Managers: wE wAnT tO bE LeAn aNd MoVe FaSt As PoSsIBLe wiTh NeW FeAtUrEs

Same Managers: Can you make this icon 2 pixels smaller?! Shift this element left?! Swap out this icon?! Use a different color here?! A perfect feature and design is critical!!!!!!

FullStackClown: You can either be lean and fast, or be fucking nitpicking clowns 🤡 about this stuff and slow us all down. Choose one.

Managers: ...

FullStackClown: Sit down and shut up

Let us pay homage to a classic quote that is so applicable it hurts:

"Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine."

Interviewer: We keep having devs take off for other opportunities after a short period of time. We need someone loyal who will be sticking around for the long haul. Oh wait, you only have one dev company you’ve worked for on your resume? Yeah that’s not good, we only hire devs who have worked for lots and lots of companies.

Dev: …

I just quit btw

I'm officially CTC.

Chief Technical Clown 🤡

How do I know? I've yet to write a single line of productive code today. I've spent the day purely as an administrative cog: writing emails, giving data to consultants, supporting juniors, and cleaning up the absolute hellscape that is also known as our Jira project.

I've become exactly what I hate.

So, I applied for a job lately and the first interview via Zoom went pretty good. Then I got an invitation for a second interview at the company.

I got there, was guided into a conference room and the two head of departments along with an HR woman joined. After a bit if chit-chat HR rep said I should tell them in the next couple of days if I'm still interested. HR left, the other two gave me a tour of the complex, lasting about an hour.

then we got back to the conference room, waited for HR rep and when she arrived she told me something along the lines of "Yeah, we got an impression of you now and you don't need to contact us anymore if your are interested...."

me to myself: "wait what? that sucks...."

HR: "We are impressed enough of you that we want to hire you immediately. Here is the contract!"

me (completely speechless): "oh... OH... THANKS, but... OHHHH" (having a stupid perplexed grin on my face)

I mean... I got the job and pay is good, but PLEASE don't trick me like that!!! I nearly got a heart attack!!!

I quit and my last day is next week.

Apparently management has decided that I should spend my last day implementing a new feature for a customer where I have been the only developer, and release it to production (without first implementing it in test) the same day. A feature that potentially could cripple a whole workflow if done wrong.

Of course I advised not to release untested code to production on a friday, just before the only person that knows how it works leaves the company. But no, “the customer reaaaaaally wants it before summer, so just be careful not to write any bugs”.

I’m not saying that I’m intentionally gonna write bad code - but if I do, I’m not gonna pick up the phone when it calls.

Over the course of a few months, I began to suspect my manager disliked me on a personal level. I decided to be proactive and invited him to a meeting on "Improving our working relationship" - he showed up 5 minutes late and fired me.

To whoever stole my copy of Microsoft Office, I will find you. You have my Word!

Just read this in LinkedIn:

XYZ is one of our top star developers, with #speed as maybe her strongest super skill. She develops and ships new features at a rapid pace, at any time of the day (and night)…

This sounds super toxic for some reason. I’m triggered

Manager: You devs are constantly complaining about context switching, if you were on my level you would be able to multitask and switch from task to task without an— hold on I’m getting a text *tap* *tap* *tap tap* *tap* *send noise*

Manager: Right, what were we talking about again?

Dev: …

Company: Bobby you saved the company millions of dollars this year!!! Great job.

Me: So...how about that extra 2k per year raise.

Company: Um well it just doesn't seem to be in our budget this year.

Manager: Have you fixed the problem?

Dev: What’s the problem?

Manager: We’re not here to discuss problems we’re here to discuss solutions!

Dev: …

A client called me today saying their custom website I built for them is down. It just shows a 403 error now. They said they just wanted to update the prices. I asked what changes they made before it crashed. She said, "I couldn't figure out how to change the prices, so I just installed Wordpress, and now it doesn't work!" They completely deleted the entire website using cPanel and replaced it with a partially installed Wordpress.🤦

!dev

Fuck Russian government. I have nothing else to say.

Vacation!
Short but absolutely needed.

My time tracker shows I’ve had mental breakdowns for 29% of my tracked hours this month. I think it’s time to mail them some mistletoe taped to some manure.

(Yes, I’m searching for somewhere else. When I’m able.)

Friends Pandemic December proposal: "We should all get on Zoom every weekend, play Christmas trivia games and do shots"

Family ideal Pandemic December: "Lets send each other Secret Santa presents throughout the whole month, and get on Zoom and unpack them"

Me: Chilled out on a reclining seat next to a freshly slaughtered green fir tree, burning hearth fire, warm wool sweater, faux fur slippers, big mug of liquored up hot chocolate, keyboard on my lap, writing a Rust library on big screen TV.

Sorry friends & family, y'all are doing holidays wrong.

Happy holidays.
-- signed, Grandpa Bittersweet.

Job Ad: You will report to leadership stakeholders on key progress initiatives and collaborate on business value add action objectives.

Translation: Have boss. Do task.

It’s one-on-one time yet again this week!

I have a 1:1 with my boss every Thursday from 11:30am to 12:00 noon. They often run 45 minutes instead of the planned 30.

Why do I have these? I complained that I have too many meetings, and that it’s hard to get my work done around them (especially while burned out). So as a remedy he scheduled a weekly meeting, every Thursday, so he can make sure I’m getting enough work done. Totally makes sense, right?

And every Thursday he’s 15-25 minutes late. And because they always run long, I lose a full hour or more of time I could have used to get my work done. See the problem?

Today he was 36 minutes late.
Seriously, how disrespectful can he be?

Sad day my dudes... I got terminated from my job.

Startups are rough, I tell you hwat.

Manager: You really shouldn’t be doing that

Dev: It’s in my job description

Manager: Yeah but you still shouldn’t be doing it.

Dev: Who should I hand it off to?

Manager: We don’t have anyone else to hand off that task to.

Dev: Ok, do I stop doing it?

Manager: 😡 Of course not, it needs to get done! I’m just saying you shouldn’t do it.

Dev: ???????????

Manager: Feature C doesn’t work

Dev: We never built feature C

Manager: Nonsense, I remember feature C clearly!

Dev: It’s still in the backlog

Manager: But we had many meetings about it

Dev: Never got put on the board

Manager: Feature C is very important!

Dev: It was never assigned to anyone

Manager: What could possibly be more important than Feature C?

Dev: All the other features you placed on the board and assigned up until now

Manager: Well I need Feature C done asap! It should be top priority!

Dev: Ok then next sprint add feature C to the board and assign it to someone

*Next planning session manager leaves feature C in backlog in favour of other tickets*

*2 days later*

Manager: What is the status of feature C?

Dev: You opted to leave it in the backlog

Manager: BUT IT SHOULD BE TOP PRIORITY!

Dev: …

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

I know a guy who writes everything in Haskell.

He started learning it because his parents got him into a math school (and math schools in Russia use either Python or Haskell), he liked it, but later he dropped out. Today, apart from Haskell, he only really knows HTML and CSS, and maybe some JavaScript.

He writes backend AND frontend in Haskell and uses some kind of JRPC stuff to manage all that. He told me that his life is a pure heaven. He IS RELEVANT (!!!!!!), his apps always run without bugs (because in Haskell you can mathematically prove that there are no bugs), they are performant, faster than C (because you can't write a complex enough app in C that will be as efficient as compiled Haskell, because it's you vs compiler). He doesn't have any problems in life whatsoever. He never got burned out, he never got anxiety or depression. He doesn't act pretentiously and stuff, he's just a normal person who rarely even mentions that he can program.

Science says it can't be done! You can't only know Haskell and be a relevant software engineer! You know what, he didn't _know_ it was impossible. He's like that grandpa from a meme, he got Alzheimers, but because of it he forgot that he had Alzheimers, and now remembers everything.

The fun thing is that he looks like a typical gopnik, with adidas suits and stuff.

What a gem of a person.

A brand new house built on top of poop will still sink

Hey Python, why in the ever loving readability universe I can't break the following command across multiple lines?

df.replace(...).apply(...).reset_index().drop(...)

Oh, but I hear you say "Hitko, why you can break it into multiple lines if you break within brackets!"

To which I ask you, does this shit look any more readable?

df.replace(...
).apply(...
).reset_index(
).drop(...)

Just wanted everyone to know that I did a find and replace all in my project and it actually worked as intended.

That's all.

We now get served free poison at work

My GF said today that she had a dream where someone took her laptop, deleted elementaryos and installed windows. She was so infuriated and enraged that she woke up, and it took her like five solid minutes to realize that it was just a bad dream, and her Linux is safe.

Fuuuuck!!!

In 2017 I had a reeeeally sweet offer for a Java-gig. Equity, quarterly evaluations with potential raises, exciting products, world class experts as colleagues and all. The catch was relocating across the entire country, and due to some family health stuff, I was forced to decline.

Today I learned that the company is valued at about $150M. The equity alone would have been worth around 1.5M today, and thats not all. One of the founders are giving away about 15% of the shares to the employees, landing them about 100K in equity each.

And here I sit, wondering about what the next electric bill will be...