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 π»π»π»
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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).
"can't you just. . ." coming from the mouth of a non-technical senior person being "helpful". Possibly goes with some vague hand-waving. π±
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.
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...
When a critical bug occurs during the demo π
Anyone else pre-record demos to combat this?
Editing a production database that doesn't have a backup, and ruining the production data in an irreversible way.
Having to make changes to code that was written by someone who did not know what they were doing.π΅
Working on any project which requires cross-team collaboration. There's always last minute surprises and a lot of headache when you're someone tells you over lunch they want you to push out a change before the end of the day.
Working hard to produce clean, scalable and readable code, to see it declining in a matter of days when another dev is in charge on the project.
You start off your day fresh. You have a clear goal on what you want to do.
You start doing stuff. But you encounter a nasty bug that prevents you from validating what you're doing, so you must resolve this bug first.
The nature of the bug forces you to resort to jumping from commit to commit trying to find the issue.
Your email starts shouting. Somebody had the idea to ask people share their calendars which has the side effect of sending email about it to everyone.
You have a meeting.
You have a second meeting.
After these you find the commit that breaks everything. You look at it in GitHub and it seems like a harmless one line change by Dependabot.
In reality it is a merge commit that contains a full version's worth of changes to hundreds of files.
You go for lunch.
You return back and are a bit tired, because food. You start trying to pinpoint the issue using bisect.
You have another 1Β½ hour meeting.
You are dead from all the meetings, the mail constantly throwing more stuff about the calendar, and the fact you now end up with mysterious blank white pages in every bisect commit you try, not helping to figure out the original commit causing the bug you try to locate.
Oh, sorry, this was my day today. Lines of code written: 0. Bugs solved: 0. Goals achieved: none.
Tasks non well documented.
Tasks very well documented... 10 years ago
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...
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.
Working remotely while home-schooling, and a child knocks over a full mug of coffee onto the laptop, during a pandemic shutdown when the laptop cannot be easily repaired or replaced...
So much pain on this, I can feel it!