The Honest Resume of a Programmer

The Honest Resume of a Programmer

Section 1. Soft Skills

1. I stay silent during meetings. I try to make an attentive and intelligent face, even when I don't care.
2. People consider me positive and agreeable. I always politely and gently point out that a task requires doing something crappy. And only once. Then I don't argue. And when I finish the task and it turns out to be crappy, I don't laugh and I don't say "I told you so!"
3. I don't care what crappy thing I'm coding. If the client were interested in my opinion, they wouldn't have hired a project manager, a product owner, a scrum master, an agile lord, and a UI designer. Let those hipsters form all the opinions, visions, and marketing gimmicks.
4. I'm disciplined. I arrive at work at 9 and leave at 6. That works for me. I can stay late for double pay or if the task is interesting.
5. I have a good sense of humor and rich life experience. I can easily derail the team's work for half a day with stories about how my Saturday went. But I rarely do this because I believe I'm not paid for that, but rather to code some crappy thing.
6. I wouldn't touch your team lead position with a ten-foot pole. I can code some crappy thing by myself, but explaining to my subordinates with a smart face that they need to do some crappy thing is beyond my abilities.
7. I'm absolutely magnificent at presentations. Especially when presenting an unfinished dumpster fire. I masterfully navigate around bugs during program demos. Once I spent two hours presenting a login screen because nothing beyond it worked. And even the login didn't always work.
8. When I've had enough, I quit quietly, rather than walking around departments grumbling "Everything's terrible, we're at rock bottom, everyone's an idiot."

Section 2. Hard Skills

1. Inheritance is an abomination if only one child inherits from the parent.
2. I use encapsulation only when IntelliJ highlights it in yellow and says this method can be made private. Same with final.
3. I've never used volatile, finalize, and many others.
4. I don't stress about whether to use ArrayList or LinkedList. I always use ArrayList.
5. I can skip getters and setters in Java if I know nobody will read my code. person.name = "john". If I know someone will read it, I feel embarrassed.
6. I still haven't understood why interfaces exist in Java, aside from callbacks and lambdas. All examples of their use are contrived, and I can do it simpler without them.
7. I don't know how the GC works; I've never used it. In 6 years, I can only recall it being mentioned once. Aside from job interviews, of course.
8. I have a repo on GitHub, but I won't show it to you. It's my personal space, and I code however I want there. You don't walk around in a tuxedo at home either, do you?
9. I can love coding frontend when I'm tired of backend. I've already forgotten React and fallen behind. But I think I still remember Sencha.

Section 3. Achievements

1. I made 3 websites that had fewer visitors than people who built them. When I was making 2 of these sites, I knew nobody would visit them. (They were expected to take over the world.)
2. I made three web applications (ExtJS-Java-Docker). Two of them were never deployed to production, and one was used twice. (They were expected to take over the world.)
   
   When I was building them, I knew this would happen because I don't believe in users who memorize a 20-page manual by heart. I myself presented my creation with a printed manual in hand.
3. I made a native Android app with 8 screens in which nobody went past the second one. It was downloaded 107 times on Google Play. (It was expected to take over the world.)
4. I once spent two days fixing a highest-priority bug, only to realize that nobody had visited that section of the site for about three years. And it was a very substantial section of the site, on which many person-hours had been spent.
5. I spent about a week making a combobox slide in from the right instead of from the top.
6. I led a team of 4 people, and we spent half a year building a project that I could have done alone in a week. And yes, this is the project from point 2.
7. I set up query caching for MongoDB on an application that gets one visitor per day.
8. I built a corporate email client despite the fact that hundreds of free ones exist and all of them were better.
9. I did pixel-perfect polishing (or whatever it's called?) on the frontend.
10. I redesigned Google's Material UI library for React because our freelance UI designer from Kurgan decided he understood design better than Matias Duarte — Google's VP of Design, a computer science honors graduate from the University of Maryland, with additional education in art and art history, and director of the Student Art Gallery at Maryland.
    
    I've never understood why people redesign good things that smart people made for you and gave away for free, especially when you're obviously less competent.
11. I spent a month building a feature that, by the most optimistic calculations, would take 437 years to pay for itself. (It was for ordering mops for the cleaning lady) in an ERP system.
12. I rebuilt one crappy thing from scratch 7 times because the requirements kept changing. In the end, it was worse than before.
13. I spent 4 hours figuring out why a penny was rounded incorrectly in an invoice, knowing in advance that I wouldn't be able to fix it, because otherwise the balance wouldn't add up.
14. I built a microservice to increase the reliability of the core business logic, and yes, this microservice crashed 20 times more often than the business logic.
    
    Then they created a whole department of 12 people to increase the reliability of this reliability microservice, and now the microservice crashes 20 times more often still, performs partial transactions, and loses data without a trace. When I was quitting, they were planning to build a reliability microservice for the reliability microservice.