You know the old adage "cost, speed, quality, pick two."

I've come up with my own.

Shitty jobs you'll forever be stuck in with no way out: unreasonable demands and coworkers that drive you insane, pay below the poverty line, no sleep.

Pick two.
More likely, pick three.

It's been a while since I've heard a consensus of a moronic idea from the corner offices. I was invited to a department planning meeting (just to listen, not necessarily engage or add value) and discussion went to the development of a mobile app.

Mgr1: "The CEO has the net present value of the mobile project as $20 million. Where did he get that number?"
VP: "No idea."
Mgr2: "How will it be any different than our web site that is already mobile compliant?"
VP: "It is to gain market share"
Mgr3: "Market share from who? A mobile app is not going to increase our customer base. At best, it will only move some of our existing customers to mobile. No way it would scale to those numbers."
VP: "The primary benefit is so customers can browse offline."
Mgr2: "Offline browsing isn't listed in the milestones."
Mgr1: "We're not going to push and keep gigs of data up-to-date on someone's phone just for random times they don't have internet access."
VP: "I guess that's right. We can push our pdf catalog. That's only a few hundred meg."
Mgr2: "Pushing the catalog? That's not on the listed milestones"
VP: "Its all assumed."
Mgr3: "Who owns this project? Web team is already maxed to capacity."
Mgr2: "Marketing team only has 3 developers, we can't take on anything as complex as a mobile app and support the existing processes."
Mgr1: "What about the network infrastructure and PCI compliance? We're talking about a system for the web site and another for mobile, right?"
Mgr2: "Who is going to manage all the versions in the app stores and future changes to the mobile platform?"
Mgr4: "Not us"
Mgr2: "Nope"
Mgr1: "OK, good. Its very likely this project will be dead on arrival at the next company strategic meeting."
VP: "Mobile the only project on the strategic meeting agenda. Sorry guys, it's happening. We're not going to leave $20 million sitting on the table.
<awkward silence>
VP: "Next item of business ..."

Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds, are scumbags.

When you progress to a certain level, they offer you a cool new thing — to hatch an egg. You click “hatch”, and then you have to wait 24 hours. This builds excitement — after all, it looks like an amazing new mode, and you can't wait to see what it is.

The reality is, you hatch this beautiful little creature. From here on, you have to FEED it regularly, or it will die. They drew it the cutest way possible. How should a child resist feeding this cutie? When I hatched it, I didn't know what this new mechanic was, and I assume new players don't know either.

You feed it apples. You can find apples on certain levels, but they are scarce. The further you go, the more apples are required to keep him alive. Play the game actively to keep up with it and get apples! Or, you could just… I don't know… BUY them.

“Mom, I need $11.99 to feed Fluffy, otherwise it will die!”

A straight-up scumbag fucking mechanic in a game targeted to impressionable children that will have a hard time seeing this tiny beautiful creature die of starvation. Let's guilt-trip kids into asking money from their parents!

Man, I'm sure there are a million of these posts right now but...

The hiring market and hiring culture nowadays is so damn frustrating. I have a decade of experience in multiple senior/lead/principal roles at both big name companies and high-growth startups, along with a very well-written resume.

Even with this, I can barely get an interview these days. I'll apply to a role that lists qualifications for which I'm an exact fit, and either get a quick auto-denial or just never hear back at all. It doesn't matter if I custom-craft my resume and cover letter to match the job description or just send my standard resume and cover letter. We all love those pandering and patronizing "We know that this isn't the news you wanted to hear, but keep trying! Maybe you'll be good enough for us someday!" auto-denial email.

Sometimes I'll receive a denial, look back at the job posting, that they needed somebody with NLP experience or something, and say to myself "Fair enough, that makes sense." Other times, I'll look at the posting and say "Oh come on, I check every single box." It makes you wonder "What the fuck are you actually truly looking for?"

Sometimes I'll look at the company's current employees and see that almost every single one is ex-FAANG, indicating that the company will almost only hire other ex-FAANG employees (despite there being thousands of other well-qualified candidates out there who are just as talented and skilled as those ex-FAANG candidates.)

Other companies seem to be "brand shopping" for ex-FAANG employees after all the recent FAANG layoffs, hoping to land a bargain on an ex-Google engineer so they can brag that their product was built by the same people who built Google.

Then there's the question of even making it past the ATS and in front of an actual human's eyes. The hiring culture seems to be an ATS SEO game nowadays. God forbid that you didn't include the super secret magic keyword in your resume, else you'll automatically be filtered out and denied.

It's just incredibly frustrating and makes you wonder what kind of candidate you need to be to even get a first round interview nowadays. Do we all need to have a glowing personal recommendation from the ghost of Steve Jobs in order for a 50-person startup to even open our resumes?

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

The IS department manager 'John' loved shelled peanuts, but hated cleaning them up. By the end of the day his desk and surrounding area were covered in peanut shells (he never bothered trying to put the shells in the trash can). He didn't seem to care because the maintenance crew would clean up the office every night and he would come in to a clean area every day.

That was until the company owner's wife was making the rounds one day and saw his mess. The shells hit the fan. The 'beat down' occurred at EOD, so most didn't witness it, but she lit him up. Almost screaming that he's a grown man and the maintenance crew have enough to do without cleaning up after him...etc..etc.
John never ate peanuts at his desk again.

Ah very good, it seems Windows has taken the liberty of putting a link to Edge on my desktop again. Just in case I had accidentally removed it or something.

The battle is lost. I'm implementing the mother of all stupid features because the sales team wants it.

Making cocktails.

(And, obviously, drinking them :))

RC racing

My dev lead is a uniquely poor leader with an impressive ability to produce a large amount inflexible, temporarily functional code.

As we're in another pair programming session where I try to keep him from destroying over all type safety and architectural decisions to meet a self imposed demo deadline, he keeps trying to access properties of his state.

This state object is incorrectly typed with an anonymous type with incorrect properties.

Despite repeating calmly stating that the object is incorrectly typed, and that's why there are red underlines when he tries to access a property he knows is in there, he insists that that's not correct.

Finally, he knowingly says that he's figured it out and that he's been doing this for many years.

What was the solution you might ask? (state as any).myProperty;

Truly breathtaking mastery.

Okay! Here’s the truth of my life 🌝

Poorly explain what you do for a living.

!rant

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

FOUR DAYS ‘TIL CLOSING!

I’M GOING TO OWN A HOUSE!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I’m starting to like snek…

salary

People should have mandatory lessons in vector processing.

In canteen, after lunch, there were 4 places you could place your trays. But only small, one-way corridor, for one person at a time to get there.

Every person picked the first place and while they were placing the tray, people behind them had to wait. Huge line started to form. If they, instead, always picked the last empty place, all tray places would be occupied for longer and the processing speed could increase almost 4 times.
Textbook vector processing example.

One of my bad dev habits is that I tend to take up too much work because a lot of devs I had to work with seemed not competent enough. It's a bad habit because I get way overworked which influences code quality and deadlines.

I have to learn to trust more in others and give up some responsibility... it's hard though.
I think a big influence on my mindset has been that I never worked in a team bigger than 4 developers and I had way more experience in web dev than the others.
I sometimes may appear as an arrogant prick, but it's not intentional.

The time when work got you burnt out / exhausted?
Yes.

When your partner rolls over in their sleep and manages to smack you in the face… not the best way to wake up.

Morning there:)
To everyone who’s enjoying / doesn’t but is going to enjoy ( ̀⌄ ́) the DevStory:
here we go, with the third episode.

Leave a comment below and tell me your “dev stories” :)

If you like looking at language designers fight on Hacker News (and who doesn't?) go ahead and search for the V programming language or Vlang as it is also called and also for the posts that the creator of Odin lang has done in regards to V langs creator.

Its a shitstorm. Apparently both languages have been designed as alternatives to C (not as in "this will kill C!!" like rust does) and occasionally you will find some posts from the Zig language creator.

Fascinating fights actually, have been able to learn a thing or two about why some ideas concerning language design are whacky etc.

I am also trying to understand language design better, which is the main reason why I appreciate all of them fights.

10/10 best drama series I have seen thus far.

I can’t remember if I shared this cringe with you all or if I was too embarrassed by it, but…

In the spirit of giving, I gift you all this cringey parody song I recorded 3 years ago. “I Program in C”. Lyrics written by Chris Frederick on amiright.com, song parodied is I Go to Extremes by Billy Joel.

https://smule.com/recording/...

Happy holidays, friends.

!rant Pulled an accidental all-nighter on Friday because I started crocheting a blanket for the cats and lost track of time. I am becoming a crocheting fiend!

I may have made a scarf for my cat

Officially Azure az-900 certified! 🙂

One more step to go from third world to first hopefully?

I met this guy on my very first job. An internship. He was an intern too. We were doing Java and he was a brilliant programmer. We would try to finish the job as quickly as possible then stay back late to play 1v1 CS. (Yes on company LAN). We worked together for only 2 months. We are still in touch. Right now helping him with SOP for his master's thesis.

In my company, we create roadmaps using Microsoft PowerPoint.

If you need me, I'll be crying in the darkest corner questioning my life choices and existence.

I'm not sure yet, but I'd like to go into a more humane side of development, maybe UX, but I'd also like to do research on the sociological impacts of softwares

I am a female manager at a small, mostly male company, and directly manage several people (all male). One of the six has worked for me for multiple years. Since he began his employment, I always felt he had a “crush” on me and kept my distance (as much as I could as his manager).

His crush has gotten increasingly more obsessive over the past year: constantly staring at me, using absurd reasons to contact me through email/messenger/texts, whether at work or evening/weekends, and getting extremely emotional/upset if I do not frequently talk with him or provide feedback for his every task. He never says anything inappropriate or makes any advances but is making me increasingly more uncomfortable.

My tendency to avoid the employee combined with my obvious annoyance with his increasingly absurd reasons to interact with me is reflecting poorly on my management skills — to the extent that my manager is questioning my abilities to manage.

Manager: *taps dev on shoulder* Hey I noticed a minor bug I think

Dev: Sigh…. So then create a ticket for it

Manager: Can’t you just fix it right now?

Dev: I can but I’m currently working on that other issue you told everyone was “top priority” at the morning status meeting. Should I switch to actioning this minor bug instead?

Manager: Don’t switch just multitask and work faster!

Dev: …