Remembering a university lecture

Prof: "What are some other downsides of using polling instead of interrupts?"

Student: "The process has to wait until it gets polled."

Prof: "Exactly. When you click Ctrl+W, you want that tab to be closed immediately. You don't want the system to wait a few seconds for those keys to get polled and risk your mom looking at that tab."

Dev: Why did you suddenly start adding random whitespace to the end of all of the files in your PRs?

Manager: IT’S NOT RANDOM!

Dev: ?

Manager: That’s a way I came up with for tracking my contributions. Every time I edit a file I add a line of whitespace at the bottom so it’s clear to everyone how much and how often I’ve contributed to the team. Although I haven’t been doing it this entire time so I had to make up for this by adding more to files that I *know* I’ve touched a bunch before. Just think! Especially with how big my PRs are compared to everyone else the tally of my contributions is going to get huge!

Dev: …

Fucking Visual Studio, I fucking hate you, I FUCKING HATE YOU, I FUCKING HATE YOU YOU PIECE OF GARBAGE, FUUUUUUCK!!!

WHAT THE FUCK!!!

I have my fucking solution. It's working fine.
I close VS.
I open it again.
Many projects are now BROKEN.

WHAT THE FUCK!!! I'm so tired of this SHIT

I'm angry today. The customer's code reviewer blocked my delivery because variables of type "Context" are abbreviated as "ctx".

My colleague wanted me to examine a script issue. I open it up, and it took several minutes to comprehend how it worked. Once it finally clicked:

Me: I can’t decide if this is idiotic or genius.
Colleague: Well, YOU wrote it.
Me: Oh… Genius it is, then!

Getting zero encouragement or positive feedback from my boss is really killing me from the inside. There isn't even a negative feedback. There's absolutely nothing.
PhD is such a lonely path as it is, and being ignored by your advisor is just...soul-crushing.
I did a collaboration with my friend from another lab, and even though her lab is bigger and crazier than ours, her professor found the time to compliment our work and even told us he will present it in a presentation he gives in Meta. Really, it's not that hard to say a kind word here and there.

My third paper got accepted, doing localization with this cute baby in the picture. Had a lot of fun collaborating with a good friend of mine from ETH.
My advisor declines every request I have, and then ignores me most of the time. No wonder the motivation in the lab is lower than the Dead Sea.
I have no words to describe how much I hate every second of my existence, but simultaneously I refuse to change my toxic circumstances so I have only myself to blame. Cheers.

Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.

Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.

I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.

He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.

He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.

At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.

Did everything right, still in the wrong.

Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.

You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.

I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.

While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.

When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.

Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.

Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?

I got a "Revise and Resubmit" response from the journal. Reviewer #1 wanted me to implement some baselines to compare against my method and he cited 6 papers. 5 of them did not have open-source code, and it's not like you can re-implement, train models and fine-tune someone else's approach in 2 weeks. The last one had code, for Ubuntu 14 (may its soul rest in peace), OpenCV version from the time America and Europa were connected and CUDA toolkit that was carved in stone in a cave.
I was bawling my eyes out, thinking about how many days it would take trying to Docker it to work. But then I realized the approach he cited was for RGB-D data, while I only use RGB camera. That's like letting a sniper with an M82 compete in archery....

The next big trend will be in the area of project management:
The Waterfall™
Agile has been abused to the point where The Waterfall™ is way more agile! Think about it: It's straight down. No loops, no unnecessary hourly, daily, weekly meetings. No micromanaging. Just one flow. It starts at the top and it's all downhill from there.
Pure efficiency!

Edit: Wake up developers! The management doesn't want you to know this simple efficiency trick!

Well, I was the One that was scolded. Because I basically took over without asking permission to fix a critical outage.
I fixed it within 3 minute, while the person in question have been trying for 2 hours.

He then got very angry and told me infront of everyone that "dont ever help me out".

Said and done. I never helped him ever since, even if he clearly struggled with everything.
He got fired recently due to incompetense

Manager: Why did you clear the data from the database? The client is now specifically requesting it and we don’t have it anymore!

Dev: You told me to.

Manager: Well why did you listen? It’s obvious now that that data was very important and should have been kept!

Dev: Last time you told me to do something that wasn’t a good idea I tried to explain why and told me not to question you ever again and that doing so was “disrespectful” and then threatened to have me fired. So now I just go along with what you say and let you suffer the consequences of not listening.

Manager: Well don’t do that then! It’s obviously not working very well! It’s ok to disagree with me you just have to make sure that what you think is something I agree with!

Dev: …

I still want Lubuntu....
Who uses Lubuntu here???😳

I have not remotely had the energy to post here. Nor reply. And it is a shame because most of you I consider friends. And if not friends, at least excellent aquitances.

People make comments, I dont reply. People make threads, and I dont respond. People make ++s, and I'm a ghost.

I enjoyed shitposting, and asking questions, and hopefully entertaining some of you. I really do.

I'm just in a funk where nothing seems to matter right now and I dont know why, pr how to get out of it.

I have threads, and responses from scor, nanos, nachoscode, and a dozen others I usually enjoy interacting with and it's like all the life has just been sucked right out of me.

I feel isolated and alienated from everything and everyone and I dont know why or when it started. Its just..there. nor how to talk about it.

I think I'm becoming a misanthrope or something. The more I go on with this sensation, the less I want to be around people, and I dont understand why.

Heaven on earth, maybe?

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

I can't tell if XCode is a torture device or just very badly written.

Fuck you ios,storyboad,xibs,xcode. FUCK OFF!! YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES. Literally giving me migrane with your fucking ass constraints!! Fuck you xcode for not having a terminal. Ios is utterly bullshit. Has fucking all kind of devices that I have to set constraint. Fuck you macos. You are slower than a snail. How on earth do you take so much time to build!!
Width, height, constraints, my ass! What is this fucking logic bro. Fuck you apple for making so many device of different sizes and then hiring us to set constraints. Warning warning warning oh what a load of crap!
I would rather die than set your fucking ass constraints.

Code works.

Rename a variable for clarity.
Third-party lib behaves differently, breaks things.

Change the var names back.
Still broken.

Stash changes and checkout previous commit.
Everything works.

Diff with stash.
No notable changes. (some comments, ...)

Checkout branch again, pop stash.
Broken again.

... What?

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

The more I code the more i realize software was all about people.

Teammate has been slacking since a week: not joining standups, not joining calls, stuff like that. Upon asking , he does give info which is needed from him, over slack. He is a pretty good engineer and has won a company award this year.

Today manager scolded him pretty harshly. No direct slangs, but very rude tone and sentences like ‘do you need special invitation to your house to join this meeting?’ , ‘If you don’t want to work, just fuck all this shit’ and things along this line for 10 mins. Basically manager lost his shit completely.

I didn’t like the way he was treated. What options does my teammate have ? We’re based out of Hyderabad, India.

Interviewer: For this next code challenge you will not be allowed to use the internet, or an IDE.

Dev: …

Interviewer: OR a keyboard OR a mouse. I will be verbalizing the code to you and you need to memorize it and tell me where the bugs are.

Dev: …

Interviewer: We must do this exercise to know how you are as a dev without any performance enhancing “aid”. This way we can understand where you are truly at skill-wise, and what you are truly worth from a compensation perspective.

Dev: …

Dev: If I get a job with you will I be allowed to use the internet and an IDE and a keyboard/mouse?

Interview: Of course you would! Getting anything done without those is just about impossible. We just need to evaluate you without them to see how good you REALLY are.

Dev: …

Best antivirus for mac?

Worst: work caused me to lose passion, be stressed/really close to burnt.

Best: I resigned

During an annual review process, my friend, who is a female dev (doesn't work with clients), got feedback that she needs to smile more.
I'd like to hear from the male devs here, how many of you were asked to smile more?

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

I was interviewing this guy who's been a dev for 12 years. Apparently got laid off in his small town company because of covid.

So I asked him to write an algorithm that loops through a list and returns the largest number.

Not only could he not do that after trying for 15 minutes, but he also spent an entire minute ranting about how algorithmic questions were dumb and unnecessary in this day and age and you can google these things without having them memorized anyway.

The point of an algorithmic question in an interview is not to see if you can memorize the fucking thing. It's to see if you're methodical enough to reason through what you don't know and arrive at a decent solution all the same.

What do you guys think? Was I somehow the asshole here? It was a JavaScript job and the product was fairly complex, not just HTML bullshit.

5000 characters aren't enough to express how much I fucking hate Xcode and iOS developing in general