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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Yeah, 4 employees out of 20.

    The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn’t even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.

    At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.

    HR as a department seems largely useless unless you’re hiring 365 days a year and have so many employees that you can’t keep up with all the requests. HR people are usually terrible at screening candidates anyway.


  • Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.

    So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by “governmental endless bureaucracy” or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.

    My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.

    I can’t really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn’t run by genius.






  • It is incredible really, I worked with C# for so long, and I tend to be very critical of the stuff I’ve used for a long time. For C#, I am struggling to figure how I would improve it, because all the stuff that suck in C# is usually the lesser of two evils.

    Of course if you hate classes, types, managed memory or anything invented in the last 20 years you will hate it, and I’ve met people like this. That is why you gotta keep learning as a dev, you don’t want to be one of those.



  • I worked in the video game industry for over a decade and let me tell you there is nothing more infuriating than arguing with a clueless gamer who thinks everything can be solved in a few minutes with overly naive solutions. Bonus points for trying to “educate” me on my own specialization like “net code”. Why do I even bother.







  • We might as well been coworkers. Crazy just how sheepish all the big execs are. Productivity was supposedly up at the peak of the WFH policies, but now suddenly it is so important to go back even though there is not enough room for everyone.

    I don’t miss being crammed into a pretencious office being surrounded at arm length by 5 other people, some of which at loud as fuck and spend their days on zoom. I really won’t do it anymore, I don’t care if I starve.

    45min commute which cost over a hundred per month and still require me to walk in shitty weather, already soaked in sweat half the months of the year, so I can walk in and plug my shitty laptop on a dock and ultimately still have 99% of my work done remotely and on zoom on my shitty webcam because half the office is home and three quarter of my colleagues live in a different country.


  • Yes, and the test suites were insane. The program was outputting a lot of data, and we basically asserted on anything and everything for any given integration. I mentioned that testing wasn’t the only issue, well there was a lot of issues. Unfortunately the behaviour changes were requested by the stakeholders and there was no way around it. That being said, had this thing we maintained been properly developed those changes would have been a breeze imo. The actual requirements were very simple.

    But anyway, I realize this is maybe an extreme example to paint integration tests negatively, but the point remain. In this scenario, every time we changed a bit of code it broke dozens of integration tests instead of breaking just a relevant integration test, had everything that could have been unit tested been written that way. The integration tests could probably also had been less… exhaustive, but it was probably for the best considering the codebase.