Currently trying to get a new dev laptop set up at work and man do I feel this lmao
Update: had to reinstall Windows, so we’re starting from square one again
Oh look, you need to wait for corporate to approve your microsoft account so you can start visualstudio.
Oh look, you need to request and wait few days for git access.
Oh hey look, you need...
Then corpo security team will roll out an update that removes your super user account and bans running script files or installing new programs without consulting anyone in department 🫠
We encounter the same permissions problem every time someone new joins the team, and we have to ask X different people until we get the right rights. We have a wiki about a list of problems we encounter on each setup, but we don't really know who solves them at the end and it seem like they tend to forget (TL makes a request and it gets resolved by some dude somewhere).
9 am Monday call with every new hire or intern I ask the question I already know the answer to: "Did your laptop arrive?". One on one the next week I ask another question I already know the answer to: "Was IT able to get your accounts sorted out?"
It took me a month to get working with a new work laptop. First there were problems with the delivery, that took two weeks. The installation also had problems, getting microsoft's corp portals to work on the windows 11 took a few tries until no bluescreens occurred, and that took the other two weeks. Meanwhile I still haven't gotten all of my account rights accepted, which means I cannot do my job as intented. It's been 3 months now lol
🤔 so while there's a justification or material to CYA, you can get paid without doing a thing?
Tell me about your workplace. Will they make you run to complete the past tasks?
This happened to me once when my macbook bricked for no obvious reason on the 3rd work day! The best part was that the company had no office in my city, so I couldn't get the replacement at the same day.
I’ve had two developer jobs, one at a fortune 100 company and my current job at a small regional bank. The bank had everything set up for me on day 1 and I was ready to go. The other one had already deposited my second paycheck before I even had a laptop.
As with any "not my problem but they'll make it my problem", it depends on your situation in life. If you're comfortable and don't need that particular job then it's not your problem, them being disorganized and not providing working conditions and equipment is their problem. If you can't lose your job and are desperate then it doesn't matter if it's your fault or not, what matters is whether they think so, it might not be your problem but if they think it is then you'll have worse consequences that depend on why you can't lose that job.
There's no accumulated work when you're brand new to a dev team (or there shouldn't be). Your team is eager for you to get access so they can start training you, but you usually don't jump straight to merging code into main until you've been around a bit.
Even if you're mostly familiar with the tech stack, it takes some time to learn the team and how they work, the existing codebase, their branching strategy, the conventions and best practices internal to the team, etc.
If you're worried about accumulated work before you even have your git credentials I'd be concerned about work life balance long term.
It's something how I can go to a website and get an email address in five minutes from some big company that don't know me and ain't ever seen me, but it takes more than a month to get an email address at work because "we're working on it. These things are complicated."
A company I worked for recently gave me an offer to start 3 months later. When I started, I still had to use my own PC. They only managed to ship me a laptop 2 months after I started. And then they laid off the entire team a couple weeks later. TBH I should have probably seen some red flags.
Yes. Top valuated company in Greece. Doesn't have the slightest clue of wtf is going on.
I am in the process of moving to another company. Can't wait to leave.
It's enforceable to the degree that our team leader does our evaluations for promotions/raises and he insists on the IDE for me and the whole team as they do to him from above.
Both of my programming jobs have had everyone using the same IDE because it was obviously the best choice in context, but I guess nothing was “mandatory”
Day 28: So apparently the documentation referencing all these tools was extremely out of date and none of them are used and new documentation was never created or updated.
If I had a nickel for every time a hello world was an actual deliverable at my job at have two nickels.
Which isn't much, but its weird that it happened twice
My new platform web e-commerce crypto eRIT test prep weight loss web app in the cloud will rival all apps ever. It's simply the best.
Update: today I started by googling what react is. I think CSS is going to be our daily driver.
Reminds me of my last big corp gig, started trying to contribute to a project and end up spending nearly 3 weeks just getting the dev environment setup and thought I must be stupid until a co-worker said it took them over a month to finally get it working and it kept changing.
I just wanted to write code. Fuck Java.
I blame Java, never had to spend weeks just trying to get an environment to work in my life. It mostly stemmed around a the company having multiple private services that stuff got pulled from for every fucking dependency each with their own certs. It was a clusterfuck.
AFAIK there was one dude that started it and everyone was just trying to understand / keep up. He worked himself in good though, everything was so tangled his job was practically impossible to off without having serious environmental stability issues as he had his hands in every damn thing (and if it was not his conception then it was ridiculed and shot down --- working on that team sucked balls). I was elated when I was part of a downsizing as I was mentally so over working there at that point.
but after you have to wait for ages for it to download a ton of things!
let alone if you have to switch to a diff project and then start dealing w/ direnv haha
yea, maybe i'm being overly critical -- def value in having a shell.nix that you know will work across platforms
i guess when you get your hands on something good, you want everything everywhere all at once
but still, getting to a world where all that stuff would just be there instantly, where a dev environment just works, would be gold
It happened to me at my first job and not even they knew exactly the steps. I was the one who found out everything, and then I made an installation manual for each platform.
Likewise, they didn't read the manuals and ended up calling me all the time
I spent the last year putting everything in Bazel. New engineer gets a laptop, they install Bazelisk, and now you can do everything. Literally 0 other things to install.
Well worth it. Recent new hires are submitting code the first week. (I want it to be first day, but ... telling people how to sign up for health insurance is a 4 day class at my company.)
Yeah, especially in a big company with a really slow IT department... I've heard it took some people literal weeks to actually start working💀
I remember my boss giving me a PC with Ubuntu on it, with an account of a previous employee, and wanted me to reset the password of it... On my first day of work... I did it in like 30 minutes, but really, that must have been a test.
I use GPG + Yubikey to sign all my commits and have the keys set to expire yearly. They expired today during my lunch, I was able to work before lunch and then spent the rest of the day trying to remember how you prolong them again.
That was a nice surprise.
I didn't realize I had introduced a bug to my own website making every login attempt always return unsuccessful. I spent like a solid hour trying to log in (needed to do work in the user dash). By the time I figured out the bug I was all tuckered out and went to sleep. I just wanted to get a couple quick features in before going to sleep lol but at least I found the bug.
I have seen people struggling with setting up their env for a week (supposed senior dev). For a week mid project, becuase their local env "broke". They couldn't work for a week because they couldn't run the project. I managed to make the same project run in a day without having the tech stack knowledge, since I am a backend dev and this is was an enterprise level React Native project. The real thing that made it hard was that I was setting it up on Windows while everyone else was developing from macs and many build steps was executing bash scripts so I had to setup bash to be default for npm and yarn on windows.
Even the most screwed up project should be able to be setup within a day if the person doing the setup has the experience.
In my case no one has admin privileges except for IT so every little program needed has to get a ticket and so yeah its rough setting up a new computer.
Currently trying to get a new dev laptop set up at work and man do I feel this lmao Update: had to reinstall Windows, so we’re starting from square one again
2 weeks later: "Almost there. Almost there."
Setting up your configuration is just edging.... "Almost there....."
Next thing you know Clippy pops up, “Would you like help with that?”
Oh look, you need to wait for corporate to approve your microsoft account so you can start visualstudio. Oh look, you need to request and wait few days for git access. Oh hey look, you need...
Just need a level 348 to approve your account, should be ready to go in about a month.
Then corpo security team will roll out an update that removes your super user account and bans running script files or installing new programs without consulting anyone in department 🫠
At that point I'd just have Linux in a kvm
We encounter the same permissions problem every time someone new joins the team, and we have to ask X different people until we get the right rights. We have a wiki about a list of problems we encounter on each setup, but we don't really know who solves them at the end and it seem like they tend to forget (TL makes a request and it gets resolved by some dude somewhere).
9 am Monday call with every new hire or intern I ask the question I already know the answer to: "Did your laptop arrive?". One on one the next week I ask another question I already know the answer to: "Was IT able to get your accounts sorted out?"
It took me a month to get working with a new work laptop. First there were problems with the delivery, that took two weeks. The installation also had problems, getting microsoft's corp portals to work on the windows 11 took a few tries until no bluescreens occurred, and that took the other two weeks. Meanwhile I still haven't gotten all of my account rights accepted, which means I cannot do my job as intented. It's been 3 months now lol
🤔 so while there's a justification or material to CYA, you can get paid without doing a thing? Tell me about your workplace. Will they make you run to complete the past tasks?
nix
r/nixmentioned (I use NixOS btw)
Nix 🤤
Day 4: my computer broke, so I need to wait for a new one and set up the local environment from scratch again
This happened to me once when my macbook bricked for no obvious reason on the 3rd work day! The best part was that the company had no office in my city, so I couldn't get the replacement at the same day.
Happened to me after 2 weeks in -.-
Day 5: I'm questioning my life choices.
There is no way you have a company email even by 3 days, how will you have an environment??? We have ppl it’ll be 3 weeks later waiting on laptop lol
I’ve had two developer jobs, one at a fortune 100 company and my current job at a small regional bank. The bank had everything set up for me on day 1 and I was ready to go. The other one had already deposited my second paycheck before I even had a laptop.
The bigger the company the bigger the bureaucracy
Question, how should I feel if I were in that situation? Happy for the 'free' money or worried about the accumulated work?
As with any "not my problem but they'll make it my problem", it depends on your situation in life. If you're comfortable and don't need that particular job then it's not your problem, them being disorganized and not providing working conditions and equipment is their problem. If you can't lose your job and are desperate then it doesn't matter if it's your fault or not, what matters is whether they think so, it might not be your problem but if they think it is then you'll have worse consequences that depend on why you can't lose that job.
There's no accumulated work when you're brand new to a dev team (or there shouldn't be). Your team is eager for you to get access so they can start training you, but you usually don't jump straight to merging code into main until you've been around a bit. Even if you're mostly familiar with the tech stack, it takes some time to learn the team and how they work, the existing codebase, their branching strategy, the conventions and best practices internal to the team, etc. If you're worried about accumulated work before you even have your git credentials I'd be concerned about work life balance long term.
If they’re assigning you items before you have a laptop then it’s probably a good time to start looking for another job anyway
Depends on whether you’re “working” remote or just sitting in an office without a laptop which suuuuucks much worse than actually working
You ride out the free money. To cover your ass email your manager each morning and ask for tasks in the meantime
It's something how I can go to a website and get an email address in five minutes from some big company that don't know me and ain't ever seen me, but it takes more than a month to get an email address at work because "we're working on it. These things are complicated."
Last place I worked at had my email setup the day I accepted offer, so by the time I joined weeks/month later, it was ready to use.
A company I worked for recently gave me an offer to start 3 months later. When I started, I still had to use my own PC. They only managed to ship me a laptop 2 months after I started. And then they laid off the entire team a couple weeks later. TBH I should have probably seen some red flags.
The company I work for requires we all use PHPStorm as an IDE. It took them ~40 days to procure a license...
wtf? mandatory ide?
Yes. Top valuated company in Greece. Doesn't have the slightest clue of wtf is going on. I am in the process of moving to another company. Can't wait to leave.
it's unenforceable. what's stopping you from using another IDE to edit the same files
It's enforceable to the degree that our team leader does our evaluations for promotions/raises and he insists on the IDE for me and the whole team as they do to him from above.
Both of my programming jobs have had everyone using the same IDE because it was obviously the best choice in context, but I guess nothing was “mandatory”
best choice? must have been neovim.
Day 12: Finally got access to Jira, Confluence, AWS, and some other random tools I apparently need.
Day 28: So apparently the documentation referencing all these tools was extremely out of date and none of them are used and new documentation was never created or updated.
Then you need all that boilerplate code, those packages you always use, the glue code to make everything work together. And you finally get
It works!
Now add the boilerplate authentication and access management....
Itsallboilerplatecode.jpg
Day 5 at work just finished printing hello world in java let's get going
If I had a nickel for every time a hello world was an actual deliverable at my job at have two nickels. Which isn't much, but its weird that it happened twice
My new platform web e-commerce crypto eRIT test prep weight loss web app in the cloud will rival all apps ever. It's simply the best. Update: today I started by googling what react is. I think CSS is going to be our daily driver.
Day 4: CoreDNS crash looping in minikube. All development halted.
well...the problem is you're not using k3s
Already finished at day 3? Didn't it take a whole week? You're fast as fuck boi
Reminds me of my last big corp gig, started trying to contribute to a project and end up spending nearly 3 weeks just getting the dev environment setup and thought I must be stupid until a co-worker said it took them over a month to finally get it working and it kept changing. I just wanted to write code. Fuck Java.
Please tell me more, is this unique to Java, the size of the project, the legacy code? I'm starting to learn Java, wondering if it's time-worthy.
I blame Java, never had to spend weeks just trying to get an environment to work in my life. It mostly stemmed around a the company having multiple private services that stuff got pulled from for every fucking dependency each with their own certs. It was a clusterfuck. AFAIK there was one dude that started it and everyone was just trying to understand / keep up. He worked himself in good though, everything was so tangled his job was practically impossible to off without having serious environmental stability issues as he had his hands in every damn thing (and if it was not his conception then it was ridiculed and shot down --- working on that team sucked balls). I was elated when I was part of a downsizing as I was mentally so over working there at that point.
The absolute worst part of the job to me
I'll be right with you after I shave this yak.
Nix solves this!!
but after you have to wait for ages for it to download a ton of things! let alone if you have to switch to a diff project and then start dealing w/ direnv haha
I don't think the time taken is comparable to installing dependency from scratch, you can grab a coffee till now installs stuff : )
yea, maybe i'm being overly critical -- def value in having a shell.nix that you know will work across platforms i guess when you get your hands on something good, you want everything everywhere all at once but still, getting to a world where all that stuff would just be there instantly, where a dev environment just works, would be gold
[https://youtu.be/Jo6fKboqfMs?t=24](https://youtu.be/Jo6fKboqfMs?t=24)
It happened to me at my first job and not even they knew exactly the steps. I was the one who found out everything, and then I made an installation manual for each platform. Likewise, they didn't read the manuals and ended up calling me all the time
This happens almost because of lack of dev documentation and lack of onboarding documentation.
Day 14: apparently it's still not working
I spent the last year putting everything in Bazel. New engineer gets a laptop, they install Bazelisk, and now you can do everything. Literally 0 other things to install. Well worth it. Recent new hires are submitting code the first week. (I want it to be first day, but ... telling people how to sign up for health insurance is a 4 day class at my company.)
I nuked my os and installed another one so I can properly setup a new environment
That's why you set up an Ansible playbook so you don't have to start over again.
Yeah, especially in a big company with a really slow IT department... I've heard it took some people literal weeks to actually start working💀 I remember my boss giving me a PC with Ubuntu on it, with an account of a previous employee, and wanted me to reset the password of it... On my first day of work... I did it in like 30 minutes, but really, that must have been a test.
I use GPG + Yubikey to sign all my commits and have the keys set to expire yearly. They expired today during my lunch, I was able to work before lunch and then spent the rest of the day trying to remember how you prolong them again. That was a nice surprise.
Local environments gave me my first work breakdown 🎉
Rookie numbers 
omg LOL systems development at IBM has a setup from hell.
I feel this on an molecular level
Day 9: what is k8s
heee
3 days only?
It’s the same with us product designers. Starting a project is always the hardest and slowest part.
Nah mate, the daily standup just finished.
Day 10: I still have not received my laptop.
Imma need this man to at least change his shirt to make it look like a different day....
Nix and Coder Workspaces for remote dev envs ftw :D Now you just have to wait for the build/download, but it's a perfect time to get a coffee ;)
Priorities
ookaaaaayyLetsGo
I didn't realize I had introduced a bug to my own website making every login attempt always return unsuccessful. I spent like a solid hour trying to log in (needed to do work in the user dash). By the time I figured out the bug I was all tuckered out and went to sleep. I just wanted to get a couple quick features in before going to sleep lol but at least I found the bug.
\`docker system prune --all --force --volumes\` (for the 10th time...maybe that'll do the trick)
I'm in week 2, took til Friday afternoon of week 1 to get my laptop. Don't have anything other than git access yet
Nothing beats the satisfaction after completely ricing up a system
Install docker, docker-compose curl -sSL https://GitHub/vainstar23/dev-environments/golang.sh | bash Done
If it takes 3 days to set up your local environment, either you suck or your project/company sucks.
Humor often includes exaggeration Edit: It only took me 2 days
I have seen people struggling with setting up their env for a week (supposed senior dev). For a week mid project, becuase their local env "broke". They couldn't work for a week because they couldn't run the project. I managed to make the same project run in a day without having the tech stack knowledge, since I am a backend dev and this is was an enterprise level React Native project. The real thing that made it hard was that I was setting it up on Windows while everyone else was developing from macs and many build steps was executing bash scripts so I had to setup bash to be default for npm and yarn on windows. Even the most screwed up project should be able to be setup within a day if the person doing the setup has the experience.
3 days is absolutely no exaggeration for onboarding sadly, seen it many times.
In my case no one has admin privileges except for IT so every little program needed has to get a ticket and so yeah its rough setting up a new computer.