I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

* No raise after one year, even that I don't earn that much
* Working in the oldest project
* Everyday I have to make quick fixes, usually requested by leader
* No spare time to rewrite shitty code - always something have higher priority (like doing some tasks that I shouldn't do, just because I had no tasks for next sprint)
* Got feedback from leader that I "hack" too much instead of writing code properly (see third dot)
* Every company around pays more and have more up-to-date stack
* The only guy that wanted to change stuff and use more generic approaches from other teams just threw resignation paper

!dev
Please enjoy this customer review I intercepted. Guess the company type and name that requested the feedback.

"______ drivers liberally show how bad it is to work for these companies.
Three quarters of all packages arrive damaged.
They park wherever they want.
No regard for traffic, people, property nor parcels.
Redefining rock bottom.
Not this delivery. Always. Everywhere. For a strong decade now."

We often give access to a product owner from the customer on our Jira to keep up a good communication and everyone stays up to date as everything is on the board and not hidden in emails or paper notes on the desk of the guy that is on vacation.

So far, so good

Our customers really like this as they can comment on tickets and they are integrated in the workflow because they can push into the backlog and can review finished tasks.

It is just getting better for everyone so where is the rant?

One project is just a dump of shitty mixed content tickets. But how? They look really neat. There are tickets like "fixes from meeting 20th of may" which are initially well structured with approximately 4 subtle changes to the UI and some explanation and screenshots.

PM says: Good ticket. There you go ticket, into the customer review loop of doom.

20 comments and 13 status changes later. Point 43 from comment 17 is referenced in comment 20 to keep on hold as a third party needs to give feedback, point 7 is still not solved correctly as dev 2 was not aware that it was already discussed and changed in the ticket "Call from 25th of may" where in addition the resolution of points 5-12 were requested with an additional excel file to import.

By now we have the 8th of august and literally 17 of these kind of tickets.

I guess we need to improve the workflow and request a new product owner. But this far I just table flip everytime I get one of these tickets assigned.

Just received an email from a company i applied while searching for a new job. They sended me this little assigment to show my skills since they had the feeling i couldnt show them much.

(they browsed through 3 of my websites while i was there, including a check on the code)

It was a simple layout assigment. Just a responsive page with a hamburger menu (also mentioned during this interview)

It took me a couple of hours to create it and ive send it back in the hope of some positive feedback.

Feedback: assignment was pretty good but it show a lack of php experience. I was clearly more on the .NET side.

....

I just sended html, css and js files as requested. HOW THE F* DO YOU COME TO THIS CONCLUSION?!?!

Damn idiots, im glad i found people that actually do know how to hire people!

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!