This happened when I was on third semester of the career at university. I had my first boyfriend, the "Python" guy. He has that nickname because he used Python as his main programming language and nobody on the classroom used it.

In a few words, he was a... horrible human being. He talked down to me almost all the time, saying to me that my country was sh*t (he is from United States, and for a reason he never wanted to told me, he cannot go back to his country), that my university was sh*t and he said "you're will be lucky if you rot programming in a chair".

As you might wondering, yes, unfortunately it was a toxic relationship. Once he said he wanted to kill the teacher because he though that he hacked his laptop D:

He claimed that he was going to teach me python and security stuff, bla bla bla, but nothing. I learned python by my own.

I almost lost my faith in dev future because I though that the only ones that could have a real future in programming where people without ethics and only if they have a friend or a relative on a company.

The saddest part was that I dated him because I love smart boys, but he was just an idiot that, furthermore, wanted to change me (he pressured me to have tattoos, dye my hair and have sex, things that, of course, I didn't do).

I found courage to break up with him. I waited until the semester ends (in order not to lose my programming final projects) and, the day after the last day of class, I broke up with him.

I recovered my faith on programming when, next semester, one of the teachers invited me to give a python programming workshop :D and I gave two python workshops, and two of mobile development.

Now I'm working as a junior .NET developer. Thank God I broke up with him before the relationship became even worse. "Python" wanted to marry me after a year! O_O

Attended one of the best meetups ever. To give you an idea how awesome it was..

Speaker took the first ~20 minutes introducing himself.
His intro card deck kept referring to himself in the third person (he is the only employee in consulting 'company'). Ex. "Mr. Smith began his humble career .."

The powerpoint presentation began with him clicking each page, not executing the slideshow (ex. pressing F5).
Finally someone asked "Can you make slide bigger?"

S:"You can't read that?..um..sure...I guess .."
Starts fumbling around the zoom ...
Dev: "No, can you start the slideshow?"
S: "I don't know what you mean...there...I zoomed it, is that better? Now I can't see my notes..just sec.."
<fumbles again with the zoom>
Dev: "No, not zoom, start the slide show, press F5"
S: "Oh...you want me to F5 it...OK..."
<he *clicks* the slide show button>

Finally getting into code, trying to get out of powerpoint ...
S: "How do I get out of this fullscreen?.."
Dev: "Hit escape"
S:"No..um.."
<keeps trying to click on 'something'>
S:"I see visual studio, but its not on the big screen... "
<keeps click on 'something', no one is sure whats going on>
Dev: "Hit Escape to stop the slideshow"
<finally hits escape, then able to put Visual Studio on the big screen>
S: "Ahh...there, I figured it out."

Speaker had no end of making wild/random statements like:
".Net Core is the future of Microsoft, if you're using .Net 4.5...forget it, its not even supported anymore."
"When I was at Microsoft Build, I asked them why not put all the required .Net assemblies in one directory. Looks like with .Net Core, they listened to me" (he was serious)
"I don't use SQL Server Mgmt Studio. Its free and it sucks. I use <insert a very expensive SSMS clone>, its great, you guys should check it out", then proceeds to struggle to open a query window to write some SQL.
"When you use .Net Core and EntityFramework, you have to write your own stored procedures. If a developer can't write stored procedures, he shouldn't be in this business."

I was on the edge of my seat, hungry for the next crazy bat-shit thing to come out of his mouth. He did not disappoint. BEST MEETUP EVER!

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

Best current career choice:
Quit to become a Freelancer.

OH BOY did I sleep bad directly after that decision - no contracts, no sales running.

Oh BOY do I now 2 days later sleep like a dam relaxed, happy baby :) - My network for the win!

The days before handing in my resignation I really looked forward to just leaving, but the actual task again was scary. Why? Cause until then future for me was bound to income, job=stable income = happy me, happy wife, happy child.

Now? Just 4 days later, If all goes to plan I'm already overbooked twice. Truth told!: Couldn't have done it without the network that I built over the years where I was employed. Let's see how this works out :)

I stand up with a huge smile each morning: Just a great feeling!

Goal for my dev career future?

I'll soon be 53, my career goal is to make it to retirement without fired for some random biz-talk excuse for being too old.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

Been reading devRant for a while now and I have to say I'm sad about the way the future of the software engineering looks like. Everyone seems to have a lot of hatred towards certain techniques and/or platforms and sad to say, but you are missing a lot.

I have been in the biz for around 15 years and have worked on Win, Linux, Mac, Unix, Symbian, Embedded etc. using all sorts of tools and languages and I must say it has taught me a lot and given diversity on my career and I hope you could also open your mind and start educating yourselves. Theres a world behind your bubble!

Peace and love!

!rant

Today I bring happy news. First company I interviewed at clicked so well, both personally and technically, and they expressed an eagerness to hire me on the spot. I figured we might as well talk salary to compare them against other interviews. The offer they made me was so good I decided to sign there and then. They said they participate in a fair wage program but for me this is absolutely the dream. I get lots of nice perks to boot. And they've already mailed me some tech documentation to go over so I can prepare, as I'll be working with the latest front end stuff and of course my trusty .NET (and yes I asked it'll be C#, haha).

I can't even begin to express how great this is. The last decade I've been unemployed for several years in total, and vastly underpayed when I was employed. I've worked in some toxic environments, been falling behind on tech and wrote a lot of rubbish code as a result of that. But it seems that somehow all the hard work I did put in paid off by taking a chance when it presented itself and go in accepting I might fail horribly. And I did bomb the tech questions actually. But they let me explain myself and come to answers together and saw beyond the black and white.

In short I feel like I've won the work lottery and will start 2018 in style. Part of me is still scared though, that there will be a mistake or a catch or even somehow I'll ruin everything. But that is the risk in life and I'm just going to have to deal. What I can control and will do is my very best, because I want to keep succeeding and have a great future career. And I hope I can inspire others in the same boat with my actions too.

Not really a rant but my biggest fuckup that entirely ruined my IT career and future life

> be me 21yo CS student looking for an internship
> looking for help with my friend and sent him my CV to apply to a big corp
> then I lied that I have sent CV to official email {here the fuck up begins}
> after that I got an instant phone call from a friend of him claiming that the CV was sent properly and I am going to visit a company
> I had a review but it was recorded my CV hasn't got precisely specified technologies so interviewer thought I can manage to work as a dev not an intern
> with my shitty communication skills I managed to "work" there 8days, fucked up someone's computer by deleting his Windows and all data he had and installing Ubuntu instead
> then shit got out of control for an intern I talked a lot of bullshit in this Corp they realized I was there an "alien" and I didn't even know what to do so I wanted to sudo rm - rf myself
> unfortunately my parents woke up that morning I decided to sudo rm - rf and and I am now in mental asylum with fucked up people and the Corp knows where am I and I am going to pay for my stupidity and being naive (I didn't even seen the CEO, I didn't have enough information that I really worked there)
> To sum up, being bipolar, naive and irresponsible has brought me to this point in life. Thank you for reading. I don't see a solution, my parents don't believe me and I feel isolated with this fuckup so I decided to share it as a remark for young people starting in IT. For me it already ended too fast.

this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.

I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.

There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.

There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.

Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.

I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.

I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.

I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.

And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.

I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.

I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.

My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.

On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.

I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.

I think I'm fucked

Dropped out after 4 months at Uni when I realised that I will learn absolutely nothing useful for my future career. We were either learning HTML/CSS or coding calculators in C# . At this point I was already writing my own PHP CMSs with huge databases for real life clients. I guess I can only blame my course level and maybe I could go someplace else but it probably wouldn't be so much different.

A month after I dropped out I got my first job as a junior Drupal developer. That was 7 years ago, now I'm a FrontEnd dev in a really great environment and throughout the years no one looked at my grades or even asked for them.

Experience and passion as as valuable if not more as your education.

What do you wanna become? / What are you?

1. PHP Developer
2. Python Developer
3. Node.Js Developer
4. JavaScript Developer
5. Java Developer
6. Android Developer
7. Other (please mention in comment)

I am Done! I am extremely burnt out and unhappy with my work. I have been doing this professionally for over 5 years now and much longer than that unprofessionally.
This new company I joined finally gave me the salary I always dreamt of but now I am extremely unhappy and depressed and anxious all the time. And I don't like the work I am doing. I don't like the team. I hate being isolated at home for over 2 years, working from home. I had a mental breakdown in the middle of the meeting the other day. And after that, I said. that's it. I am done. So, I gave the resignation letter. I don't know what I am gonna do. But I sure as hell can't do this shit any longer. But now, the fucking hr is making it even more difficult for me by not letting me leave without serving the notice period. I told her I am on fucking medication and I am having severe mental health issues. Now, she wants to see the medical certificate. Or I have to pay two months' salary. WTF? If I had that kind of money lying around, I wouldn't have slaved myself away at your shitty company, would I?
I went to my psychiatrist whom I have been seeing consulting for the last couple of years now. I asked for a medical certificate and he thinks it'll hamper my future career. So, he said I should get a certificate from a general physician. So, that's the world we live in then? You can't even speak the truth? And the way HR is behaving over the mail makes me feel like a total slave. I mean I am not at all fit for work these days, and it feels like, if she had her way, she would tie me down to a chair and ask me to push out code. what the fucking fuck. This is some fucked up industry and I think I am finally done with software development. But now, I don't have any idea what I am gonna do with my life or how am I gonna earn money. I am so burnt out and anxious that even the thought of working again gives me panic attacks. even working from home. What the fuck do I do?

Just want to share that in August I'll be starting my career as a developer, something which I'm super nervous and excited about.

I just finished my bachelor degree, and will be starting mid-August. I've been moderately interested in the concept of programming since I was 14, but I initially didn't think I had what it took to make it my profession ("Programmers need to be good at math and that sort of stuff, right?") So I studied electronics and started at the same place where I finished my apprenticeship, working IT support. Eventually, I found myself not fully pleased with how things had turned out and quit my job to get a bachelor degree. And now, having graduated a few days ago, I'm very excited to see what my future as a developer will bring. I'm stoked and nervous at the same time, and I just wanted to share this with someone.

During my time as a student, I've been so lucky as to have discovered the world of JavaScript/Node.js/React in addition to all the standard Java-centric curriculum they taught at school, and I think that's an area I hope to explore more in the coming future.

I just decided to take some time off from work, and use my savings to survive next months. I have been dealing with work related problems for a few years now, and since last year I was sure I needed time to recover my health and improve my skills, to get better job opportunities.

I was trying to balance my life and my time, working a bit less, trying to rest, study, and so on. I was hopeful I could achieve my goals just fine with some adjustments. But now... I just don't care.

Last Thursday my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Two weeks ago, my only brother lost his job.
The same happened with my bf, few months ago, and he needed to move to another state to get a new job.

There is so much going on... Sometimes I just feel like panicking.

It's sad to fear the future, and deal with so much uncertainty.

It's hard to deal with work and money issues. It's even harder to deal with serious health issues.

I hope things will get better somehow, but I needed to vent this. Sometimes life can be a bitch.

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

My SO got a promotion, and with it he's going to be out of town about every other week.

I told him I'm excited for him, that even though I'll miss him it's a sacrifice I'm happy and willing to make because it's so good for his career, and our future. I don't want him to distracted during his work trips about worries about my unhappiness.

But I miss him and this is so hard actually 😔

Happened to me - an experienced dev with most of the experience on the web.

I apply to this company that I had no idea what they do (big mistake on my part). I ace the technical interview, and they follow up with a request for a presentation on a topic, to see how well I can prove a point or understand a technology. So I do that. Everybody is listening carefully. Most people at the office didn't know the basics of what I was talking about, but there was a guy who knew more and asked the tough questions, but I didn't let down.

So we talk again, and again, and all is going well, we're out for a coffee, talk about the future of my career and the company, in a more casual setting. Got to know the CTO, etc. Everything was going stellar.

I was waiting for the offer, but instead I got a generic "We can't continue with your application" together with a notification that I was being blocked by the contact person.

Weirdest interview ever. And this thing really put me down and struck at my self-esteem. I mean was it really hard to mention whether you didn't like my expectations, or my skills, or my "fit for the team"? Or at least not block me like that, it's not like I'm gonna stalk you or anything. I still get birthday notifications on Skype from people I've interviewed with before, and I haven't written them since because they have other stuff to take care about, as do I.

Anyway. I got up and started again. New company. High expectations. High salary expectations. Rejection. Fuck.

Ok, start again. 2 companies this time. Both at the same time. Both make me an offer. Have to turn one down. Harder than I had imagined. The choice that I made literally changed my life for the better. I'm glad I didn't end up at any of the other 2 companies that rejected me.

Even experienced people get bad bitter rejections. Don't have high expectations, and that will help you keep your emotions in check, and fight on.

Got rebuked by the Java teacher today at the University for using proper long names for variables in the code. She though I was just wasting time being lazy in the lab. "If something can be achieved by a single character, why type that long variable again and again?". *Everyone in class laughs*

Then, there was an error in my code [turned out to be long long int in Java is weird], and I had no clue what was going wrong [I'm a week old in Java]. So, I had initially called her to help. She made me change all private methods and attributes to public. When asked "why?", got trolled again.

Now, I know it's okay, and not that I really care about what my classmates think of me, but getting this kind of treatment really sucks. And if this is how future software developers are crafted today, maintainability is surely going to be an issue tomorrow.

Maybe staying in this stupid country was my worst career choice. I should have tried harder and gone abroad.

Future kids ;)
P.S. : Plz reply, if possible, to my previous post asking for some career advice

My developer career has ended before I even start. After failing to get a job, I have started a business men services company. Maybe in the future, I will include software development to the business. So no more rants from my side at least for one year.

Fuck you all fucking retarded companies who wants junior developers with the same experience of senior developers.

My present role does not show up in the future career roadmap roles presented by the management.

I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.

Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.

Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.

One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.

I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.

Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?

I once interviewed for a role at Bank of America. The interview process started off well enough, the main guy asked some general questions about career history and future goals. Then it was off to the technical interviewers. The first guy was fine. Asked appropriate questions which he clearly understood the answers to.

The next guy up, however, was what I like to call an aggressive moron. After looking at my resume, he said I see you listed C++. To which I said, yes I have about 7 years of experience in it but I've mostly been using python for the past few years so I might be a bit rusty. Great he said, can you write me a function that returns an array?

After I finished he looked at my code, grinned and said that won't work. Your variable is out of scope.

(For non C programmers, returning a local variable that's not passable by value doesn't work because the local var is destroyed once the function exits. Thus I did what you're supposed to do, allocate the memory manually and then returned a pointer to it)

After a quick double take and verifying that my code did work, I asked, um can you explain why that doesn't work as I'm pretty sure it does.

The guy then attempted to explain the concept of variable scope to me. After he finished I said, yes which is why I allocated the memory manually using the new operator, which persists after the function exits.

Einstein then stared really hard at my code for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Then finally looked up said ok fine, but now you have a memory leak so your code is still wrong.

Considering a memory leak is by definition an application level bug, I just said fine, any more questions?

Things I’m learning from my accounting job that will help me in my future dev career:

Today I have really, truly understood the need to sometimes just walk away.
I couldn’t figure out how to fix something, I kept fucking up, and at 16:40 I realized I can just stop, do something else that’s easy and doable, and come back to the fucked up mess I made in the morning. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s a lesson I’ve been continuously learning over the last few years, not to stubbornly brute-force my way into doing something when I’m not in the right mindset and able to do it, and instead just calm myself down and come back to it later.

a very polite recruiter in linkedin after our connection asked me why i choose this kind of career. I answered this and i hope i did not ranted a lot :)

i was trying to figure out what profession would make me more happy than others. I was always felt comfortable with computers, i was installing cracked games, exploring folders to paste the cracks etc. later in school when i learned the first algorithms like bubblesort i was knowing that i liked it. I also like working in silence while searching for solutions. That is the first part, the second is that i made a search about what industries would give me a safer future and international opportunities without having to be stuck in my country only. By working and getting more experience i felt in love with my job and trying to learn everything i missed and give to my boss or customers professional results with quality. I like it as a lifestyle, it combines a magic feeling of spells with the logical procedures of science. So why not? it combines all my loves together: creative thinking, technology, mental work, internet, music at the workflow, job demand, opportunities, and money! I hope i helped you my friend i am at your service for every question you have :)

Goal for my dev career future?

Start my own company that hopefully makes enough money to make me financially independent and lets me live the life I want.

[SERIOUS ADVICE NEEDED, PLZ HELP]

I am going to school again for like 4 days from tomorrow (don't ask me why, blame the government) and I feel a bit depressed. I just don't know what I have done in the last 2 years.

What I learned:
- Bunch of stupid facts from devRant
- C# stuffs
- Games are expensive
- Music production

And.... that's it, tbh

I don't really have "PERSONAL PROJECTS" that everyone is bragging about, I just have bunch of empty projects with a cool name but just Program.cs in it.....

I am worried of what to do now.

I just feel I made the wrong choice going with C#.

I just feel I should have went with JS.
With JS, you can do
- React Native + Cordova + Titanium + etc and make native android/ios/wp apps
- The WWW stuffs
- Electron --> Cross platform desktop apps (win/mac/linux)
- UnityScript (deprecated, but whatever) --> Games

So, what I am seeing now is a thick fog in the way to my future + career etc.....

I am stuck rn.

Please help.

Should I continue with my pace and learn more C# and the things I do rn, or change the language and start from scratch, or as a last resort, leave the "make stuff by coding" industry and go to music industry, or just go to the airport and do planespotting and upload in youtube to earn money?

Serious advice please, and no jokes about C# and JS. These languages may suck, but YOUR language may suck more.

It's been 1 year in my crappy yet comfy and high paying IT job(my first job).

I have already been in 2 dev interviews, with 3 more on the way.

The end of my IT career is near, the future is bright and full of code!

GWT.
Let me explain:
Tl;dr : someone fucked up, I took shit, it was a gwt project. In a sense I don't hate GWT because of the framework itself but because how I was introduced and forced to "work" with it.

Context:
Was working as a paid intern at a small company there were 3 devs 2 interns and one senior employee that only worked from home handling the shit ton of legacy VB6 code he wrote over several year and a boss with no technical knowledge. (Other unimportant people as well)
I was working with their DBA (cool dude) because I was writing statistic and report generating software.

Story:
The other intern was tasked of doing a gwt app that was supposed to use a input file.
Rather than asking the user to upload it with a file picker (I guess they exist in gwt I didn't got to dig in the framework) he was trying to load the file with a http request directed at the same host the app was running on.
It did not work.
Then his contract was other and the app was left in an unfinished state.
The boss then tried to have the app deployed, the remaining dev dodged the bullet invoking some bullshit because he was clearly incapable of doing it.
So it fell on me, couldn't deploy the app because it was not even close to working.
Tried to fix things and make it work.
Turns out he thought it would take me 3h to deploy when I clearly explained that the other guy didn't finish the app.
Boss got mad, threatened to ruin my studies and my future career.
Couldn't because my uni had my back.
Didn't want to see me anymore.
Couldn't break my contract.
Told me to work from home for the end of my internship.
I got 3 weeks early vacation and got paid, fuck him, fuck GWT, fuck his company.
Still got well marked for the internship as my supervisor was the DBA who was happy with my work.

Morality:
Don't let your intern unsupervised, don't let your main dev work from home when you don't know shit, don't piss me off and send me work from home.

Best career decision:
Doing many different jobs before programming, move to capital city to pursue first software development job without money, college degree, place to stay and plans for future.

Worst career choice:
Probably would be staying in Poland despite many opportunities to travel around the world, earn big money or work on really cool things as software developer but I won’t know until I die.

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

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

Low paying job:

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

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

High paying job:

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

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

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

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

Friends/Seniors : "Hey, you should take these courses. They are easy and you can get easily an A!"

Who the fuck decide what optional courses to take based on if it's easy or not?!
Students take them because :
a. They are interested in the subjects
b. Knowledge/skills after attending the courses will be beneficial for future career.

I put my money more on option b though, i.e I'd rather get C's in courses that I found it useful, than getting A's in useless courses.
(Btw, my avg grade is just a little above Cs)
If my sole purpose was just to get straight A's, I would enroll in liberal art courses instead of this stressing half-CS course we're in.
You're a joke to yourself, that's why I don't hang out with you.

hey guys, i was recently appointed to be devops engineer in a company. i did want to be a software developer though but they chose me for devops because my lack of java knowledge and a bit knowledge of linux and stuff.
my question for u guys is that... is devops good? for future career as well.
i m quite afraid to be honest, wouldn't want to have made a bad career decision. 😅😅
i must admit i have always enjoyed programming and hence i am worried in devops.

Honestly, school is useless for me as of right now. I know I should be well rounded and stuff, but do I honestly need to know the symptoms of cervix cancer while going into a tech career? My eyes have been set on tech for my whole life, ever since I left the womb, and I know that if I do switch careers, it'll be from comp sci to cyber security not from IT to med school...

I feel like I could really be devoting my time towards something better than writing a 5 page essay on a healthy food choice.

Every night I think to myself, "You know what, I'm going to lock myself in a room and write bash scripts all day" but then I wake up in the morning, and remember I have to take a quiz on reproductive systems, learn about the procedure of organ donations for driver's ed, write 2 paragraph definitions of vocab words, and read a book about communism.

The most useful thing I learned last year, was how to efficiently navigate the java API, and that's something you don't even learn, you just encounter it. Schools need to start having more specific specialties and stop enforcing knowledge of pointless topics.

I'm not saying to remove all core classes and stuff, I'm saying why waste space in our brains with something we won't use ever again? I get it, some people don't know what career they're looking for yet so you can't make them choose, but it honestly sucks some serious ass that I can't learn what I want to at school, and as a matter of fact, I can't even learn at home, because they're filling my schedule with pointless work because they feel that they have to fill our time somehow.

Point of this long ass rant is: Why lock yourself in a room and learn about something if it isn't something you want to learn about? The space in our brain is finite enough, why can't it be filled with things we're interested in rather than things that will only be used to get good grades in the future then overwritten with useful knowledge. Same thing with time. We have a very finite amount of time in a day, and now that I think of it, a lifetime. Why spend it on something that doesn't, and never will, make your life enjoyable?

Being an unsupervised junior developer, I wonder how shitty the code I write is, and how being unsupervised will affect my future in this career.

How do you deal with anti-competitive clauses in contracts with your employer?
I have found them to be unavoidable here in the field of IT/CS related fields, and I don't want that to affect my future career as much.

My current strategy is to gain more of other skills than just in software development, so I can fall back on those skills for a different field (e.g. DevOps, sysadmin, ...) instead of being unemployed for a year because I didn't like my workplace anymore.

The only other way I can think of would be to open my own company, but I'm not going to be ready to do that right after school.

Any other thoughts?

I got a question at an interview today asking what type of developer do you want to be and what's your long term technical goal. Right now I'm a senior software engineer at a pretty well known solid mid sized tech company. I work across the stack but I really don't know what type of developer I want to be.

Which way technically are you directing your engineering career? How and why did you decide this is the type of work you want to do?

Realising that my skills were stagnating and there was no opportunity to improve them or grow my career.

After 5 years in the same job (longest I've held) I started looking for a new one.

I'm now in a new job, doing much better work (even if it's a little chaotic right now) with the potential for growth in the future.

Whilst I loved the old job in terms of the staff and the atmosphere, I now couldn't be happier I made the decision.

Need opinions on testing as a career:
- is it good?
- Do you find your work interesting?
- Is it rewarding(in terms of salary/timings/other stuff)?
- Does it has a good career growth?
- How hard is the work for a fresher in this?
- How much mentor support does a fresher gets in this?
- How much salaries are there in this?
- how true do you find the believe that software testing will get automated and jobs in this area will get reduced in future?
(Better if you can give a comparison in your answers, with developer profile) how tru

I am a dev and am thinking of getting into this

I don't feel ready to search for jobs. I don't feel that coding is for me.

There is this guy that wanted to study physics and changed to System Information. He is more logical and rational than me. I'm too "emotional" to code, I get stressed easily when something isn't working.

I'm doing this because I wanted to challenge and prove myself that I could be more. I could have been a teacher, but I thought that it wasn't enough for me and I wanted to go further.

Every day I'm outside of my comfort zone and I don't know where this path will lead me and I'm scared and at the same time, I'm hoping for a happy end.

Maybe my brain is not made for coding, maybe it is more on the database side. But I'm sure of one thing: this year I'll give my best and everything at my current internship to get better at coding with Android Studio, Windows Form, Angular and React. My results will determine if I''m a good fit for coding.

Remember one thing: not everyone can easily learn how to code, but you will never know if you don't try it. Go out of your comfort zone in your life and you will meet a whole new world.

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

Bootcamps get you up and running in coding quickly. If you are a programmer, companies are only interested on how quickly, error free and cheaply you produce marketable output. Bootcamps enable this.

More or less you are not more than a former assembly line worker putting parts on a car platform. Your value is not very high as you may be exchanged at any time at their will.

Nevertheless, you can earn money quickly. You trade in your youth and time which might be a dead end in the long-term. Trends go to machine learning, artificial intelligence. They will not need Bootcamp people and code workers.

It is better you set up Bootcamps and sell them versus absolving this. Like selling shovels during the gold rush, but not working in the mud of Alaska by yourself.

Your choice is: Making quick money, which fades anyway; or striving for the long-term future proof career.

C/S degrees from Technical Universities of reputation give to you the right direction under a strategic consideration. Companies which pay well, or freelancing with a solid acknowledged background, will always look for top graduates. People from Bootcamps are just OK for hammering assembly line coding. Even worse with SCRUM in one noisy room under enormous team server pressure controls, counting your lines of code per minute, with pale people all around. And groups of controllers never acknowledging nor trusting your work.

To acquire a serious degree, a Bachelor is nothing. Here, in INDIA, Bachelor now is what a former high school grade was. You must carry a diploma or Masters degree combined with internships at big companies with high brand recognition. This will require 4–6 years of your lifetime. You can support this financially by working part-time freelancing as making some projects front- or back-end web, data analysis and else.

Bootcamp people will lose in the long-term. They are the modern cannon fudder of software production.

It is your choice. Personally, I would never do Bootcamps. Quality and sustainability require time, deep studies and devotion.

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

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

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

Recent discussion with ele gave me an idea to post this question here.

Which type of company should a fresh CS graduate work for? A corporate or a startup or a SME.

My advice for newbies is on SME for first few years. Then decide on your own based on your personality and career goals for future years.

[Fairly existential career question] How fulfilling would you say your career in development has been?

[Long rant] for years I had been planning on becoming a rabbi, majored in religious studies etc, until I realized there would be no way out of my rapidly growing debt if I chose to continue on that path. i had to drop out 3 years into my undergrad due to financial issues, and as it is now working full time im barely holding my head above water. I spent a lot of time being sad about it until i decided to change things and started getting into accounting before I discovered coding. I am SO GLAD I discovered coding cause accounting was so boring...Now I'm excited to be going back to school for software development and I'm in a bit of a pink cloud having discovered something thats both exciting/fun/challenging AND lucrative... But i do worry about 5, 10 years in the future, will i still be as stoked about it? Religious leadership was and is something I know i would feel ~fulfilled~ over a lifetime, and while my newly discovered passion for coding literally keeps me up at night getting fired up on solving problems and writing my little newb programs, i think I'm afraid of burnout?

[Tl;dr] I'm making an education+career switch to software development and i wanna know how folks feel about their career years into it, do you still love it just as much? Feel jaded? Regretful? Happy?

TL;DR: I have some rambly shit to say...

Update on the Uni stuff: I think I got a pass in all the subjects. Two exams left but I am holding on. It's a big deal to me since last year I could barely do a single subject per semester - a subject I had failed a few times because of lack of interest and good ol' depression. Anyways, I persisted with that subject, got my Bachelor's in Food Technology and now I'm doing that Master's of mine... It probably looks wild to people here that I did that switch but I have always had a relationship with computers as long as I remember myself. So it's not surprising that as soon as I got a choice in what I *actually* wanted to do I chose this kinda thing. But I do have to rant that it took me 10 fucking years to choose! And that I did not choose it before choosing food technology which I will probably never use anyways. I wasted so much of my energy and time on that. I did elect programming as one of the subjects while doing food tech but I really should have moved to something else. But oh well. Guess I had to find out the hard way.

For all those reading, this is what it looks like when you're 30, have very little experience in doing programming for anything else than academics and are doing a major career switch through studies after struggling for 10 years with a 4-year Bachelor's. But such is life.

Also a bit off topic but I just cannot handle people not telling what they mean because of the inability or lesser ability to tell what that is in the first place.

I can't deal with the fact of how fucked human societies are. I just can't. I am way too nice for it. So I listen to stuff like true crime to really get a feel of how evil people can be. I know it's ~problematic~ or whatever, but to me it is a way of engaging with the lesser spoken side of human beings.

And maybe, just maybe, I should get checked for ADHD again because I feel like despite my therapy for depression, nothing really has changed with the ADHD symptoms I was diagnosed with. And maybe for autism since people have labelled me that way and it might explain some stuff... All that is to say I need some good mental care. And this society is shit for it. Hell, apparently one of the psychologists I was under the care of thought depression resulted from ungratefulness. All this while I was legit being abused. But that abuse has stopped now that I found a psychologist that is actually standing up for me. I just mourn for all the time I spent being depressed and how it fucked my memory and stuff. How much it affected me and all. I have no idea why I'm being this vulnerable but it feels somewhat fitting... How do you cope with being 30 and not remembering almost all your life? What you remember being what you managed to write down or has been negative enough it stuck in the brain for forever...

Just why am I fucking supposed to be all happy and shit when I am just tired of life because it is too goddamn much? I have no real reason to look forward to things, online friends and the offline one included. Because ultimately, I have no damn motivation to look forward to anything, really. I am supposedly doing better but in reality I am just getting better at going through the motions. The therapy, while mindblowingly effective, is not actually addressing the core cause of everything and just expecting me to fake it till I make it. And this is me saying that about CBT. Why should I have to tell myself things just to feel human? I am one and as long as I'm alive, nothing will change that. So why do I have to always feel like an alien wherever I am? So out of touch with myself that I don't have a self image or an ability to even tell what the actual fuck I want from life... I am getting better with the latter, but still. It hurts. I wanna shed so many tears but I'm frustratingly unable to do so.

I am just a human trying to human in this ocean of 8 billion humans. Maybe I will find some more connections, maybe I won't.

I wanna end this rambling session by a few things:
1. I will have to go to Canada at some point this year to see my in-laws and some other family over there...
2. I will probably have to seek a job there (for financial reasons it is much better for me to have one there and to work remotely in Georgia) and I have no idea of where to start since I am not the greatest material for it.
3. Life is going alright-ish.
4. I will hear from the startup company at some point this month.
5. I have plans for my future but no idea if they will ever come true at this point.
6. My family arrangement will have to change in more ways than one.
7. I should resume my unofficial first music album and engage in creative stuff because at the core, I have a need to do so.
8. Do I really have to do Duolingo again? I really want to not forget German and Russian, but I just never have practice. And Duolingo is surprisingly easy to forget to do for me.

The end.

Game title: Vacations of an engineering student.

Aim: to utilize 60 days of freedom with something worth useful in future career.

Game Modes: (1) Sit at home. (2) intern for some company

Mode(1) Sit at home.
>>Villains : Games,Netflix and movies, food, friend parties, late night sleeps, afternoon wake ups, trips (random villains)
>>Boss Battles : laziness, procrastination, loosing of interest in stuff you wanna do
>>reward on completion: more knowledge increase, better resume ,$0 earnings

Mode(2) : intern for some company
>> extra level before starting : apply for 100s of companies,interview rounds, test
>>villans : no self choice, work with shitty code, too much workload, less time for outside-work life
>> Boss battles: do stuff that you didn't agree to, less stipend, unwanted scoldings from boss
>> reward on completion : more work experience , lesser knowledge, more $

What would be your mode of playing this summer?

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

So many of the idiots at my school, when they grow up, want to do "something with computers". Wha? The concept of what you even do with a computer is so widely screwed up that kids think that is specific enough to plan their futures on. I suggest they actually learn minute enough of their future career to know what really they want to do, but I guess this would be too logical?

Just want to rant about my current struggle and look for some advice.

I was never encouraged to explore and cultivate my interests in my life before college, and my family kept pressuring me to achieve academic excellence in the past.

Only until I got into my current liberal art college last year, I was able to do what I like: Art and programming.

Everything was moving forward smoothly so far, but when I started to apply for internship, I found myself in a very awkward situation: companies who offer interns prefer students who're concentrated in cs or art, but not both. And as you might guess, they require personal projects which I barely have time to do besides my school work.

Sometimes I wonder if studying in liberal art college is a good idea... I can't imagine myself competing with CS guys from universities...Or art students from design schools like RISD.

I really like both fields, yet Im still struggling with my future career decisions.

What do you think of Elixir + Phoenix to build API’s? Is it a better choice than a more established language like Python or something more new like Scala or Clojure?

At my company we're going through a watershed moment where we're starting to discuss and think about re-building our digital foundations and nothing is off limits. I'm leading the discussion about our architecture where everyone can have their say into what the future looks like for our applications. We're currently on a Drupal (CMS)  + PHP7/Symfony (Backend Content Repository) + Symfony Twig templates (Frontend)

Even though I have been developing in PHP most of my career, I personally love Elixir and spend a lot of my time away from work learning it but many of my reasons feels subjective like pattern matching, it's actor concurrency model, immutable data and not having to deal with classes/objects, and I'm not entirely sure how that translates to business value, advocating successfully for a tech stack change requires solid reasoning and good answers to challenges like how do we find Elixir developers when existing devs leave, how easy is it to build a CI/CD pipeline for Elixir/Phoenix, etc.

I checked something and the school I want to apply to for Computer Management (basically the paper I need to prove I’m a dev) requires me to do PE.... Like, come the FUCK ON. How am I gonna learn stuff (and get retold the same shit I know since I’m 10) about PROGRAMMING if I’m doing SPORTS?! WHY?! I can barely get up the damn stairs without my knees fucking up and being out of breath.... fml

So, hello. :)

I'm on my second semester of my IT degree. I'm in "Analysis and development of systems". I aways loved the world of technology, and more especific development.
The thing is, right now I work on a bank, but I'm starting to hate that thing. Stress 24h a day, and I'm doing something I don't like.
I've married a few months ago, so now I have a family to maintain, the main reason I'm waiting to get a degree before starting on my IT career (maybe it could help on getting a new job or even freelancing).
Now, I need a little help. A lot of you looks like to be working on this for some good years. What are your advices? Do I need a degree to start on my career? If quitted my job right now, even without experience on the programming world (professionally), would it be worth it?

I have little experience with freelancing, I don't think its enough to work full time on freelancing development. Should I try it? What you guys think? Or should I just drop out on work and star investing on my career?

Do you teach your kids to code? Do they enjoy it? I think it'd be a great way to help Give them the tools to be successful early on. :)

So I've been a developer at my current job for about 12 years. I am the most senior level developer at my job. Let me state that I am a backend developer although I did frontend development off and on as well for the first 5 years of my career. However I have done no major frontend development for around 7 years now.

Effectively our frontend developer of 6/7 years just left.

We had an existing project in the queue and my boss expected me to do frontend development for this project which I did just to help out, but I am not getting any extra pay for this and I absolutely hate doing it. The only thing I was paid for was I overtime for completing the project quicker. With that being said I feel like I should be paid substantially more since I am doing double work and since they are not paying for a frontend developer. I'm literally doing her job and doing a better job than she did mistake wise doing her job.

Additionally many things have changed over the past 6/7 years and they have it in their minds since I did it in the past it should be the same now which isn't the case. So there are things in my project queue right now for future projects that they think I know how to do and I don't. It isn't that I couldn't eventually figure it out. It is just that I have zero desire to learn it .I just absolutely hate styling websites.

I'm ok with doing minor frontend things for projects but not entire websites

I literally develop the backend off all the sites we build setup Google tag manger tags/triggers, Google analytics, search console, Google looker studio, dns, site updates, manage all out Linux servers, do seo for content and sites. I can't handle something else on my plate. I'm currently having to rewrite a ton of code as well due to upgrades for our sites.

How do I respectfully tell my boss I refuse to do frontend work going forward or pay me substantially more on another project and that he needs to hire someone else without damaging our relationship?

I like my boss and my coworkers as people a lot outside of work, but I feel like I'm being taken advantage of financially and I'm honestly tired of it. As a developer for 12 years I'm honestly ready to just go elsewhere.

I am in a very difficult position

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

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

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

I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.

I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).

I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.

- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience

However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.

I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.

What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.

This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid

Hello wonderful people out there, I need some career advice and would really appreciate your help in deciding. I am sure you have perspectives and opinions that may not even have crossed my mind.

I am a Full Stack Dev with 9 years of experience. I got two overseas opportunities, one in Bucharest, Romania and the other one in Mississauga, Canada.
Now according to my research:

+ives in Romania:
> Role is good
> Low cost of living
> Money is good and company also provides 2 bed accommodation
> Access to Europe
> Is approx 8 hours far away from my country of origin

-ives in Romania (just as per my internet research when compared to Canada)
> Healthcare is not the great
> Scores low on standard of life and quality index
> Not sure I can think of settling down there

+ives in Canada
> No Language barriers
> Ample amount of opportunities in the long run
> Can strongly think of settling down there
> Scores really high in standard of life and quality index
> Strong healthcare and education system

-ives in Canada
> Living expenses are fuckin high
> Money initially is not that great and won't be able to save enough for my future goals
> Is approx 28 Hours far from my country of origin

Which one would you choose and if you can please mention why?

Not dev per sé but annoys see he'll out of me on a monthly basis... 30 day password expiration, how does that make things more secure?! The thing that makes it worse is that I can't use any previous 28 passwords or anything too similar... Now I'm stuck with a 36 character password which I have to put in everytime my work machine decides to lock out... Which is less than a minute of not touching it.

What's that? No I can't turn around and answer a question because if I do I'll be taking 20mins off of my future career prospects as I'm working on leveling up my inevitable arthritis

So I'm currently working on a chat app that deals with astrology..dealing in the sense we are building an AI which gives prediction based on ones date of birth, time of birth and place of birth, you can ask it questions (currently only career related) and you get some prediction..it's an in-house project, we have a client who is an astrologer who gives us the logic to compute the predictions ..it's still a long way from being an AI ...so our CEO walks in one day with his huge plans for the product...decides to ditch the app completely, on which we have invested 4 months of our time and instead make an appointment scheduling webapp for our client as he felt that would fetch us some green stuff..so I was like why ditch the app when we can have the same module in the app itself and ask the astrologer to make his clients install if they want to book future appointments, he completely disregarded my idea and said that is bad marketing and all other shit and he went on to explain his other ideas ...I didn't think much of it at that time , then the CEO and the director of technology had a separate meeting where the director has made the same points which I had told him(ceo) that it is a bad idea to ditch the app (I wasn't aware of this meeting untill later)...so after a week we have a team meeting with the CEO, director of technology ...where he starts telling how it is not so wise to Chuck the existing application and build a new one which is totally unnecessary and we can have it as a module in the existing one...and I'm like sitting there thinking to myself da fck is he talking about...so i decided to stay silent and listen to his bs...my marketing lead leans over and ask y so silent ....I tell her whatever he is talking now is the same thing I told last week which he rejected blatantly... And then he had the nerve to ask me any inputs to this plan...I couldn't hold back ...I told him that this is the exact same thing I told u last week , to which his reply was focus on the future and forget the past ....I was like mother fckr woooooot ...I realised the power of position !! Fuckol man

High school Career readiness class assignment

I need to interview someone in my chosen future career (computer programmer or ethical hacker) anyone know any companies in Pittsburgh I should look for people at who may be willing to let me talk to them???

Please help

!rant

I just got the best pe of my carrier.. Got some extra cash, and new future career path goals..

sometimes it’s hard being in this industry, but when you find a great team, you’ll know by the support

🍻 happy Friday!

No, they didn't supported and infact are source of major problems in my dev and college career. Just granpa and dad, they wanted me to go for government jobs. Whenever they saw me with laptop they will say things like, you are ruining your future, this won't be asked in exams etc. They are good at manipulation too and sadly they won. Forced me to take civil engineering as it makes you eligible for most government jobs. I didn't knew what was going on my mind back then, and why i listened to such peices of shits. Real bad decision.

i am having a feeling that getting into software branch of it industry might be a wrong decision. in my college years, i got to explore different domains in tech :

1. software development : frontend tech , backed tech, mobile tech : somethings i and a million other people know

2. os and internal softwares : os, compilers, processor coding , chip manufacturing etc : don't know what this industry is known but we devs rarely go that deep in the hole

3. the network industry : computer networks , topologies, packets, data transfers etc. again not sure what this industry is but 4g/5g brands/ cisco seems to making a lot of money with this

4. cloud computing, devops, data etc : i guess some backend devs explore this domain too.

5. ai/ml data sciences/web3 : the new fad

6. biotech :?? don't know anything about this at all

7. graphics/management/qa : the other associated sisters of software dev. they are seeing a similar recession

8... ans so on.

i chose the 1st one in my undergrad as my career and now regretting this i am thinking of doing masters to fix my mistake and take a job in some other industry that is still blooming and has a future for sustaining a recession for atleast 30 years.

so any suggestions/experiences?

One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,

Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.

!rant

I'm thinking of turning my hobby into a career in the future. So I'm wondering, is it standard practice to use StackOverflow and web forums alike when doing software development in a professional setting? Is it generally looked down upon? I'm asking because I find myself using it every now and again, sometimes for silly things.

Thanks!

I'm finishing my secondary school in a few months and I'm currently unsure what exactly to do after school.
I'm pretty sure I want to become a software developer (maybe frontend UX/UI focused) already but I'm unsure what path to pursue.
As I live in Germany I have the options of either vocational training or studying at a University.
I'm pretty fed up with theoretic work and school right now so I'm tending towards vocational training as it incorporates one or two days of school with working in a company for the rest of the week.
The issue is that I will complete my A levels and therefore be eligible for university education in most relevant courses and have the feeling of wasting possible success in my future career (and maybe life experiences) if I just do the
vocational training.
As most developers here have a long experience as devs I'd like to ask you for advice.
Would you suggest studying something like applied computer science etc. to achieve a successful software developer career and higher wages or is experience more important than higher formal education at university for a developer?

!rant
Hey there everyone :)
I am struggling with my next career steps and hope you can help me with your opinions. So I finished my IT School (HTL for German fellows) this summer, I am 20 and don't know if I should start working or studying at a university. Most of my friends start at a university because they say you will have problems in your future career without a bachelor title. Maybe you could give me some advise so I can make the right decision :)

This is for the people with gsoc knowledge.

Short :gsoc2020, good for final year student?

Long:
So i am having a lot of doubts regarding my future career. I have done a few internship, have decent knowledge of java/python and some other tech stacks (android/ data analytics,etc) .
I always had the dream of being selected in gsoc, but i was always too late to start preparing/applying, being busy in college stuff(lame excuse, i know)

But this year seems i can try my chances. College is all focussed about students getting a job, so they are pretty lenient. If i dedicate my full time to GSOC, i might crack it. But i would then be playing all my cards on this , as I won't be focusing on other companies' interviews and placement tests. Plus from what i know, its whole timeline takes around 5-6 months and ends somewhere in August-September (the time at which my college would be ending and my other peers would be starting a full time job)

So is it worth for a final year student like me to go for gsoc? I know it does gives a good weight to the resume, but is a heavy resume with no job in hand better than a light resume with a job in hand, for a passed out student?

I'm stuck in a really difficult spot in my office and I'm not sure if I should start looking elsewhere. Tldr; there's no defined hierarchy or career path in the web department leaving no position to be promoted to.

We've got 2 offices with now 150+ employees and for the last 2 years I've basically inherited the responsibilities of an IT manager. Planning and deploying our networks, firewall config, VPN setup, keeping users' systems functional, track equipment, order/setup systems for new employees. All of this in addition to my original job description of web developer, which has basically turned into maintaining client WordPress sites while the other developer builds sites.

I've spoken to our CTO (my supervisor) about how much time the IT stuff actually takes and some of my suggestions for the future to make sure we protect ourselves and future proof our systems the best we can and one of my suggestions was that we needed to create the IT manager position because he is usually in meetings or building out API integrations. He's behind the idea, or at least says so to me, but leadership doesn't believe it's needed because we "manage just fine as it is" (this does require 60 hours a week of work along with much automation that I wrote/built). But we're trying to open a 3rd office which means another 50+ employees and systems to manage as well as more websites as we sign more clients.

My pay has never been satisfactory where I am and based on the maximum raise each year it would take me another 10 years to make what I would like (that's calculating without cost of living increase) but they claim this is because I lack a formal degree (self taught). I love most of the people I work with, don't really have an issue with any of them (outside that they're stupid but that I can let that slide if they're trying), and they work with me and my health issues which cause me to miss significantly more office time than I would like. I've been here for 4 years and I've learned a lot but I don't feel like there's any upward mobility here. The only position I see in my department above me is the CTO (or possibly the new PM but that's not a position I want) and he's not going anywhere, and I firmly believe we need someone who can full-time stay on top of our infrastructure before we expand further.

I fantasize occasionally about leaving and finding something else, and there are plenty of opportunities online that I appear qualified for which pay more, but I worry that I'd be trading in something that really isn't all that bad for something that sucks and the only real perk is more money. I'd hate to go somewhere else and start back at the bottom again and have to prove myself yet again.

I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

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

Now the full story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So idk how to start this but ... ohm the short version would be that I'm in a little life crisis because idk where my career should go, i know the basics (maybe a bit more) about it security, i know how to setup a nodeJs server from scratch, i know frontend dev. , swift, kotlin, java, C , R and a lot of useless frameworks but nothing of this I'm really good in (what's ok because im in my 3 semester) i just don't know where i should go.
I seriously love every aspect of computer science but i also know it make no sense for my future not to focus on one suspect.
Now how can i find out with way i want to go ?

This year I'll join college and opt for BCA. But i want to take a step towards future. How can i learn quantum-focused programing language like Q# and become expert and write programs in it? Also, any career advice is appreciated. I'm just the beginner but i liked coding very much in my high school and i want to be a software developer in future.