Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: What Are Some Insults No Developer Wants To Hear? (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: Flame wars in the bug tracker might be exactly the right (harsh) feedback your code needs, writes Peter Wayner in his run-down of the insults no programmer wants to hear about their code or coding skills. "The technology world is a bit different than the pretty, coiffed world of suits and salesdroids where everyone is polite, even when they hate your guts and think you're an idiot. Suit-clad managers may smile and hide their real message by the way they say you're doing "great, real great pal," but programmers often speak their minds, and when that mind has something unpleasant to say, look-out, feelings." Instead of posting this story in a click-bait fashion as presented from InfoWorld, we thought we'd ask the developers of Slashdot: What are some insults no developer wants to hear? Some of the classic insults include: N00b, /dev/null, Eye Candy, Fanboi, and [Nothing]. Are there any insults you are familiar with that aren't mentioned in the list?
What?! Do you read Slashdot?
I don't give you anything from my ammunition depot. And spoiler alert, I've browsed that article some time ago, and its the last bullshit of an article. Sometimes journalists write good pieces which are interesting, sometimes they just wank something into their keyboards.
This article doesn't even deserve to be featured on an SEO site, let alone an otherwise reputable news site as infoworld.com.
My personal favorite is, when you know the person in question should know better, spending 10 minutes alluding to the actual problem through a game of word charades, while staring directly at the one line that's causing all of their headaches. It's far more pleasant than exploding at them.
It compiled cleanly, so he shipped it.
John
I live in fear of losing my edge and becoming irrelevant. Maybe I already have.
I didn't read the full story - don't need to. It not a "story" and
it's not "news." It's just more crap.
As a 25+ year PROFESSIONAL I'm a lot more concerned
with how we can compliment and complement one another's
work and skills. The world is complicated; we need to help
each other.
Smack is fun and important. Ask me: I have no living enemies.
Getting things done is more important.
"Yes but as I'm not a moron I never thought of the user story from your perspective..."
C# developer.
systemd
Does someone, anyone, really *want* to hear *any* insults? Rather than constructive criticism?
Posting as AC, because I'm not that 'special someone'.
Shoes from the 60s. For that swingin Jack Lord look!
the recursive function computing her mass causes a stack overflow.
"You're an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing." Possibly also, "We'd be a more productive team if you just stopped working altogether, even if the company keeps paying you. When you try to contribute it actually creates negative productivity."
Wow this is microsoft quality!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You shouldn't be eating at Burger King.
You should be eating a vegetable-based diet as opposed to a meat-based diet. This is very hard for alot of Americans apparently as their grocery stores seem not to sell vegetables as I understand it, so they eat fast food.
Stop wasting the business's resources. There's no way building this massive company-wide application should take more than a couple weeks and one person. And you don't get a QA pass, either.
"You got a little d*ck" is always the worst. Unless you're a female, in which case "you were artificial selected for this job as a matter of affirmative action" would commonly apply.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
...C# dev!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Saying that after someone explains at the daily why he didn't move forward, and have all the excuses of the world (needed to sync with that guy, review the sepc of that, the right tools were not installed on his machine, etc...)
You can also use it when the guy have a very big and deep tech issue, that he spent 5 hours trying to resolve, and you just sit next to him and fix that in 30 seconds...
In the 15 years of my professional career, there's only been one day when I didn't want to come to work.
That was the day after the IT department accused me of intentionally crashing their network, and my Director didn't back me up.
That loss of confidence in my integrity was far worse than any spoken word.
Is your refrigerator running?
You better go catch it.
What kind of frat-house development shop are you running? These are the people who are going to help make you successful, not some new pledges to haze. Grow. The. Fuck. Up.
Maybe we should hire a professional
"I just wrote a script that does your entire job"
Because there is a high chance they're right.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
You read this article? Your code reflects that.
nothing to see here - move along
All of my code is shiny & chrome.
i once created a backend application from scratch, everything homebrew
it was easy to mantain, it was easy to improve, the code was as human readable as the abc
sadly, there were some gotchas : i had to follow some management decisions, the backend didn't validated some features of the application which were to be validated only on the frontend
months later, , a new manager comes in and berates me for the lack of validation of said features, the manager who told me not to said that if the backend wasn't "subpar" it would have been validating it
i quit the same day
ps. there were other reasons for me to quit, the 'subpar' comment was the last straw
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
It used to be that we could insult someone by implying that they learned to code at Microsoft. Even if they actually worked there.
These days, you can run bash on Windows, so I guess I’ve run out of ideas.
Nah, men were meant to eat meat. Admittedly, not as much as it as we do. But Vitamin B12 proves it.
/* anybody who doesn't like this can suck my dick */
"No, we're going with SCO to reduce our risk."
This code is so poorly documented that Donald Trump wants to send it back to Mexico!
"So-and-so's project does what you're doing only way better."
A male, maybe, could get away with speaking of another male worker's genetic endowment.
In my part of the world, the second remark would bring an immediate lawsuit. Heck, they would conduct mandatory polygraph tests to determine if anyone was even thinking that.
"You code like a UX designer"
Those are fighting words. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not even your mother could be proud.
How about "Fat fingered freak!"? That usually gets attention.
... or "too much POJO usage in detriment of basic patterns". To me, as an OOP developer (Java mostly), this is so much more hurting than any single word/expression criticism. If there's something I don't like is someone to tell me I code like somebody who knows the language basics, has the intellect to get things done, but doesn't know the ways to make it standardized. At the same time it is also something I will look for in a quality developer, so in practice I'm only really offended by others saying stuff like that because I see it as an actual flaw. So there's that.
Pointy haired boss: "Janet, that could looks so nice, a man could have written it!"
Why are you not putting in 60-80 hours a week?
Apu does and we don't even pay as much as you.
Sorry, but so far, almost every story posted by BeauHD has been completely irrelevant. Perhaps SD is better than HD? Either way, all his posted stories don't belong on this site. They're all click bait.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
yo mama so fat that a recursive function computing her weight causes a stack overflow.
yo mama so fat that the long double numeric variable type in C++ is insufficient to express her weight.
From a sr. developer delivered directly to the face of another developer who had been at the company a few years.
To reduce crime, make fewer things against the law.
Something that a lot of developers seem to take pride in, but which is really at the root of unprofessionalism is
Wow, your code is so complex I can't understand it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
My least favourite word in the English language is just. "Just do ...", or "It's simple, just..."
You hired me for my expertise and the quality work I deliver. I have a track record with this firm spanning several years of high-quality delivery and being right about nearly every technical and process call I've made. But feel free to walk in and denigrate all of that value by telling me to just ...
BSOD
But, here's one I actually heard...
"Are you doing drugs? Then start taking some"
"Hey look! Your code snippet is today's featured article on The Daily WTF!"
Summation 2
No developer ever never ever wants to have Linus critique their code.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So, a developer went to the doctor, he said, "Doctor, what's wrong with me?"
Doctor: "You're fat.".
Developer: "I want a second opinion."
Doctor: "OK, you're ugly, too."
You are welcome on my lawn.
The true master would not care about insults
who fixes all your bugs.
Said in reference to someone who has said or done something exceedingly stupid. But the real meaning is that anything that they say or do in the future will not be taken seriously since they are now regarded as a bozo.
She shops for Apple in a grocery store
"You should be eating a vegetable-based diet as opposed to a meat-based diet"
Provably false. Compare your intestinal tract to herbivores and carnivores and you find that ours is longer than most carnivores but not nearly as long as herbivores (compared to hard core herbivores, we only have 1 stomach!). Examine our teeth and we have a mix of crushing teeth that herbivores have, but also sharp tearing teeth that carnivores have. Our eyes are in the front of our head giving us excellent depth perception necessary for hunting just like carnivores. If you look at it objectively from how we've evolved, we're clearly omnivores meant to eat a mix of plant matter and animal matter.
Also, you should consider actually going to the US before making misinformed comments. My local grocery store, probably about a third of it is dedicated to the produce section, with another third dedicated to deli/bakery. And it's not some high end store either, it's Kroger.
I remember working in a small team where all the project's devs were in the same room when one of our devs half blurted out without realizing it " who wrote this (shit)?" And when he realized that it must be someone in the room got embarrassed. Everyone except one nervous guy laughed
You must really know what you're doing.
Now you know the truth: nobody, and I mean NOBODY, gives a damn about you or your career. That's because every person you meet at work cares about one thing and one thing only: themselves. Go into work every day expecting to be shit on by other people, and you'll have no surprises at all.
"Programmers who hurl insults at each other like to think it's because they're honest, no-nonsense efficiency machines that get things done. The reality is that they never bothered to learn how to interact effectively with other human beings, and that deficiency is typically far more detrimental to their professional lives than they realize."
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
People have very long memories, especially in the career department when their house, and food for their family is on the line. Wisecracking about devs in general in IT is one thing. Insulting people to their face or their manager's face is not exactly a very wise career move.
Plus, devs have heard it all. They have heard they can be replaced by offshore dev houses, H-1Bs, monkeys, or almost anything. They are not going to perform any better when someone continues to compare them with inanimate objects or people in a persistent vegetative state.
To boot, there may be a good chance that the college intern or H-1B fresh off the boat that is the brunt of insults this week may be one's manager the the next week after a corporate reorg or a buyout.
We call an assignment vs equality error a "Deepak". As in, "oh look, right there, you pulled a Deepak".
To reduce crime, make fewer things against the law.
Your thoughts are ugly.
Developers don't want to hear ANY criticism of their work.
They're the rock stars who are coddled and in demand. They are the only ones valued on the team. So QA says "oops, you got a bug here." and they explode like a bridezilla.
Starting with tech recruiters who are total experts on development talent but are totally stupid on any other talent. What's a good QA? They can't tell. BA? They can't tell. But they can spot good dev talent right off the bat, because that's what they obsess about. Then look at the hiring managers who think the best devs make the best software (nobody else exists on the SDLC team) and the results are predictable: $5 tickets to Hawaii on your favorite airline.
If Ralph Nader was running for president
He is. At least he was on my primary ballot. Some people said Kerry and McCain were on their ballots... I don't know, maybe they were trying to clear out old ballot inventory.
I'm going to Burger King now for that spicy buger thing. I'll follow-up with a revew after I eat it.
Can you also follow up with a review of the post-burger poop?
Significantly less efficient than a heap of crap.
It's even better when you are pushing 50 and they are about 24. Owie.
"Your penis is kind of small."
Oh, wait. He wants to hear this because it means he's finally gotten with a girl.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Considering all the controversy over XScreenSaver, coding like JWZ is an insult.
...a developer?
she thinks Apple is a tech company.
Pet Enragers:
- It's all finished, just needs to be programmed.
- Can't you just write a three-liner and fix this?
- That's not important for the requirements, that's just technical stuff.
- Why is this taking so long? My nephew can do this in two days.
- I need the image in 300dpi (web development, where print resolution means squat).
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
RESOURCE!
I agree with the article on that one. A word that is often used to dehumanize people.
If a project is late, we can just "throw in more resources"!
One of my co-workers was once told by the business product owner to get her application finished in unreasonable time. When he expressed his concerns, she basically told him that she would replace him any time with a bunch of "developers from the street" who would get the job done faster than him.
I built a website for my Synagogue, donating my time and effort. Then, they had some staff turnover. I tried to meet with the new administrator to talk about future work on the site and was told "Oh, we're not using that site anymore,I know how to make websites so I'm going to do it." Of course, by "knows how to make websites", he meant he opened up a Webs.com account, used their drag and drop tools to put together a few pages, and gave everyone that address. My skills in custom coding a website to the exact needs of the organization were replaced with "here's a WYSIWYG that lets anyone be a web developer!" (And, yes, I hate those Wix.com ads. You are NOT a web developer if how you "develop websites" is by loading up Wix.com!)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Turgid and redundant
Found Jenny McCarthy.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Any manager who implies that problems caused by a lack of resources is actually a lack of competence.
and your code smells of elderberries.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
That does it every time. Every. Time.
Best one I ever got aimed at me: "Wow, did you give the developer an extra Hot Pocket to build this?"
But you guys are fucking pussies.
Seriously. They are words. Stop being so offended by stupid shit and do your job, maybe you'll hear less insults if you focused on getting something done instead of taking every opportunity you can to get offended.
Its like you're mission is to try and be offended as possible by people, at least judging by this story and its posting.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But this one is straight from med school. From Dr. O., may you rest in peace. When anyone shows "initiative":
"There's nothing worse than a fool with initiative"
Everyone hated rotating with him. I actually had a nice time :)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
My six-month internship as a software tester was for the WorldsAway virtual world at Fujitsu in 1997-98. I came across a graphic bug that I wrote up with the word "suck" to describe the problem. The artist/programmer made a fix and marked the bug as fixed. I reported back that the graphic "sucked less" than before and re-opened the bug. The artist/programmer immediately came over to ream me out for using the word "suck" in a bug report. After he left, my boss looked at me and said, "Damn, you're good! He usually ignores QA."
You're typical of arrogant asshats. There are two types of error messages. The first indicates that the user made a typing mistake. Those should be the most common. The second message relays to the user that you fucked up, either programming or designing the UI. If they put in an input that's invalid and not a typo, then you fucked up the user interface. If the program generates a fault, then you fucked up. Error messages are for them; you shouldn't have fucked up.
Since he's not running, you should vote for Jill Stein.
Whatever you do don't vote for Hillary.
Ugh.
My favorites are:
"A global variable?!?!?! What a piece of shit code!"
"LOL, this code using goto. What n00b wrote this?"... so ironic
The worst insult is when somebody submits a bug report, you fix it or ask for more information and then they never reply again.
If somebody throws an insult at you, it at least means they cared enough about the project to spend time on it.
Words like "fanboi" and "n00b" aren't proper insults.
Whoever uses those kinds of words merely demonstrates their own incomprehension.
Otherwise they would have made substantive arguments.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
And the space dedicated to vegetables at your Kroger is likely larger than the total size of most European grocery stores.
I mean nobody wants to be a nigger.
One of the biggest insults I've ever gotten is after ten years of this job being called a "Junior". Uh...
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
From a tech writer who had been given a very early version of something to try out.
He's a cuckold
In my 18 year career, I haven't met one of those people yet.
This branch is gay. It'll never be merged into the trunk and propagated.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I'm old enough to have worked with paper-based bug tracking systems.
On one project I worked on, there was a protracted feature vs. bug debate between a developer and the QA manager. The QA manager made a "final" declaration that the "feature" needed to be fixed, crammed into what little space was left in the bottom right corner of the bug ticket.
The ticket was returned once more with that corner burned off.
"You're a fine PHP programmer."
You can replace PHP with javascript or, even worse, a specific library. "You're a great JQuery coder!"
For a long time, I would get very dismayed at the reaction of my users when I spent hours (or days or even weeks) working on a complex problem, and they would respond with, "that's it?" when I demonstrated it to them. Those were cases where my presentation lasted a minute or two after a long, blood-stained battle with algorithmic logic. At the end of the presentation, everyone was experiencing an anticlimactic sense of, "how do we fill time now that the presentation is over?" It was borderline depressing, and a bit insulting. There was no praise for all the hard work I put into it.
Then I started looking at it from a different perspective. My job is to make my users' jobs easier. When they look at my work and say, "That's it?" they are really saying, "this is too good to be true, but it is true." Eventually, they confirmed that they indeed were expecting something much harder to use, and were stunned to see so much useful functionality packed into such an easy to use interface.
You broke the architecture
Written by a room full of retarded monkeys
Just because C++ allows recursion, doesn't make it a recursive language (middle recursion, really)
Real conversation: "Did you unit test it?" Developer: "Of course, it compiled didn't it?"
For myself, that's the worst one... largely because it isn't even true. I endeavor to test everything I write before committing it to the repo, but I know I don't think of everything... including, unfortunately, the very first things that my boss's boss apparently tries to do with whatever I've written whenever he gets a new binary, leaving them with little impression but to think that any testing that I may have done was obviously too cursory to qualify as even the most rudimentary verification of code stability and correctness. What I've had to do is simply learn to think more like how he likes to do during first tests.... which isn't easy at all, and does not come naturally, but as I've been learning, the number of complaints has been steadily dropping, and I haven't heard that remark about my code in over a year now.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What were you thinking of? Did you think that the FBI was stupid?
Uh...yeah, we're engineers, not salespeople.
A great way of expressing frustration and reducing tension is with humor. THese types of threads are intended to express humor and blow off steam.
contrary to your assertion, the world does not and should not bow down to your personal biases. Don't like the thread, don't read it. Don't care for snark, satire, or any other genre of humor don't listen. Sit and "be positive", just out of earshot if sound bothers you.
Thinking positive and praising is a good thing to do when it's appropriate, but it often is not.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I forgot to mention, they also were secretly trying to buy an off the shelf product to replace the 100~ line program I had written. That was insulting. Again, it demonstrated to me that I was at the wrong job.
Compiler Masturbation.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/01/linus_torvalds_fires_off_angry_compilermasturbation_rant/
Aah! That finger! Give us some warning next time.
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
The worst is this:
You write something that (a) works and (b) provides industry leading value. It's actually well written: modular, performant, and scalable. Users are surprised at how well it works for them compare to what they are used to. You move on. A year or two later, a junior gets his hands on it to add features, with no plans for change to architecture. Still, over the next year he breaks it completely and deeply, checks in his unfunctioning mess everywhere and doesn't forget to complete his efforts with plenty of vitriolic comments cussing you out for having written shit that doesn't work. The guy also campaigns administration about what a lousy starting point he was given to work with. I'm brought in.
You want to know insulting? I wanted to kill the guy.
nothing more to be said.
Wow, this much hubris and you don't understand confidence intervals worth shit.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
...inner Reiser whilst re-factoring that were you?
Too soon?
Code so bad, it makes Adobe programmers cringe...
if we built buildings the way you code, ... the classic!
the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization!
Once I was a junior dev and went to a very busy Sr. Dev for a question on some code i didn't understand. His reply was "..just forget it, i'll do it" i was pretty crestfallen.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
A colleague seem insulted when it was claimed that he produced write-only code.
"Your code is problematic"
"Your code is toxic"
"Your code is sexist/misogynistic"
"Your code is racist"
"Your code is transphobic"
"Your code reinforces the insidious invasive nature of the white straight cisgender heteronormative patriarchy"
'Well at least it's consistent'
love is just extroverted narcissism
Let's look at the positive side for a change...
Only yesterday I got this compliment from a fellow developer on the other side of the world:
I'm still glowing and more motivated than ever ;-)
(Give a deserved compliment now and then and keep open source going)
The compiler is still laughing about your code. It said "6745: Inefficient code detected", then it went nuts just laughing and laughing...
Wow! Code like this, you should be in management!
"How does Google do it?"
There are four universal relationship killers:
- invalidation
- negative expectations
- escalation
- pursuer pursued
They kill every single human relationship where they are present. Universally.
More accurately, Sanders would take about 40% of the shoes beyond the 100 and give them to the poor, college students, etc. and it will be less oppressive than it used to be in the USA because there is no way the top marginal rate will go back to >90%. It should, but it won't.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What the hell is this? Are you building a solution, or a solution framework?!?
Good post-burger poop review.
Granted, sometimes these can be compliments but when they aren't they can really hurt the target.
They can also hurt the reputation of the people using them and overall team productivity. When that happens, it can hurt the careers of the whole team including the team's direct managers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-...
You don't have to insult them. Just do their job for them and they'll get the point.
He has no clue whatsoever.
In my domain - no. However, there are plenty of coders better than me in other arenas. If you are better than everyone at everything - then you are really something special.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I agree with your first four pet enragers. As for the fifth:
I need the image in 300dpi (web development, where print resolution means squat).
What's the pixel density of an iPad mini tablet with Retina display? Wikipedia says 326 dpi.
And that is the reason why I never buy Kafka brand electronics.
Younger Developer (enthusiastically): "There's this thing they teach in Comp Sci" Me: "I have a degree in computer science"
Glory days have passed you by, Slashdot.
Yes, they try to give feedback about readability and code style and they should. Yes, your code is likely perfectly correct and works fine. If you were writing an app yourself or some small solo programming project, that would be fine. But, in today's world, dozens or hundreds of people work on a coding project and dozens will have to read it and edit it years later with no one from the original team being available to walk them through it. This means that coding styles and conventions become important so other members of your team and future teams can understand what the hell you wrote and be able to edit it. I don't even want to imagine updating code for a project with a team of 20 that everyone wrote in their own style with their own personal shortcuts; it sounds like a specialized circle of hell. This is where you end up with things like certain Symantec products where there is an original core code blob that no one can understand or edit nor is there anyone from the original product working for the company to help edit it so they have to put rings of code to modify that core blobs output to work with the new layers of the product. Yes, I've dealt with this; not as a coder but, as a professional trying to figure out why their product was breaking when Symantec themselves didn't know as they couldn't access the problem code.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
In every organization there will always be one person who knows what is going on. This person must be fired.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"R U really THAT stupid?"
This code sucks.
This GUI is completely unusable.
I'm still wondering who thought mono was a good idea.
Also, still wondering when Java won't suck all system RAM and run 10x slower than **any other language**. I won't touch java development on less than 16G of RAM with a new Core i7 CPU. Just not worth the time.
I hate that one, also "Fuck you idiot!"
I've been coding (as in, full-time employment) for over 20 years now, for large corporations with their own squadron of lawyers and HR people on the payroll, as well as startups of less than half a dozen people. Not once in that entire time have I seen a so-called "flame war" in a bug tracker. If that's just me, then it must be purely due to dumb luck that I've have always somehow been working with people who have consistently maintained a professional attitude towards their work.
I've seen (and have written) self-deprecating check-in comments, but going after others has no place in a business environment.
We've all worked with assholes, but something's seriously wrong with a work environment if flame wars are allowed to evolve in bug tracking software, of all places.
"Wow, that looks like great code, hard to believe it was written by a girl!"
[my name], your F'ing software F'ing doesn't work, you F'ing F.
Perhaps not a personal insult, but an insult to the profession?
"We need it now. Don't waste time with fancy coding."
In (separate, literal) reference to "fancy" things like: documentation, design, error handling, type casting, object-oriented/modular paradigms, common practice, existing standards, etc.
I used to call a guy at our office Senyor Fatthumbs because the guy could fuck up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Also, i have seen errors/bugs labeled as "I-D-10-T" which is pretty self-explanatory.
^ Probably Sarcasm...
. . . . but the ultimate Unix/Linux burn is:
"You can be replaced by a VERY small shell script. . . "
IME, nobody who's ever been asked a question beginning with "Why don't we just..." has ever been happy to hear it.
IME, nobody who's ever asked a question beginning with "Why don't we just..." has ever liked the answer.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not functional or elegant
What do Code Monkey think?
The worst thing you can tell any nerd:
"(This/that/your performance) is unacceptable".
I only ever quit one job and that was due to those very words being said to me by a stupid little Assistant Manager in his early-20's whose only previous job experience was working the night shift at a Blockbuster Video store. Walked right out and never looked back. They kept calling me for 2 weeks begging for me to return but I demanded a $1/hr pay raise and they wouldn't offer a penny.
You code like a girl!
and then there's Ramen Noodles.
Overheard uttered by someone trying to figure out another's literally (not figuratively) 40+ page procedure paragraph.
If you believe in Intelligent Design, then it makes sense to say "men were meant to eat meat."
However, if you are more of the critical thinking perspective, it should be obvious that evolution has a distinctly happenstance character to it. We evolved to eat whatever we could get our hands on. That is what it means to be an "omnivore." We can derive nutrition from a wide variety of foods, so that we don't up and die of some specific plant or animal suddenly isn't on the menu.
Vitamin B12 doesn't prove squat though. Did you know that Shaolin monks, arguably the most powerful athletes in the world, are raised from childhood (and sometimes from birth) on a strictly vegan diet? Not only do plants give us all we need, they give us all we need to be the strongest and most bad-ass humans we can be.
So take your agenda-driven justifications and shove 'em.
Thank you Vegan warrior. Now piss off. Why? "... their grocery stores seem not to sell vegetables as I understand it, ..." You do not understand it, and yet you flap your yap.
"User!"
"You /dev/null kluge! Your code is so full of anti-patterns even my brittle n00b of a grandmother could do better! This crufty bitrot doesn't even compile! Where'd you learn to program, you cargo cult bogon?!"
"learn to..." usually means that someone has not reached a point in their cognitive development where they realize that people specialize in what they do and are not idiots because they don't specialize in what the person hurling the insult does. Coming to appreciate the fact that smart people still don't know everything is often a slow grinding process. This insult is an indication of frustration that someone is present in the context with which they are not fully familiar. Each context has its own set of known facts and its own (often idiosyncratic nomenclature). Confusing someone new to a certain context with someone who is ignorant is a sure sign of someone who's only worked in one context and doesn't know much about anything else. It maybe frustrating, but the frustration comes from inability to explain something which has been internalized. A person who doesn't recognize this about themselves usually ends up being difficult to work with.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
"...but programmers often speak their minds, and when that mind has something unpleasant to say, look-out, feelings."
And then we engineers wonder why we never have a seat at the executive table, and keep getting run over roughshod by the product suits.
If you wanna run your internal engineering team that way, fine. Only code matters below a certain level, and constructive code reviews, criticism, debate all directly contributes to someone's engineering skillset. It's critical to development of a good tech team. Too much passive aggressive touchy-feely and nobody learns anything.
But above a certain level, it's not enough. Eventually, you find yourself promoted to a level where your "performance" is more about a fight for influence and resources at the executive level, where your peers both pay your paycheck and have zero technical background. And if you go into that as the same arrogant asshole tech guy, you will not only fail and get yourself fired, but all too often most of your team as well.
"Did you fix the firmware problem yet?"
"A defective cable is not a firmware problem. The device not giving you no measurements instead of noisy measurements with a defective cable is not a firmware problem. From my point of view, the device now giving you noisy measurements and a warning message if a defective cable is present amounted to deliberately introducing a problem in the firmware.
#2
"Did you fix the firmware problem yet?"
"It's not a firmware problem. It's the analog circuitry unexpectedly crosstalking from point A to point B. But it's easier to make the firmware work around this than recall a hundred thousand devices."
What is this shit? You're fired.
Insults are the first refuge of the insecure. I'm not talking Torvalds-style insults of the code, I'm talking about when they insult you.
Um, no. Or at least, not only that.
Human beings learn from modelling, from environment, from role models. While insecurity can be a part of what feeds an insult, an insult can also just be "this is how I learned to interact with people." Sometimes it was from an environment where the insult was considered friendly (and yes, insults can be intended and taken in a friendly way), and sometimes it was from an environment where that was the only way a boss knew how to get through to people, and sometimes it was from an environment where some other person learned it from someone who was abusive toward them, and sometimes...
Blaming this all on insecurity is inaccurate at best. At worst, it's more a strategy to urge people to be polite based on shaming them. And while shame can be an effective motivator, it's also a really insulting motivator to use.
So they have sections for ketchup, rolls, and sausages?
Enjoying the kool-aid, are we?
Nodejs hipster
"It says here that you have over two decades experience in low-level C programming. That's great! We're going to need someone to write software in VB.NET..."
At DHL back in the day, begin referred to as a "poison dwarf" was probably the worst. Not sure about the origins. It basically meant you were not only a useless loser, but your very presence tended to have a negative impact on the project and all the people involved in it.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
"Come on, its not 2009!!" (pick any year approximate to when they started their career). Has worked well for me to grab their attention....
Insults are easy to brush off, and usually come from overly defensive pedants with no real talent desperately trying to keep their grip on some digital fiefdom. The real nut punch is simply seeing somebody silently be better than you.
In CSS, 1px doesn't literally mean one pixel. It's whatever multiple of a hardware pixel is closest to 1/2700 of the distance from the eye to the display. On a 96 dpi display at arm's length, 1px is, yes, one pixel. A phone with a 160 dpi display, such as a pre-Retina iPhone may be held closer to the face and thus still one pixel per px. But on the higher-density displays of today's tablets and phones, 1px may equal 1.5 or 2 pixels. In any case, if you size everything in px, things will look perceptually the same size on all displays.
The error message should be for BOTH. You can give the user a decent general idea of what went wrong, but also give tech details for the help-desk etc. Example:
"Sorry, the email service cannot accept your message. It's not responding as expected. Click for details [button or hyperlink]."
The detail screen would then say something like:
Error Details
Error Code: 48271
Full Description: "The SMTP server that is designated to process messages is responding, but could not understand one or more commands that this application sent to it. Suggestion: switch on SMTP logging in the [application's] Settings, Messaging, Logging menu."
Table-ized A.I.
"Now that's coding like a [pointy-haired] boss!"
Maybe you should go back to using managed code.
If you are insulting me instead of sending a pull request you have already fallen short of any chance at your intended goal.
By far the worst insult to be accused of is Cargo Cult programming because it says not only is the implicated incompetent they are also dishonest.
While just making a mistake is inevitable human fallibility.
I haven't seen code of this quality since Windows ME
A vegan diet works fine assuming you get everything you need. Eating some iceburg lettuce and broccoli isn't enough. Like you said "wide variety", an extremely wide variety is required. You say "powerful athletes", but by what definition? Many top performing athletes need to eat junk food just to get the required caloretic intake. It is literally impossible to eat enough vegan food to sustain the energy needs of a training athlete. It can be hard to eat 5,000+ calories of vegan food per day. You'll rupture your stomach.
While working your way through a complex, poorly written system, whose creators have some god-status... and business or the client politely suggests, "Shall we call up the original developer(s) to assist you?"
Dev: "You broke my code."
QA: "It was broken when I got it."
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Do you know what some of us more seasoned veterans in the industry call a passionate criticizer?
A volunteer [to fix the code].
Once where I worked, there was this horrible piece of user interface code (code that handles keystrokes always tends to be). And there was this programmer who was constantly flaming about how bad it was. Then there was the meeting with management about adding Kanji support to the operating system. He wasn't at the meeting, but everyone else familiar with the code was and got assigned to other tasks. The meeting finally got down to this one ugly piece of code and nobody left to enhance it. And somebody chimes in, "Mr X, was just talking about it the other day..." Note that "complaining" got translated to the less specific "talking". Mr X did a great job on that code, BTW. Nobody has ever complained about it since...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Oh wow, another paranoid psychotic "everyone who disagrees with me is cultists drinking poison brainwash commie kool-aid!!" The best part to me is that they all talk and sound alike, they all insult anyone trying to be unique as having "special snowflake syndrome", and yet they claim to be defending free thought against the evil tyranny of those who dare to think differently.
Nuts.
Munch on nuts all day and you can do pretty well.
A 32-oz. jar of peanut butter can provide 5,000 calories.