Does anyone else feel like every single thing they touch turns to crap?

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sixten04@reddit

Bro you are me. 13 years experience and waves of layoffs and exodus of good devs at my company mean we who are left have to pick up the trash that's left.

It feels like everything I touch also shits the bed, not because of what I change exactly, but problems just start happening.

I tried to make a change and found out the existing deployment didn't match source control for the past 15 years and had to rebuild the entire application.

I got pulled in to a prod failure because I made a change to another app last year and the manager just knew my name. Restarted docker containers, data is loaded, it runs and creates its file, problem solved. Today there is another issue with the containers. I think maybe someone ran a pipeline from a bad branch, failures are not being caught by monitoring that was supposed to be set up, downstream apps are failing and their error notices are not being received. I don't think this is my fault but I'm in the spotlight so as far as management is concerned, it's my failure and I have to fix it and I'm expected to instantly catch failures that other people are responsible for catching.

I am beginning to lose all confidence in myself. I just want to quit because it feels like I can do no right.

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Ch3t@reddit

Holy Shit! Donald Trump subscribes to /r/ExperiencedDevs

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WesolyKubeczek@reddit

Nah, too much self-consciousness in this one

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old_man_snowflake@reddit

Programming -- actual coding -- is hard. It's like speaking another language. It pays well for a reason. It can be intensely frustrating.

I have felt this. A lot. If it ain't one thing, its a fucking 'nother.

It's not accident the people who work with computers a lot all dream of running off into the woods, far from any computers.

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Imaginary-Poetry-943@reddit

So true. There’s a big part of me that’s very jealous of people who have jobs where they just work with their hands and never have to use a computer. I stick with programming because the pay is good and I enjoy the mental challenge of coding, but the number of times per week that I want to throw my computer out a window is very high.

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kronik85@reddit

It’s almost a month and I’ve been pulling my hair out for days trying to land the commits. I got everything green, ready to go finally.

Suddenly I’m getting a half dozen errors from checks that never raised any issue before. I fix those and something new pops up.

what's going on here? are there new tests being run? diff pipelines?

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shawntco@reddit

How much you want to bet there's different environments (dev, test, prod) that magically have different linting or SonarQube-type requirements

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CHR1SZ7@reddit

Oh my god I am dealing with this bs right now. Cloud migration, seen as an opportunity to for a “step change in our processes” because the on-prem environments are all totally different. It feels like every week I have to fight some idiot trying to make the environments different again because they’re just not thinking about why consistency leads to stable delivery.

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behusbwj@reddit

The first time i led a greenfield project, it actually came out perfectly. Tech-wise it was operationally a breeze, used modern frameworks and techniques, solved a novel problem. And then it got given to another team and I was left with the crap.

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reboog711@reddit

Some days I turn things into crap! Some days I make magic.

Our experience should let us recongnize the difference.

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fuckoholic@reddit

Are those code bases too dry?

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Affectionate-Aide422@reddit

Standard. It’s why I do side projects so I can make good progress and prove to myself I can GSD.

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Schedule_Left@reddit

If they gave you a timeline without your input then that seems like it's a rushed project (as with alot of other projects). So like it was destined to be pain.

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ChiefNonsenseOfficer@reddit

Nobody has ever asked me for timelines, and I'm the dev lead

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OptimistCherry@reddit

Lol, then business gives timelines to you? I’m sure they will be nowhere reasonable or possible, do you pushback and reason with them?

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ChiefNonsenseOfficer@reddit

Middle management gives timelines, then senior management challenges them to be more ambitious and make us look better. No way to push back - it's a done deal, I'm expected to push people to deliver.

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tommyk1210@reddit

My condolences… I don’t understand how management could even have an idea of delivery timelines if they don’t consult with the people doing the work…

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gomihako_@reddit

Its a spaghetti shit show of VC-driven impossible business goals, psychopathic c-level execs with terrible communication skills not conveying the correct level of context to their divisions, internal politics fucking everything up...all this ends up in non-sensical requirements being pushed onto product managers pulling out their hair trying to figure out why the fuck we're doing this stupid shit, then eventually it comes to us and we're basically told "we don't know why we're doing this, and we don't really know what the impact will be, but the director told us we have to get it done in 4 weeks". Then the code turns to shit because we have to get it done. Time is a flat circle.

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Prestigious-Apple44@reddit

Bro learn TDD, it will save you from all those craps..

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Goducks91@reddit

I'm sorry but TDD does not save you from rushed projects, bad estimation, ambiguous project requirements, external pressure, weirdness in CI pipelines, and overall wonky things happening with code.

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spacemoses@reddit

I'd like to see TDD magically defuckulate a system migration project.

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Prestigious-Apple44@reddit

If your issue is with static analysis then learn and use it in your pre-commit hook and Run locally before your PRs, so your PR validation won’t fail..

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AnthTheAnt@reddit (OP)

Sadly it won’t.

It’s not tests or bugs, it’s random fucking static analysis checks that take 10 minutes to fix but an hour to run again.

I’m getting bit by “this file is too big”, “this little thing you did that’s all over the code base is actually bad and you need to change it”, “changing this file might cause issues because it’s already a massive nightmare”.

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poolpog@reddit

You are getting these things from tests or linters?

Or you are getting these things from people?

Understanding the linter requirements beforehand will help. Understanding your company's code style guide will help. Having a conversation with those people for guidance will help.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here

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The_Real_Slim_Lemon@reddit

Wait so performance is fine but it’s an automated PR checker that’s screwing you?

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AnthTheAnt@reddit (OP)

I submit the code for review.

I wait hours for the tests to finally fucking run

I get flagged because some pattern I used (because it’s all over the place) gets flagged. Or a file is too long/complex so you have to move code out.

So I fix whatever issue and then wait hours again.

Repeat for a fucking week.

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old_man_snowflake@reddit

ok, dig deeper. what code tool are they using? what rulesets are they using? can you run the checks locally from the command line? is there an IDE plugin available? Can you use the same tool, copy the rulesets, and run it locally?

Long cycle times are morale killers, and huge productivity killers. It behooves you to figure out how to get these sorted before you're sending it to the pipeline.

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ryanstephendavis@reddit

This 👆 ... Figuring out how to "shift left" and run these lines and other checks locally for a faster feedback loop will save time and sanity

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mofreek@reddit

What are you doing while you’re waiting on the build? I’ve been in this situation and the solution is to spend the long wait times figuring out how to shortcut the time sink.

In your case, it sounds like static code analysis is only being done on the build machine. Get the local version of the tool your company is using. It may not catch all the errors the full featured version does, but catching 90% is huge. Use the next build cycle to improve your local environment. This is coming from my experience with SonarCube. There’s an IDE plugin for it so I installed that. It was still missing some things the build was flagging, so I spent the next build cycle tweaking settings to catch more stuff.

Another time sink similar to this is bugs that only occur in certain environments. Spend your time figuring out how to reproduce these locally and add test when you’ve figured it out.

That reminds me, if there’s any aspect of the build you aren’t running locally, address that first. If there’s any aspect are tests that are only running with the build that’s a huge waste of time. Get them running locally and run them before pushing any code.

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The_Real_Slim_Lemon@reddit

That’s so jank… I can’t believe they don’t provide a way to quickly verify that locally. My condolences brother Ant 🐜

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FetaMight@reddit

Is this a large python project that's only partially type annotated?

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AnthTheAnt@reddit (OP)

No

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The_Real_Slim_Lemon@reddit

Wait so performance is fine but it’s an automated PR checker that’s screwing you?

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morswinb@reddit

Random static analysis?

Sounds like major skill issues.

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Slime0@reddit

This is wrong and mean.

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Slime0@reddit

Long iteration times are the death of productivity and motivation. That's not on you. But you should recognize it as a productivity target and see if there's anything you or your team can do about it.

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AdamBGraham@reddit

Sorry, no, usually the opposite.

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CVisionIsMyJam@reddit

I wouldn't say I feel like every single thing I touch turns out like crap, but the things I end up spending the most time on are usually the things I didn't get quite right the first time.

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MonochromeDinosaur@reddit

Every software project, turns to crap eventually without strict consistent centralized direction.

Team turnover, feature Creep, hacks to implement features the current architecture doesn’t support, urgency/deadlines, cut corners add up over time.

Everything becomes shit because it would take a dedicated code dictator on each project to avoid it.

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ephyre@reddit

Yeah I feel like I have only been successful for 1 year out of my 5 YoE. The nonstop struggle makes me want to switch fields but I'm not sure where to run

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Brave_Bullfrog1142@reddit

Um No

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rcls0053@reddit

Not shit but more like lacking actual meaning. Most of the apps I've worked on have just been for enterprises to make money. I would like to build something that actually helps someone.

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lolcatandy@reddit

welcome to capitalism lol

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VelvetBlackmoon@reddit

I get stellar reviews at work, and personally, I feel like I don't have a single project that really "went well"

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BeansAndBelly@reddit

Sometimes the thing that makes one a good engineer is anticipating every bad thing that can happen, and being aware of what risks have yet to be addressed. This can lead to good work yet feeling like shit.

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Unfair_Abalone_2822@reddit

That’s not how it goes down in my experience. Usually, Cassandra gets ignored and then put on a fraudulent PIP for being too “negative” or whatever. There’s so much toxic positivity and willful ignorance in this industry. It makes me sick.

I’ve found that being right is punished far more severely than being wrong. You’re better off never anticipating any of these incredibly obvious risks, and playing dumb when it inevitably blows up in management’s sand-buried faces.

I’m clearly very bitter. I feel like shit because I’m treated like shit regardless of how good my work is. No matter what I do, it’s never good enough.

If something doesn’t change soon, my hat’s gonna grey before my beard.

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thrynab@reddit

Sounds a lot like Dunning-Kruger.

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Unfair_Abalone_2822@reddit

Have you ever had someone reject your PR, reassign your ticket to themselves, steal your commits and edit the author, merge your code as theirs, lie to a nontechnical manager and claim you didn’t do your job, and then no one cares about your receipts? Because that’s happened to me. The workplace is an absolute dictatorship. There is no due process. You have no rights.

The most mediocre fucking people I’ve ever worked with, have employed this trick in your comment. You accuse me of dunning-Kruger so I can’t point out how your dismissal is the fucking epitome of that. The worst economy in at least 20 years, and you still pull that crap. It’s unbelievable!

It reveals your childlike belief in the just world fallacy. That bad things happen to bad people, and they won’t happen to you because you’re good. It’s nonsense. I’ve done everything right. I got a fang job, I got a grad degree, and I’m still fucked. All that happened is that you got lucky and I didn’t.

The job market is a market of lemons. I’m starting to think my luck will never turn around, but I know for damn sure that yours will run out sooner or later. You’ll see. Just wait.

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thrynab@reddit

Wow you’re antagonistic, no wonder you can’t make enough friends or alliances to survive in the workplace. It’s a fiefdom, not a dictatorship, you know?

Of course there is no due process towards your direct superior, your their serf. Your receipts are not for them but proof towards your peers and your superiors superior, which in group or individually do have the power to oust your superior.

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Unfair_Abalone_2822@reddit

That… is actually really good advice. Thank you.

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DeterminedQuokka@reddit

I think it’s perception for a lot of people. I always have a much longer list of everything I messed up vs everything that went well. But to other people most of the fuckups are basically invisible. Unfortunately for OP deadlines aren’t one of those.

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BeansAndBelly@reddit

Sometimes the thing that makes one a good engineer is anticipating every bad thing that can happen, and being aware of what risks have yet to be addressed. This can lead to good work yet feeling like shit.

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FetaMight@reddit

Is this web frontend stuff?

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AnthTheAnt@reddit (OP)

Yes :(

Never worked on it before

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FetaMight@reddit

Yeah, frontend web stuff can be a shit show.

It's truly amazing how overly complicated and brittle some of it is.

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nothingexceptfor@reddit

I blame ourselves engineers and the companies we work for, web development is not that hard, and there’s quite a lot of tools out there to make it easier but the way many companies are set up you need to make an impact to get ahead and get promoted, that leads to CV Driven Development when engineers come up with unnecessary complexity, trying every pattern on the book and every tech they can get find to solve a problem that didn’t require it, once their monstrosity is built it is now set in stone, in the legacy stone where new comers can’t really do much about it because dismantling will have a monetary cost so you just keep on building on it

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old_man_snowflake@reddit

I stopped with webdev when it all became about angular/react/ember. It was too much to keep up with. I can still make some dope static html pages with ajax, though.

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Humdaak_9000@reddit

I really like embedded systems and robotics. If I can help it I'll never do web code for money ever again.

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thekwoka@reddit

Maybe you don't have 13 years of experience, but just 1 year 13 times.

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Idea-Aggressive@reddit

You’d be surprised that even the greatest in any field gone through similar experiences. Watch some documentaries maybe?

In any case, you can start with something that works and iterate! Start smaller:)

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demosthenesss@reddit

Reverse midas touch?

That being said, there's a reason why devs make so much and that it -- as much as people meme about this -- isn't an easy job.

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btrpb@reddit

Bro AI vibe coding launch a SaaS in 2 hours dontchaknow

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Work_Owl@reddit

I tried Cursor earlier to make an app. It actually added the line !/backend/.env to the gitignore file! It's reasoning was so others can run my project and use an api key I have.

There were a couple of other crazies like that.

That said, it is amazingly fast at getting a proof of concept together, but you really have to check it

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Yabakebi@reddit

Yeah, this is why I think it's honestly better for most people to be using 'Ask' mode rather than the Agent as I find the Agent can make me more reckless than I would normally be, but when I use Ask mode and have to click apply for a change to happen in the code base, I tend to pay more attention and do smaller changes

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besseddrest@reddit

what kind of work? you just started at this job?

if its a new new job - evaluate this past project and think hard about what caused those mistakes, then adjust and try to not make the same ones the next project. Keep a close eye on how your colleagues work, and try to mimic that

i was in the same boat, a lot of it had to do about the order of how I broke up the task n how I saved things for a single larger PR. This is just how i was used to working, i wasn't doing anything wrong, I was just stuck in that way.

and so instead - i picked up on how other's were navigating through their tasks, which where very much like mine. the first commit is just like a skeleton of what I needed in place, placeholder content, minimal unit tests. Created a PR - the code is new, nothing is touching it, it can go into master/main without causing problems

while that's in review I just start on a nother piece, either on top of those changes or something that is standalone. at the same time i'm addressing any review comments and taking mental note that "ok they keep requesting changes for the way I do ABC, so from this point on do ABC that way." I finish with this Pt 2 of my task, and as Pt 1 is approved and merged, i can pull it into my Pt2 branch, add more tests, make sure it works, another PR.

Now its cool cause, Pt 1 can get a second pass and has a little more to it, plus my Pt 2 new changes. if there's a Pt 3 to it, its the same pattern. And by the end of Pt 3, Pt 1,2 will have been thoroughly reviewed and bugs fixed, Pt3 gets all the attention - and because its just like, the thing that completes the circle of 1-2-3, the code review there is easy, much shorter. Pt 1-2-3 all had a few unit tests every time, and my unofficial part 4 is just include any remaining unit tests, while the complete 1-2-3 can go through more rigorous testing by someone in QA. and usually it comes back fine cause through the entire process i've fixed errors here and there as I worked on the next part.

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Stubbby@reddit

One I came into a role, I scrapped existing codebase for a device, replaced it with proper compute unit that could handle the load, set up a new architecture that was decoupled from the compute so each developer could write and test on their machines rather than with print statements on the device, we rewrote the entire functionality in a fraction of time anticipated and I left the place before I any issue emerged.

So yeah, managed to pull at least one good project :)

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snowycabininthewoods@reddit

I deeply feel this. Am also cursed.

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turningsteel@reddit

If it makes you feel better, I’m right there with you. I started a new job in the past year and spent like 6 months just getting roasted in the PR reviews, a lot of it nit picky but also some good learning experiences. It’s easy to get down on yourself but just remember, you’ve been doing this for 13 years so you can do the job, no question. Maybe there’s just some learning opportunities for you to improve? Take it on the chin and keep pushing forward.

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AnthTheAnt@reddit (OP)

Yeah I think this is pretty fair advice.

At this point I’m already pretty resigned to the fact that I’m just gonna get fired at the first performance review. I just don’t see this getting any better.

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pwndawg27@reddit

I feel like a lot of that feeling comes from the clown show that is modern managemet. managers arenf taught how to train people and are put under the same kind of pressure to deliver as much as quickly as ICs multiplied by team size.

the only tools manager's get is hire and fire so they'll keep pulling those levers until delivery speed improves.

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turningsteel@reddit

I think I’m gonna get fired every time I start a new job but I have yet to be fired and I’m not a shit hot developer by any means. Don’t worry, you got this!

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quypro_daica@reddit

same here, to the point that coworkers acknowledge that problem happens to what I touched

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These_Translator_488@reddit

Most of my projects are successful because I test all the random ways someone can break it.

Also I don’t have stupid linting infrastructure and rules

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spacemoses@reddit

All I can say is I've been dealing with this same shit since I was a young, green programmer. I get you completely brother.

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plane-n-simple@reddit

I can relate, my career started bumpier than expected, and I have spent time at some good companies with good teams. However my current situation is being challenged for it's dream job status.

With that said, evaluate yourself and the situation. For me personally, I realized I was very reactive early in my career, not mean, just more easily triggered and less professional.

The frustration may be internal, vs external, or visa-versa. In your example, if you properly set expectations and that 3 weeks is unlikely to happen and your team/management responds reactively, it's likely an external problem. Which indicates a problem with the project/leadership/company.

If the source is internal, this book may help as it did for me. I discovered the book, "7 habits of highly effective people" by Stephen Covey. The audio book read by him is the grandfatherly support we all need.

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the_whalerus@reddit

I used to have a lot of issues like this until I fixed my bad habits. I try to have well structured commits. Good test coverage. TDD when I can. Double checking all the time.

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przemo_li@reddit

Narrow down issues.

Worked for a company that had different tools running locally and different on CI/CD, and they mandated refactors from code that worked on both to code that needed fixes.

So go around and check what people are using. Maybe it's mere version mismatch.

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RayBuc9882@reddit

Obviously you are feeling a lot of frustration, and more. Hang in there, I went through something similar in late 2000s, for about 4 years. Was extremely tough but had to get through until I got a new job and suddenly things turned around. Feels as if these things go in cycles.

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Significant_Mouse_25@reddit

They do kind of go in cycles. There’s a bigger cycle that kind of drives some of this too. During rough labor markets engineers are less likely to push back removing a check on product and management types. Everyone feels the need to deliver so they shove whatever shit out the door. And it is shit. Lucky it even works.

In the more granular sometimes you’re just not in a product, environment, or mental space to make good decisions. A change in your surroundings and context can help give a fresh perspective.

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RayBuc9882@reddit

Also with code, smaller commits are recommended when starting out. Right now I am fighting Jenkins scripts and I am getting groovy errors that are Greek to me.

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white_window_1492@reddit

See if you can be involved in the timeline decisions! Then you can push for double whatever is proposed lol. Then you'll also have time to write tests to help you 🙂

For projects at my work Eng is involved early so we can start planning and make stakeholders aware of blockers/possible blockers/issues that need resolved (esp if the involve other teams). Then we divide the work into tickets, decide how long each ticket will take to complete, and then assign to different engineers to work on.

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budulai89@reddit

That's normal.

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Gareth8080@reddit

Yes and not just at work. 😂

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Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit

Switch to qa

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AnthTheAnt@reddit (OP)

I’d rather not.

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Unlikely_Link8595@reddit

I have worked in large corporations and small ones.

In the small ones, things mostly worked as expected, and I rarely felt that way you do. However in any medium to large size organization there are so many things going on, projects happening in tandem, product owners demanding progress on a myriad of things, that I basically can expect things always go awry.

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ashultz@reddit

At no companies do all projects go well.

I'd guess at the majority of companies no projects go well. A company has to have several different kinds of discipline and realism to have the chance of projects going well and most companies are missing one or more of them. Those companies can change but you have to be pretty high up in the hierarchy to even try to make that happen.

When next interviewing, try to find a company that has been able to do anything well to at least get out of that silent horrible majority. You can ask "tell me about a project that went really well" and they should be happy to tell you.

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DunnoWhatKek@reddit

Oh man. It resonates so much with me. I recently inherited a project from different team, it worked great and all during onboarding, but the moment I started taking lead making initiatives everything started falling apart, like nothing integrates well without hacking lots of things to make it work.

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Decent_Project_3395@reddit

Three legs of a stool. Good, fast, cheap. You are prioritizing fast, and cost (cheap) is fixed. So you give up good.

There are ways to make schedules happen, but they involved flexibility in either quality or cost. You are going to need to be able to explain that the schedule is flexible. If you can't, you need to pad the hell out of your delivery dates, because that is just the way it works.

Flexible schedules without repercussions to you, or you double your estimates, and stick to it.

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metaphorm@reddit

take a deep breath. it's gonna be ok. you're gonna be ok.

this comes up all the time and I feel it frequently. sometimes its outright "imposter syndrome" and sometimes its just frustration. in either case, what has worked best for me is to have a conversation with myself, where my calm rational side gets to explain the situation to my panicky neurotic side. it helps. understand that we can always choose which perspective to adopt. it can be hard to choose the calm collected one, because the panicky neurotic one is louder and is sending a lot of signals to get your attention. it's ok to just let that perspective make his noise and say his piece and then step back into the calm rational perspective and choose your actions based on that one instead.

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Dimencia@reddit

13 years of experience on what not to do is a lot more than most people