Hey, dev's π
As a developer, you might have faced many challenges and frustrations in your projects. But what is the worst thing that could happen to you in your tech career? Feel free to share it in the comments section. π
I'll go first. I work mostly on full-stack projects, and my biggest nightmare is having to debug a bug for hours, only to discover it's in the library/framework I am using or a compatibility issue. π
If you've ever worked with Next.js, you may completely relate to this.
Top comments (39)
I work in crypto and people constantly try to hack us. So my biggest fear is authoring a bug that leads to bajillions of dollars in theft! Of course, that sort of thing is never one person's sole fault, since we have code reviews, QA, security audits, etc, and security is the responsibility of the organization as a whole. Still, I'd sure hate to be the one who opened the file and typed in the bug.
I get it! It's scary to think about making a mistake in crypto code that could lead to a lot of money being stolen. I think that is a valid nightmare for most developers, especially in the crypto space. Keep being careful!
Same fear can be present if company is dealing with a lot of personal information. Leak can lead to avalanche of personal lawsuits. On top of that in EU penalty for data leak can be as high as 20 000 000 EUR or 4% worldwide company turnover.
hold on a second, are you guys talking about cryptology or cryptocurrency? Does that go without saying these days, am I becoming an old fart?
Please keep in mind I know nothing about you @mistval both personally and professionally, but If nothing else i gotta say i love that you are self-conscious enough to not only know your own limits as a developer - not be afraid to lay your cards on the table, it takes a degree of humbleness to do that and it's the one quality I find indispensable amongst whom I chose to work with. It can be really dangerous when people are both responsible for owning some code or infrastructure, and insecure about the requisite skills and expertise it takes to do that competently. Kudos to you!
Thank you Billy for your kind words :) It's crypto as in cryptocurrency. I should have said I work in "blockchain", that would be less ambiguous!
Haha working in crypto is already a nightmare without that responsibility π I've been there, but stopped cause I hate crypto
Monotony tbh. There's nothing more boring and draining than a monotone development job (for me at least). No challenges and no change is a recipe for burnout and nightmares. The idea of doing the same work over and over again for an undetermined amount of time fucking scares the shit out of me.
This was the reason I had to stop working earlier this year to take a break. I left in April and still haven't considered looking for another job.
Absolutely! It's essential to find fulfillment in your work. Take the time you need to explore opportunities.
That's true! Being there and done that!
Same here! I usually switch jobs after some time, simply because I just get too bored of the tasks I am supposed to do.
In a new job, there are new tools and different approaches to learn, at least xD.
I also start a lot of different initiatives like refactoring code for optimization or readability, some UX improvements, or building the developer knowledge base. When that get's boring. I'll try to see if I could be engaged with other tasks or tools, looking for holes in the process.
That approach of course depends on how freely you can assign your time, though. If all your time is constantly planned for some super important stuff that needs to go out by yesterday, you don't get to do fun stuff at work. And this also depends on your interest/motivation/will to start initiatives at work.
I also try out and combine different roles. I switched from backend developer, to full stack, to Unity developer, back to backend, a bit of systems, a bit of graphics, a bit of devops, a bit of writing.
Like this I am kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. But at least not bored :D
Working with teams under the influence of a tyrannical date-driven micromanaging delivery manager. Literally anything not feature related is at the bottom of the backlog and process and bureaucracy strangles quality, creativity and innovation.
Not project-related, but Iβm living through it right nowβ¦I injured my dominant handβ¦ π±
Itβs been x-rayed, nothing broken or dislocated, but it was too swollen for them to assess the tendons & ligaments. I go back tomorrow for a follow-up.
Get well soon brother!
As mobile game programmer, device specific bugs are the worst :D They take ages to be found and solved. You need a very specific device to reproduce the error. There are so many different devices, some are not even available in your country, or not in sales rotations anymore.
The fixes are usually not nice either, you kinda have to implement a workaround because you don't really get to the source of the problem which makes the code smelly.
Such bugs are the worst to find and debug. The fixes are usually ugly too, you have to use a workaround because you can't really solve the root cause of the problem.
I am the guy on the team that everyone calls when something catastrophic happens. It's scary to shoulder that much responsibility but also exhilarating when we get over the hurdles.
This happens at least every few months, something must go down like MySQL master or some intricate bug that takes anything from 10 minutes to a few hours to resolve. Which can be painful and costly when users get error pages.
For example - some legacy ETL scripts are running at night that perform some DB optimizations. At some point - the scripts locked some tables with a big update transaction, and the locks slowed down everything from slave replication to other write transactions on master. This led to binlogs filling up too fast, and taking down master and slaves going out of sync for hours. Nightmare to clean up and bring everything back up. took 2-3 hours.
Kudos to you for being the go-to person when things go haywire. It's a wild journey, but fixing these must feel like a victory every time! πͺ
BTW, do you use any tools or frameworks to automate or monitor your ETL processes?
Thanks yeah it's interesting solving complex problems.
For tools, yes, we have our enterprise bus system. Which ingest data from various sources in various formats including APIs, JSON, XML, etc... and then transform the data via various stages into the DB.
We use the following:
Monitoring - we used to use cloudwatch and newrelic however these weren't flexible - so we built our own internal monitoring system in Golang. For code level monitoring and error tracking we use Sentry and Rollbar.
@kwnaidoo Cool! I haven't used Cloudwatch, but personally, for a New Relic alternative, I rely on either Dynatrace or Datadog. Building your own internal monitoring system from scratch seems like a senior-level engineering task. Thanks a lot for sharing such a beautiful stack! π
Working in IT for many years, I believe I have experienced some ups and downs in terms of motivation to learn and share development knowledge. So one thing I'm afraid of is becoming unmotivated enough to abandon this field. This would be my nightmare.
Stay consistent and it will help keep you engaged and motivated. Don't let the fear of losing interest become a nightmare! π
One thing that I wouldn't call a nightmare, but definitely dislike, is failing tests on GitHub Actions due to network issues. Damn it!
I haven't experienced this much, but in one of the open-source projects I work on, sometimes there are failures when downloading packages while setting up the environment!
I make software for creating concert visuals, so my biggest fear would be introducing a bug which causes an artistβs performance to be visibly disrupted at a big event with lots of eyes on stage.
Nowadays the nightmare for most of the developers is AI taking over IT which will not be happening in short term, but definitely in future
It's definitely worrying that AI might take over IT in the future.
My biggest nightmare is company's message: "Our contract was stopped!!!".
π
I guess this is everyone's nightmare! π
I'm terrified of writing 300+ lines of code, and then realizing that I prematurely optimized everything. This has happened one too many times π .
Totally get that fear! Better to find the balance than over-optimize. π
I have had to deal with this issue so much. I can't even explain how frustrating it is for me to use a library that lacks documentation.
@abneribeiro Thanks for sharing! π
There are too many hard time during my career,
1-no specific requirement
2-had to use a close source framework and only has bad doc
3-Must be compatible with IE8
4-long history codes without any ticket or annotation
I totally get it! The struggles with poor docs. I don't quite recall having to make a project IE8 compatible nowadays. π€·ββοΈ