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

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺

is someone who repairs printers only, working in IT?

How do you feel about using TypeScript with React? I appreciate the benefits, but, as every snippet of React code everywhere on the web is vanilla JS,I just don't want the cognitive overhead.

Yes, I know TS is JS, but, if I'm not going to use the features, why bother? I'd want to strongly type props, state, etc.

What's the status of TypeScript support in the React ecosystem (eg Router, MUI, etc.)?

I'm kinda hoping Reason will get some traction as the type inference is much better, but, will that happen? Or is that going to fizzle so it's a choice between TS and JS?

Appreciate any thoughts on this---including those from anyone who's in the same boat.

Looking for views on TS in React ecosystem---no need to sell me on TS in general.

Bruh, tbh, this is kind of going to be a sad rant.

tl;dr: LEETCODE THE FUCK UP AND GET INTO FANG.

For all the people out there, just stop fucking around with small companies/startups early in your career. Leetcode up and get into FANG. Once you have that validation, these startups will be much easier to get into.
I have gone through this first hand.

After amazing on-sites with multiple startups, where everyone said that I'm the kind of person they're looking for (background wise: CS grad, startup experience, 2+ YOE as a fullstack Dev using Java, py, js and all the famous frameworks you could name), they rejected me.

Heck, a company flew me out to SF from Seattle where I think I had had my best on-site ever. They rejected me today. The sad part is that I actually for once really believed in the mission of the company.

At this point, I have wasted so much time reading about the xyz startup that's about to disrupt pqr industry (to prepare for behavioral/cultural interview), practiced for such shitty interviews like pair programming etc., worked on numerous take home projects (completing all those "bonus" parts) and deploying it and spending money out of my own pocket for that.

I'M JUST FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.

I have given mock interviews with ex bosses and friends and they told me that I'm good. Heck, I even solved a LC medium in 20 minutes (optimal solution) but still got rejected.

I'm kind of writing this for myself and people who are on the same boat as I am:
Get into FANG and then think about other shit. STOP looking for smaller companies and being scared of getting your ass kicked by a Leetcode interview. Any company who would not take LC interviews will prefer someone from FANG unless you're lucky as fuck. You don't want your career to be based on luck, man. That shit's not gonna take you anywhere.

Have you ever worked for an organization that is not specialized in software development because that is not their main line of business, however, their products are software applications?

If you are, then hi you and me are in the same boat. Currently I have a nice manager and I'm acting as dev lead the strange thing I have a peer that is supposed to be lead as well but I cannot define his position....

In theory he should be scrum master / resource manager which fails at both terribly.

I ended up implementing Agile in the team and deciding what goes and not into the sprint based on quality while this guy just try to squeeze stuff into the sprint, the more the better even with all kinds or problems...

Honestly I'm not sure why he is still in the team since it seems like he only drains the budget, doesn't understand a thing about the products he is working on and every single idea he has is horrible.

Every meeting I have with him I always ended up asking myself "How can somebody be that stupid?" The lack of technical knowledge and even common sense is over 9000 in this one...

It might sound bitter from my end but after two years of dealing with this stupidness of getting people in software development that have no idea what software development is and understand the intricacies of it just because they did an access database or are good at excel is nonsense.

I'm at the verge of quitting and the only thing that is keeping me here is my manager and the fact that the products I am working with are pretty interesting.

Sorry for the long rant but I had to get it out of my chest before it explodes and I directly call out this person.

Not looking for suggestions but if anybody want to chime in go ahead.

Hey guys,

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

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

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

However there are some cons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any thoughts?

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

Ok. I GIVE UP! ...for at least a couple hours...

I'm not a big believer in... well anything suitable to the literal definition of believe. But there's only so much 'wtf? How is this even possible?' and any answer u can come up with is nearly statistically impossible...

I am a neuro-atypical (and just extremely atypical even if i somehkw was neurotypical) being, based on logic, finely calculated statistical probability and the most raw data and as unbiased as realistically possible, algorithms and interpretation (usually recursive pattern recognition with several highly detailed historical sources.

...but at some point statistical improbability and a collation of separate, yet relatively closely occuring events/circumstances makes logic, itself a primary suspect of corruption.

What was the breaking point that caused me to (temporarily) give up and tell logic to f off for a bit cuz maybe the illogical and mythical is the real logic, leaving me in a losing battle with 'the' fates?

Trying to get all my sourcing/purchase orders in/paid for/on the literal boats b4 end of the workday/week in china...
1st, had to drop a supplier cuz they have limited reps. When the one ive had 7+ years left, i got the aloof blonde girl societal trope of a rep... who for the 2nd time (despite the several very blunt complaints above her, incl me) she sent out a promotional update to the entire client list (ie, inherently competitors) as CC not BCC... over 200 business email accounts with tailored info of their sourcing.

2- totally diff company/ industry a former rep i was glad be rid of apparently just sfarted back for "awhile" as i needrf to restock/scale...apparently she forgot everything we discussed at length... lke if you want a chance on my business im not gonna be wasting time looking through your gui "mini store to then inquire about everything individually insead of a simple spreadsheet(which i print and put in a 3-ring binder rotating current catalogues in the same format i require everywhere)

3.dog was an ahole, my packed schedule got delayed and morphed.. a bunch of little bs thatd normally have no extra thought impact, hyperfocused forgetting one of my alarms til i realised my idiopathic fever was back and i didnt take/apply meds (pain/muscle relaxers mainly so despite this odd free time and needing to shower. I gotta sit on my rear, leg elevated/non-productive far 40min b4 i can shower (as functional legs and lack of syncope is almost a req to shower)

4. A new-ish rep of a company/factory i like/respect enough to not mention in relation... he makes invoice 1.. slight error thst was easily resolved...#2 was flawless... he goes to officially generate the contract(alibaba... verrrry simple with lots of extra explanation buttons). Price and all items match, its near workweek end so i was waiting for it so i could quickly pay/have it on the boat b4 it left and few fdav days are behind...

I put in card info, get to the 2 cbeck boxes (imo should be only 1 but whatever) asking if billing address is same ss delivery(its always default yes)... then i see a few lines in chinese (i can read enough for business negotiations... typical words/sentences innately look different than things like individual letters/address and postal indicators.) After a few loops of double checking, mentally trying to dismiss my i Intial judgement cuz it'd be too ridiculous... even resorted to google .... nope... initial wtf was spot on... recipient name/address was indeed the company(multi factory producer)i was purchasing a wholesale, via sea freight, bulk of products from.

Im pretty sure the system would've flagged it as an invalid contract within an hr... but seriously... ive been handling alibaba (and other) international sourcing since before high school(mainly small businesses i made sites/little tools for that found anything with a light up screen intimidating) and a purchase then shipment to the originating company/factory actually entered into a contract(the form is sooo simple)... im faced with ridiculously improbable obstacles actually existing and changing in such nonsensical statistically improbable ways so often that 1. I wouldn't trust a dr (or most humans) that didnt 1st assume i was crazy of some form...unfortunately im not, despite hkw much simpler and probable itd be 2. Id be super suspicious/converned if statistic norms were my norm for over a day.

But seriously wtf???

Someone give me some wisps of a frame of ref here... where's a typical 'fuck this, im out!' Breaking point?