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Client: I have lost everything on the cloud holy crap!
Me: Are you signed into your google drive, and within the folder?
Client: No, how do i do that again? I obviously cant be bothered reading your well formated and instructional guide and would rather contact you at 6pm on a saturday night8 -
HO. LY. SHIT.
So this gig I got myself into, they have a whitelist of IP addresses that are allowed to access their web server. It's work-at-home. We just got a new internet provider, and it looks like I get a different public IP address everytime I disconnect and connect to the WIFI. And since it looks like the way they work on their codebase is that you either edit the files right on the server or you download the files that you need to work on, make the changes, and then re-upload the file back to the server and refresh the website to see the changes, now I can't access the server because I get different IP addresses. And it's highly inconvenient to keep emailing them to add IP addresses to the whitelist.
No source control, just straight-up download/upload from/to the server. Like, srsly. So that also means debugging is extremely hard for me because one, they use ColdFusion and I've never used that shit before and two, how the hell do you debug with this style of work?
I just started this last Tuesday, and I already want to call it quits. This is just a pain in the ass and not worth my time. I'll be glad to just go back to driving Lyft/Uber to make money while I look for a full-time, PROPER job.
By the way, can I do that to a contracting job? Just call it quits when you haven't even finished your first task? How does this work?17 -
I draw things! I bet we all draw things, but I still think it counts as nerdy.
...unless you draw UML diagrams on whiteboards. Doesn't count.
... unless you draw stick figures battling ON those UML diagrams. Counts.
... unless those stick figures battling demonstrate dependencies or demographics. Doesn't count.
... unless you put little pirate hats on them. Counts.
... unless you're contracting for a Somali counter-piracy recon project. Doesn't count.
... unless you also include dank memes. Counts.3 -
My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!3 -
Woohoo!!! I made it to 1000++s :) Now I feel less newbie-like around here :)
So... I don't want to shit-post, so in gratitude to all you guys for this awesome community you've built, specially @trogus and @dfox, I'll post here a list of my ideas/projects for the future, so you guys can have something to talk about or at least laugh at.
Here we go!
Current Project: Ensayador.
It's a webapp that intends to ease and help students write essays. I'm making it with history students in mind, but it should also help in other discipline's essay production. It will store the thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography so students can create a guideline before the moment of writting. It will also let students catalogue their reads with the same fields they'd use for an essay: that is thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography, for their further use in other essays. The bibliography field will consist on foreign keys to reads catalogued. The idea is to build upon the models natural/logical relations.
Apps: All the apps that will come next could be integrated in just one big app that I would call "ChatPo" ("Po" is a contextual word we use in my country when we end sentences, I think it derived from "Pues"). But I guess it's better to think about them as different apps, just so I don't find myself lost in a neverending side-project.
A subchat(similar to a subreddit)-based chat app:
An app where people can join/create sub-chats where they can talk about things they are interested in. In my country, this is normally done by facebook groups making a whatsapp group and posting the link in the group, but I think that an integrated app would let people find/create/join groups more easily. I'm not sure if this should work with nicknames or real names and phone numbers, but let's save that for the future.
A slack clone:
Yes, you read it right. I want to make a slack clone. You see, in my country, enterprise communications are shitty as hell: everything consists in emails and informal whatsapp groups. Slack solves all these problems, but nobody even knows what it is over here. I think a more localized solution would be perfect to fill this void, and it would be cool to make it myself (with a team of friends of course), and hopefully profit out of it.
A labour chat-app marketplace:
This is a big hybrid I'd like to make based on the premise of contracting services on a reliable manner and paying through the app. "Are you in need of a plumber, but don't know where to find a reliable one? Maybe you want a new look on your wall, but don't want to paint it yourself? Don't worry, we got you covered. In <Insert app name> you can find a professional perfect to suit your needs. Payment? It's just a tap away!". I guess you get the idea. I think wechat made something like this, I wonder how it worked out.
* Why so many chat apps? Well... I want to learn Erlang, it is something close to mythical to me, and it's perfect for the backend of a comms app. So I want to learn it and put it in practice in any of these ideas.*
Videogames:
Flat-land arena: A top down arena game based on the book "flat land". Different symmetrical shapes will fight on a 2d plane of existence, having different rotating and moving speeds, and attack mechanics. For example, the triangle could have a "lance" on the front, making it agressive but leaving the rest defenseless. The field of view will be small, but there'll be a 2d POV all around the screen, which will consist on a line that fills with the colors of surrounding objects, scaling from dark colors to lighter colors to give a sense of distance.
This read could help understand the concept better:
http://eldritchpress.org/eaa/...
A 2D darksouls-like class based adventure: I've thought very little about this, but it's a project I'm considering to build with my brothers. I hope we can make it.
Imposible/distant future projects:
History-reading AI: History is best teached when you start from a linguistic approach. That is, you first teach both the disciplinar vocabulary and the propper keywords, and from that you build on causality's logic. It would be cool to make an AI recognize keywords and disciplinary vocabulary to make sense of historical texts and maybe reformat them into another text/platform/database. (this is very close to the next idea)
Extensive Historical DB: A database containing the most historical phenomena posible, which is crazy, I know. It would be a neverending iterative software in which, through historical documents, it would store historical process, events, dates, figures, etc. All this would then be presented in a webapp in which you could query historical data and it would return it in a wikipedia like manner, but much more concize and prioritized, with links to documents about the data requested. This could be automated to an extent by History-reading AI.
I'm out of characters, but this was fun. Plus, I don't want this to be any more cringy than it already is.12 -
If someone calls me with the thickest indian accent in the world and they tell me that they are Dave or Mark from an American sounding company I eould usually assume I am getting spammed or phishing calls.
If american companies are contracting from India to do these sorts of things I would really like to know the numbers for it, since I would assume that the average tech company would be like "hey wait a minute this sounds fishy af!"
Not hating on my Indian homies, y'all know i got love for ya, but fuuuuck man y'all can't deny that a lot of fake scam calls come from over there. They can come from anywhere really, but i have gotten many from over there19 -
Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.
Here is an example.
A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...
Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”
Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”
Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”
Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?
Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”
Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”
Her:
“It’s the same thing”
Me:
~Facepalm~
As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.
You’ll here things like...
“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”
Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!
FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!
Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.
Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.
I’d rather get it right than feel good.1 -
I was working on a team with people with various employment statuses. Contractors, employees of the client, and me as a regular full time employee of the company that “owned” the contract. My HR manager gave us a presentation about our reporting structure. I had at least seven managers for different reasons across various projects.
I got a new position so needed to resign but I had no idea which managers were the ones I should notify. I looked at the org chart that the HR lady showed. I sent my resignation to five managers that would be affected by my leaving. Unknown to me my project manager was actually a contracting manager hired by the client. He let his employer, the client, know that the lead dev quit.
Apparently it destabilized the contract for my employer. If I hadn’t just issued resignation they would have fired me for telling a customer about a significant internal staffing change. They didn’t fire me because the optics would have been worse for them.2 -
The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."4
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!dev !rant
You guys talk about having too much coffee occasionally - enough to where you weren't able to even focus;
I, being the dumbass I am overachieved a little and actually drank so much once and basically seized up
My friend was driving me home and all of the sudden i felt my arm muscles contracting, and then my abdomen and chest
shit was scary
we had to pull over and i had to struggle to shove a bottle and a half of water down my throat before he could drive me home
moral of the story = Make sure you eat in the morning, and there IS such a thing as too much coffee6 -
New contract termination clause to be included in all future project contracts: "Contracting client agrees that uttering the phrase 'Your job is whatever I say it is,' or any semanticaly equivalent variant thereof is grounds for immediate contract termination. All work product and IP rights will transfer and assign to contracting client ONLY upon payment in full of contracted payment amount prorated to contract termination date."
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I got cut from a contracting job yesterday I have 3 weeks left in the contract. They said I worked well with the team, had a great work ethic but didn't think I had strong enough tech skills. In the past this would have hurt my feelings and it does a little but I think my tech skills are fairly high. There were three devs working on 66 apps with no tests, some source control but most of the code in source control was older than code deployed in prod, no automatic builds, people would wait a week before checking in code, others would check in code that would not build. Today the boss asked if I had messed with app pools on the prod iIs server because something was wrong. I said no because never remote into the server. Anyway it is the end of the world and I feel fine.5
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I don't like interview coding challenges. At the same time, given the skill level of some developers I've worked with who work for a contracting firm and presumably didn't get a coding test in their intervies...I understand the necessity. Some people are so bad at coding that even the simplest of coding tests can show how bad they are.
I think my favorite is being given a simple task to write code for. And that's it. No "use this specific language feature to do this specific thing". Just a task and that's it.
I got a really simple coding test once. I had to reverse a string. I could choose any language. Presumably they wanted to see loops or something, but I just used Python and did this: string[::-1]
I got the job.3 -
I decided to go freelance/contracting. Headhunters keep pitching me permament roles (and I love watching them run out of pitch lines :D )
Headhunter: This job can't do your asking salary, but can offer career development.
Me: Already did that. was Engineer, then Architect, then CTO. I'm actually stepping back to be an Engineer.
Headhunter: Ok well, in this job you can do things start to finish, see them through to the end.
Me: I actually get bored after a while. Prefer change.
Headhunter: Well this place has a great culture and fun atmosphere!
Me: It's an insurance company mate...2 -
Best: 100% of my contracts have resulted in extensions and permanent roles offered, after worrying I wasn't good enough to try contracting.
Worst: Used the wrong set of monitoring when doing my first deployment at a contract and thought what I had deployed was working fine. It wasn't. For 24 hours. Cost the company a lot of money. (why did they offer me an extension again?) -
I'm going home!
For the past six months I've been on a contract that has kept me away from my family. On Saturday I will finally be moving back home. I'm elated to be seeing my family again, but I'm scared because I don't have a new job lined up. Wish me luck. -
I just found out that the company that i've just started contracting at has the entire of wordpress inside of a repo for quite a few of their sites.
Fuck me now.7 -
Be me
Work at software contracting company
Get a new client, iOS objective-c app with ~40000 lines of code
Previous Dev didn't leave a single comment, and he didn't use a database, he used 'NSUserDefaults' -
Contracting:
Con - It can be hella stressful and last minute, especially when contracts and agencies are a real pain.
Con - finding out you’re probably gonna need to go to site at like 11PM the day before, and train tickets are a fucking scam
Pro - Sitting in first class with a complimentary croissant and orange juice isn’t so bad.
Pro - Being able to finally travel to an Apple Store to get that MacBook you’ve been eying for a while because now you actually have to travel. 👀2 -
TLDR;
When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.
When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.
I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.
It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.
I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.
I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.
After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.
People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.
I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.
Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.2 -
Consulting/contracting for a company, and their lead developer/ops guy quits without warning. This leaves me as the only one with the somewhat technical know how but without access to do anything to move any changes to production....4
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These are probably stupid questions but I have to ask.
So does it usually take long for people to get back with you after you apply (if they were to be interested)
And are contracting positions worth looking into as well for someone trying to build professional experience?8 -
2:17 AM, it's raining, I have opened my windows and still temperature is above 30 C.
Can't sleep and will have to convince my boss I haven't been drinking all night in the weekdays (don't know if he'll believe though).
Ah, almost forgot, there are also mosquitoes, besides biting you everywhere in your body there's the risk of contracting Zika, dengue and chikungunya.
That's why I *love* Brazil
**story if my life3 -
Aaagh...... 2022 this year has been shity for real..
So its now 1 year and I've been a fullstack developer for this mid tech company as the only developer
so I've been trying to get these guys to hire a second developer. and try to also upgrade equipment and these guys didnt even bother to attend to my requests and during my evaluation meeting on friday these guys where down my neck about why projects are taking time to complete i MEAN WTF!!!!! told them its bcoz Im a 1 man army and most of the times Im chocked with the "any other duty" thing and how tha fuck do they expect them projects to be done on time
I'm the only developer some times i get sick 2weeks and where i left off is were i continue from and thats 2 weeks work of progress down the drain
I'm so fucking pieced off ryt now I feel like droping this shity job and find a much better organization
they want me to build them a developer department and they dont even equip me with the necessary tools to do so WTF do they think they are doing they think they know better than me?
so let them build their fucking dev department without me
this has been a fucking stressful experiance
wrote them a later to hire a second developer
I dont fucking care how they are going to do it
contracting or an internal dev if they dont in the next 3 months I fucking leaving this shit7 -
!rant
I’m really loving being a contractor and working for myself.
Currently waiting for the client to order the next lot of work, so that means today I got to go out, go swimming, walk down the seafront and just generally have a nice day out in the sun with friends and family.
I can’t believe I didn’t try this whole remote contractor thing sooner.4 -
Was just asked to review a new set of libraries that the "experts" from our contracting wing created.
I opened one and the readme lists its features as:
Features:
- Feature 1
- Feature 2
- Feature 3
and the Faq is:
- Possible question 1
- Answer to question 1 -
Are you willing to share details of your salary, or for contractors your daily/hourly rate? If you're not, that's interesting to know too.
Interesting to know;
- Currency (hopefully obviously)
- Location of work (or if remote, primary location of employer?)
- Contract type (FT/PT employee, contractor/freelancer)
- Job title (or general activity for contractors)
- Number of years in role/contracting
- Whether or not you would or have shared your salary with a co-worker (perhaps you're willing to share here but not with a co-worker)
- Gender
The 'Why is it soooo taboo to ask co-workers salary?' question made me think about this (https://devrant.com/rants/1557306/...)8 -
So I'm in a meeting with the Company director where I'm contracting for a few months. She is explaining the company history, goals etc. I can feel my eyes drooping, my head tilting and my body sloooowly sliding of my chair. Im literally fighting to stay awake. She is about to explode and go crazy BUT the business manager flies in explains to her that I have a medical condition known as narcolepsy...meaning I could be half way through a conversation and I fall asleep and it's not anything more than that
....When she said my name is thought to myself yep I'm outta here...4 -
[Blue pill]
stay in my current workplace [approaching the 10yrs mark], with an agreed salary and seniority raise, with a high probability of losing my current project [which is really fun!] in Feb next year and having to switch to another one, but keep all the benefits
[Red pill]
switch full-time to contracting with a potential to reap big bucks [x2-x4] and be free to juggle as many clients as I like, dictate my terms, become a shareholder, but lose all that warm and cozy certainty guaranteed by my current employer2 -
Finished my contracting project I’ve been working on for the last 2 months. They said that they might have more after the new year. I get two weeks off! Contracting is great until you don’t have any contracts… or they pay you a month late… or they don’t tell you what to do and expect you to do it…1
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Do you all comprehend how dangerous devRant - especially its users are? What if we all quit our jobs and handed them a business card “devRant - ‘your name here’” and just stuck to contracting. Stick it to the man and have fun while doing it. 😂
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I should wait a bit longer before sharing this but looks like I am going to get a fulltime contracting position in a company that develops Netflix-like on-premises solutions for global brands, TV channels and telcos. I would with the team write hybrid app targeting phones, tablets, IP Tvs & consoles. I am waiting for them to call my two references and then voilà. Byebye e-commerce and WordPress, Welcome JS, React and Haxe. So excited this morning.3
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Genuine question, what was the most comments you've left in a single code review?
Just reviewed pull request submitted by a developer working for a contractor company and needed to leave 70 comments. Seventy.
Opened LinkedIn and saw a post from that same developer saying he left the contracting company an hour ago. I still can't believe it.14 -
I'm shitting there hammering out some code butchering some real problems when I suddenly realise I'm surrounded. I look around and yes it's the bloody committee.
The committee is what I call the rest of the department and it is dominated by the old guard which comprises of the programmers that have been around for longer.
None of the old guard can program particularly well but because they had been around the longest they'd all grown senior. The committee had free reign but anyone else doing anything differently has to get approval from the committee.
The only way to code otherwise was to copy and paste existing code then to primarily rename things. If anyone did anything that hadn't been seen before then it would have to be approved by the committee. Individual action was not permitted unless you were old guard.
I swept my headphones away expecting it to be something unimportant. It was.
First things first they announce. We're going to add extraneous commas to the last element of all possible lists separated by comma including parameters or so they say. Ask but why so I do.
Because the language now supports it. They added support for it so it must be the right way someone proclaimed. Does it? I didn't realise we were waiting for it. Why do we want it though?
Didn't you hear? It's all over the blogosphere. It massively improves merge requests. But how I ask?
Five minutes later I grow tired of the chin stroking, elbow harnessing, slanted gazes into the yonder and occasionally hearing maybe its because and ask if they mean when you for example add an element the last element registers as changed from adding a comma. Turns out that's all it is.
How often do we see that tiny distraction and isn't it pointless to make the code ugly just for a tiny transient reduction in diff noise I ask. Everyone's stumped. This went on and on and got worse and worse. But it makes moving things around easy half of them say in unison like the bunch of slobs that they are. I mean really. It doesn't make expanding and contracting statements from multiline to single line easy and it's such a stupid thing. Is that all they do all day? Move multi-line method parameters up and down all day? If their coding conventions weren't totally whack they wouldn't have so many multiline method prototypes with stupid amounts of parameters with stupidly long types and names. They all use the same smart IDE which can also surely handle fixing the last comma and why is that even a concern given all the other outrageously verbose and excessive conventions for readability?
But you know what, who cares, fine, whatever. Lets put commas all over the shop and then we can all go to the pub and woo the ladies with how cool and trendy we are up to date with all the latest trends and fashions then we go home with ten babes hanging off each arm and get so laid we have to take a sick day the following to go to the STD clinic. Make way for we are conformists.
But then someone had to do it. They had to bring up PSR. Yes, another braindead committee that produces stupid decisions. Should brackets be same line or next line, I know, lets do both they decided. Now we have to do PSR and aren't allowed to use sensible conventions.
But why, I ask after explaining it's actually quite useful as a set of documents we can plagiarise as a starting point but then modify but no, we have to do exactly what PSR says. We're all too stupid apparently you see. Apparently we're not on their level. We're mere mortals. The reason or so I'm told, is so that anyone can come in and is they know PSR coding styles be able to read and write the code. That's not how it works. If you can't adjust to a different style, a more consistent style, that's not massively bizarre or atypical but rather with only minor differences from standard styles, you're useless. That's not even an argument, it's a confession that you've got a lump of coal where your brain's supposed to be.
Through all of this I don't really care because I long ago just made my own code generators or transpilers that work two ways and switch things between my shit and their shit but share my wisdom anyway because I'm a greedy scumbag like that.
Where the shit really hit the fan is that I pointed out that PSR style guide doesn't answer all questions nor covers all cases so what do we do then. If it's not in PSR? Then we're fucked.4 -
That feeling when you know there’s work to be done, and a deadline to do it by... yet you can’t muster the motivation and you’d rather just play video games.
I suppose at least with contracting from home I have the option of taking a break like this so long as the work gets done on time. I mean, if I was in an office I’d just be dicking about online. -
Looking back on 2020: I only did one small contracting job.
The client wasn’t putting their trust in us. I fired them. They went with another company. Almost a whole year - and the old flash site is still up there! Kinda a waste of time / but got paid for our work - and it feels great to just let shit go.
Besides that, I didn’t do any official dev work all year! I just continued working on our school curriculum and teaching. 2020 has been an R&D dream, really. I feel a bit spoiled! As I sit here in my Christmas pajamas!
Excited for 2021. -
I’m from the UK, should I go freelance?
Last few weeks I’ve been feeling really bored with my job. Like mega fucking bored. It’s basically just meetings 7 hours a day, 4 hours planning and then 3 hours of talking about how everything didn’t get finish (I know. I keep saying it’s the fucking 7 hour fucking meetings).
Pay is pretty decent, we have a few juniors, not exactly great code base, kinda cool idea, pretty unique, business will defo work or be sold by corporate owners. (Start up owned by corporate)
I just feel really flat and bored. Mega bored. Keep wondering about going solo and being more of a consultancy or my own little agency? I’ve tried before but I suck at marketing and freelancer and similar sites never provided enough income.
I guess my questions are (if anyone wants to answer):
- What’s this new IR35 or whatever? Is it now pointless to be self employed?
- how would I boost my leads?
- should I do a bit of contracting to get used to it maybe?
- should I just stay where I am and deal with the feeling of not really feeling like I was hired to do anything?
I do also have a little side business I started that I could also work on whenever I have free time, it’s not taking any money at the moment though, early years I suppose?
I’m really sorry if anyone feels offended to read that I’m fucking bored and don’t have a clue what to do with myself. Please don’t reply with some sarccy comment. I really cba to have an internet keyboard troll fight about some stupid opinion we’ll all forget about in a few days. This now counts as a rant. So fuck you. It’s a rant. And I’m rant about the possibility you might comment on my post not bring a rant coz I can’t tell what category I’m posting on. I live in the 5th dimension. Deal. With. It. Or just ignore and scroll on 👍🏼5 -
Getting all the shitty half-broken stuff because you're 'just a contractor'...
...and not being allowed to use your own top-of-the-range stuff due to 'data security policies' 😧1 -
Her: and they were roommates
My autistic ass, picking my belly button while contracting my neck muscles on the left side, trying to balance the tension in the precise spot between regular and uncontrollably cramped, singing “One” by U2 in my head, keeping my eyes completely relaxed to focus on those little blurry floaty thingys, knowing full well that when you focus on them, they disappear, assessing whether it is time to trim my nostrils' hair, focusing on feeling the surrounding smell, wondering whether I can figure out whether it is time to change my bedsheets without getting closer to them to smell them properly (do I feel the smell? I don't feel it, but is that because bedsheets are fresh, or because I'm too far away to smell it?), thinking about whether my T-shirt is exactly centered and whether one side has more fabric than the left, thus weighing more, so I have to readjust it, also thinking about whether “text/pain” is a good enough name for my book: please continue
(I know that the answer is “oh my god they were roommates”, but I want to socialize and not appear as a smartass, all while thinking about whether it's authentic or not)2 -
I do contracting for different companies who get too much work on their hands and a deadline on their ass, and it’s always a trip to see how amateurish some of their developers are.
Like who the fuck names a major variable ‘abc’ or ‘xyz’ !!!!
Also they clearly don’t know how to ask equivalence if statements as I got a chain of if else statements that were written like
if (decision>0 && decision<2)
//Code
else if (decision>1 && decision<3) ...etc1 -
guide to make successful software house company for future me:
1.find shortest domain name with code / star / best / it / super / ai / - whatever banger word you find
2. parse companies work board / linkedin jobs
3. parse people profiles
4. setup email server and create fake linkedin profiles that match jobs and candidates so company looks big
5. fake c-level management so company looks big
6. spam likes and create posts generated by ai from multiple profiles
7. spam invitations to people that match job descriptions and to people working within companies posting jobs
8. offer fake candidates that match job description
9. find real but less promising candidates and offer them the job
10. tell that fake candidate is no longer available but you have someone better
success6 -
And that, folks, is why you never do a rush job, no matter how urgent, without an RFP and answering estimate followed by a signed statement of work confirming agreement to the estimate. Even with a prearranged, perpetual contracting agreement. And also why you NEVER deliver the end product without payment. No matter how much you trust your client or believe they will do right by you, process still matters.2
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I really want to start up a business as sort of a consulting service, or a software contractor...
Does anyone know how to get started in contracting? I see contracts online and they are only like 2-3 month long contracts? How can I get involved with that to get some experience and not have to quit my current job...? Is it possible to do both?
Also it seems like a lot of the ones I see are where you have to go live there during the duration of the contract... Why don't they do any remote contracts...?
I've only worked at one place as a Software Developer, and from my previous post you can tell that I really hate it, but my location is hard to find anything else at all... Any advice would be greatly appreciated! -
Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?
The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.
I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.
I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).
Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?
I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.
Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?
The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.
At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.
I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.5 -
Is it normal for US based companies to lowball EU based remote senior hires that much?
Just had this weird experience:
Applied to a US based company as a remote senior android dev.
Told them my rate was 55usd/hour.
Their internal recruiter who is based in Poland told me that their budget is max 45 usd/hour max for a senior role.
I was like ok maybe its worth a shot.
Passed the initial interview, did the technical interview, seemed like I did really great.
Today I receive an offer from that recruiter of 30 usd/hour. Feedback was that Im senior in some areas but in most of them Im a "really strong mid level" so they cant offer senior rate for me. Right now Im thinking of how to respond to that.
What is this? Seniors are expected to know everything 100 percent? Every senior I worked with usually specializes in 2-3 areas and looks up others as he goes. I guess shes trying to lowball me or something.
To be honest this is hilarious for me. If I wanted I could land a contracting gig with same 30usd/hour in my city 5 miles away from my home (Im based in Latvia, capital city Riga). But this is US based company so what the heck? Am I being gaslighted? Or is this rate the new normal?
Maybe Im being delusional here, should I manage my expectations or something?
Can you share your experiences with negotiating hourly rates as a senior dev and what rates you guys charge for EU/US B2B contracts?22 -
I'm looking into buying a new laptop. I want something speak and ultrabookish, but dedicated graphics are a must.
Will be mostly for work, so a good CPU and RAM are important, but probably will do some gaming. Battery life and cooling are pretty big too. I've looked at the Aero 15X, the XPS 15, Razer Blade, etc. I just can't decide. Need to get it this year for the the tax deductions for my contracting income. Any thoughts? What's the best one out there?12 -
I've been dealing with a guy who knows almost nothing about tech and always insists on asinine systems and buzz words he's been sold by 3rd party vendors. Lately he really wants to replace our relational dbs with hdfs.
Our data is sub 10 gb in size.
I've been seriously considering making a contracting company and just preying on tech fools like this, I just don't know if I could ethically swallow it. -
Contracting some sports related web apps for the national army.. Couldn't have predicted this kind of projects / clients when started the business some years back. :)
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So uh does anyone have any advice on freelancing/contracting? I’ve been considering doing it a little while going through college since it would be a little better than a full on job (or at least for my current situation) I’m realizing, but I have concerns like the myths I hear about clients, or with my own performance, or just the pay in general.
Idk what do you guys have to say4 -
Question:
Were you hired by a company and develop software FOR that company?
Or...
Were you hired by one company and build software for a client or attend work at a client's office?4 -
Person from a company I am contractor for tried to fuck me up and put me to the project with high money penalties without my will and behind my back.
I don’t understand those people.
You run a project do everything for them except delivering invoice to client and they try to fuck you anyway behind your or their client back.
You literally fight with people to give them money.
This all happened after me keeping their client project for almost 4 years.
Bell rings again to leave them this year after end of contract and don’t look back but I’m sad I need to leave nice client and application I was making for 4 years straight. I am oldest person in project probably only one that understands business behind it from ground up.
There was big rotation in project and knowing the company they will put some junior on my place that will break everything.
Well I still have some time to think ( maybe even couple of months) about what to do next besides taking some time off during this summer.
I am afraid that I rejected so many interesting offers during those 4 years nobody wants me and I got rusty with my stack I am no longer competitive.
I was unable to make anything during weekend and on Monday again cause of this shit.
Fucking people.4 -
2019 - The year I try freelancing as a contractor and doing some paid side projects as an alternative to permanent employment. I'm sure it'll be ok, I've only got a mortgage to pay and a young family to feed! 😬
Seriously though, looking forward to getting a wider range of experience and having some in-between contract down time. What are your experiences of contracting?1 -
Suffering from the cash flow blues.
Remote contracting roles are far and few between, and so far I’ve only found the one client, the problem is that because they’ve been burned in the past by contractors, they only operate on an order by order basis.
So we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of issues > estimates > order > development > test > tweak > pay and repeat.
The problem is that there is always significant delay between the stages from both sides, either because they’re busy on stuff, or I’ve burnt myself out rushing to meet an estimate and having to take a bit of breathing room.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great working in blocks of a few days to a week and then having some time to myself (and the money is nice too), but the cash flow inconsistency is super scary when you’re having to manage corporation tax, accountancy fees and a salary.
Anyone else have these issues / know good places to find remote contract work?2 -
!rant
That remote contractor life is waiting for work, feeling super unproductive.
Solution? Shorts and shirt in the glorious weather with a spliff. -
So I have two big named companies who have offered me a job after I graduate from college... Choice A is a defense contracting and technology company in the US and is very reputable. While, Choice B is a higher education software company and is reputable but not as popular as choice A.
I enjoy both work and think both would be a great platform for my career, however I don't know how heavy the weight of choice A's (more reputable) name on my resume will carry when applying for mid-career level jobs than Choice B.
Should I even worry about the name of the company?... Or mainly worry about what I would be doing at each company?3 -
Have any devs done bar work before..?
I've always enjoyed doing things outside of work, and I work 3-4 days a week in my main job to create time for this. It's great for my mental health, and means I can optimise the main job for pay/good benefits and fulfil my "other needs" (stimulation/challenge/enjoyment) in other places.
The main things for me are dev contracting on the side or acting/singing, to a lesser extent travel, a bit of activism and law study. Just because 🤷♂️
Especially re: my last rant with *that* email from HR on Friday, I'm tempted to be a bit more strict about only doing three days and picking up something else.
Although I know the pay is awful, I really want to try bar work on the side just to do something different.
Has anyone else done bar work before?9 -
Good company refuced my contracting service. Fuck that. And reasons do not sound good to tell - like team did not want me anymore, maybe too dificult project, I am not independent enough, too many fixes after code reviews. This sucks that I do not know how to fix those parts, I have tried. And about too dificult project - how can I do better on dificult projects, I am not sure. There are projects of similar dificulty in most companies. And if projects would be easy, then everyone does that and reward would be small.18
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Is ColdFusion still a thing? I just got a contracting job at this startup. I know nothing about ColdFusion. Spent yesterday and today just figuring how to dynamically create a folder inside this <cfscript></cfscript> tag. I am yet to figure it out. -_-
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When you have a service that makes you a £1000 a month that you become completely obsessed with in the assumption you will be making £10,000 a month in 40 years time if you keep going you invest your life into it and ridiculous amounts of time because it's yours and your not making someone else rich and building their dream just someone's bitch. Even tho you can make £400 a day contracting.
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Personal question what sort of wage are mobile devs contracting out at with around 6 years experience, day rate? Would be interesting to see the difference1
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