Rough analysis of LinkedIn inmail’s I get:

Hi <5% of time, not my name>,

I was looking at your profile <97% a lie>. I was very impressed with your <10% something I’ve never done> experience working for <5% a company I’ve never heard of>. Would you be interested in hearing more about <60% a job I’m not suited for>, they offer amazing benefits and have a great culture!

... no

Benefits of being a dev:
Wife: "I just wish I had a program that could organize all my shit for my [work-from-home outside sales] job. My old company had much better software."
One week later:
Me: "Here honey: I built a program that will organize your business leads, allow you to search them by city, street, phone number, it detects when you have multiple businesses with one owner, warns you of duplicate information before you add it, and you can now launch phone calls with the click of a button. I've also put an app on your phone that can send and receive data from the main program."
One hour later:
Giggity giggity.

"full stack" means "you'll be doing everything from gathering client requirements through data architecture up to the UI design and of course implementing all of it"

"backend" means "you'll be coding everything from database through server-side code and client-side code including html and css"

"we need you on-site all day every day" means "we have no idea how and why we should use repositories with remote access despite being a company developing an internet app, and we don't trust that you would be working anyway"

"interesting challenging projects" means "the same boring crap as every other company, running on an incredibly botched and dezorganized codebase".

"competitive pay" means "actual pay is around 1.5 times the minimum allowed pay, and everything else is being siphoned off into (stupid and useless) 'benefits' like massage and fitness discount coupons"

"friendly collective having fun at numerous company events each years" means "it is mandatory for you to participate on our weekend drinking retreats but you'll only find out when we fire you because you're 'not a team player' after you refused to participate on those"

HR girl sent a generic email with the job description and benefits of the company but forgot to set it as BCC.

Not 3 minutes passed that all the 73 recipients of the mail (me inlcuded) start replying to all making jokes about it, ranting about HR in general.

An hour later we created a Facebook page called "not-BCC guys" where we keep us posted about opening positions in our companies to bypass future HR hunting interactions.

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

1. If your contract allows it (and it should), get more involved in public dev community. Your employer benefits greatly from making a small closed source core product, with a giant open source ecosystem around it. Write public articles. Working in a community larger than one single business is fun.

2. Start a company coding club, a "labs" division, work in a slightly more exotic language. Great if your employer gives you time, but using some of your own is worth it too. Work on non critical tools, creative experiments. Sometimes you stumble onto incredibly valuable ideas which would never have popped up if you had strictly followed stakeholder requirements.

3. Listen to your body. If you feel restless, go for a run. If you feel tired, take a nap. If you're stuck, wander around the company. If you feel down, go find a place with more than a dozen trees. And always have a notepad nearby for doodling!

I hate how willing companies are to let someone go over money.

I’ll use a real life example with someone I knew. This person joined a company at the entry-level developer and worked up to a senior level. His pay rises were around 3% per year with around a 5–7% promotion raise (there were two of these).

At this point, 4–5 years after joining, he was making far under what a senior developer salary was in his area. Eventually, he interviewed on the team of a friend at another company and was offered a 40% increase. Four-Zero. CRAZY.

What the company did is baffling to me.

His boss said they may be willing to increase 5%, but there was no way they could even match what the other company offered, let alone beat it. The benefits were better at the new company, but he would’ve stayed with the original for a salary match.

So he left…

But what did the original company do? Hired a new senior level developer for the same dollar amount the dev was offered at the new one, then lost about 6 months ramping up that developer due to a super complex code base, and the new developer turned out to be much less capable than the one they just let go.

So wtf? It’s flat out stupid on the company’s part. Some sort of effed up pride or something.

They’d rather let someone walk out the door, knowing it’ll cost just as much to replace them, plus losing literally tens of thousands of dollars on ramp up time, and they gamble on getting a capable developer instead of a known, proven, loyal developer.

Thankfully, the younger tech companies understand this, and many pay people appropriate to level and talent, regardless of what they were making before they advanced to that level.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Minimum wage employers and restaurants asking "and why should we hire you?".

You have 40 vacancies in your area for just your company alone.
You're paying $13.25 an hour when only a year ago you were paying $9.75.

Why should we hire you?

F*ck you, pay me, that's why.

You're not f*cking NASA
You're a God damn chain restaurant with a 40% turnover rate, who's employees probably shoot up in the bathroom on the rare occasion they even get a break.

I looked at the guy with all the annoyance I could muster, stared him down for a good five seconds and said. "You pay a few dollars over minimum. You're job is not important enough to even ask that question. Have a nice day." And got up and left.

Dude followed me and stuttered " hold up. I was just..."

But I was already out the door.

You were just what mark? Asking a dumbfuck question as if you had any leverage at all?

Your competitor *across the street* is offering 50 cents *more* per hour, and has guaranteed breaks.

What, did you forget 2008 and how you treated millions of people as disposable? The little part where you and most american industries demanded passion, without pay raises? Promotions without benefits? The jobs that if you worked hard, rather than a promotion or a pay raise, your reward was more work and less hours to finish?

You assholes thought we forgot about that? How you shipped millions of jobs overseas, blamed it on "automation" (chinese and indian slave labor), and then pointed the finger at millions of impoverished people as "lazy" in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and told them "you just got to work harder and smarter!" Or "just get a small loan and create the next google!" from the comfort of your yachts? I'm looking at you bane corp.

No, now the shoes on the other foot motherf*ckers. Hows it feel needing all *us* commoners? "Why should we hire you?"

No, why should *I* WORK FOR YOU?
Cuz I saw THREE dirty tables coming in. A line of people that could be being served. A line that could have been optimized with the proper table count and some simple changes. A menu that doesnt even incentivize your biggest sellers and a dozen other things your store is doing wrong.

Think mark, think!

This is one of those braindead questions employers paying sub $18 an hour ask, because they suffered so much brain drain from years of payola profits from too-big-to-fail wallstreet bailouts, that they forgot they are not king midas, unless they are the king midas of shit, because increasingly everything corporate America touches turns into shit.

And while were on the subject, stopping bringing in outside management to stores. It destroys team cohesion, staff morale, pisses off people *on site* who *actually know* the team, the stores daily activities and processes, and who are better fit for that role. You bring in disinterested outside management, and it's one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen: these smarmy selfcongratulating f*cks who know nothing about the particular store, have no connection to the staff, go on firing sprees or alienation-sprees to hire in friends, fuck up the schedules because again they know nothing about the employees, and then move on after a few years to greener pastures, leaving a barren radioactive wasteland of chain smokers and burnt out staff in their wake.

Dear corporate America, your free ride on the public's good will is over. It's over.

Now you're in the bitch seat. Come sit at my desk and explain to me, EXPLAIN TO ME, why I should sweat and labor to save your shitty company hemorrhaging money like a bleeding crack-addicted hobo dying with a sucking chest wound from a chicago skidrow friday-night drive-by?

You dont deserve it. Your management and company culture is worse than incompetent. It's full of smiley guys expounding about their passion for customer service while giving each other sloppy BJs in broom closets, a veritable cornucopia of cult-like corporate dick suckers *and* dickheads, proclaiming, no...PROFESSING (hence "professional") their undying allegiance and dedication to their corporate family with the intensity of cujo, foaming at the mouth, or Mitt Romney preparing for a photoshoot, plastic smiles and feigned laughs.

Dont forget to wipe your chin, asshole. It's not Ronald McDonald your blowing, but it's definitely not Gordon f*cking Ramsey either.

Would you like fries with that?

List of benefits given by some random company to its developer,
1- Medical, Dental, AD&D
2- Generous paid time off and holidays
3- Free fitness center in our building
4- Flexible schedule
6- Mac or PC, your choice
7- We and our customer don't use IE
8- Starbucks on the 1st floor
9- Generous 401k match
...

But I like 7th one the most!

I work for a company known for its unbelievable perks and benefits. Every time a job opens up, we get thousands of applications.

Candidates are becoming increasingly aggressive to stand out. Hundreds of them (literally) have purchased Facebook ads or LinkedIn promoted posts to get their information in front of current employees.

Others have taken to outright stalking our employees. I freelance occasionally and have a separate website for my freelance business. I receive dozens of calls and emails to my freelance number and email account daily from people who want to “chat about the open position.”

My husband — who has a different last name — runs a small retail shop. He’s had people come into his store and tell him that they did internet sleuthing and found out he was married to an employee of my company, and would he please pass on their resume?

I expect to get these messages on my LinkedIn or company email, but am I wrong in thinking that stalking me out and trying to contact me via personal contact info (or my husband) is way out of line?

Is there a way to sharply tell them that this is not okay? Normally, I just don’t respond, but I have to turn my phone off or it rings all day and it’s really annoying. Would it look weird to put a message on my freelance website that says do not contact me about Company X jobs?

My company is aware of this problem, and has said to forward the names of aggressive or alarming candidates their way to remove them from consideration, but it’s so common, I’m thinking this is a product of being told that if they just showed GUMPTION, they’d get the job. I feel bad for them, but it’s also creeping me out.

I met with the CTO of a local tech company today for a beer, at the recommendation of a friend who currently works at the company. They're looking for Software Engineers and wanted to see if I'd be a good fit.

I'm not actively looking to leave my current job, as I love it there. I was just curious to see what other opportunities were out there.

After the beer, he pretty much offered me the job on the spot for $30,000 to $40,000 more than my current salary, along with benefits. When I asked if there was any sort of technical interview, he said that this meeting was actually the technical interview, and that by the time he had finished his first beer, he could already tell that I would be a good fit. He wants me to meet with his Lead Architect and CEO soon just to see if we all click and then we'll go from there.

The only problem is that I really love my current company. I love the work, the atmosphere, the autonomy, and my coworkers. But an extra $30k to $40k per year is a lot of money.

If everything works out and they give me an official written offer, I'm going to see if my current job will counteroffer. I know my boss would happily counteroffer if he's given authorization from the higher-ups, it's just a matter of exactly how much they're able to counteroffer.

TL;DR: Tech companies. Don't ask for loyalty if you don't care about your people.

> I'm a gud Dev (and a gud boi).
> The company assing me a cool project.
> The company promised pay me the training. about that suite. They didn't.
> I finish the project and i'd accomplish the task with more effectivity than excepted.
> My company won an interview about "the success case of the implemented software and its integration with our software". They denied me the chance to fly and go to the meet. Instead they will send another guy...
> I asked for a "salary adjust" cos I'm finishing my engineering degree and my good work. They declined.
> Next day I'd present my volunteer job resignation within 15 days (because laws demands that). I have a better job option with +20% my actual salary and a lot of benefits. And they needs me ASAP.
> Everybody look at me shocked and if I am a traitor.

What the f!$-k they did expect?
My unconditional loyalty?
🤣🤣🤣

I was told there's gonna be:
- good salaries
- informal company setups with benefits
- lots of jobs available
- non-dev people look at you in amazement
- get to work on really interesting stuff

What I'm actually doing:
- carrying a team of people in uni because you're the only one who knows how to code
- deal with shitty uncommented legacy code at work
- be reminded that if you don't do something super-sophisticated you're easily replaceable
- spend unpaid overtime hours because you're the only one at your job that is on the issue (I see a pattern of being alone in a problem here)
- requestion all my career decisions
- cry and be stressed
- hate every minute of work, yet be stuck in it because it's a source of income that is flexible enough for me to be able to study full-time

So dunno man, I'm still waiting on what I've been told, people say there's lotsa money and satisfaction waiting for me after grinding through 5 years of high education, it'd better be worth it

A friend offered me a new job in his company. Therefore I am going to quit my job. I like my current job, but the conditions are shit. Still I like my colleges and my clients. So I feel really bad for quiting.

The Job he offered me is pretty good, well paid and has many benefits for me. I like him and his company and are really excited to work with them. They are expecting big things of me and I'm scared to disappoint them.

Also I haven't told my boss about my plan to quit yet and because we become kind of friends in the time I work for her, it's an difficult talk for me.

😕

Who else is at a Rammstein concert right now?

I know of @CoffeeNCode

My company got another contract to support a research institute. My current contract has shitty leadership that won't back us against our boss (different company, same contract) without proof. The fact that 3 of the 4 of us dread going to work isn't enough?

Anyways. Talking to the other site about transferring. Need to gtfo to a less toxic environment where I won't be made to work fucked up hours with a boss who doesn't like women in tech, and thinks he's something special because he's vegan (but had real leather jackets and bike seats, but that's an entirely different story) and does yoga and plays the guitar.

Meanwhile, he resents his kids and seems to regret getting married. All because he used his military education benefits to pay for their school.

Money isn't everything.

When I graduated, I chose the job I have now because of the pay and benefits. A couple years into it, and I realize now what a mistake that was. After my first year teaching myself Apex and automating most of my team's work, I hardly spend any time as a developer because of the low number of jobs at the company that allow me to do that level of work within the first five years of employment. I've consistently asked my supervisor if I could move into a more technical space with proof of my work as reasoning to no avail. If your job pays a lot but isn't challenging, you can wind up being just as upset as if you had to work 60-70 hrs/week.

Applied for a company and received a contract today. I can't believe what I'm looking at. (Graduate software engineer)

- £30k starting salary
- 28 days annual holiday
- no benefits whatsoever
- no work schemes
- reserve the right to tell you to work overtime without extra pay
- reserve the right to work you from home on weekends in emergencies
- you will only work on what they tell you to and nothing else

This company has awful reviews all over the internet which I didn't see until after applying.

Going into their offices for interviews, all I saw was a bunch of slaves on their screens, no one talking, no one smiling.

Spoke to the CTO whose words were, quote: "we only care about making money, we don't care what people are saying about us as long as they are using our service and paying us."

What the actual fuck?

Overheating The Javascript Ecosystem

Paranoid thought: You know, in the course of every day, being the corrupt piece of shit that I am, whenever I see a scandal or what looks like shenanigans-in-the-making, I ask myself

"Wisecrack, is this a fucking scam or con of some sort?"

I was recently asking myself this about javascript.

Not the language per se, but the ecosystem.

I noticed how there are a thousand CLIs for simple shit. Another four thousand for page long libraries, for simpleton level shit (because prototypes are designed after satans own aborted love-child of object models). I noticed another eight thousand guys imitating steve jobs, talking at conferences and 'change the world' high-on-huffing-my-own-shit TEDX talks like rubyists that don't realize the world has moved on, all to hawk books and inflate CVs for cushy positions at major tech firms and the herd of dicksuckers following the next fad off a cliff like lemmings. And another eight thousand 'tech journalists' pushing them off the cliff while begging for outrage and hype dollars and slowly circling like vultures above the drain that is the ad-based economy.

And I thought to myself.

"Wisecrack, who benefits from all this noisy self-indulgent horseshit? Where is all the money coming from for all these books, conferences, meetings, publications, media, bread, and circuses?"

"I don't know wisecrack. But if I were the CEO of a big company, threatened by the prospect of a universal language, or universal platform, like flash, but one I couldn't kill like flash, I would try to do the most corrupt thing I could think of."

"Whats that wisecrack?"

"I would try to 'overheat' the ecosystem by selectively hiring people from that ecosystem, pumping money into a boatload of similar products, all in the hopes of provoking the equivalent of an immune overreaction, imitators all flooding the ecosystem with the same shit in different packages, self promoting sycophants, aggrenadizing social media idiots, tools sold as tools, hyped as 'the next coming of steve jobs', overcooked shit that focuses on ceremony over functionality, ritual over productivity, documentation over innovation like some sort of amazonion infinite nesting doll hellscape of documents linking to documents linking to documents, each one a new circle of dantes inferno, where the definition of anything links to another document that says "see also xyz", and I would convince them that they had done it to themselves."

And then I would push typescript as their lord, savior, and master. "

"How do you know all this wisecrack?"

"Because I am a piece of shit, and, this is what I would do in any executive's shoes."

So the story start like this, 6 months ago i left my job in a big company for an oportunitiy to work on a new one without all the bureocracy and shit and with better benefits , the first months were wonderful we were using a nice stack of technologies and the team that was assembled was a nice one with smart and hard working people with a few exceptions, but overall very good. One day out of the blue the manager started to presure us to release a project that was on time and wanted us to make extra hours and work on saturdays, sadly we blindly did because we cared for what we were creating, fast forwarding to yesterday, the whole team was called to a meeting and our contracts were terminated without previous advice because the company could not afford to pay us for more time and blahblahblah..., soo here i'm feeling used and sad but with renowed feelings about starting my own business!!

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

I don't understand why people are making a fuss about Facebook.

It's free to use, the amount of users kept increasing (thus the cost of maintenance) yet the company kept getting bigger and bigger. Obviously they're not making all their money off the advertisements on Facebook's own website.

So why are people so surprised that they're "selling" user information?

This is really funny to me. Especially the media joining in saying that it makes all your information available to everybody when they're actually talking about the fact that the majority of Facebook users have their profile set to public and they can be easily found with a simple Google search.

People are so fucking hypocritical it makes me want to puke. If you don't want anybody to know what you posted, just don't fucking post it on a SOCIAL MEDIA in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that facebook is all flowers and love, they clearly didn't handle this situation well. They could have done something about this whole situation when it started instead of waiting for things to blow out of proportion.

However, people are just being assholes now. I highly doubt that they're reading all chats nor are they sending it over, they're probably just sending out some words you mention often so that it is pertinent for advertisers (ex. If you use the word computer next to buy, then maybe that triggers something). I could talk extensively about it but I'm way too lazy, the point is, they most likely aren't sending the nudes you sent to advertisers because that does not provide any benefits.

If you don't like Facebook, don't fucking use it. Delete your account and shut the fuck up. When you screw up in real life, there's no takesies backsies, why the fuck do people think it doesn't apply online? The government gathers up quite a lot of information on you yet I don't see you crying your eyes out.

Why the fuck do you care so much if an advertisement is tailored to specifically? Yeah, you talked about dildos and now you see dildo ads from Amazon, not happy? Just download adblock and shut up. If you're gullible and the moment you see an ad about single women in your area you click on the ad because you want to get laid right now, that's your problem.

Don't want people knowing about some aspects of your private life? Don't share it online.

Stop acting like people are any better at keeping secrets, I'm sure you had some people leak your secrets at least once, yet I doubt you sued them and you brought them to court.

===========

I'm sorry about this, it's just that Facebook is all over the news and I'm getting sick of it.

Also, I hate facebook, I'm not necessarily defending it, I'm more pissed at the medias for blowing this situation out of proportion.

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

Mail: Meeting about new benefits from working at <COMPANY>. Estimate duration: 1 hour.

Me: Alright, I'll bite. Might even be something I can use.

HR person in said meeting: At <COMPANY> we'll reward you for being healthy by giving you a better life insurance.

Me: Sounds good and reasonable but you also said this didn't require a physical so how...?

HR: Install <APP> on your phone to keep track of all your healthy habits

Me: Wait wha-

HR: Generate our own brand of crypto currency by linking in all your other health apps like google health, and (lists 4 others), goes towards your life insurance and you can even donate water, food or books to the less fortunate! You DO want to help starving children, right?

At that point I just disconnected. I'm not paid to take part in a corporate crypto scheme.

I had a manager who scolded me in me in public on a non-IT floor because I used child classes and overloading of methods which "is too hard to read". Instead use "lots of ifs and else's". This is the guy that had a JSP so large (be cause he had so many ifs) that it couldn't be compiled even on a server.

The best karma happened a few months later. I was looking for a new job (wonder why?) and was very deep in the interview process - like round 5- of company A. I got talking to this jackass, who had no idea I was interviewing, said "yeah I applied to company A once. Couldn't get past the first round. Great benefits, though.". Me getting the job a week later was the best thing ever.

I was reading the post made by another ranter in which he was basically asked to lower the complexity of an automation script he wrote in place of something everyone else could understand. Another dev commented that more than likely it had to do with the company being worried that ranter_1 would leave and there would be no one capable of maintaining the code.

I understood this completely from both perspectives. It makes me worry how real this sometimes is. We don't get to implement X tech stack because people are worried that no one would be able to maintain Y project in the event of someone leaving. But fuck man, sometimes one wants to expand more and do things differently.

At work I came to find out that the main reason why the entirety of our stack is built in PHP is because the first dev hired into the web tech department(which is only about 12 years old in my institution) only knew PHP. The other part that deals with Java is due to some extensions to some third party applications that we have, Java knowledge (more specifically Spring and Grails) is used for those, the rest is mostly PHP. And while I LOVE PHP and don't really have anything against the language I really wonder what would it be of the institution had we've had a developer with a more....esoteric taste. Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, F# and many others. These are languages and tech stacks that bring such a forward way of thinking into the way we build things.

On the other hand, I understand if the talent pool for each of these stacks is somewhat hard to come up with, but if we don't push for certain items then they will never grow.

The other week I got scolded by the lead dev from the web tech department for using Clojure to create the demo of an application. He said that the project will most likely fall into his hands and he does not know the stack. I calmly mentioned that I would gladly take care of it if given the opportunity as well as to explain to him how the code works and provide training to everyone for it :D I also (in all of my greatness) built the same program for him in PHP. Now, I outrank him :P so the scold bounced out of the window, plus he is a friend, but the fact remains that we reached the situation in which the performance as well as the benefits of one stack were shadowed by the fact that it holds a more esoteric place in the development community.

In the end I am happy to provide the PHP codebase to him. The head of the department + my boss were already impressed with the fact that I was able to build the product in a small amount of time using a potent tech stack, they know where my abilities are and what I can do. That to me was all that matters, even if the project gets shelved, the fact that I was able to use it at work for something means a lot to me.

That and I got permission to use it for the things that will happen with my new department + the collective interest of everyone in paying me to give support even if I ever leave the institution.

Win.

My boss, head of IT, doesn't see the benefits of using slack at our company. He thinks it's like instant messenger...

Not necessarily ignorant, but funny.
Before my current job I used to work for a company that provided software services to logistic type corporations, import export and all that jazz.

I was asked to generate an admin interface that would allow people to enter scans from different products, sort them in the right place and update the main interface. During the time we were using Classic ASP with VBScript. There, AJAX and similar functionality can get quite tricky, but definitely doable if you know what you are doing, VBScript has many limitations when compared to something like PHP for example. But thus the application was created in about a week once everything was sorted and then the storage manager came back to ask me if I could put a spinner or something in it to show that the information was loading. I asked him if the information was not being updated accordingly or if there were similar issues to that extent.

He said "no, it is working perfectly and I have no problem with the functionality, but these morons keep trying to scan shit because they can't tell if something is being populated into the main table in the interface because it all happens so quickly" Me: "well it is a very simple process, if you want I can add some sort of additional message to that or a spinner or something of the like that would show for two seconds or something, just so they can get some visual clarification"

Him: "This is a pretty stupid thing isn't it?". Me: Yes. Him: "I am so sorry to ask for this, how long will it take you?" Me: "Lol give me about 30 mins maybe less, it is no problem really, let me get this out of the way so that your people can get to it without loosing anymore time"

Such things are the reason why they literally brought me to the head of the company when I told them that I was leaving in an effort for him to try and convince me to stay. I was not to be contracted into their service anymore, but a full time employee. It was nice for them to ask really, but I declined in favor of the benefits I get from my current company.

To this day I think its funny and they remember as well.

I am back with some more emotional shit.

So tomorrow is my last working day at my second employer where essentially I'll just walk into the 10 seater serviced office to drop my laptop in a cupboard because no one else is here.

So today, an hour ago, they had a virtual farewell for me and everyone spoke of me highly with specific examples.

Well that's not what this post is about, but the emphasis is that I am still in dual mind of whether I made the right decision to quit my second employer so soon (in just 10 months)?

If I had stayed for two months more:
1. I'd gotten a hike this week
2. More RSUs in that hike along with cash
3. Joining RSUs would have vested for the cliff period of 1 year
4. Tenure would be at least a year
5. Would have found a better job with higher pay (on the new hiked salary).

I surprisingly got the grip of the product and that's when I decided to quit.

The reason I quit is I wanted to optimise for WLB and timezone with better team culture.

While the next job is surely a company I wanted for a long time and that too in B2C space, I really lost my affection for that role and that's where it came to me upfront and I rejected them initially before picking up the offer again.

My second employer is a very global and one of the largest brands. Really wanted to stick around and never got to enjoy the benefits which others did.

Only time can tell, because when I chased something I never got it, when I stopped, it came to me.

And what I am chasing now is something I am unable to achieve.

Why is life so fucked. Seems like I am about to lose one of my biggest and only life and career dream.

Maybe I fucked up this decision. Maybe not. Only time can tell.

I've got a rant-type question:

Why would you EVER use Google Chrome?

There are a million browsers in the world, you could've used Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Bad Wolf, Qute, st, Epiphany etc, but you chose to uss Google Chrome.

What would be the reason you would ever choose Google Chrome over any of the million browsers, out of which many of them get the job done much better than Chrome? Okay, I get it why you might use IE or Edge, cause you might be too lazy to install any other browser or you just want the performance benefits you get with Edge which totally, most definatelly, a very big plus point for Edge.

*"Chrome has a balanced-bloat out of all browsers"*
But how tf does that matter? That doesn't even help performance wise anyways.

I can't get over the fact that I have to see/hear about 'Chrome hogging RAM' EVERYWHERE. Like, why do you even care about the god damn browser? Why is it a standard over the million other browsers that exist? Why can't the general public be educated that browsers have choices (just like phones) and you don't have to spit crap over people who don't use Chrome.

It just drives me crazy of how many people hate Chrome, and still it's a 'default' browser.

I would quote Vivaldi (the company/browser):
'A browser should adapt to you, not the other way around.'

(Disclaimer: Rant of a former Firefox, qute, st, Opera, OperaGX, Edge, and ofcourse, Chrome user. Currently in deep love with Vivaldi.)

I'm done ranting. Have a nice day!

(My first post here, if I did something wrong, let me know! I'll make sure I don't do it again!)

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

So it's done. I signed my new contract with my new company after I left my old job. Better contract level, better pay, better benefits (at my old office they didn't even give me a pc. I had to use mine..)..
But the sad/funny story is that my old boss do not talk to me anymore because he can't understand why I'm leaving..sooo mature!
I really don't care because actually he do not deserve anything from me, he's (and forever will be) an arrogant prig without humility.
The only regret is leaving the co-workers I bound with..but I'm sure we'll be in touch.
Yep.. maybe this is definitely a rant/story!
Wish me good luck for this new adventure!

Just had one of the most cringiest HR interview ever. I'm looking for a new job, and yesterday applied for several med/senior backend developer positions and immediately got response from a well known software company.

We schedule a call today 9:00am, so I take homeoffice and wake-up half an hour earlier than usual.

First thing I notice, lady is 5mins late, but okay its morning, we're all humans, so I don't mind it even though some other person might call it a classical sign of disrespect and hangup right away.

First question: Why did you apply for our company?
- Euhhmm cause I'm looking for a new job and I saw your job ad yesterday?

Second question: Why would you like to work at our company?
- Left speechless.. Well I honestly don't know, not really following your company, I know that you exist but that's about it, shouldn't you be telling me this? (*heavy breathing on the other side*)

The rest of interview left me quite uninterested due to initial questions, like what the hell, I can imagine these being alright for interns and junior developers who might be fascinated by opportunity to work for a big and well known company to build their CV, but c'mon I've went through shit already and honestly don't care for who I work for as long as they have interesting projects, are paying me right and have couple small benefits I'm looking for such as homeoffice, gym card etc..

Depending on the company you get to work for you have 2 choices in Lithuania.
Either you're the outsourced developer (The pay is amazing, many benefits etc...)
Or you work in a company that is not multi-international, then either the pay is much lower, or they expect a lot and push you to the curb with tasks.

One of my parents likely has cancer (waiting for results to confirm), my work is currently cutting benefits, I am reaching a new level of burnout where my voice just cracks during meetings and I have terrible sore throat afterwards and the only project I was looking forward to, is deprioritized due to company doing bs (so much bs that there’s a team that expects progress even though it has been officially deprioritized). And don’t ask me about the junior, I don’t even have energy anymore to rant.

People ask me how am I, and I’m wondering how much more shit needs to happen before it’s acceptable to reply “I’m regretfully sober”

Another day, another job description

# Benefits
- Flexible work hours
: You'll be coding to midnight
- Ability to work from home some days
: But watch out for those other days..
- Our office space provides free coffee, beer and soft drinks as well as an amazing modern workspace
: Our tax expense will get you gee'd up and tipsy til you loose track of time. (Future diabetes health insurance not included).
- Growth and future progression opportunity
: Pinky promise!
- Receive valuable company equity
: Plus a set of steak knives for four easy payments
- Latest MacBook Pro
: We own this. We own the thoughts you have while looking at this. Plese think many thoughts.

I got call from a recruiter today for a job I applied for on ziprecruiter. The job is listed as remote. He says no, it's Denver, I said ok, well the listing says remote, he says, ok, remote is fine. He then argued with me about salary after I said it depends on the company on where I'm happy to negotiate to, and I'd want to know about benefits etc.. here is what I currently make, etc etc. He kept on trying to make me pick an hourly number.. I said I don't know the company, so he told me the company name.. them started in again about hourly rate (no idea who the company was). Finally he moved on and said he'd email details.

5 mins later, email comes through, please give hourly salary. Then another saying he'd pass my details on and I can just ask for about remote during the interview. And then another email 2 mins later asking for education etc, all of which is in my resume. I looked the company he was recruiting for up to find that it's an IT recruitment firm, looking to fill a clients position. So a recruiter recruiting for a recruiter :|

I'll be so happy when I find a new job and don't have to deal with these idiots again.

So i had the second talk with this company today. The backend developer somehow expected me to know all four benefits of jQuery. What the hell dude?

Nobody knows everything.

I’m not a big fan of jQuery period.

The whole company [cult]ure bullshit has really gotten out of hand. When management sets new deadlines that only put stress on the devs then decide to have some cringe AF company bonding soirée in the middle of the work day who benefits from this? The rebranded HR platoon thinks all employees want to participate in basically mandatory chum-it-up gatherings. Don’t get me wrong I love to party and enjoy myself, but I go to work to do just that. Work. And when other departments whose main responsibility is setting up events for the technical staff, they never seem to consider these work loads or what other people actually want. It might seem all fun and dandy on the surface but when you hear tales of people talking in the closed offices about so-and-so because they aren’t reflecting the cultural values, it starts to seem very fucking problematic. Like why would anyone ever say anything when you would probably just get the boot for just being too different, even though all this sits on top of some guise of, “a diverse work environment”. All in all I hope this [cult]ure shit summers down sooner than later. And I’m in a right to work state, so transparency be damned.

It pains most when a colleague left the company for good since OJT. Worst is leaving the company without a pay, no refund for not remitted governmentt benefits. I thought this only applies to fucking government or politicians, but also to the company you worked and shared most of your goddamn life not wondering why most good employees left the company.

Just been hired as a mid level developer for an IoT company. With considerable benefits and pay increase!

YES!!

As someone deeply questioning their life and career choices as of now, I wouldn't want to become a dev anymore because:
- you spend most of your time burning your eyes on a monitor and getting terrible back pain
- you might sell your soul to company benefits whose only purpose is to make you distracted from the fact that you're basically spending 1/3 of the day wishing you were doing something you actually want to do
- might have to do some exhausting communication ooga boogas to understand what supervisors and your other colleagues want to say (in a small company setting)
- again, as in my previous rant, if you're not on some less disposable dev position, you could as well become something else given that junior salaries are not that high
- get into an unhealthy work world where little hours of sleep, overworking, and other such unhealthy lifestyles are praised or used to determine your worth

Of course, these differ on a case by case basis. I'd become a train driver or something if I still didn't have to eat and not throw more money at a career change
Life's tough

So I got approached by a recruiter... not from a recruitment consultant company, but from the company offering the position - which is a refreshing change. Now I have a dilemma....

On the other hand I’m really interested in their offer since the way they approached me by basically saying ”noticed you can do F# and we need F# devs” - so I have a chance at getting a job programming with the language I really like. And these opportunities don’t come around often, since F# isn’t really widely used anywhere it seems.

The caveat is, I really really enjoy working where I’m at now, even tho I mostly work with PHP (with the occasional Vue, C# and F# thrown in), but the atmosphere is unparalelled, my colleagues and my manager are the best, and the benefits are better than most companies can offer - so I’m a bit reluctant to change employer, especially since I have personally interesting projects coming up soon on the roadmap.

What should I do if the details for the offer I get are worth considering?

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

I'm quitting my current job. I don't like my lead, and he doesn't like me either. Our team consists of two people. Me as a Junior Developer, and a dude as my senior.

Our company used 3 different organization chat in Lark.
1 for global developer team, 1 for local developer team, and the other for the operational team.

Countdown 3 weeks before my resignation, I got removed from the global chat room. 1 week later suspended from the operational chat room. The interesting thing is that, my senior teammate who resigned the same date as me does not receive the same treatment.

I still have tasks to do and it is hard to work with teammates who are not in the same organization chat. I also need to work on my benefits which require chats with the operational team.

I already asked HR and they took their sweet time to respond. Approximately 2 weeks after I privately messaged them. How responsive 😧 Even then their answer was vague and I didn't get the what I questioned for.

I'm kinda annoyed by this. No communication, no announcement. This company is just straight up shitty.

"come work from the office! we now offer an on-site masseuse with quick massages!"
WTF? No. First of all, the office is in the wrong fucking continent. But let's focus on the bogus "masseuse" crap for now.

We are a 3000+ full-time employees company. If all were to come to the same overpriced pile of fancy rocks at the same 60 hours interval (spread over 5.5 days), it would mean 1.2 minutes per massage per person per week. So to let each person have a single 15 minute massage session per week, there would have to be at least 12.5 masseuses available at all working hours.
Let's say 10 masseuses to account of those people who would not have a weekly session.
Now, let's say each masseuse is a no-strings-attached independant contractor making USD 3000 per year on a 60hour, 5.5 days full-capacity work week without breaks, vacations, benefits or sickdays (European readers may faint, but it is not so uncommon in other parts of the globe).
So this shit costs 30k USD per year.

I would much rather have 10 more USD per year than this useless "look how young and hype we are!" startup horsecrap.

"it would actually be more like 2 USD per year" was the rebuttal to my (way more politely phrased) argument above. "there is the whole overhead costs thing, and, besides, we will only have one masseuse available at a time"
Oh. So besides all the marketing, the whole point is to let a person have like four sessions per year.

Office Perks. Are. Not. Real.

I just felt like Google is the best player out there in terms of Companies.
Seriously, Well played Google.
This is not a negative opinion, I am just awe-struck at its tactics.
See, Google is currently the biggest name in terms of development in Android, ML and multi-platform software but no one can say it being a monopoly due to its dedication to open source community.
Recently Android emerged out to be One of the Biggest , most advanced, trusted and loved Technology . It saw great achievements, and up till 2016-17, it was at its peek. BUT when the market started shifting towards multi-platform boons and Ai, it got its hands into that too with its flutter and kotlin environment
One could have a negative opinion about this, But i can't seem to engulf the vast amounts of positive situations i see in this:
1) this IO18 (and many months before that) saw ML/AI being incorporated in Android (also the arcore, proje tango and many more attempts in the past) meaning that Android will not officially "die". It will just become an extremely encouraged platform( not just limited to mobiles) and a beginning of the robot -human reality ( a mobile is handling everything of your everyday life: chats, music apps sxhedules, alarms, and with an actively interacting ML, it won't be long when Android comes installed in a green bug lime droid robot serving you tea xD). Meanwhile the market of Windows games may shift to mobiles or typically " Android games" (remember, Android won't be limited to mobiles)
2)java may or may not die. The animations and smooth flow it seems to provide is always appreciated but kotlin seems to do so too. As for the hard-core apps, they are usually written in c++ .So java is in the red zone
3) kotlin-native and Flutter will be the weapons of future , for sure. they will be developing multi-platform softwares and will be dividing the market of softwares into platform specific softwares(having better ml/ai interactions,animations) and platform independent apps(access and use anywhere softwares).
And where does google stand?Its the lord varys of game of thrones which just supports and enhances the people in the realm. So it benefits the most . That's a company for you, ladies and gentlemen! If seen from common eyes they seem to be the best company ever and our 1 true king but it can also be a very thick fur cloak hiding their negetive policies and tactics , if any.

Well played, Google.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

Last job search was in mid 2020. I thought I had a pretty good offer: getting 40% more in gross salary. But then I asked some pretty standard/clarifying questions about benefits and all the red flags started coming out 🚩. They really used the pandemic to sell ppl short. TLDR I turned down the offer.

PTO was the dealbreaker. Their PTO was 16 days: 6 holidays plus 10 personal days. Even though any paid time off is PTO, I thought it was pretty gross to count holidays in the PTO bank like that. My friends agreed with me.

Yes, this is a US company.

Then shit hit the fan when I asked about sick days.

Me: What’s the policy on sick time?

Talent/HR: We have a flex time policy, so you don’t have to take time off for a one hour doctor’s appointment.

🤨🚩
I didn’t ask about flex time.

Me: The PTO is really low.

Talent: Well, you could use your sick days for vacation.

🤨🚩🚩

Me: I just asked you about sick time and you didn’t mention sick days. What are these sick days?

Talent: Oh, well technically the personal days are 5 sick days and 5 personal days… [I swear this is what I heard over the phone.]

🤨🚩🚩🚩

Me: 😤 This isn’t going to work.

Talent: I can see about getting you more PTO.

Talent comes back with 5 additional personal days. And it wouldn’t be included in my offer letter it would only be a note in my file. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

The gross thing was this startup was in the healthcare space: it’s a prescription meds delivery service/pharmacy. I know ppl say startups are the “throw money at you and go cheap on benefits” type. But how can you be in a healthcare space and not give ppl decent PTO? And during the pandemic and pre-vaccine existence? They were trying to con me. It was bizarre because it’s not my first job search. I was still employed so I wanted a new job but I wasn’t desperate.

I couldn’t see how anyone would accept that abysmal PTO offer. Maybe if they were really desperate or naive. I suspected this company had a big PTO disparity because I’m positive most employees would have negotiated for more time.

It was hard to turn down the money because I was afraid of not finding a job. Luckily, I did get an offer with really great benefits from a different company later on.

When applying for your first ever job, which of the following is/are/can be acceptable?
- Bad company culture
- Slavery pay
- Bad location
- No benefits (health care, etc.)
- No coffee/free snacks
- Long working hours/Lot of overtime work
- (Other)

🙄😐

It happened with a company that makes the audio Codecs for Apple (you guessed it right).
It was supposed to be the most pleasant interview ever but not exactly. Here's the thing, the interview went so well that the HR explained all the benefits for its employees and handed me a copy of a leaflet containing so. In the end, as they were walking me to the door, the HR lady told me "you are staying here, you don't have to look anymore" as they were walking me to the door.

Well, everything I did from my end was perfect. Thank you emails and follow-ups blah blah. But not a single answer from their end regarding any decision.
This was the worst feeling to me.

So new job started.
Just for context- old company was shit.
Promised the world but.
No benefits.
Terrible project management.
High pressure.
But green field interesting work (except by now it’s a few years in so it’s a ‘browning’ field but I was on it from the start).

New company first impressions..
Seems a fantastic company.
True to their word they have money for tools.
Making time for personal development.
Much bigger development community/department.
Seems like the term are under far less pressure so far at least.

But a MASSIVE amount of tech debt.
People seem to want to do the right thing and they’re making time to try and deal with it.
But one or two are very opinionated as to how to deal with it.

So this could go either way and only time will tell I guess.
Trying not to over analyse every little thing they say but I’m hyper sensitive to it at the minute while in the early days.

As always the real challenge in IT is the people not the tech. I count myself as part of the problem, sure I will form some opinions and sharing them too.

As I already said on devrant, I'm a freelance web developer and I also often sell my services for teaching, loving that. Currently I'm teaching PHP with 30 students and it's going very well.

But yesterday, I received an offer for giving another course next month, this time on HTML and CSS, for a company I don't know yet. Almost every line of this email is wrong, outdated by 20 years, or just basically meaningless...

So I thought I could do my best to translate this as close as possible to the original, preserving the wrong formulations too, just for you devranters fellas.

"Hello,

I have an offer for a 2 days course for 5 people (level 1+ and/or 2), on HTML5 and CSS3. Below, the program :

1. XHTML AND CSS2 INTRODUCTION

Advantages and benefits of change

Understanding compatibility for different versions of browsers

HTML, XHTML, CSS edition tools : presentation of the different tools

The CSS language : different types of selectors : class of selector, identifier of selector, contextual selectors, grouped selectors

Blocks of text, boxes of text

The CSS1, CSSP, CSS2 properties

Relative and absolute measures units

2. LAYOUT TECHNIQUES

Full CSS, XHTML websites demo

Positioning with the position property, positioning with the float property

Columns creation

Layout for forms

Layout for data tables

Layout for menus

3. INTRODUCTION TO SVG (SCALABLE VECTOR GRAPHICS)

Role and importance of SVG

Using SVG on client side : basic shapes

SVG structure of document, tags examples

Using CSS styles with SVG

Different integration methods for SVG in a XHTML document

4. OPTIMISATION OF JAVASCRIPT CODE

Introduction to DOM and Javascript

Access to document objects : different access techniques, using this keyword, create elements dynamically

Positioning elements with the help of Javascript : positionning elements relatively to the mouse, move elements

Show/hide elements for creating hierarchical menus

Code optimisation techniques : using objects, objects litterals, loops optimisation

Can you please give me your availability ?"

Seriously...

CSS-fucking-1 ! Is it a course for dinosaurs ?

...And if only my rant was just about the program...

It's totally impossible to cover all these subjects in only 2 days with people of different levels and experience.

The guy exactly said to me : "don't worry about the program, it's an old text but they agreed to it anyway. They just want to learn HTML and CSS, some of them already know it but want to learn more, and the others are total beginers.".

And here is the meaning for the "(level 1+ and/or 2)" part in the email.

So... Surprizingly, I accepted the offer, but asked for at least a 3rd day. I'm waiting for their answer, but I'll do it anyway, adapting the course content to the actual students knowledge. I need the money, after all.

Wish me luck...

It's just sad that these formation companies are selling bullshit to clients that just want to learn something useful. It's too often like that, they sell shitty/useless programs and we have to catch up in real time with students that don't understand why they don't learn what was told to them.

Day 1 of a new semester in college. Our 50 yr old H.O.D is a guest lecturer of this new subject called "Industrial Management" (why its included in the syllabus of CSE degree i wonder) . As there were only 6 students , the guy went on like a drunkard telling life lessons :

1) only 20% of the people in a company are only working. Rest 80% of them are just using sugar coated words at the right place ; doing politics and taking credits of the others .

2) those 80% getting benefits are usually the bosses (and in his example, the senior deans and H.O.Ds buttering the administrative dept and director ) and the hardworking 20% are the Juniors or the new joiners ( and in his example, the latest recruited ,honest teachers. Makes sense why we have shitty teachers :/ ). They altogether make sucesses to the company(although its just those 20%hardworkers doing the actual job) . But at the time of salary everybody gets the benfit.

3) Its always perfect to throw blames at senior or junior. (explaining how a parent complaining about the poor study environment to director is made to think that it's only the fault of his own child. blames going from director to dean to HOD to teachers to your own child's mistakes.)

4) Being your boss's favourite is super important. He gave example as : 2 teachers meets him with 100% results and 100% reviews. One of them is a known asshole with 0 knowledge, who makes jokes and sexist comments during the class, gives free attendence and question papers before the exam{therefore 100%reviews} . But he is dean's great ass-licker . The other one is honest hard-working teacher with real reviews and results. So he says he shows their combine results to the director along with his own buttering and ass licking, gets a hike himself and permit to give hije to one junior teacher. And who would it give hike to? The ass licking asshole, because that's how it works. What about the honest teacher?what reply would he get? Simply, appreciations and sugar coated words : "thank you for working so hard. But you did not do anything new. You were only hired to DO hardwork and give good results"

( and i was like fuck? Like seriously? Because that is something resonating with what i once heard in my internship :"yeah you are developing nice and all good, but that's what you are expected to do. You were only hired to achieve results, and you did nothing new". So that's what we are missing? Ass licking?-_- )

5) He believed its important to "look working" than being "actually working" . Quoting an example from his days as a dev, he told a story about how he once worked on a project with deadline of 1 month . He was young and worked hard and in 2 days completed the complete project and accidentally reported success to boss instead of his seniors. The boss simply congratulated his team(seniors and him) and assigned them another project. Later that day , he got an ass-wipe scolding from his seniors that if he had kept his mouth shut, they would have simply watched movies and relax for next 15 days, and submit the project during the salary time to gain bonus attention.
He even gave his short mantra or principle for such situation "kaam ki fickar kar, fickar ka zickar kar, par kaam mat kar " (get worried and tensed about the work. Display your tention and worries to the world (esp bosses) . But don't work.)

And there were many other short stories like that.

Mann, i was about to shout " you corrupt asshole ", but one thing He just told us about the importance of being in boss's good books made me stop ( nd he is a fucking HOD, senior to teachers)

But hell he told some relatable truths. Make me sad about the job life.

Bloody Office politics :|

High paying unstable job at a startup vs. Low paying stable job at a huge company.

I'm currently at the latter and I'm expecting a job offer (hopefully!) from the other one today.

Low paying job:

Pros:
1) big name. (their stock has recently gone down tho)
2) insurance and stuff.
3) quite stable.
4) can re-skill and move to another team.
5) work from home.

Cons:
1) shit technologies.
2) lots of fake "we are a family" kinda crap.
3) shit pay for a huge company.
4) boring. I feel very unmotivated.
5) obsolete systems and management processes.
6) it would take years to save for a car even with my upcoming promotion pay raise.

High paying job:

Pros:
1) awesome salary. Like 6x my current.
2) up-to-date technologies. Something I'm passionate about.
3) team lead position.
4) I can buy a car in a couple of months.
5) might get a visa sponsorship in the future.
6) small team, my voice will be heard.

Cons:
1) it's a startup so it can go down anytime.
2) no insurance or any kinda benefits.
3) no work laptop.

I'm kinda in the beginning of my career, so my gut is telling me to risk it and go for the unstable job.
It will be my first time to be an "official" team lead and honestly idk how I'll go about it yet.

Which one would you go for?
And wish me luck! The interview went pretty well but I'm dreading for some reason.

It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.

We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.

We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.

Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.

So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.

In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.

Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...

Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.

It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.

[vent]
I am java dev with 5 yoe at a place which has really good engineering talent.
Was assigned a feature request.
Feature request requires me and one more older dev(in age, not in exp at company) to write the code. My piece is really super complex because of the nature of the problem and involves caching, lazy loading and tonne of other optimization. Naturally it makes up 90% of the tasks in the feature request. On the other hand, the older dev simply has to write a select query (infact he only needs to call it since a function is already written).
Older dev takes up all the credit, gives the demo, knows nothing but wrongly answers in meetings with higher ups and was recently awarded employee of qtr.
It looks as if I do the easy work whereas he is the one pulling in all the hard work.
Need advice to justify my work and make others realise it's significance, nuances of area and complexity of it.
Do not expect monetary benefits, just expect credit and recognition for the worth of work I am doing.

I know there has been a million stories on people asking developers for free/cheap work, and having this happen constantly is probably one of the biggest ways coding has impacted my life, but it happened to me for the umpteenth time this morning and I'm still reeling from it.

A close friend of mine asked me to create a bespoke website for her new business. I currently work as a Software/Web Developer so I assume this made sense in her head to ask her friend first.

She gave me some requirements and seeing as I already had a figure in mind, I asked for her budget. She says - 'I don't want to say a figure and insult you with it being too low'.

I tell her I'll work out a figure that benefits both of us, seeing as I would be using this as experience to try out some new stuff and she doesn't want it done until January. Because of this I was already going to give her a great deal on it anyway (in comparison to what it would be if I charged her through the company) because it would practically be a project I'd work on if I had a spare evening.

She said, and I quote: 'We preferably don't want to spend more than £200, and if it's less that is even better'.

I think I was actually more insulted that she thinks something I do for a living is worth £200 or less.

She thinks that designing, programming and writing content for a website is worth < £200.

I think she'll be shocked when I give her the quote that I had in mind. Looks like she'll be getting a WiX website or something for that kind of money.

so i am on notice period and suddenly my manager has realised that there are a lot of tasks that i have to pickup. well fuck this guy.

i was initially dumb enough to think that i leaving is a bad thing,and i should be doing everything to make the transition easier. the task was also interesting enough , as we were trying to add a new and complex feature and i was the main dev there.

so i started at full pace. i would work on my tasks for hours , even missing on my personal projects. but since last week he would keep adding new tickets in my jira boards every few days , followed by a quick huddle telling how this is a very small and high priority ticlet and i should look at that first.

and me being me, i would not only just finish those small tickets in time, but have a progress on my major feature, as well as answer doubts of other team mates and attend meetings.

--------

i always forget how hypnotising this work culture usually get. the above scenario that i explained? i have no problem with that in a general day. i love to work, solve problems and help others. but these are no normal days, this is my fuckin notice period.

And i am here coz of a reason. if they rely on me so much, why did they forced me to relocate when i just can't? why don't they gove me a lucrative salary + worthy relocation benefits ? fuck them. i even have to serve for a fucking 60 days coz they are not willing to reduce my notice period .

fake promises everytime.
"you don't worry about different office mentioned in your offer letter. we will always keep the environment remote" ~ lie

"even if we go wfo, our company will open an office in your city too, your city is the capital and we had an office there before" ~ lie

"your notice period will get reduced, dont worry about the 60 days" - another fucking lie

______

notice period experts, i need some devil advice to not get exploited by a lier corp. how to utilise my notice period and what should he the excuses to not attend any nloody meetings?

Tl;Dr Im the one of the few in my area that sees sftping as the prod service account shouldn't be a deployment process. And the ONLY ONE THAT CARES THAT THIS IS GONNA BREAK A BUNCH OF SHIT AT SOME POINT.

The non tl;dr:

For a whole year I've been trying to convince my area that sshing as the production service account is not the proper way to deploy and/or develop batch code. My area (my team and 3 sister teams) have no concept of using version control for our various Unix components (shell scripts and configuration files) that our CRITICAL for our teams ongoing success. Most develop in a "prodqa like" system and the remainder straight in production. Those that develop straight in prodqa have no "test" deployment so when they ssh files straight to actual production. Our area has no concept of continuous integration and automated build checking. There is no "test cases", no "systems testing" or "regression testing". No gate checks for changing production are enforced. There is a standing "approved" deployment process by the enterprise (my company is Whyyyyyyyyyy bigger than my area ) but no one uses it. In fact idk anyone in my area who knows HOW to deploy using the official deployment method. Yes, there is privileged access management on the service account. Yes the managers gets notified everytime someone accesses the privileged production account. The managers don't see fixing this as a priority. In fact I think I've only talk to ONE other person in my area who truly understands how terrible it is that we have full production change access on a daily basis. Ive brought this up so many times and so many times nothing has been done and I've tried to get it changed yet nothing has happened and I'm just SO FUCKING SICK that no one sees how big of a deal this. I mean, overall I live the area I work in, I love the people, yet this one glaring deficiency causes me so much fucking stress cause it's so fucking simple to fix.
We even have an newer enterprise deployment. Method leveraging a product called "urban code deploy" (ucd) to deploy a git repository. JUST FUCKING GIT WITH THE PROGRAM!!!!..... IT WAS RELEASED FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO......

Please..... Please..... I just want my otherwise normally awesome team to understand the importance and benefits of version control and approved/revertable deployments

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

So it's officially a month into my new job...

I have to say, sometimes life can surprise you, I never expected things to go down so smoothly especially after getting fired from my previous one.

My manager is just an amazing super friendly guy, great colleagues with positive attitudes, positive work environment, better benefits, the list goes on...

Honestly I would say the biggest con is I now work 45hrs/week instead of 35, which might be a dealbreaker for some but I also work in the cloud industry which is honestly miles ahead than the UAT testing crap I used to do, plus the company pays for your certifications after you pass, so it's a small price to pay imo.

If any of you are struggling with a shitty job/work environment don't give up, out of all the places I worked at I never felt appreciated until I came here, keep on grinding.

Started at a new company that uses Perforce as an scm. For those who don't know, it's a centralised, yet distributed scm with benefits of neither! It's also incredibly unintuitive.

What I don't get is that git is free and awesome, and we're apparently paying through the nose for something worse!

Company i work for just posted updated pay rates.
It's good. They went from lower end of spectrum to a little above the average in terms of pay, and benefits stay the same - solid.

Well, my country aint very bright at least for me.

So you have few options, i will arrange them from generally percieved as shittiest place to best place.

You are student or whatever and work in small company. Thats where lot of people are stuck. Like me. Pay is... Sigh. When you hear dev can earn more than 1k$/mo its like "yes, yes, gimme, gimme". Forget about beeing just dev. If I left my company it would collapse within week, but bosses greed is insanity. Oh well.

Than you have that middleground that I would love to be in. Freelancing. Here freelancers can live really well if they can find contractors willing to pay for their services. Wuthin this space there is most profit but also that uncertanity. But its my goto.

Than you have miniscule group you **really** want to be in, medium companies writing software, usually b2b. Well, here you get often 2k$+ and bonuses for working your ass off etc, and benefits are minor but there is usually *something*

And than you have corporations. They often pay a lot, lot of benefits, but.... Its corporation, all ypu learned in small companies usually goes through the window, their expectations are high etc.

In my country everything is like everywhere else but pay is much less, especially in small company space, and somewhat smallish in medium company/corpo. Freelancers are least affected.

I hate applying for a job online. For some reason it just doesn't work out for me. I have a lot of humor but today my interviewer asked me if i was insecure doing that. I'm like "No, my whole family is like this".

But that's beside the point. Every company thinks they're so special. Well, some do have special benefits. But after a few times turned down my ego starts to break.

I'm so done with this new type of interviewing

I used to be at a company where it was kind of expected that you worked long days, which made it quite difficult to balance work and private life. It got so out of control that I was even called to work while I was on my holiday. At first I started with shutting off my phone after work hours, but the real solution I found was moving away from that company.

Pretty much everyone at my new company just stops working when the clock hits 4 or 5 pm unless there is something critical that needs to be done. Seeing that also discourages me (and everyone else) from working long days. We are also quite open about our workload so if anyone thinks they’re overwhelmed they can find a relevant person to talk to and eventually a solution is found. The salary isn’t incredible, but the work/life balance and the benefits I get are just way better than getting paid more and living to work.

I think a lot of people go for the high salaries, most of the time disregarding the other part of the equation. If the company has a meh work culture with low regard to employees’ work/life balance, there isn’t much the employee can do besides finding a place to work with better wlb. I’d pick a great work/life balance and peace of mind to a high salary any day.

Just today I lost a lawsuit because my contract was written and signed in Nigeria and I sued them in the USA and I couldn't convince the judge it was fraud. I transformed the company implenting SAP and office365 and a WAN and many other projects. Worked nearly every single day 3 years in a row even during vacations, public holidays and holidays. Lost over 400k USD in lost benefits and wages that were in the contract but never paid. I feel absolutely devastated.
Unless you work for a US or European based company never ever work in Nigeria.

TLDR: I need advice on reasonable salary expectations for sysadmin work in the rural United States.

I need some community advice. I’m the sysadmin at a small (35 employee) credit card processing company. I began as an intern and have now become their full time sysadmin/networking specialist. Since I was hired in January I have:

-migrated their 2007 Exchange server to Office 365

-Upgraded their ailing Windows server 2003 based architecture to 2012R2

-Licensed their unlicensed VMware ESXi servers (which they had already paid for license keys for!!!) and then upgraded them to 6.5 while preventing downtime on hosted VMs using tricky transfers and deployments (without vMotion!)

-Deployed a vCenter server to manage said ESXi servers easier

-Fixed a three month gap in their backups by implementing Veeam, and verifying its functionality

-Migrated a ‘no downtime’ fileserver to a new hypervisor host, implemented a ‘hot standby’ server as a backup kept up to date by the minute with DFS replication.

-Replaced failing hard drives in a RAID array underlying their one ‘business critical’ fileserver, which had no backups for 3 months at that time

-Reorganized Active Directory and Group Policy deployment from a nightmare spiderweb of OUs and duplicate policies

-Documented the entire old network and now the new one as I’ve been upgrading this

-Audited the developers AWS instances and removed redundant machines, optimized load balancing on front end Nginx servers, joined developer run Fedora workstations to the AD domain and implemented centralized syslog monitoring on them.

-Performed network scans and rewrote firewall exceptions to tighten security

There’s more, but you get the idea. I’ve now been tasked with taking point on an upcoming PCI audit which will be my first.

I’m being paid $16/hr US, with marginal health benefits. This is roughly $32,000 a year, before taxes.

I have two years previous work experience managing a third party Apple repair facility (SimplyMac) and every Apple certification for warranty repair and software troubleshooting. I have a two year degree in general sciences, with about 4 years of college credit (Two years of a physics education and two years of computer science after I switched focus) I’m actively pursuing a CCNA and MCSA server 2016 with exams paid for and scheduled.

I’m going into a salary negotiation in two months. What is a reasonable salary to request, from your perspective, for someone in my position?

Thanks in advance!

As a new freelancer I didn't have much clients , so I paired with a web designer +10 years exp. who work with me as a pm and that was a bad decision.
Although I am a back-end dev , half of the projects were frontend/WordPress theme (less price than back-end projecrs) - so 30% of the projects were cancelled .
sometimes I receive project's which have requirement, like magento, I don't know anything about ,
I tried to push myself but I burned out after six month.
he deals with clients, partner with other companies ,and I don't know anything about the terms.
at the end I was like an employee without any benefits from his company .
moreover I get my money after 45 day!!!
and not all my money .
this is a project I work for another company through him
A requirement for mobile back-end server was integrating with parse and that was my first time working with Facebook parse so ....
after two weeks ..
we received email from parse that they'll shutdown their service after a year .

so we moved to Amazon sns again my first time working with aws .
at the end I can't charge for extra money but my pm became a gold partner for that company .
the only thing that made me hold is that I need some high quality projects for my c.v.
-----------
he didn't show on hangout because I need my money .
this will be my last project with him.
wow I write too much ... I feel better now .😥

Isn't it all too ironic that the inefficient suck-ups get to keep their jobs all the time and get all the benefits? And how the hard-working people get sacked and disrespected all the time? It shouldn't be this way.

At my job I bust myself every day mentally to come up with the best solutions and I don't get taken seriously, I just get shrugged at.
Meanwhile, an undereducated friend of mine got his contract extended and got a praise from the manager because all he does is do what they ask of him and he slaves away instead of coming up with ways to better the company. He's just a useless, mindless grunt. There's no value in him.
Then another friend of mine is asocial and while he had been hoping to get a promotion for the five years he worked at the company, solving numerous important issues, this one younger kid who happened to be a suck-up who bumped up everybody's mood but was in fact as intellectually useless as a rock, he got promoted to team lead in two months.

That lackeys and lazy people get more respect than authentic and well-meaning people. What an ugly world we live in..

I wanted to talk about the right job.
In my previous job I did not feel happy, the management was weird, the salary was low.

For a time I was thinking, I need to get better and do more and I will have a better salary and management will be more lenient towards me.

After a few years, I got an offer to join a much bigger company with a bigger salary and better benefits.

I joined them of course. And it turns out in some places you just do not fit in or the company just wants something that is not realistic and always will be unhappy with you.

In my current company, I have never felt better working, the team is awesome and tasks are challenging but doable, and they appreciate my skills and speed of work.

TL;DR:
If you do not feel good in your company, leave for some other company, most likely it's not you, but its the job that sucks.

Got a high paying job, with great benefits, and a big name, straight out of college. I was hired as a software engineer. Comfy, relaxed, and flexible.

The problem comes where it was not the job I was expecting. It has been almost a year and the only programming I've done has been 1 small copy pasta project. I am worried because I am bored and feeling my coding skills fade away. I'm still a novice programmer and feel like this impacts future career opportunities not learning useful skills for outside of this company. I'm going to grad school to do what I really want but still have the 2 years.

Do I stay or do I make the stressful change again? Other fun thing is I just relocated a distance to an area with not a lot of opportunities so would likely involve relocating again.

Do you prefer working remote or in the office?

I like to view these as equal choices. I don't think offices are as bad as some people make them up to be (of course heavily depends on the environment and company!). In opposed to working remote, offices can help you focus more on work and leave work problems "at work".

While, if you're working remote, it's not unlikely for work and personal life to become so intertwined that it's hard to tell them apart anymore. It's hard to not think about work at home if home is where you work.

I believe an ideal is somewhere inbetween - not entirely remote, but not entirely office focused either. Mixing and matching seems like the one approach where you get to have most of the benefits, but with the least negatives. It doesn't seem necessary to always be at the office but it also doesn't seem good for you to always be cooped up at home.

I was fine with Eclipse. Then everyone around me told me that Eclipse is old and IntelliJ is new and super cool and makes me super fast and much more productive. Finally in our company we got a Ultimate 2018 license and I started to use it. There is a function: import from Eclipse. Hey cool - let’s import and go... but no. After importing I needed one day to get that running. But I’m not really convinced. After that... ok let’s try another project where colleagues have used IntelliJ already. But after checking out - that also didn’t work well and I spent the whole day it running locally. Although it’s a maven project. Up to know I think Eclipse is better in handling Tomcat and better shows the version control state of files. And for me the workspace concept of Eclipse seems to be better than the project concept of IntelliJ. But maybe I just have to get a better understanding of IntelliJ. Hopefully I can do my first coding in IntelliJ tomorrow. Maybe then I can see all the benefits. So far...

So, I'm going to apologize before I even start this rant...lol. I am the Senior level web developer at my job and have been there for around 12 years now. I have been there at least 2 times as long as everyone else.

I also want to say that my boss is a good man and I really like my coworkers and he has helped me through a lot over those 12 years and I don't want to sound ungrateful. However, I am so fed up with my job. I think the only reason I stay is the fear of the unknown of switching jobs and that I really like the overall work environment and my coworkers.

With that being said I have been with my boss almost since the inception of the company and I am the only original employee there. I have seen the company grow from 3 employees including the secretary there. We now have like 20 employees.

I have never complained and I have showed continual growth and loyalty over those 12 years. However, like a month ago they had me post a a job position and it was for a social media position and the job required only 5 years of experience and it was within 8k of what I currently make. That made me so angry.

I am literally capable of doing everyone's job at my job including my own with ease. However, no one else at my job is capable of doing my job at all and I have a bachelors degree as well and certified in many different things as well.

Again I am the most senior person at my job period and the most senior person at the entire company. Not only am I an expert in the programming languages we use at our company, but im an expert at analytics(certified in GA4, looker studio, tag manager, etc).

Additionally, a month ago I was reached out to on linkedin by another company and was offered a job for almost 30 to 40K more than my current job is paying and better benefits than where I currently work and it was fully remote.

Should I even bother asking my boss to match this or should I just walk and go to the other company? Apparently loyalty and knowledge hold no value anymore.

Just signed the offer paperwork with a new company!! Excited for a great opportunity with great benefits! Had to tell devRant before telling my boss, wish me luck!

"The Phoenix project" alternative ending:

Bill Palmer manages to avert disaster with heroic efforts, working 18 hours per day for weeks.
His wife files for divorce. He starts to sleep at office, next to the servers room.
At the last moment a huge hacker attack almost destroys everything, but he finally manages to announce that Phoenix is ready on time, security auditing passed and any kind of great improvements.

Steve, the CEO, calls him and says: "are you crazy? we put you on an impossible project with short notice to make you fail! All our investors have been secretly short selling our stocks, so now they are waiting a big failure to cash in. We also paid korean hackers to bring you on your knees. But you are really stubborn! "

All Phoenix Project is rolled back, huge shit happens, stocks fall, investors ripe great benefits. All IT is outsourced to an external company (owned by members of the board)

Bill is fired. His reputation tainted by the failure, he can't find job anymore. his technical skills and knowledge are out of date.
As he didn't have time to take care of divorce he has lost also all his personal wealth.

He writes a book about his experience, well, actually a rant, but the company sues him forcing him to pay more money.

In the final scene, police arrests him, drunk while trying to burn a server farm with matches.

Me: "I have sent my resignation letter, What happens to my Saturday duty, which will be converted to Vacation Leave?"

HR:"Vacation Leave is for employees who have rendered for 1 year only."

Me:"Then what happens to my Saturday work?"

HR: 🤷‍♀️

FUCK YOU, FUCK THAT COMPANY. I HAD TO WORK FOR SATURDAY BECAUSE IT GAVE ME BENEFITS, BUT INSTEAD I HAVE TO WORK WITH NO PAY!

!Rant
Help/ideas needed

I need ideas of projects to develop in my free time, I'm tired of the old technology and ugly projects from work, I want to develop something new, fun, to feel the excitement of coding again ;)

The field does not matter i'm willing to learn.

And , no , I can get another job, that is not an option because of the special benefits it's offering that I can not find in another company(very flexible schedule, I'm a student and need it).

Did some contract negotiations with the company I work for a couple of months ago, when they offered me a promotion starting next month ... today I got the contract. Only one of the terms we have agreed is in the contract, of course that benefits them. No word about any promotion etc. Wrote to the guy in charge today but no answer so far. Should I just abandon ship or am I just to worried?

Has anyone experience with true full remote working?

I keep searching for job postings, but they mostly have huge BUT(s)

- remote BUT you need to be resident where the company is
- remote BUT you need to have a valid vat number and it won't be a contract, just a "we will ask x hours per month, you get no vacations or sick days"
- remote BUT you need to be in our timezone or work at our hours.

I am lately thinking a lot about what to do with my life due to the possibility that i will move with my sweet half and... We live very far apart so it's like... A bummer to be bound to a place. Especially since they love where they are, but i have a free house which I inherited, so... Could be nice as a fallback

Edit: the vat number thing is not necessarily bad, but one of the main reasons to work as an employee is that i get sick days and stuff, if i have to follow your hours, get no sick days/vacation days/benefits i may as well be a freelancer and gain more, lol.

After weeks of interviewing, I just got an incredible offer to be a Junior Full Stack Developer at an amazing company. Great benefits, awesome pay, but instead of being excited I'm nervous to the point of self doubt. Can I really do this? Am I good enough to be part of this team? Did I misrepresent myself at the interview? Shit... Fucking self doubt

Posted like two weeks ago that my company/manager wouldn't give me a (substantial) raise even though I'm doing exceptionally.
Got two job offers since then. One is 70% more pay and gives more benefits than my current position... The other one is similar but I'd have to move country.

TLDR: It's okay to take naps while working from home
Brief:
I feel that there is nothing wrong with taking afternoon naps while working from home. Mainly because after taking rest for a couple of hours my mind is re-energised and I am able to pull off quite a lot of work in much lesser time after waking up and my overall productivity for the day roughly remains same.
This is mainly because if I end up staying awake even when I am tired and sleepy there is not much productive work done even if my number of hours online increase.
And if a company has strict measures set for calculating the number of hour employee stays online while working from home then it will actually reduce overall employee productivity rather than having any kind of actual benefits.

New dilemma. Now that I have some interviews lining up, I’m having trouble trying to figure out which direction I want to go. One is a company offering unlimited PTO (whatever that actually means), remote only, non-micromanaged work. If I want a nap in the middle of the day, cool. Just gotta make progress.

Another is in an industry that I really want to get into.

A third is with a major entertainment company that is contract to hire with a high probability of hire. Amazing perks and benefits from what my friends that work there tell me.

And it’s looking like maybe all three making an offer simultaneously is a possibility.

So I might need to choose between a comfortable situation, my ideal industry, and a big name on my resume that includes great benefits.

I should be happy but this is stressing me out!

so which company is the new faang among developers? you know, the one where there is a good WLB, nice pay , 5-7 hr work/day and other benefits , but with a high entry barrier?

I am thinking of starting to revise DS/Algo for some interview prep

Hey guys,

I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.

Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.

Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.

However there are some cons:

My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.

Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.

Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?

They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.

All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"

What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.

On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.

Any thoughts?

2007, I worked in a small company that develops a web platform, and we began to discover the benefits of MVC and that helped that rookie work team improve our skills to get a better job

>work as a team lead in a tiny startup that lives off of investment money due to a strained business team that should stop sucking
>everyone is underpaid
>make do with what I can, manage to push for raises to keep the team going
>one dev, Timmy, is a pretty nice fella
>with 1 very annoying flaw
“Why can’t we get all of our utilities paid?” “Why can’t we have unlimited paid time off?” “Why can’t we be like Biilionare Company XYZ?” “Company T gives everyone the latest laptop models” “we should be getting paid twice as much” “why do we have to work 8 hours?”
Constantly, to everyone.

I agree with Timmy in most points. He is not saying something I do not know. Sometimes I want to strangle Timmy, feed him his own nutsack, and kick him out to apply to billionaire company XYZ. He can have all those sweet sweet benefits.

It is very hard to handle AIs, you need leading scientists/artists, not managers.
You can't charm your way around its behavioral problems, you can't effectively bully or pull rank on it, and can't threaten it into unemployment.
So, the entire repertoire of the typical (asshole) manager is toast.

The *only* way to handle AI is to lead by example, give unambiguous, comprehensive and very specific instructions, and be always available to guide it through complex, gray-area situations.
Thus, it is not much different than being an actual leader (to a greenhorn and anxious and overreaching junior), but also a programmer (of a raw and unforgiving language like C or COBOL).

Since your typical company mid-level asshole manager won't do those things for dear life, AI will only leverage their incompetence to heights never seen.

By ignoring feedback and misinterpreting instructions, AI will make mistakes (just like a person).
On the wake of those mistakes, AIs have a bias for falsifying evidences and hiding relevant information (just like a bad coworker), and yet are quite persuasive to the innatentive reader (just like your typical manager).
Thus, without a daft hand, AIs will only perform worse when doing the tasks that would otherwise be done by a human.

But that will take time (more than a couple quarters, at least - probably a bit longer than the average tenure of a CEO).
And in this time, the numbers look great - the over eager "aimployee" works tirelessly day and night, seven days a week, takes no breaks, holidays or vacations, asks for no benefits besides a paycheck, have fewer and fewer sick days (maintenance downtimes), always sucks up to its corporate masters and is always ready to take on even more responsibility for (relatively) little extra pay.
Thus the problem only scales up, compounded by the corporate ideal of screwing up workers for no monetary profit, and reluctance to course-correct after investing so much time and hype into this AI bubble.

Thereby, AI is evolving into the corporate super bug that shall erode the already crumbling, stuck-in-the-past "boss mentality" institutions into oblivion.
I'm making popcorn.

I am in a very difficult position

I work at a pharmaceutical industry that has also a start up side company, and i worked in the second till now. I have a very attractive offer from a multinational that wants to set up dev teams for innovative projects, with a raising around 400 euros (very good amount for greece).

The thing is, that as i went to announce my leaving to my boss (he is a very rich industrialist) he offered me many benefits and to hire me in his mainly business (the pharmaceutical) with similar raising, if not the same, and also my colleague, and the promise of educational budget (which i was lacking in the start up, imagine that phpstorm was with academic licence). All that cause i was complained about the sort of IT culture in the way we are working till now. Also he promised that i will get knowledge through the projects of pharmacy industry that will help me in my career in the future.

Now the thing is that i was ready to sign up the contract with the multinational company and i have to send an email with an apology instead of my vat number and my digital signature. I feel totally jerk, how can i handle this, and say it with a nice way? Should i say some lie, that a problem came up or tell that i had a proposition that i cannot refuse?

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

Anyone ever get cold called through LinkedIn? I had a guy contact me asking could we have coffee. Did some research on him and he seems a pretty successful guy. I was curious so I responded with a time and date.

Met him and he explained his business, what he was doing and what he was looking for. It was a senior position but would involve alot of backend work and team leading. Lots of long hours.. i was very interested but due to other commitments I couldn't take it further, so I politely declined.

Fast forward to 6 months later, he comes back to see if my situation has changed. It has. He says the company is being bought out and being funded for 3 years, he is in the middle of negotiations and its almost done. we begin negotiations and I agree a nice package with benefits. He seems delighted. I am happy.

Nearly 4 weeks later, 3 unanswered messages and an unreturned missed call, I am like wtf!!!

Afrer an excruciating year of work, all I get is a ridiculous pay increase barely covering inflation. I am seriously considering resigning by the beginning of the year and live on benefits.
Even worst : the levelling of my current company is absolutely stupid, which I take as an insult to all the things I do and I can do while others apparently at my level would not even be able to think about. But yeah, I refuse to be a buffoon who spend his time posting useless bullshit on Slack.
Plus my manager is always on my back giving his opinion on absolutely everything, being wrong 90% of the time. I checked yesterday. 1 contribution from this person per month. But always very keen to prevent me from doing my job.
I am so fucking done.

I have a genuine question for y’all folks: How do you define what’s your next job going to be ? As in what you set your mind to, I guess. I’ve been through multiple stages of thoughts during the past two years and I find myself stuck.

On the one hand I work at a decent company and I have a great team with a lot of benefits and an OK salary but on the other hand I want change, more challenges and to get a little bit more of 💰(I’m not complaining about what I have but I’m clearly on the low tiers of the salary range for a software engineer).

At first I thought I wanted to completely change my work area and go for music, then I thought I wanted to work for the biggest IT players (Google, Microsoft, etc…). Turns out none of these two ideas really suit me. I also don’t want to work in a startup, I’ve only had bad experiences so far and don’t seek to reproduce them yet again.

So I guess a more precise question is: If you were in my shoes, with all that in mind, what would you do?

As for the reasoning as to why I’m asking here: devRant is literally the only place I know with so many people that work in the same field, but that also have a lot of different experiences and background 😁

Anyone here from Europe????? :D
JK
I just need a good bank here, with benefits, shoot me some best ones, also shoot me reference shits so you and I will have money :)!

If you want me to have some sort of crypto thing only, don't worry to shoot that on me too. I work for crypto company.

Anti climactic story time (as in there's no promotion in this story):

Sometime ago there were some organizational changes happening in my company that put me in a very tricky place. Theoretically, I was put on a level that was supposed to be an upgrade from my previous level. Practically, it didn't come with any benefits and it was actually a downgrade because anyone who joined the company in the six months before these changes was in the same level as me (who'd been in for roughly 2 years).
It felt really insulting because I was about to be actually promoted. My manager and his manager tried to gaslight me into believing that I'm not at all affected in any way, before giving in and agreeing that a mistake was made. I was promised that next year it'll be corrected and I'll be promoted two levels. Even the HR assured me of that. I knew it was too good to be true but I was too demotivated to find another job.
Fast forward one year. My bosses are all praises for the work I put in. But, no two level promotion. Reason? They tried but couldn't get the management to agree. The boss apologized to me and asked me if I wanted him to try again. What an insolent arse!

Fast forward one more, extremely glum year.
This time I am part of a different team so the team lead is different but the manager is same. The team lead really went all out with showing appreciation for me. He talked for almost an hour(!) about how I exceeded his expectations and went on to claim that his app's release would have been impossible if it weren't for me, the new team member. It was really humbling and satisfying. But what did I get? A limp handshake from the manager with fucking loose change.
Silver lining. At least the manager did away with the 'well wisher, on your side' pretense this time. No mentions of failed promises, just regular empty promises for the future.

Fast forward 3 months.
Still here. Recovering. I am mulling over a much better offer than what my current boss can give me. Thinking about how long it takes before I'm in the dumpster again. I have stopped giving any fucks about anything here. I try to do the minimum required unless it benefits me in some way.

The end.

So, I have been working for a company XYZ for about 2 years now and for this 2 years, we are just two engineers handling everything. The job is becoming super stressful and time consuming, the founders dictates how the engineering team operate, ranging from choosing a third party service we are to integrate into the platform without letting us know and also study the api to see if it will be the most viable one to use.

Imagine using a third party service that you can't get through to when something is unclear?

I and my team mate has asked the founders to hire engineers so the work load on us will reduce, they said it's on their mind ( this request was made months ago), fast forward last week, we were told to start interviewing interns ( I don't have problem with interns working with us ), but what we asked for was experience engineers working with us but the founders did entire 180 degree of what we asked.

We have been asking for a QA Engineer for months and months now, all we get is we will hire one, and till now nothing is been done.

Following good software practice has been a problem in company XYZ, we have been finding it difficult to write test and documentation (this shit makes me seriously sick and hate myt po self).

On top of all this, the salary is shitty, there are no benefits, we are coerced into working during weekends (most times), and we are also told to work during our holiday, no single health insurance.

I think I have come to that point where I will have to say good bye ( but I am finding it difficult to do this).

Any suggestions ? Should I wait until I get another job and then I resign from company XYZ or just resign.

Fellow ranters, I need some advice.

Work at an early stage startup to build their initial product(let's call it X) or work at slightly established startup with funding(let's call it Y)?

Both have their own benefits.

Working at X:
- I have equity (and a co founder position) thus chances of high rewards if the startup is successful.
- I get to build the whole product from scratch (great learning experience).

Working at Y:
- Don't know much about the company but I get a decent stable income.
- Work with a team (although a small one).
- Job security.

I'm currently in my final year and have given up on campus placements. Moreover, I'm not interested in wasting my time in pointless interview preparations. So I figured that startup is the way to go.

In my EOY performance review/summary, I told I would only receive (along with everyone else) the standard cost-of-living increase of 3%. I'm OK with that, with my tenure/seniority, 3% is a good bump, but I had to make a comment.
Me: "With Biden's inflation between 7% and 10%, its actually a pay cut, right?"
Boss: "Yea, I know."
Me: "Our insurance went up around 5% and they cut some of the benefits, so that's a little more of a pay cut, right?"
Boss: "I know that too. With the economy and cuts to margins, there won't be any profit sharing this year. We have a hiring freeze for the foreseeable future."
Me: "Recruiters have been offering sweet work-from-home compensation packages, what's the likelihood that these young guys will move to greener pastures?"
Boss: "Hard to say. I think the ones that wanted to quit already have. Company already gave a generous industry level-up pay adjustment back in November. Those guys are all single and the 3% is icing on the cake. I don't think 3% will look very good next year."
Me: "Agreed. Looking forward to a wonderful year"
Boss: "Yea, sure.. smart ass."

!rant

So, at this day I have two jobs as software engineer (I'm self thought). The first one with a friend from high school, a billing platform. The engineer he had flew to Canada and leave him with nothing, so I made one from scratch, I couldn't deliver on time and most of the clients he had moved to another services so the benefits of the deal I made with him ended being less than expected (there was a deadline set by our government as these clients are merchants and the Costa Rican IRS equivalent is moving everybody to electronic billing to mitigate tax evasion). The backend was done using Go, the front-end with React and MobX.

Then, the second job. I'm being staffed to a big outsourcing company for a North American business. The engineer team is small compared to the other departments and the people are really nice. Their stack is Python and React, I'm the only guy allowed to use a different editor than Neovim (Emacs in my case).

between the two I work 11 hours per day, and I'm satisfied with this.

This is way better than my old CS job at Amazon Spain where I couldn't use Emacs to have a decent text editing experience.

Thanks, Lord.

Oh let the rant time begin…

So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.

Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.

Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.

Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.

So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.

Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.

I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.

I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.

So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.

After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.

I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.

Frustrating is not the word.

!dev Nice surprise... Hopefully...

Been having a lot of teeth problems and need like 2 crowns and 1 filling now... Old fillings just suddenly fell out. My regular dentist plan is ok for cleaning but isn't so good for these expensive treatments. And it seems the dentists in network are sorta so-so... The original fillings were done by them like last year....

Well somehow it popped up into my mind that with COVID.... Given its a health crisis and the govt is bending over backwards to deal with it... it may also let me change insurance plans during the year.

Usually enrollment is once a yr until you change jobs... But when I googled I saw that apparently they did.... Though it's upto the employer and the insurance company. They have to negotiate and allow it. Not required to by law.

So anyway last week, I called up my HR asking if they allow it. The rep said they'd need to ask higher up and get back to me this Monday.

I never got a call though but today I took off to deal with all the health stuff and just take a personal day. So I called my "current" dentist insurance to ask what I needed to do to see a specialist for the root canal crown as regular dentist can't do this one.

But they couldn't find my policy because it turned out it was cancelled last week. At this point I'm likeOK WHO FUCKED UP... WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK... IM UNINSURED NOW?!!!

I login to the company benefits site to get their support #. But it also shows my current plans. Where it shows that it got switched.

I still had to call the new insurance to get my ID info...

But I'm like hm... This seems to have worked out well... Assuming everything goes as planned. Basically got 1/2 year on cheap normal coverage but now that I need it, got to switch to the more expensive coverage, which now comes out better: lower overall costs, and better drs...

Need some job search advice here please!
A startup is has offered me a job, but is going to be paying me half salary for 3 months, and then they're sure to get funding, so will be paying the difference amount after 3 months. But, it all hangs on this supposed funding that will happen in 3 months. The "CEO" is actually working for another company currently. And his rationale for half salary was, we all need to take risks with startups. Is this worth taking up? The alternative is me continuing job search for a more stable job (where I can stay for few years) and a full salary with benefits and all. I'd tried starting up on my own earlier, and now I'm looking for opportunities fulltime (in other words unemployed).

Which should I choose:
Company A: much better pay and benefits, team seems nice, Glassdoor citing quite bad reviews about CEO and upper management.
Company B: current company. uninteresting field, team in distance, tech lead likes micro management and quite annoying in general. In middle of a project.

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