Let's share some of the worst-case scenarios and nightmare-inducing horrors in the work of the devs.
My #1 nightmare is cleaning up lengthy, real complex, unreadable, critically ridden code with bugs left behind by the previous developer 👻👻👻
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What are the worst nightmares for devs? 🎃
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Top comments (54)
Working really hard on something that is then never used by nobody or even scrapped and forgotten into oblivion
I learned a long time ago that you need to separate the code that you write from your sense of professional self-worth. Write better code than you did yesterday and try to better someone's workflow but the app is the company's (not yours).
It took a major toilet manufacturer canning a Spanish-language HR app that I worked month on to learn that lesson.
Joe,
Never thought of it that way. I know it seems pretty obvious, but "do today better than yesterday but the app is the company's" should bring us some relief...
I mean, if everybody thought of it that way, we would have so much people on the brink of war because of self-pride... :P
Ah hate when that happens. Once I was working on a new feature and then the CEO who's mind changes like the weather decided that he did not want it anymore...
"can't you just. . ." coming from the mouth of a non-technical senior person being "helpful". Possibly goes with some vague hand-waving. 😱
On the more technical side, tricksy multi-thread concurrency bugs. Bonus points if it relies on a big service framework even to try to reproduce the problem.
When the requirements change and you have to start all over again
That's a widespread situation in an agile environment. Too few customers are ready to employ waterfall approach (writing a full technical description, before starting the coding part).
When a critical bug occurs during the demo 😅
Anyone else pre-record demos to combat this?
Week three as a junior dev I was given a task to clean up s3 buckets that hadn't been touched in years and accidentally deleted one that looked empty but had a CNAME redirect in it and took down production. The scramble to figure out what happened and the stress of what that might have meant if one of the senior devs didn't figure it out fast enough still gives me chills.
@ben maybe we should have a sad reaction on comments.
This comment touched me, a day can't get worse.
Oh gosh, the worst possible nightmare! Worse than accidentally committing secret keys and sensitive files to repo 💀
Wow!
"It needs to work on IE8" believe it or not a major Telecom company i'm working for requires this for every single project...
Omg!
Oh since nobody has mentioned yet, deployment on Friday
Second that. Don't do it, just don't...
Data leaked is forever. If anyone has compromised user privacy, you can't un-compromise it.
This. Tied with destroying user data in an irreversible/very difficult to restore way. Especially in a highly regulated industry.
Speaking for a friend of course...
Editing a production database that doesn't have a backup, and ruining the production data in an irreversible way.
Biggest longterm fear: Being told you don't "You don't really have enough experience with the stack that we are working with" when looking for a new job
Biggest midterm fear: Being asked "Why didn't your time estimate cover the new requests that we gave you since then?"
Biggest short-term fear: Realizing that an engineering decision is a dead-end and that I should have done something else 40 hours ago.