My classmate is a real SAVAGE!!

He (team leader) and his team participated in hackathons several times and kept losing.
He noticed something common about winning team, majority of those team members were women, even if they were non technical and their project was pure bs, they were winning in the name of women empowerment.

This time he came out with a plan, he fired his boys and invited women into his team, and even made one girl the team leader.
Result? HE WON!!!
NOT ONE BUT THREE HACKATHONS BACK TO BACK

AND

His so called women team was invited by Google to pitch their startup idea.

Now, if they gets funding, he's gonna kick out these women and bring back his teammates

The new MacBook Pro will have three price ranges:
- Funding to 30 years
- Robbery
- Prostitution

How to get funding? Powered by AI.

tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.

We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.

Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.

Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.

Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.

After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.

Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.

He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.

Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.

To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.

Wannabe entrepreneurs approach for building their app.

Them: So you're familiar with Android?

Me: Yes but it's been a while, will take some time though.

Them: Not a problem.

Me: So shall we talk about the payment?

Them: Yeah, about that.. Listen, we don't have any funding now but we're sure this idea will be a hit and take off, then later we can pay you.

Me: Ok

*Gets up and leaves*

It looks like we have been working on something that qualifies almost all of this (except the management wants it, so there's little funding) 😂

Haha, pretty shitty to work on something like this for the last 4-5 months.

Friend: Hello dude, I have an idea that..
Me: (cuts in) no.
Friend: you didn't even hear me out!
Me: let me guess. You have a super idea you want us to work on. I will be the tech guy and you the business guy and we would get funding and that will make us super rich and make all those girls that looked down on us start chasing after us?
Friend: something of that nature.
(Silence).
Friend: well?
Me: I already said no.
Friend: just no?
Me: Oh I am sorry. No fucking way in hell.

1. Submit my resume, get an email asking to schedule an interview
2. Schedule the interview
3. One day before the scheduled time, I get an email saying that the interview is being rescheduled to another time two days later (no explanation for why they did this)
4. I clear out my schedule and wait for the interview call (it’s suppose to be at 2:30, but I wait like 15 minutes early because I don’t want to miss it)
5. I don’t get a call
6. At 3:00, I call the company and ask whats going on. They apologize and say my interviewer will call me back as soon as he gets back from lunch.
7. He doesn’t call.
8. At 4:00 I call them back. Apparently the guy who was suppose to interview me went home. I ask them wtf they are doing and if this is how they treat their employees. They said they would reschedule the interview and call me back once they did.
9. No one calls.
10. I wait a week, call them back, and am told that the funding for my position didn’t come through (what does that mean? You’re not hiring programmers to design the software for your billion dollar war machines anymore? Seriously?).

I’ve had it with this company. I don’t know if it was just this incompetent recruiting group or if this is a company full of scumbags, but I mean, really?

These fuckface wantrapeneurs, posting jobs (paying to do so) and then offering bullshit like:
- We have no funding, so you'll work for free for some time.
- Paying in fucking crypto.
- Wanting a full stack rainbow puking and shitting unicorn for peanuts
- Fucking scammers, posing as legit companies and asking you to install Anydesk.
- Asking absurd interview tasks and times (a couple of days worth of work for a task).
- Whiteboard and live coding interviews with bullshit questions thinking they're Google, while having 20 devs.
- Negotiating salaries and when presented with contract get the salary reduced by double the amount.
- Having idiotic shit on their company websites like a fucking dog as a team member associated as happiness asshole. (One idiot even had a labrador during the video interview while cuddling him)
- Companies asking you to install tracking software with cam recording to keep you in check. (Yeah, you can go fuck yourselves)
- Having absurd compensation schemes, like pay calculation based on the "impact" your work has

Either I'm unlucky or job hunting has become something else since I last started searching.

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

Asking for donations via terminal is a thing? Programmer thing 😎

Just when I thought I'd seen the craziest job ad...

Title: Sr. Lead Data Scientist / Python Developer

Required education: bachelor's in CompSci, Math, etc. PhD preferred (lol)

Required experience: 10+ years in Python development

Other requirements: must be under 25 years of age to qualify for funding from EcoCanada (lmao!!!! y'all trippin)

Who is writing these job ads? I swear they get more insane every day.

Not laughing.

Not cursing.

Both for interviewing and being interviewed.

Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......

"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."

"Ok, what did you do?"

"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."

"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"

"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".

I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.

When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.

IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.

Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...

For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)

Even worse is the patsy.

When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:

- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....

All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.

:)

The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...

A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".

And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.

"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".

Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath.

I was working as a contractor for a client who just got enough funding to hire a full-time dev. I lovingly referred to him as "Mr. Koolaid" because he was obsessed with whatever the newest hotness was and cried constantly about how the 3-year-old code-base didn't use The Next Big Thing(tm). This was my first interaction with him:

Mr. Koolaid: I'd like access to the github repository. My username is xxxx.

Me: We currently aren't hosting the code on github. If you send me your public ssh key, I'll get you access to the private server.

Mr. Koolaid: I'd like to access the github repository.

Me: It's not on github; send me your public key and I'll get you access.

Mr. Koolaid: Can we skype real quick? You don't need my public key to grant me access to the github repo.

*Mr. Koolaid proceeds to forward me github's documentation on adding users to an organization and the documentation for adding users to a private repo. The email is written in a very passive-aggressive tone.*

ಠ_ಠ

Boss sends e-mail telling everyone we have funding for 1+ year.

Two weeks later 50% of employees laid off.

ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

Omg, when does the Stupid stop? New Zealand just passed a law that empowers immigration officials to compel travellers to unlock their devices. Otherwise, you pay a hefty fine. They are also allowed to copy the data and do God knows what with.

The horrible invasion of privacy aside, it also brings with it some legal hurdles. What if you are making a presentation or report to an investor or someone you have a fiduciary obligation with. You are carrying IP bound by several NDA's and other funding red tape that would end your life if it got out. Are you in breach if the data gets copied by the gov officials? Worse yet you have zero control over what they do afterwards.

I don't think any of this inspires investor confidence.

Government needs to stop touching things!

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

Walk around the office in his underwear, because he forgot he left his trousers in the bathroom

Run a red light outside the office due to not wearing his required glasses. When questioned by co-workers, replied "I don't follow those facist rules"

Asking if we work less will we get paid more, because the project will take longer to do (while in a startup with no funding trying to secure some)

Tell a senior dev to stop testing in his spare time, as we won't be able to release on time if he keeps finding critical security bugs

Telling me "your timezone is not my concern", when asking for help with new tooling so we don't have to be online at the same time

Blaming my team for requesting too much help, leading to his team missing deadlines, in a meeting with very senior managers. When the reason we were requesting help was the handover doc we were given was filled with lies about features being finished and "ready to ship" and lacking any unit tests

Being accused of bullying and harassment to the CEO, because someone asked "did you follow up with X about the partnership they emailed us about". The person who was responsible, forgot 4 times, and saw it as an "attack" to mention it in team meetings

Telling an entire office/building mid November they've secured funding for at least the next year, then announcing in January after the Christmas break that its cheaper to move to India, so they are closing the office in 30 days

!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

Well, fuck. The CTO of our startup decided to migrate data of our hundred thousand customers from a stable functioning platform to an in-house unstable platform with severe performance issues, to "save" costs, despite our repeated requests. He made us not have any contingency plans because he wanted to "motivate" us to complete the migration.

Result- we have a thousand customers reporting major issues daily, which is causing loss of revenue to both us and them. The company ran out of funding. Most of the team members were fired. And he's expecting the rest of us to magically fix everything. Dunno what kind of office politics is this, in which you're sabotaging Your Own company.

Looking for a new job now to get out of this hellhole. I really used to love this company. Feels sad to see it ruined like this.

Dev: So we need around $50-100 a month to activate and use some key services that would greatly reduce our backend complexity. Would this fit into our budget? Actually, we've never really discussed in general what sort of tech budget we have to work with...

Management: UNTIL WE HAVE SUSTAINABLE REVENUE, OUR TECH BUDGET IS 0

FullStackClown: 0? Are you serious? You can't spare a few hundred dollars TOTAL over the next 3 months until our next round of funding clears?

Management: ALSO WE ARE REALLY GOING TO NEED YOUR HELP TO FIND PRODUCT MARKET FIT FROM THE TECH SIDE

FullStackClown: Oh no... we've gotten to the classic point where they think tech is the thing that will solve their problems... abandon ship...

Casual workday be like:

Project manager: It is important we deliver these features.

Me & Coworker: Sounds reasonable, here is how long we need, roughly.

Mgr: Well, the deadline is already set and the contract is signed and written.

M&C: Ummm...

Mgr: Also, while we are hosting the application, we are not paid for operational cost, so make sure to optimise the crap out of it immediatly. Preferably while developing the features.

(A wild architect appears): Also everything has to be built on cans and kubernuts, with rectangular ui and bootstyling and with these internally developed backend frameworks NOBODY tests. Coroporate policy you know.

(A wilder division CEO appears on meeting): Also we are rolling out code KPI's across the organisation. Everyone is expected to Focus on documentation, test coverage and there is now mandatory SonarQube scanning of repos. ZERO DEFECTS PEOPLE

M&C: ...

(Wildest Salesteam appears): By the way we sold the application to these other customers, they love feature XYZ and must have it.

M&C: It does not have feature XYZ

Mgr: It will have feature XYZ

M&C: Allright so with all the extra funding from the sales, we need to hire atleast one Machine learning guy, an extra frontend specialist a developer and maybe funnel some of the funding into slacking the operational budget in the start.

Animated Suit *Railing a line of coke from his gold plated ihpone 15*: What funding? Get to work. Also your havent been super sharp with your time registration.

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

A conversation that me and my boss had this week:
Boss: "Hey, why is this not progressing"
Arcsector: - "We're waiting on system users to move their destinations"
"We need the system in the database in order to move it"
- "Okay awesome - let's move it, oh wait, I can't do it because I don't have access, here's the stuff that needs to be done: a, b, and c"
"Oh I'm actually not able to help with that"
- "So then how are we supposed to get it done?"
"idk but also this other issue is something missions are complaining about"
- "oh I already am talking to them about it and it should be remedied by the team creating the problem because it's a false positive"
"Well we need to solve it still"
- "We would've solved it already but it has dependencies with other projects that we're still working on because we don't have enough people"
"We cant get you more people because we don't have the budget"
- "Then this stuff will have to wait"
"Get it done"

ACTUALLY SCREAMING! Why cant people understand that there are conesequences for their actions??!!

Imagine if you will, a fictional world outside our own.

In this world, the requirement for getting a drivers licenses is 4 years of research into quantum mechanics.

- Was it interesting? Yeah.

- Did I learn it because I had to? Yup.

- Will I use the harmonic oscillation calculations of a particle when driving my car. Fuck no!

- Did it cost me an ungodly amount of money? It sure did!

- Will some dumb people still say it was useful because it is the minimum (fictional) barrier to entry for driving a car. You bet your sweet ass they will!!!

It was about as useful as any made up requirement, make-work, self-funding, circle-jerking, waste or time and money to feed the pockets of people who are too scared to do actual work so they teach, can be.

I paid all that money to be taught technology that was old when my mother was in school.

In the first year out of school, with only a $300 subscription to PluralSight some uDemy courses and hard work, I learned 100X as much as everything they put in front of me in school.

-------

School has its place.

Children who don't understand the importance of learning and need their hand help.

Adult children (some of which on on their 3rd or 4th degree) who also need their hand held.

People too afraid to enter the real world.

Doctors.

-------

I would do it again because it is the minimum requirement of entry, but thats nothing more than a bullshit make-work project.

Play their game as long as you need to. Keep your own game in mind. Don't drink the koolaid, just fake a sip. Then when the time is right, play by your own rules.

Peace

I just got a call from a recruiter asking if I had any recommendations for a company in town. Eight years ago, I met the owner of this company and he seemingly went out of his way to ignore me every time we met. His attitude was cold, unwelcoming, and not a character I ever wanted to associate with.

It's a small world. Please don't burn your bridges before you ever get your company's first round of major funding. Yes, I know a lot of people that might have wanted a position like this, but not with him at the helm.

As much as I wanted to express my disdain for the owner, I hold steadfast that the only respectful answer to this recruiter is to say: "I have no recommendations for this position."

I love when employers reach out to you like desperate fuck boys on a dating app.

Tell me more about your “amazing” benefits package that’s indistinguishable from any other, your PTO that is as “unlimited” as my phone plan, and the empty mustard packets you acquired in series Z funding.

I’ve got all day to watch your dance play out its milky chance.

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

40.5 hours of overtime this pay period, and about another thirty coming next pay period.

What should a young Algo do with such funding??

Most unrealistic deadline I've had?

The client gives us a project with A 3-month deadline. All good, at first.

3 days later they told us that they're cutting out the funding and they gave us two options: Either stop the project right away and get paid for the work so far, or somehow finish the project in 7 days and get paid for the 10 days worth of work.

My idiot boss chose the second.

Saturdays and Sundays were declared working days, everyone screaming at each other, devs running around scrambling code to make the webpage render and keep it responsive.

Forget unit or automation testing, we only did not null and undefined testing and submitted the project.

Yeah, I hauled my ass out of the company just after that.

Hey. I am recruiter X from irrelevant startup Y. We automatically sent you a message with our LinkedIn bot because we think you may like working in an irrelevant language and an overhyped useless technology. I hope you love working overtime and getting burned out. :)

Free beers, silicon valley blabla. Insert irrelevant information about millions of dollars of funding blabla.

Fuck man.. very disappointed now.. 3 months ago i was told not to worry about funding and salary and all, now fucking still waiting for half salary.. fuck startup like this

Most hobbies need funding to get started and to continue. Wood to carve, cables and electronics to solder. Programmers need only their time (as long as they have a computer). It is the most cheap thing to pick up and learn.

Tried to do a startup for a year, did not make loss but did not get the funding to keep going. Now going back to previous company and taking up the old job. 😔

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.

I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.

So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.

I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...

~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.

~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!

~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.

~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.

~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.

~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.

~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.

And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...

Yay. I was yet again asked to make a whole module that is meant to compete with stuff companies have made who have funding of millions - without even a designer to help out. I'm the single frontend guy in the team.

"Let's make our website like that super beautiful website we saw that actually paid a designer, UI/UX guy, interaction designer and graphic guy. But let's not hire any of them. Who needs them anyway? Such a waste of money which their high fees"

I guess I'll just take "inspiration" from Pinterest/dribbble/behance

5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.

One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).

After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".

Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.

Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding.

Working for this startup as a remote dev for last 6 months.

This month they delayed my payment by saying that they are still waiting for crowdfunding payment to be processed.

After 3 days my teamlead who recruited me quitted with 2 more people saying that its 'personal issues'

1 week later (today) I received a letter of termination saying that my contract ceases its effect after 30 days and I will receive my payment after 45 days as all service providers.

I reminded those fuckers that in contract there is a clause saying that they are supposed to pay me within 24 hours of invoice receipt (because this is not my first time with startups). Then fuckers responded that I will get paid as soon as they receive the money.

Contacted CTO today and he told me the truth. Turns out that venture capital that supposedly raised funding of around 10 million usd last year actually didnt raise shit. In the end startup did not receive this funding because VC convinced investors that this project is shit and not worth investing.

VC's plan is to starve out the startup by giving it bridge payment injections. At some point they want to buy out the startup and resell it for profit.

And here I am fucked in the ass. But for some reason im not mad at that VC because shit happens. Im mad ar startup managers who kept us in the dark for 2 weeks and dropped us like shit :)

I am really tired of broke startups and their bullshittery.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.

So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).

Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.

Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.

I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)

This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.

This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)

Finally got my Bluetooth earphones!
It's called Pamu Scroll, funded in Indiegogo.
I bought it for $49 without shipping fee.
Now let me write a review about it here after using for about an hour or so.

1. Shipment
Shipment from China is slow and hard to track unless it is classified as EMS, which mine wasn't, obviously.

2. Packaging
It has some shock protection layer, but without that, nope! It was staying still inside the packaging though.

3. Design
Beautiful. Just beautiful. Period. Just see the picture below.
It opens as a papyrus, maybe that's why it is called Pamu Scroll. Both the case's end, and earphones itself has magnets to hold each other.
It has a leather feeling to both the inside and outside of the case, and the touch control area of the earphones is also leather feeling, adding a nice touch that differs with other earphonnes.
The diamond feeling finish in the end of the case makes the case itself isn't earphones, more like some expensive jewelry case.

4. Fit
My ears are smaller than most people, for I am young, so it sometimes fall off when I jump, but when I put it the correct way, never falls out.

5. Audio
I am not an audiophile. I don't really care about the audio quality and how it sounds like unless the sound is too cringy and has so many white noise.
This earphones has white noise, but just a little bit, you won't notice except when you are in a quiet room.
The bass is boosted, but low sounds, and vocals can be cringy sometimes, so I should manually tune them with my phone's equalizer.

6. IPX6
Not tested yet, but they advertise as using it in the shower.

7. Stereo call
Yup. Stereo call. Call in both ears. But only right microphone seems to get the voice.

8. Pairing
Using BT 5, it is a breeze to connect.
Take both of them out, put to your ear, then ding! "Connected"
Done.

9. Charging
with micro-usb
wireless charging for optional purchase - 10 bucks

10. battery
Reasonable amount
You have 3.5 hrs of listening time in both ears, and you can charge 2 times more each by putting in the case.

===============

Overall, it is awesome and let's just pray it doesn't break for at least for an year.

One side note, I can activate assistant by double tapping in the left ear (yes it is touch control), but my S8 asks me if I want to customize with Automate/Tasker. Yup!
Will share that later as well.

If you have any questions, ask me! Thanks for reading my first ever product review in devRant! <3

An uncle of mine, owns an NFT/Betting startup (early 30s, so no veteran and no doesn't know much coding).
Got 3-4m USD as investments.

It's an utter garbage "app" that he knows will die in an year, and he's drawing big salary and buying properties from the funding until he has the "runway" of funds remaining while app/company works in the background

What bugs me isn't that he's feasting on some random investors' petty change, but that such "ideas" get money thrown at them while ive seen 100s of more fun ideas/apps back in uni-days that died in obscurity when people graduated and retired them as projects, being talked about in 1 liner in their CVs.

This world ain't right :v

My current dream project is sailing a 21st Century Message in a Bottle across the Atlantic Ocean from US to Europe, satellite tracking it in apps and desktop environment and more importantly inspiring school children everywhere that anything you can imagine is possible. Fortunately, the project is rapidly becoming a reality - here's how:
- teamed with a few amazing devs virtually
- team created an effective infrastructure for communication and knowledge sharing
- researched oceanic patterns, satellite communications, sensors, material design, recovery logistics...
- developed budget and received funding sign off
- created realistic, yet aggressive project plan with deliverable dates
- built relationships with two Universities for Oceanic knowledge assistance
- developed a partnership with NOAA and will share info

Oh yeah, we did all that and are having fun in only 25 days so far! More challenges to come but we embrace the challenges!

Clever use of a period...

Contact wants to discuss a list of projects with me next week.

What's the betting that these are unfunded ideas that need code?

I should just check by email, but it's been a while since anyone walked this path with me, so I'm up for some fun.

I see myself taking an advisory role in these projects for equity.

"First thing you need to do is obtain funding for them all. Then get back to me for my insights on next stage. Not sure how to get funding, but I'm not the the 'creative' side of the team."

Ideas aren't worth shit. I have a bunch every day and they are as worthless as yours.

Ideas without execution are like owning a book without reading it.

A company you loved working for announcing mass lay offs due to a lack of funding.

We were like a family which made it all the worse.

Well I got offered a position as the CTO of a local charity but the funding fell through. That job sounded pretty sweet.

Otherwise my dream is honestly not having one, like in a situation where I didn't need the money. I'd not working and basically just spend my time volunteering for stuff at my church

Me: Why are we spending time building reports for Support? AFAIK they never read or use them.

Boss: Seems they expect you to do it.

Me: Then what exactly are they supposed to be doing? All the issues seem to just escalate back to us.... We should just make sure issues never get into PROD

Boss: I agree, they're always firefighting... we gave them more funding so eventually they should catch up **Me: I highly doubt it, you should just stop hiring monkeys** esp. if we prevent PROD issues.

Me: Yea... we should prevent production issues because someone always has to pay off the (technical) debt and interest rates in PROD are very high

nice, 10k reached before sidtheitclown! (that’s all that actually matters, heh)

so, yes, as promised it’s me… chris from chris’ full stack blog.

I think kiki knew this, as I used to be called fullstackchris… though very briefly... don't know why i was ever worried about the old clowns i used to work for knowing my identity here

i’m a host of react round up, and also an ex-futures trader (that life is / was hidden on Twitter), I’ve recently quit because I’m ALSO still building 4ish SaaS products including The Wheel Screener (wheelscreener.com) and CodeVideo (codevideo.io), over my LLC, Full Stack Craft (fullstackcraft.com)

oh yeah, and on top of that i have a full time job in Switzerland (read: not poor boi 38 or 40 hour work week, 42 minimum)

so yeah, its a fucking lot of shit to do and sometimes it’s too much! glad i have this place to vent

so, don’t be too harsh on me… really, 99% of my bitterness comes from the approximate 5 years of my working life (2018-2023) were taken from me by lying business folk type who actually didn’t know what the FUCK they were doing or talking about, even after promising me they did (at two different companies). Listen, I’m all for people telling me iTs a RiSkY VeNTuRe; i get it. But if you say everything is rock solid (like funding, my future employment, etc.) and it is not, then fuck you; you’re just lying to my face, it has nothing to with management vs employee, engineer vs. non-technical - you’re literally just a *bad person* (sorry, mechanical engineering genes and honesty to the core - sue me) To be sure, I was partially at fault - too optimistic, and too gullible, and I’ve have since learned my lesson. but still working on it. (obviously)

but things are look up - my company is running better than ever, the current job is great with insanely smart people

In the end, it’s always the hardcore engineers who are the most honest, hardworking, respectful, and the best to work with - you people know who you are…

Until then… see you in the next rant!!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Dutifully signed,

🤡

Font Awesome. Stop changing the format. 10 changes/page refreshes and I still don't have the fucking icon. what is it? fa fas or fa-solid or fucking what now?... make your fucking mind up!

What is it with companies that get super popular through crowd funding and then just end up annoying?

Your tagging system sucks too. Finding relevant icons could be much better with underlying tags.

I'm so fucking frustrated with my ex company CEO, this motherfucker made everyone move to Bangalore costing is employees a good chunk of their salary and this delusional ASSHOLE knew that only half of the expected funding was coming in January 2023 itself and they'd be out of funds by July/August, they let go few folks from the team, fired the entire marketing team and expected to make the product profitable. The only reason I had stayed at that time was because the product was interesting to build and the scale I was working with was crazy like 100k request per minute peaks and avg of 10k rpm. I left the company in August...

This MOTHERFUCKER hasn't paid out final settlement after leaving for most employees and he openly says to the folks who are still working there that paying us is not his priority.

I hope your Atlas cluster gets fucking deleted, accesses revoked and entire AWS setup goes down forever, bitch.

We can't goto courts because the company law tribunal needs atleast 1 crore (1.2 million usd) of unpaid dues to declare it insolvent in a years time..

This asshole deducted taxes from our salaried but didn't pay them to the income tax department for an entire fucking financial year.

What a cheating, delusional, sick bastard. And he's still not willing to sell off the company to pay off the debts and call it a day.

Aarrghhhh on top of losing 2-3k USD I might have to pay my taxes approx 5-6k USD to the govt to keep my records well maintained.

What a grade A delusional asshole 😡
If he won't clear the dues till December, I'm gonna launch a mass of social media posts and destroy his reputation so that he doesn't get one penny of VC funds in the future I'm gonna make sure of that...

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

#Startup #Funding

I've been working like a mad woman in a startup for 3+ years now. They feel like 10. Or at least the tech stacks we went through.
Never, ever join a startup, regardless of compensation, unless you know you can emotionally and mentally recover from that startup failing as if it is yours, not your bosses. Otherwise, it's just a shitty short experience.

My long experience is shitty, but man. I don't know.Those who built google, wanted to make a search engine. Did they know they're gonna be good? NO. This is the result of them being good. They now have that great product that succeeds and is able to become a self-referential piggy bank. You cannot be a self-referential piggy bank based on a fucking belief and idea, and a bunch of VCs who already put money in you. You know why? BECAUSE GUESS WHO IS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR SUSTAINING YOUR START UP NOW?

The bloods and passions of youth, that join your startup, thinking they can make a difference, and you just undermine them constantly thinking that no engineer can make a difference if they can't ensure compliance with your dumb funding strategy.

Don't even get me started on the fact that most people who work for startups, rely on either laziness or passion. It's like a bunch of kids in art school, whose professor doesn't like anything they make, but they still kinda like it hoping one day they leave and become artists themselves. Then they discover that this shit professor actually taught them nothing about creativity in the real world, and what it takes to push something out.

And, it finally fucking hit me.

The reason startups will never work in this year, and beyond, AND TILL I SEE A CHANGE IN ATTITUDE IN 10 YEARS.....

The market won't fucking allow it with the current strategy tech companies are a fan of: hire a bunch of passionate devs who wanna learn a tool through doing our unique work. Doesn't matter. DIVERSITY. THE UNION IS THE PASSION. That's dumb as fuck.
Why?
Here:

- Passionate people do not have to use passion as an incentive, the passion was there, and them getting their idea made or money is the incentive
- If you hire a passionate person - even if they are the fucking best - you just made their passion a tool, in getting your PRs done and shit epics scoped AT BEST, and so the tools you're teaching them to use are getting away with doing less impactful, productive, creative work.

I AM SO DEPRESSED.

MY FUCKING COLLEGE PISSED VOC REHAB OFF SO MUCH THEY DROPPED MY FUNDING.

i got to waste 6 hours doing unnecessary work to learn this.

Thanks, Columbia College. Eat shit.

!rant + !story

I hate every human on the planet that says WFH is just people pretending to work or are slackers looking for an easy way out.

Now the story bit.

In 2021, I joined a company (I really wish I could name-drop the company), where the micromanagement was OFF THE CHARTS.

The company got a client who pitched a product they wanted built and gave us a super reasonable 3 months to complete it. I was really happy about the timeline and kept working under keystroke monitoring, which I didn't really mind at the time.

3 days into the development, the client informed us that they are pulling the funding i.e. they don't have money to pay us.

So at that point the client gave us two choices:

1. Stop the development right away and get paid for the time that we put in already.
2. Finish the project under 9 days. We would still get paid for the 12 days total, mind you. Not the original budget set.

So the motherfucking boss chose the second option and then the chaos ensued.

Devs screaming at each other on calls/slack. The boss yelled at us all the time about the completion. It was wild.

I had to wake up at 7:30 AM and start coding and log off at 11 PM for literally the next 9 days including Saturday and Sunday. No holidays allowed for the timeline. This was all at a WFH job.

So fuck anyone that says WFH is easy and just for slackers.

We're getting done with SidTheITGuy's bachelor party where we auctioned him off.

Before it was through, the lucky winner who snagged him at the bachelor-auction had already sold him to another, gotham's most mysterious tech heiress, looking to do a mezzanine funding round on her relationship status:

Meet, Ms. Planky Le Planche, the new fiance of SidTheITGuy:

Go to bed tired. Wake up tired. Get up tired.
A month ago I was excited doing my work, I even was planning a huge change on one of our projects, detailed everything and passed it over to other folks to get funding. Now I seriously doubt I could pull it off. When I start reading a line of code I forget how it started before I reach the \n.
There was this thing I was asked to implement... A nifty one, I already could see the implementation. As I came to it I got stuck. Like when your body gets "stuck" when you get scared to death - you know what you have to do (i.e. RUN), you know how, but for some reason you just can't... Couldn't come up with anything. The other dev had to take it over and implemented it all in like 4 hours. Just like that. And it took me another 4 hours to understand how and why it worked when I know it should not take me that long as I used to write similar algorithms myself for fucks sake! I know I could have written it myself... but I couldn't..

I'm seriously worried.. Is this the end of my carreer as a dev? Am I broken somehow? I have some vacation days saved but I doubt it would be enough... Don't know if changing workplaces would work as well. I've always wanted to leave 9/5 and start working on my own project full time but now I am not sure I could pull it off either.. wtf is happening.. wtf... wtf..

Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!

April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!

July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....

August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...

September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'

somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..

I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.

Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.

Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.

Can I?

ok. been going full steam since December with 1 day off since. managing teams, review designs, designing, prototyping, code reviewing, mentoring, and doing project. management. i get that it's a "flat" org structure but hire proper PMs and BAs instead of trying to pinch pennies. all the while, i see marketing with deeeeeeep pockets spending money on anything like mommy and daddy are funding their spring break getaway. i need time to disconnect and recharge my spirit.

My laptop decided to not turn on or charge anymore in times where I needed it a lot and when repairment funding is not the best. Thank you, universe

Given the recent election, I'm taking measures to ensure the privacy and security of my data. Call me paranoid, but I think the NSA is going to be getting some extra funding soon. I'm already working on encrypting a ton of my data. Any other tips some of you guys could give me?

The best way to get funding from VCs now is to include the following words: ML, AI, IoT. To even blow their minds more, add Blockchain.

This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.

I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.

As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.

One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.

In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.

Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.

We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.

What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.

The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.

The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.

INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').

Three years ago I started developing a platformer game on Unity. Really low budget if you consider $0 as funding. I had six levels and it looked really well, the problem though was I got bored

How to get funding for your startup in India?

Just sprinkle a little bit of blockchain on your project idea. Done 😂😂

I remember my colleague who was DevOps guy (15+ years exp) in our one very good project about kids' edutainment.

He always breaks things & blames others when only he had admin access of the tool.

When client was very much interested in Android app, our that DevOps focusing totally on REST API & ignored Android app related DevOps tasks.

Our Android CI/CD was not complete till project ended. Due to his stubborn nature we couldn't take benifit of automation testing.

You can't tell him how to do any task, if you tell then it will be taken by him as an insult to his intelligence.

He would waste his 2 business weeks to find a way to do that task, then he would do some frugal trick half heartedly then he will leave it. Still he wouldn't accept your help due to his ego & he would work on tasks which he likes even though they are of low priority.

He was hellbent on cost cutting so he reduced caching availability to save extra billing, now we couldn't had enough speed for even 10 users to show recommendation feed by API.

Due to this our client couldn't show demo to angel investors properly & didn't get funding.

I don't how with such a bad attitude, he could survive so long.

He had plenty of training certificates (Salesforce etc.) with very little practical knowledge.

God save people of his current & future projects.

1. Kill Internet Explorer
2. Kill anyone who sell their web/app/design services cheaply that broke the market value
3. Kill anyone who want something in exchange of "exposure" or "you'll get the money when we get funding or IPO" or some shit like that, you name it.

Need 20000 next week to pay my devs to hold off till the other funding clears. Not sure how im going to pull this off

I'm using fucking Fortran 77 and Perl
The government needs to start funding nuclear or I will beat a bitch

The day my company got its first round of funding

The worst guy I worked with: Ex Military from USA, psychopath creating SaaS, B2B solution. The business idea was good and also got funding. He was so fucking racist.

When I joined his project there were 4 developers already working for him. One by one they all leave. I worked for the first 3 months taking over all the project.

Between the next 3-4 months I onboard 10-15 different developers and do knowledge transfer for all 10-15. Nobody works with him for more than 2 weeks.

He wants to developer do fucking 4 hours of meeting each day, repeating the same thing each time and expecting 8 hours of output. hire 3 project managers in 6-8 months. each one left.

I also told him i want to leave the project. By different ways he manages to keep me approx. 1 year. At end I told him this is my last month find another developer, So I can hand over the project. He was not able to find one. I leave the project he fucked up my profile.

Till date he has been looking for a developer, even trying to onboard developers in profit sharing.

So I have been tripoing about an idea and now is the time to start on it. I have 9 months to get money, to be able to fund myself to avoid external pressure that could scew the product.

Any ideas on raising 100,000$ in 9 months?

As a 17 year old iOS Developer it is hard to find iOS jobs. I found one and 8 months after working here their funding is low and they can’t afford for me to work anymore and are cutting my hours😤

Incredible that these companies with literally no product, and barely a website (if any) come around offering 100K+ jobs

They have funding out of their ass but literally NO real-world value... it's amazing to me.

Guess it really is not what you can do but who you know.

The ruling government coalition of my country officially prohibited ANY pay raises in 2024 and is likely to limit them until 2026, obliterated running tax exemption agreements on Intellectual Property specifically targeting software developers, raised tobacco taxes by 25%, killed fossil fuel-powered company cars while barely investing ANYTHING in electric infrastructure, and severely cut public transport funding.

AM I SUPPOSED TO JUST SIT BACK AND TAKE A YEARLY 5000 EURO LOSS WHILE MY MARKET VALUE INCREASES?? WTF man.

Good job centrists, greens, socialists and liberals. The only thing I can do to punish them is by voting for extreme left or right. Way to go to turn a law-abiding, moderate citizen into a riled-up, disillusioned mofo.

I hate web development
I mean why it has to be everywhere and so important.
I joined college my friend calls 4 days before my quantum physics test. Asks if I wanted to do internship. My reply sure.
( Level of knowledge at that time no idea what API is, what react is but it's just making webpages ) made a nice homepage within 4 hours of YouTube 2 tutorials and 2 developing that. Friend appreciated his manager also liked.
But failed to deliver the complete e-commerce website's frontend.

Comes next, hackathon nothing related to Android specific( I like coding for Android) need webdev in one way or other. One senior asks if want to go together sees my GitHub and rejects politely by my skills ( I would have too).
Went on with my 2 more friends with thought of making an all Android app guys team, next week team breaks. I then got offer from a friend to join with them in web development I agreed now prepare for web development.
Team was rejected internal politics of organizers ( would take no all fresher's team).

Dropped learning webd.
Now started flutter and it feels good and comfortable but stability isn't permanent.

Now seeing GSoC
Sigh...Most requirements are for web , hacktober fest also had things related to web maybe I don't recall. Still thinking about it sigh...

Got selected for college app development team. The head had to be one with excellent webd skills.

Now college provides funding for projects and ideas, prototype requires making prototype. Most easiest thing to work on
.
.
.
.
.
web development.

For the love of the God and compiler. Why do tech companies keep putting finance people in charge of operations?

Everything gets reduced to a value in a spreadsheet and ifsum<pretendprofits it’s a problem.

Company just closed $40m in funding and here I am quibbling about fixed costs with some MBA holding jackass to get $200 so I can equip my team with a licenses for a better IDE.

I’m this close to saying fuck it, buy independent licenses and then expense it back to the company. It’ll cost more than bundling but that’s why I’m not in finance.

Overall, pretty good actually compared to the alternatives, which is why there's so much competition for dev jobs.

On the nastier end of things you have the outsourcing pools, companies which regularly try to outbid each other to get a contract from an external (usually foreign) company at the lowest price possible. These folks are underpaid and overworked with absolutely terrible work culture, but there are many, many worse things they could be doing in terms of effort vs monetary return (personal experience: equally experienced animator has more work and is paid less). And forget everything about focus on quality and personal development, these companies are here to make quick money by just somehow doing what the client wants, I'm guessing quite a few of you have experienced that :p

Startups are a mixed bag, like they are pretty much everywhere in the world. You have the income tax fronts which have zero work, the slave driver bossman ones, the dumpster fires; but also really good ones with secure funding, nice management, and cool work culture (and cool work, some of my friends work at robotics startups and they do some pretty heavy shit).

Government agencies are also a mixed bag, they're secure with low-ish pay but usually don't have much or very exciting work, and the stuff they turn out is usually sub-par because of bad management and no drive from higher-ups.

Big corporates are pretty cool, they pay very well, have meaningful(?) work, and good work culture, and they're better managed in general than the other categories. A lot of people aim for these because of the pay, stability, networking, and resume building. Some people also use them as stepping stones to apply for courses abroad.

Research work is pretty disappointing overall, the projects here usually lack some combination of funding, facilities, and ambition; but occasionally you come across people doing really cool stuff so eh.

There's a fair amount of competition for all of these categories, so students spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff like competitive programming which a lot of companies use for hiring because of the volume of candidates.

All this is from my experience and my friends', YMMV.

half of these YC companies don't even show up on the first page of google when you search them by name...

my company & all my products do, with a _very_ basic set of meta tags and a few blog posts 🤷‍♂️

it's officially a 🤡's world, and we're just living it in

Well at least he added the time....

My Drafts section is looking pretty nice now huh? :)

@dfox is the # of hours between posts now dynamic as well?

And perhaps its time to think about getting outside funding and help. Seems growth is now exponential? and I'm kind of feeling this is like the Facebook/Twitter for Developers.... but prolly not sustainable with just 2 devs who are also footing the bill.

In startup speak I guess validation is over and you have won!

I was away for a long time. Now I got a new job which means it's time to start ranting. Fuck this legacy code is worse. I mean, a fucking cat running after a mouse could write a better source code if he had somehow pushed buttons while doing its job. Every fucking best practice I know is crushed to bits. And the funny part is, this company/startup recently got $300.000 funding.

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

Nope, I haven't built a startup. I lack:

Product Idea
Funding
Motivation

Basically all of what's required.

npm fund, shamelessly plugging one single person's funding ad into the whole fucking community platform.

No, thanks.

I hate the US education system, its just designed to fuel capitalism. It keeps getting less funding so that actually passionate, intelligent people get kicked out and replaced with people who only want to be a teacher so they can have power over others.
Why do they block news websites? Why do they block github, so their own robotics team can't even access the essential building blocks for the robot? They make everything more complicated and for the reason that it might distract you. Maybe just make topics engaging and not boring asf, just cramming for the exams so the school gets more funding. Maybe prepare students for jobs, allow them to do projects, pursue classes that interest them, and have any sense of individualism.
Anyways, yeah, the school blocked github so I can't do my FBLA project, I can't access the code for programming our robot for competitions, I can't even download software required for half of these classes. I have a Linksys router, is there any way I could set it up to bypass the firewall?

Yesterday : I hate everyone in Microsoft that works on this funding visual studio that now crashing every time I open my project 😤I'm going to kill them

Today : Wait... What is this? A new update? Solution now open without crashing! OH I LOVE MICROSOFT especially visual studio team 😘💗

Hello Devrant. I really need a second opinion on this one. I work in this promising start-up and our current evaluation is about 10 mill $. I have a vesting opportunity in the company where I earn 2.5% of none dilutable shares in the company over three years. I also get salary of about 500$ a month just to survive. Though it is the plan that I get a decent salary once we have more funding secured.

I'm the CTO of the company where we are 10 employees in total and 5 are in the development team.

I've been programming for about one year now so I'm not that experienced and some of the guys I lead are much more experienced than me. Which is good because I grow my skills quickly, but it is a challenge sometimes.

I'm really in doubt if I have got a good deal in the company. I started working in February and back then the company was valued at around 1.5 mill $. I have always been loose about not demanding money right away and said to the CEO that we will figure that out about the money eventually and I trusted him blindly. When he gave the offer of 2.5% vesting I just accepted it right away, because I was a beginner in coding and I just wanted to learn. Also I was traveling around the world for a few months at the time and it was a great way to get a little money quickly.

I also study together with two colleges who are some of my best friends. We study business development at university and have round 1.5 year left. It's a lot of work
but we've managed to only study about 1 week in advance of the exams and still pass. So we all still working full time on the company.

I've never known how many shares the other guys had, but yesterday me and the other partners had a meeting about some contract and the CEO pointed out how many shares everybody had. I was stunned to hear that the my two other colleges that I study with have 10% each. And the reason for that is that they helped start the company from the beginning and I've only joined when it was around 6 months old. Still I find it difficult to that that it's fair that they should have 4 times as much as me. I would say the amount of value we provide to the company is about the same. One of the guys is only the son of the CEO, which should not change anything.

For me it's not all about the money but I don't want to be taken advantage of. I can't determine if I'm being overdramatic about this and whether it is a good deal or if it sucks and I should find another place to work. Also my studies at the University are pretty much intertwined with the company by now. All our school projects are something that creates value to the company and if I leave I would have to dramatically change the direction of my education.

I know that there is a lot of information here and that I'm not the best at writing, but what would you have done in my situation?

I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.

The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.

To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.

I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.

For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.

They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.

Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.

When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.

Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.

And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?

Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.

They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.

You can't make this stuff up.

Most people will know how the AI in 2001 A Space Odyssey came to be called HAL. By the simple expedient of taking the letters IBM and applying -- to each.
How many remember how the Windows have all come to know and love started out as Windows NT?
It came about when Digital pulled the funding for the new version of it's VMS operating system, and Bill Gates swooped in and hired Dave Cutler, who basically took all the code with him to make the new version of Windows.
And stick the finger to his former employer, incremented VMS to get WNT.

[Background]
Back in September I joined a startup after my first job in MNC for about 1.8 yrs as a fresher. I always wanted to learn, but the experience in that MNC was not at all fruitful. So ai decided to join a small/mid size company or a startup. To my luck, I got in this small startup in a week after my resignation as a front-end dev (always wanted to be).
It's an automation company, so you can find software, electronics, even mechanical engineer.
The team was almost a year younger than me. It was a team of around 12 people, in which 5 of them were from Business development.

The tech team was too driven and knowledgeable. Always trying new stuffs and motivating to do the same. I was highly motivated by them in my initial days, watching them working on new stuffs.

So I started with revamping their website completely in Angular 4, and did it in around a month or so, being new to Angular. Outcome was pretty satisfactory. I wanted to work on new projects, but just to get the cashflow in they started getting in WordPress projects. It was frustrating, I wanted to work more on new technologies like Angular, React, etc...but just for the survival of the company I had to work on WordPress, so to respect their urge to get going I kept working on 3-4 projects in parallel, and mind you the clients were from hell !!

Fast-forward 4 months, I am still working on few WordPress websites, and one internal GPS based project in React. And I haven't received my salary for past 3.5 months, since the company is still struggling with the issue of funding and getting money from clients. I kinda liked working there because there was lot to learn even though they are so young, but I had bills to pay too.

And I am in dilemma to leave the company or not, because I already stretched 3 months out of good will and guilt of leaving the company in high time. So i finally let the CEO know that I cannot stick for any longer. And i was done with the false promises of getting the salary "next month" everytime. All the money getting inside of company was invested heavily on the product we were building and no one was getting the salaries. Others were fine since they were founding members too.

Long story short : I finally left immediately and now working in a good company as a React dev. I hope they do well and I would love to see them grow, but please *STOP* making false promises and hold on to employees on a lie.

Being able to have a small team sit down all day for several weeks or months before having an alpha version to present to the public or to investors. How can you finance making your proof of concepts?

!dev

the most ridiculous things get the best backing on kickstarter

I'm talking 200% of initial funding

I had this boss once who called himself a sitting bull sometimes. He was about 60, an absolute dictator, strong right wing and building an aura of fear around him. He had this emberassing macho attitude which was especially delicate since he was a protective of the female ceo. He talked to everyone, colleagues, customers, partners like they where enemys and was extemely aggressive towards everyone. Meetings where extremly emberassing because he insulted everyone (except us devs), talked much bs an didn't let anyone else speak - including customers.

He was also paranoid af. Once he talked the ceo into firing a team lead he disliked. Before the guy got to know this, he called me, and wanted me to sneak in his office, copy everything from his computer in case he would destroy everything when I realized he's fired. As if everything relevant wasn't on GitHub anyway and is if the poor guy would be uprofessional as sitting bull.

The sitting bull lead the department like a ponzi scheme: He required constantly new projects with funding for some years to maintain the old ones and their piles of tech debt. Dev team grew and grew but every insider knew the bubble will explode at one point. One of the last projects was a partner project with another institution. Naturally he didn't want us to do anything for this project but use our man power to rescue older ones. One pm guy was employed fifty percent as ours and fifty at the partner. So while months passt by and we delivered absolute nothing but lame excuses, his other employer started to ask questions. At one point I told him, and told his other employer afterwards, that the sitting bull never intended to anything for the project. When the sitting bull learned the pm. Guy told them the truth he called him a traitor and fired him instantly.

I left shortly after and the bubble imploded eventually. The sitting bull retired after an heart attack. From over twenty dev positions a single one remains and his main job to shit down one broken service after another...

I've developed a habit to kickstart stuff I probably use once or twice in my life, am I the only one? Deciding to block all traffic to kickstarter.com

Our business partner just tried to deliver a motivational pep-talk to the dev team that ended up sounding more like a sermon. Instead of hearing we did a good job, we heard we could be doing a better job. Never mind that the project is rushed, lacking funding and built on an unstable codebase inherited from a proof of concept demo. I just lost all respect for the guy, who I thought appreciated how hard we've been working. Apparently he's just another administrative cog who wants to climb the ladder of success while standing on other people's hard work.

Right, no more extra miles for this project. Time to just coast on and see it sink in its own excrement.

When you have a great idea and 'possibly' the skills to pull it off
But...you lack the bank account and the experience to confidently try, as well as the social ability needed to attempt crowd funding

okay so I already did one of these but I totally blanked about the actual best worst

Best
Got offer to be CTO of a local charity
Worst
Funding fell through, so it didn't happen

I used to love the hero treatment I got long ago in my previous company. Appreciations and what not for conducting events, contributing to open source. I think I burned out later. Later the hero treatment stopped there and I craved for it when I wasn't doing the stuff I used to do - basically I was previously keeping others happy I guess, instead of keeping myself happy. Contributing to open source or conducting events was not even part of the day job and was mostly considered outside the working hours and hence one had to stretch to do all that extra stuff. I over did stuff I guess and burned out

In my current company, I see heros and appreciations so much for contributing to open source though not all our roles are completely defined as open source roles and we instead have to work on closed source or yet to be open sourced stuff. My role is contributing a very tiiiiiny testing bit in an yet to be open sourced project, but a few other colleagues of mine work on closed source paid advanced version of the open source core project

Seeing all the hero treatment where I'm not the hero and seeing all the appreciation, I wonder how it doesn't seem right. Surely I'm jealous, lol. But I also felt the treatment also shows some sort of Special treatment for some people. It's "Special" and not exactly for all and only for open source contributors or people doing all the popularly so called as "cool" stuff. Fortunately for them their job role kinda mentions that I believe. And people working on closed source are now trying to contribute there. I'm stuck with some of my main day job work and dying in guilt for burning out, and not being able to contribute to open source and also kind of starting to hate open source for it's dark sides. Reminds me Batman dialogue "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.". Open Source dark sides - of course the possibile dark sides of companies funding open source, the people behind the companies and also of course my company being one of them possibly, though if you ask anyone they say "Community comes first". That's full of lies is what I would say.

Inclusivity gets thrown out the window. Heroes get to talk. Heroes get worshipped. Others are not even noticed I think. I guess the only way to get noticed is to imitate the heroes

At some point I realized I'm envying or idolizing a crazy set of people, or like putting them on a pedestal. I'm trying to fix that in my head. But oh my, you should see all the treatment, the respect, etc. Surely some people just are there to do meh or grunt work or even good work or whatever without much appreciation, and then have to move on. No respect or consideration for opinions, thoughts usually. Some of them don't even have the time to care to check what people have to say. Top down hierarchy but they say it's flat hierarchy. They don't even wanna listen to some of us I think, that is during team meetings. Only very few care from what I have noticed

One good thing is I have to come to realize how much I'm like them in some behaviours and feeling damn guilty. I sometimes spend time thinking how to change myself for the long term. And how to avoid the toxic behaviors in the team and also control my anger and control my response to their behaviours. I'm also trying to understand where I'm climbing the ladder with my assumptions and also trying to see the "real" thing instead of assuming or being blind or imagining etc. But it has become so hard because idk if people are faking it, it's become very hard to always assume people are telling the truth 🙈 though it makes to assume or believe that by default. If people are okay with themselves lying, who am I question that huh

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.

Me: *watches programming video on Y-Combinator*

Also Me: "why the heck are they talking about recursion and not funding startups?"

I have to choose to accept an internship offer for dev role between company A and company B (potential PPO at both).

Company A: Unicorn startup ~3000 employees. A disruptor.
Company B: Early stage startup ~30 employees but has funding and all. Also, sounds promising. Loved their interview process.

Both are interesting to me and pay almost equally. Any inputs ranters?

Is it harder to get funding for your idea or come up with an idea?

I need to build a mock-up site to demo a concept what's the fastest way to get set up?

Need a db, login and sorta like devrant collab or actually Kickstarter... Or actually pretty much like them except not for funding products

There is so much potential of funding a startup at my work atm. We develop an open source software which will be used on several public institiutions in several countries soon. At least in one country they will be forced by law to do so. One could earn so much money by offering help desk Support, data protection legal stuff, hosting etc. for said software because we do not even have a concept nor a single position for such things. Or develop plugins and stuff for special needs. So much money. But funding a startup, actually get those fundings etc. is much work also. I am too lazy.

About to have my first interview ever for a sw Dev position. Any advice? It's a co op job posted by my uni at a local start up (already has funding and a product).

With bitcoin/binance still allowing russia to move money about, is anybody abandoning it? I don't feel comfortable using it, but also if it becomes their only way to fund themselves, the government will push through new tax laws on it and throttle it anyway. Or just outright ban people from using it.

Funding a war is one of the occassions where decentralised financing becomes a major problem.

Dev ranting about US foreign policy. Trigger warning!

US has a track record of funding the bloodiest regimes, funding terrorists and then using it to create problems for neighbouring regions. I'll tell you step by step how that's done.

1. Look for opposition in non-aligned/sovereign or even-allied country but opposing viewpoints. (Remember spying on German chancellor, Merkel?)
2. Covertly provide them support (providing fundings, potentially arming them).
3. Slow media propaganda, claim the country is undemocratic.
4. Opposition might stir things up.
5. Paint the current leadership in the sovereign country same as Hitler.
6. Continuous bombardment of propaganda using MSM like CNN, MSNBC, Fox, France24, or bribed insiders.
7. Once the regime is finally toppled, black out the media, and see deals can be made with the opposition (Oil, Military bases, or whatever)
8. Reality: these countries are worse now, but no media coverage because exploitation is complete and no-one gives a shit about democracy or whatever. (If you watch few videos about Iraq, Libya their own people says they shouldn't have toppled their leader.).

Any ideas on where startups are supposed to look to get funding?

I wanted to build a platform for student who wants to do research and are having hard time finding a good professor within university or from outside, so naturally I started asking professor I knew and this is what I get:

Normally they will only hire students from within university unless student himself has funding, and even with that hiring students from outside is a lot of procedures.

And no, such platform probably won’t be that useful as they get a lot of emails asking about research.

Startup idea instantly killed.

Been applying with a couple of colleges for a certificate course on data management and the admissions coordinator is being a complete fuck! Called and left a message to which he offered to arrange a phone call if I felt like I needed it (I didn't at the time) and so I politely ended that particular convo by saying "thank you and I'll be sure to send any questions your way" (I think a gesture of good faith considering he did offer a phone call).

I sent him a couple questions the day after asking politely application dates and then another the next day (he hadn't replied at that point, but I suppose it's better to show interest than not, especially since I'm entering into this with not - a - engineering /computer science background) about whether a campus tour is available and also about funding. And the guy just hasn't replied! It's been two full days now and I'm pretty sure that's not exactly kosher for a program coordinator to do. Like was I being too persistent with the emails (3 in total) instead of just waiting it out in the dark? (the issue is I'd need to wait until the next cohort so May of next year instead of January so I'm in a rush!)

It doesn't help that it turns out that the program coordinator is a professor at the college 🤔 so I think maybe he's got some big d*** issues

My office at the weekend, it’s quiet so no one annoys me, setup is good and my main side project at the moment involves a modification I want to proof of concept (to try and get funding to do it properly) to our main product so all my resources are there

How often does crowdfunding a prototype work out right?
Like I've been working on this prototype for 2 months and it is so damn expensive, especially with a horrible college job. I want to crowd-source the funding but I'm not sure about it.

Ever feel like all you ever do is recode the same projects over and over with no significant time or funding or sometimes energy to complete something that would be new or awesome ?

I really wish I had more opportunity to collaborate personally.

If someone asks you for a quote on a project and they use the phrase "It's like [SOCIAL_MEDIA_SERVICE], but for [TARGETED_DEMOGRAPHIC]" and they don't have VC funding, you're gonna have a bad time.

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).

mv /america/funding/coronavirus /china/coronavirus

Is that correct?

The more I am exposed to the more i realize they weren’t done building their weird crap yet I was seeing the self funding preview
Which sadly reminds me of joke where bill gates dies and is given a choice between heaven and hell

Obviously the top item on the table is NN, the "end users" from both sides of the connection on the net are for the saving it, and the middlemen that only own the "cables" want it to be repealed.

We have the solution to end this issue forever. It wont be easy, nor will it be fast.. unless certain "entities" team with us in secrecy. (There's a reason why certain "entities" have stayed silent regarding NN, due to agreements to not get involved due to the risk of backlash. AND if NN is repealed Those Entities cannot fix the problem as their hands are tied to continue to provide content to the end users.) Read between the lines you will understand it will all make sense later.

I will make The Official Public Statement within 24 hours of the FCC Vote. That statement will be how to get involved, help, get us jump started in your area, funding, the ENTIRE details of the plan, goals, and timeline. AS WELL as how to contact us. This will take time and we are not a magic solution that will fix the problem overnight.

We are however THE solution to the underlying problem with ISPs of today. We have been researching for quite a while and digging deep into the entities that have caused us to get where we are now. The further you go digging into 'THEM' the more pissed off you become as you truly realize whats going on and has been on among the ISPs its MUCH deeper than you are being told.

OUR solution will remove all of "them" from the equation completely as well as being faster, and cheaper than the Tier 1 as you wont be paying for the connection or speed, you would be paying for the hardware/overhead cost. AND we will be bringing you closer to the content providers than EVER before.

AND we will be the only solution capable for competing in the current Tier1 Monopoly zones, I promise you they cannot match our plan's price, IF they did it would be only as a loss leader and NOT a sustainable long term solution for those competing with us at are for-profit....

In order for our solution to work, and to keep the internet service non-bias, well non-bias from OUR members :) this will need to be a collective effort, focused one clearly defined vision. WE WILL AND WE MUST ALL set "profits" aside on this as profits in selling nothing other "connection" to the internet has gotten us in the mess we are in now. AND YES we realize profits help maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, BUT that isn't true in this case...Overhead from our view includes those anticipated costs.

Smaller ISPs will need to make a decision, give up profits, become one with us, and be apart of the mission OR they will be left to suffer at the mercy of the ISPs above them setting the cost of bandwidth eventually leading to their demise.

This will happen because we wont be bound by the T1s .... WE would be the "Tier 0" that doesn't exist ;)

This sounds crazy, impossible, BUT its not, it will work WILL happen, regardless of the FCC's vote. as if the FCC choices to keep NN, its only a matter of time till the big lawyers of the ISPs find some loophole, or lobby enough to bring us back to this.

Legistlation is NOT the solution its just a band-aid fix as the cancer continues to grow within.

PLEASE understand that

Until the vote is made, and we release what we are doing, stay put, hang in, it will all be explained later, we are the only true solution.

BIG-ISPs WILL REGRET WHAT THEY HAVE DONE!

What needs to be understood by all is with net neutrality inplace the ability to compete aginst the Tier 1s directly over customers and reinvent the internet to lower or remove costs completely, increase speeds AND expand to underserved/unserved communities ITS NOT POSSIBLE WITH NN

NN REPEAL is the only way to the fixing the problem for good... yes the For profit BIG ISPs will benefit but not forever.. as repealing it opens the doors for outside the box big picture innovators to come in and offer something different, the big ISPs have clearly over looked this small detail being the possibility of a “NonProfit CoOp TIER 1 ISP” entering into the game thru end users and businesses working together as one entity to defeat them... THE FOR PROFIT ISPs over looked this because they are blinded by the profit potential of NN Repeal, never did they consider our option as a possible outcome because no one has attempted it....

We will unite as one

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Are there any freelancers from the UK around here? I'm going it alone and I could do with some advice on finding filler projects whilst I wait for a client to look at funding