purpose of separating your code into "independent" modules if each module contains everything anyways?

My remote job just ended

I am so fucking salty today.
I've had multiple tight deadlines overlapping with the crescendo one where I did 90% of the implementation including helping another company implement some stuff on their side as well as coordinating multiple parties with lots of twists and turns. We barely delivered on time. Contract is worth 10 million.

There was cake to celebrate the success last week. They didn't even bother telling me. I found out on LinkedIn. I mean I def dont get paid enough but cant even fucking have a slice of cake on the success I created?

Oh fyi I offered to buy some drinks so we could have a little celebration on my costs, just you know like have 2 beers and some snacks nothing grand. It was shut down the only way it was allowed was if I paid for the whole company to have drinks. Seriously these people be out of touch I cant pay for 300+ people ..

The most interesting thing about the GDPR training that we do is that very little of it is about our rights as employees and almost all of it is to protect our employer. Funny that.

We "engineered a prompt" (in other words, crapped a very poorly written paragraph using only short sentences) that gathers many arguments pro and against the usage of AI to code our production data pipelines.
Most of the "pro" arguments are variations of "we'll get fired if we don't use this crap in something".

Prompted with the whole argument, even Gemini thinks we should not use AI to write our code. Nowadays, we use Gemini mostly to justify why we shouldn't use Gemini.

Seriously. We made the whole setup so that any PO who demands AI has to convince the AI it is a good idea. I'll admit, the AI is doing a good job to deter people who want to use it. It hasn't cracked even once. Not that it matters, anyway. POs just ignore what the AI says and organically write orders telling us to use it anyway.

Reminder for Europe meet up.

I suggest August 23rd, Amsterdam. Let's meet at centraal and go from there.

... I expect 5 of you to show up, btw, with one being late and one being very very late. 😐

is it just me, or is reading LLM-generated text really annoying?

It feels like I'm reading the same thing over and over again, in different contexts about different things.

In my company I now have 3 browsers.

Chrome for company stuff that only works in Chrome.

Safari for company stuff that only works in Edge or Safari.

And Firefox for actual work.

🤡

My wife went to do some work for a charity. They "got her the best computer available". It was a poor mangled MacBook whose better days were somewhere in the dawn of the last decade.
She tries to type anything... and only gibberish appears on screen.

She comes to me, absolutely me puzzled. I try to type anything... gibberish. I boot up in safe mode, everything is OK.

I look around for system configs... there is a custom keyboard mapping enabled by default.
We check the weird stains on the keyboard... they are regular and in all keys. Like if there used to be adhesive stickers on the keys, and those stickers were later removed.

I boot up again... and type "q". It becomes "a". I type "w". It becomes "b". I dread typing "e". Sure as bug, it becomes "c".
By the love of byte, someone asked for a custom keyboard layout... IN FUCKING ALPHABETICAL ORDER.

It was easy enough to change the layout after that, but the weirdness continues: my wife asked around, and apparently the laptop used to belong to some old dude... who was convinced there were characters missing from his keyboard. Apparently he could never find them in a regular QWERTY layout.

I wish I could give some encouraging words for the kid who came up with the solution. Working around technophobes is a drying art, that needs to be rewarded.

I think I'm now a tabs person, it's the only character where the width can be easily adjusted for different devs without changing the underlying file's data

I feel like I'm being forced to crawl when I desperately want to fly.🥲

I work with a team of morons where they just keep overriding my code and business sending us mails saying this requirement hasn't been implemented so please done.

Those morons are just getting on my nerves

We had a teambuilding last Friday. We went indoor karting and it was a lot of fun. My project manager does not have a driving license and it did show.

The karts have a boost button (electric karts) and my project manager used it before a turn and then slammed into wall. Now he got a few bruised ribs haha

Also, it's still funny to me that I was part of the teambuilding during my resignation but i'm not gonna complain about that. :D

Swift: Have you ever noticed...

How many times the word "Safe" is used when describing Swift, yet there is no way to programmatically determine if a memory allocation failed?

How many ways this "Safe" system has a way of crashing:
1. Unwrapping a Nil Optional
2. Disconnected Outlets
3. Out-of-Range Array Access
4. Accessing Uninitialized Variables
5. EXC_BAD_ACCESS (Memory Access Errors)
6. Threading and Actor Isolation Issues
7. Type Casting Errors
8. Uncaught Language Exceptions
9. (fill in the blank?)

What frustrates me is that Swift lacks a language-level way to check if heap memory allocation succeeded. When you create an object like MyClass(), Swift assumes success—if allocation fails, the process dies instead of allowing your code to gracefully handle the failure.

And to avoid having pointers, it creates this horrendously random undocumenting syntax salad that is worse than ADA.

Swift, when you wanted a liter-bike and you get something else

If your manager is an asshole in unrecorded 1-on-1's, buy a dictaphone.

Dear Windows,

How hard is it to actually update and shut down? No, don't restart. If I wanted you to restart I would have chosen that option.

Sincerely,
The last decade

Opinions or resources on how to do good abstractions, encapsulation and separation of concerns

Dear employers, DO NOT FUCK WITH A PERSON'S DOCTORS. My doctors are paid to help me. If that means helping to sue your asses, they'll do it in a heart beat. Don't give them motivation.

My employer made dubious claims to my doctors in an occupational health referral. I've requested a copy of the referral. In the hopes I might not get a copy of the referral they've pushed this to my doctors as they don't want to give it to me. Because they've lied. Or they think I won't jump through the hoops to get access to MY OWN MEDICAL RECORDS.

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.

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.

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

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

I need a polite way to ask someone if they're brain damaged.