!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

"Personalized Advertisements":

No Amazon, I'm not interested in buying any of these phones, I just bought a new one five days ago, remember? You sold it to me! And stop recommending the same book I already got five YEARS ago!

YouTube, why are you always showing me the same ad about an app I already own and use regularly? And why the FUCK do I you show me the new trailer of Star Wars Ep8 as an ad video before the actual video of the new Star Wars Ep8 trailer?

Audi, I am an university student, barely able to pay my rent, why are you telling me to buy your newest car? How do you expect me to afford this?

Monster, why exactly are you showing me job offers as "Technical Product Designer at company X" for which I'm not remotely qualified or even interested in?

Neither do I have 5000£ (I live in Germany, at least match the currency, ffs) to invest in some suspiciously promising stock market schemes, nor am I in any need of rheumatism pills or a hearing aid (I am 19). I cannot afford or want any Rolex watches and PLEASE, I don't know why you think I would, but I really do not need a special new and innovative brand of tampons, my dick is doing fine, thanks.

"Hot local singles near {my actual location} want to fuck!
Click here!!!"
At least there are still some ads you can trust to be relevant...

1) I accepted this job for way way less money than market value.

2) Approached boss about having performance review because I had been here over 12 months and no one brought it up to me.

3) Had performance review where they offered a big raise (12% but still way under market value)

4) I countered asking for market value and showed aggregate research (30% increase)

5) A week later we meet again and they offer 23%.

6) That's where we ended at, pretty surprised they offered that much, but glad. I wasn't looking forward to looking at other jobs to catch up to market value.

7) Feeling pretty good considering I've never negotiated anything before.

FUCK... THIS WAS JUST THE WORST WEEK I'VE EVER HAD IN MY JOB. LITERALLY WANNA JUST THROW MY DESK TO MY BOSS AND THEN CLEAN HIS BLOOD WITH HIS LAPTOP COMPONENTS AND THEN SELL THEIR ORGANS TO THE BLACK MARKET, USE THAT MONEY TO BUY A MACHINE GUN AND USE IT AGAINST THAH GODAMN CLIENT...

So i was working with a small company which were developing software for insurance sector. It was decided then that there should be an app for windows phone community and i was hired to that job.

It took me almost a month to finish the job. Please keep in mind that project was huge and already developed for android counterpart and was a hit in market. This was a chance given to me to prove myself and i proved it.

First month was fantastic for the company as software the company made was not available for windows phone. Price has been set for the software was higher in those time. Almost $15.

Excited by the success i added some more features which were not available on android counter part.

But price was very high. Even i asked management to drop the price because there were less windows phone user but no body listened.

Result : in a year app has made roughly 5000 download in which only 200 paid the actual price. Company asked me to take down the app from store. I was blamed for my over confidence in adding features that this made app less usable. They did not say a word to business managment team. I was fired.

Rough, cruel world.

6 month ago i published my app for same purpose with same feature set and different UI. And made it free. Completely free. Added a link to pay developer $0.5 or Rs 30.

Result: i have now 10 thousands plus download in last 4 month in which almost 3000 users have donated already.

Now i have my resource and my confidence and making an android app for same purpose.

This is my story and is not fake, i am 28 years old. If you think you can, you can.

Amen.

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

True Story. Good rant bad pitched.

Just a small information before: In Germany, if you want to be a softdev and want to learn it, you can either go study IT or you can have a apprenticeship, which is 3 years with 75% of work in a company which will pay you (around 1K / month) and 25% in a school.

I work for this city-govermant company nearly 1 year now. Around 6 month into I told them I which to have a intern for 3 years (apprenticeship) at my site. Most likely because I really enjoy to teach.

My boss agreed to this very fast, told me it's a good idea, it would be a new way for our company to evolve. In Feb 2019, when we had interviews with candidates, we decided for one and I made a resource plan for most of 2019 in which I blocked 3 weeks for the start of his apprenticeship in July (2 weeks ago) because I knew he is a kid, 18 years, etc, never coded etc.

7 days into his apprenticeship my boss called me and my boss to her and told me there is a project which should be done by end of june and why it isnt finished.
It was the same project which I had ressources for 4 weeks in June but the department didn't come up with proper feature requests etc. so another department got the time from me. I told my boss exactly this: not my fault that it isn't done, showed her emails, reminders etc.
I also offered her to spend a weekend soon if everything is there now, but she told me: no. It has to be done ASAP. ASAP means, start now, don't stop until its done.

I told here, I have a intern on my site, I blocked the time.

She told me one sentence I will never forget:
"If your intern is blocking this project, he has to go. You decide. Now."

I was so surprised that I didn't even got any word out then "yes, I will start." I was shocked by this words and her decision to quit this young guy.

Just to give a a bit more background: we hired him in Feb 19 for Jul 19. If we would quit him right now, he would most likely not have any chance on the market for another apprenticeship and has to wait for Jul/Aug 20 and 1 year without job, money etc. He even moved to our city for this job...

So I moved back to my desk and today, 2pm, I finished all of the project, nearly 50h+ work done in 5 days, so he can stay.

What the actual fuck...

So I dropped out from University after 5 years because I was fed up with it, took a look at the job market, found something interesting, applied for it and got it. Now I'm here on my first day, sitting on the toilet, scrolling through DevRant.

Life is good.

Boss: Hey, you were in that "Pike place fish market session" today. How was it?
Me: well, it was really motivational and inspiring. I learned few new things.
Boss: Great! Also let me tell you that you're again our employee of the week and we're considering you for the employee of the year award. No one got nominated so early in the job here.
Me: Thanks
Boss: So you wanted to talk to me. What was it about?
Me: Oh, I wanted to resign. Already sent the mail to you.

Job market these days... 😂

*Taken*

!dev What pisses me off about today's job market is that the following idea is a naive one:

Let's just find a junior position and learn on the job so you can demonstrate your skills to your employer so they can promote you.

Wroooong. Reality: They only hire the most gifted geniuses who already know everything and they don't have the budget for someone who is rusty.

Welcome to the modern world of the CompSci market, where you are expected to have expert level knowledge in every language, especially in Software Engineering and Algorithms. And if you don't remember how to write an efficient Comparator algorithm in under 3 minutes, you're screwed.

Yaay.

I don't know a lot of people in other market segments who have zero fear of losing their job. Since I discovered that my coding skills are marketable, I have not lost a night of sleep over job security.

I'm very happy with my current job, but the privilege of rarely having to feel uncertain about income is incredibly liberating.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

I'm done with f/e. I so fucking hate it .
I fucking hate implementing weird highly animated websites designed by gurus
I fucking hate making them accessible.
I hate working on weird code generated by my coworkers and jump on projects with 0 specs.
I fucking hate this whole bloatware called javascript.
I fucking hate morons who think they know it all.

I'm fucking disgusted by the job market with their whole job specs ( Oh you don't have 5 year experience in some fucking stupid library I don't give a flying fuck. Too bad, we can't hire you )

And most importantly I fucking hate the day I chose f/e development instead of smth else.

Now at 29 I'm fucking stuck with this shit with no energy and patience to learn something else or at least jump on b/e or anything that is not related to web dev or js.

Sorry for so many fuckings but I had a breakdown.

Love ya.

Fuck it. I'm tired. Anybody found me a rich husband? I'm ready to assume the role of a trophy wife.

1. Still no recommendation letter. My PhD application is hanging on a thread. If I were such an intolerable ass, someone could've at least told me. Or at least told me "no" when I asked them to write these damn letters.
2. I turned down a job offer, cuz a) offered salary was below market average for that role on that level, b) the guy who was supposed to be my senior and the only other person in the team gave the vibe that he disliked me, and c) asked the PM a simple question of what is his expectations of the product for the next three to six months and didn't get a solid answer. (Can't do magic tricks)
So I turned it down cuz I don't want to get stuck in another's swamp. (Been there, done that!)
3. I'm running out of ideas for the comic I was working on. As well, the backgrounds of drawings proved to be an absolute hassle. Gah.
4. So, the next switch is to the barista role. I have signed up for a lackey/intern/assistant role which starts in about two weeks. Wish me luck cuz if this doesn't work out I'm all out of ideas. Like, literally don't know what I'm doing with my life anymore. Which will make those who are jealous of me really happy, but I shouldn't make my life about what doesn't make enemies and frenemies happy, right?

First of all, I hate crammers so much. These people kill the industry without even understanding it. They turned interviews into exams, missed the point of hiring, and saw no distinction between knowledge and information all the time. They don't understand that if you can google an answer in five seconds, it's not knowledge. It's information.

They don't understand that questions like 'what will Python do if you delete an item from a dict while iterating over it' are complete nonsense. They don't understand that it's not 'dig deep'; it's just a bad practice that leads to errors, thus must be avoided. The fact of remembering 'RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration' means that you haven't been avoiding it enough.

One more example. Which signature is correct?
- ApplicationListener<ContextRefreshedEvent>
- ApplicationListener<ContextRefreshEvent>
- ApplicationListener<RefreshedEvent>
- ApplicationListener<RefreshEvent>

Second. What's the point of forcing you to write compilable code in google docs? Do they really expect that one could possibly remember 'import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;'? Seriously?

Third. Why do they expect me to know Spark, Java, J2EE, Spring Boot, Python, Kafka, Postgres, React/Redux, TypeScript, and work for miserable 70K EUR?

What's wrong with the European IT job market? Are they fucking nuts?

so... i'll probably be joining my first job in 17 days.
My profile is *supposed to be* devops engineer (not that i know much about it, they just felt i was better suited for it than java programming (and i do agree)), although, apparently, the offer letter states java engineer and i talked to them about it, they said that it's a standard template but u are chosen for devops only. i hope that is true.

mostly i feel really upset that college will be over, but i am kinda excited about the job too.

wish me luck guys 😅😅😅

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

Long rant, sorry.

I’m pretty upset, or let’s say: I want to kick asses and chew gum but I’m all out of gum(The duke TM).

Yesterday we had a discussion in the office about salary basically.

Context: The company has about 150 employees and earns a lot of money. I’m the lead dev for about 1.5 years since I joined.

So I talked to our CEO/HR about a raise since I was hired as a normal fullstack dev(title is lead dev now) but have to:
train my junior(PHP), frontend guy(react), our QA(Automation with cypress atm), our junior devop(gitlab, jenkins, docker) and even assist marketing with GTM and adword campaigns.

I’m a jack of all trades basically since I was a freelancer for big brands for a long time.
I’m fine with helping/training, I like it a lot but I still have to watch everything and be fast with my own stuff. If anything goes wrong, people call me.

That will change since I train them all(They will all be independent soon) but still, doing everything for the same pay feels wrong.

Bottom line: CEO told me it’s cool that they can use all my skills but I won’t get a raise.

The worst/strangest was: My coworkers heard about that(as always in an office) and were like: Everybody should get paid equally because we’re all a team. Uhm, ok?

I just contacted the head hunter which got me that job. I guess I’ll just see what the market has to offer.

It should never be about money but this was confusing. People telling me we should all be equal who are on their mobiles 3h a day and feel underpaid. Check yourself, really.

People who think their pure presence is enough.. Germany -.-

10 years experience in DoD C4I enterprise hardware and software.
Looks at civilian job (requires A+)
Gets A+
Looks at civilian job (requires Network+)
Gets Network+
Looks at civilian job market (requires Security+)
Gets security+
Looks at civilian job market (requires CCNA)
Getting CCNA
Looks again at job market (requires CCNP)
Fuck...

Job interview "we don't think you have a strong enough background"

Looks back at my 5 million dollar military flying robotic server FML

take your fucking feelings out of the equation

AND GET OVER IT

feelings don't get market share, features built, or any growth

so shut the hell up and grow up

AND DO YOUR DAMN JOB

you'll be proud devRant, I've finally decided to leave these clowns. updates to come...

only sad part is my rage posting will likely drop to very low levels, but i guess my own well being is a bit more important than devRant karma :) 🤷‍♂️

Got the ideal job right now. Over market salary. 100% remote. Mornings to myself until the rest of the team in another time zone comes online. Working within my competency with just enough challenge to make it interesting. Free products for being an employee. Only wish it came with paid health insurance but I do get a partial reimbursement.

A close friend of mine is in his third term in university studying software engineering, asked me how did I land my first job so quickly after graduation.

His question made me stop for few seconds and ask myself, how would my life would've been without Coursera , Udacity, codeacademy and css-tricks.

I literally spent 2 years wasting time in uni then I discovered these sites and started learning while studying just enough to pass subjects that really has no benefit for the future whatsoever.

Even with subjects like data structures and AI, which should be interesting, it was 40℅ theory and the practical part was to complement the theory part, it was never for real world examples.

Kinda feel bad for my friend because he'll end up feeling the same frustration I went through at university.

Even now a year after graduating I feel that the only benefit of my degree was legal.

When would this silly system change ? If university courses can be specialized like online courses wouldn't it bring better talent to the market? And why governments don't take action towards this?

Today I finish a 6-month course called "Webdeveloper". It was meant to be a further education but it felt kinda basic.

HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP, Typo3 with some Typoscript

I still don't feel prepared for job market :/

After 2 years of applying for jobs and not getting any, I'm beyond tired of hearing employers complain to me and ask: "You have a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, you should be able to find a job without breaking a sweat".

Excuse me? In what world do you live in? Are you not aware that we have been living in an academically oversaturated market for more than two decades now? Nowadays you need a degree, plus a heavy portfolio plus crazy interest in the field (to an obsessive degree) because the competition is fierce.

It's not my fault I don't get jobs. It's always some "no fit", "not enough experience" bullshit.

Sigh.. seriously.

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

Ok, so I'm one of the new folks here, and spent some time looking around.

And I've read so many of you write about levels of insanity at work that just baffles me.

Why do people do that to themselves? And no, I don't mean you sales-manager, or your boss who hired the wrong kind of dev, I mean YOU.

You are a developer, currently the market for devs is so large you can literally pick your jobs. And if you don't know how to find a new job, just Google (easy mode, search on LinkedIn) a company which specializes in recruiting, there are tons of them, and they will gladly search an employer for you.

Don't get stuck in a job that sucks - you will kill your motivation, and you deserve better.

I really don't understand how some it recruiters ever got their job... Brainless fucking scaredycat fuckwats!!!

Just finished a mission and i put myself back on the market, been flooded by calls and emails since monday, so far so good.

But all of them wanting you to 'come over the office for a chat', fuck no. 'I will come once a real opportunity gets presented, i propose to do video conference call as to not waste time and transportation'. But noooo... It's like they never heard of that thing being possible before. I propose them to use meet.jit.si (really cool and free to use videoconference software, no software needs to be installed)... 'Yeah sorry but your link doesnt work', 'how come? You just need to go to the url and grant cam and mic permissions for the session'... 'No it asks me to install software (not true) and i simply cant now ... Can you tell me who you are and what you do and what your field of expertise is?'

For fucks sake you got my cv right in front of you you fucking blind maggotpuss! Learn to fucking read!

Tomorrow is another, hopefully better day...

Glad to take that of the chest.

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

Recruiter is contacting me out of the blue for a vague job position. Tells me he is very interested in my skillsets as they are apparently difficult to find.

I don't hate my current job but it has some problems. My interest is piqued.

I ask for more details and tell him what minimum benefits I would expect, given I won't quit my job for less. I tell him I have a very tight schedule at work and at home right now but I could fit in some time for a 1-2h interview.

He tells me I'll get more details in the next interview and tells me there will be a little coding test. Ok sure...

Dude proceeds to send me a test description by email. It consists in designing an actual small python project. Would take at least 1 full day of work (tests, doc and functionality included). I have 3 days to complete it.

fuckThat.jpg

Is this guy for real? In this market?

Ok.. So I'm a student striving to be a mobile developer and since the job market is non-existent if you don't have a degree here I had to take a customer support job for the moment/until I find something better.

I was handling some purchases and ask this customer to provide me a screenshot of the receipt.
Send him steps on how to do it and a video demonstration for Android devices.
Now the great part
HE PROCEEDS TO SCAN HIS PHONE SCREEN WITH A SCANNER, PRINTS THE IMAGE AND THEN TAKES A PICTURE OF THE PRINTED FILE AND SENDS IT. HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I READ ANYTHING THERE YOU FUCKING TOMATO?!?!
HE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND HOW TO TO TAKE THE SCREENSHOT!!!

I used to think I was so clever by viewing the source code of websites, and would just scroll through it for fun, but what really got me started in programming was the TI-83 calculator I got in grade 10.

You couldn't view the code of most programs on that calc without a computer connection, but I managed to get my hands on the source code of something simple and learned how to prompt for values and calculate things with them. Before I knew it, I was making little programs in BASIC that did formulas for me (Area/circumference of a circle, etc.). One of my professors caught me showing my calculator to another student in class, and assumed I was being a bad student. When I said I made a program as a shortcut for one of the formulas we were learning, she tried to call my bluff and said to write the whole program on the whiteboard for the class to see. 10 minutes of writing and more than one blank stare from my classmates later, the teacher just waved me off and continued the lesson. I was chuffed :-). I made these simple programs for all my math classes throughout high school.

Unfortunately, my first year of university I took a CS course, and my teacher was probably the worst I've ever had in my life. I decided it wasn't for me, and though I did maintain my general aptitude for tech (and was still the person who fixed everyone's printers and viruses), I took a different path, eventually getting an Arts degree in Anthropology.

Where I live, the market for this is more than stale. In fact, it's completely flat, so I thought I would take a course about programming with Arduinos for fun and see if I should return to school for a different certification. It was AWESOME! I made a wireless weather station with Xbees and sensors and built my own anemometer.

I got a job at a manufacturing company, and had the fortune to build a robot which eventually made it's way to the second season of Battlebots. The level of intelligence and enthusiasm I encountered really inspired me, and now here I am at 31, halfway through a BSc in Computer Science and working for a company that makes 3D printers.

It's been a long journey, but the adventure always starts anew tomorrow.

- Be me
- Been in a new job for 2 months
- Was excited because of 50% salary increase and better position

- Have a new team of 6 devs including me. All new guy
- Market crash
- Top management demands a trim down to all divisions
- Will be left to 3 devs next month

- All the while being asked to
- Deliver a shopify like marketplace from end to end
- Deliver integration with partners for data inventory tracking
- All within 2 months

- Furious when target is not met
- Demands a micro management to every single person on the team on what their day to day schedule
- Demands everybody to live by hustle culture and ready to work non stop even nights or weekend

- Be me
- Been working non stop for at least a month
- Sacrificed weekends and holidays

Beginning to think that maybe the money and position isn't worth the hassle

Bossman kept giving me a new “high priority” every month. Which would’ve been fine except for the fact that the prior month’s “high priority” was always a type that needed several months to come to full fruition. So he was constantly pulling the rug out from under me just as I was starting to gather steam and make progress. Also, he was begrudgingly paying me only half of the market salary for my job title in my locale. Would have loved to have paid me less and worked me twice as hard. I endured about 9 months of that and then I quit. Now my job is the exact opposite. Paid nearly twice as much with no micromanaging and plenty of time to work on my projects.

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then said yes!

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

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

Looks like despite 20-30 years on the market all popular text / spreadsheet editors are still loading whole file to memory.

What the fucking wankers. WTF are they doing whole day besides changing menu layout and icon colors ?

Clearly development today is lead by bunch of idiots from marketing department accompanied with HR hiring social network self made models.
What a fucked up world.
Let’s add AI to our software but fails to open 150MB csv file.

Great job everyone. Great job.

Man, I'm sure there are a million of these posts right now but...

The hiring market and hiring culture nowadays is so damn frustrating. I have a decade of experience in multiple senior/lead/principal roles at both big name companies and high-growth startups, along with a very well-written resume.

Even with this, I can barely get an interview these days. I'll apply to a role that lists qualifications for which I'm an exact fit, and either get a quick auto-denial or just never hear back at all. It doesn't matter if I custom-craft my resume and cover letter to match the job description or just send my standard resume and cover letter. We all love those pandering and patronizing "We know that this isn't the news you wanted to hear, but keep trying! Maybe you'll be good enough for us someday!" auto-denial email.

Sometimes I'll receive a denial, look back at the job posting, that they needed somebody with NLP experience or something, and say to myself "Fair enough, that makes sense." Other times, I'll look at the posting and say "Oh come on, I check every single box." It makes you wonder "What the fuck are you actually truly looking for?"

Sometimes I'll look at the company's current employees and see that almost every single one is ex-FAANG, indicating that the company will almost only hire other ex-FAANG employees (despite there being thousands of other well-qualified candidates out there who are just as talented and skilled as those ex-FAANG candidates.)

Other companies seem to be "brand shopping" for ex-FAANG employees after all the recent FAANG layoffs, hoping to land a bargain on an ex-Google engineer so they can brag that their product was built by the same people who built Google.

Then there's the question of even making it past the ATS and in front of an actual human's eyes. The hiring culture seems to be an ATS SEO game nowadays. God forbid that you didn't include the super secret magic keyword in your resume, else you'll automatically be filtered out and denied.

It's just incredibly frustrating and makes you wonder what kind of candidate you need to be to even get a first round interview nowadays. Do we all need to have a glowing personal recommendation from the ghost of Steve Jobs in order for a 50-person startup to even open our resumes?

When you want to move jobs and you have no idea where you stand in the job market...

Attention Software Engineers!

Quit shooting yourselves in the fucking foot! And this ESPECIALLY goes to new grads. I get that you have just finished school. I get that you need a job! But don't fucking settle for a $30-$40k salary because you're "entry level"! The only reason why there are employers who offer that type of salary is because they know that there are enough idiots who will settle for it!

On average, an entry level software engineer's salary is between $50-$60k at the very least! For Senior developers, it is at least $80K/year (although an argument can be made for why they shouldn't settle for less than $100k/year).

Each time a moron low balls his/her salary, that brings down the market value for that talent. And keep this in mind! They don't have a choice but to hire you. They could choose to outsource their work to poorer countries but they don't want to do that due to obvious quality-related reasons so they HAVE TO hire you if they need the work done. And since the ball is in YOUR COURT, demand your fair salary. You went to school for 4 fucking years. You dealt with that stress for 4 fucking years. Why settle for a salary that you could've made without going to school?

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

The moment when you are tasked with finding a new person to your team for the lower position than yours and you check the going monthly rates on the job market just to realize that they are higher than yours is.

Their intent is great but if they are over saturating the market with mediocre developers then that is a bad thing.

The reason i say that is because they are often cheaper and more eager than skilled individuals that want the job done properly.

We have a course in our uni where we're given a client and are supposed to make a product for him.
> Only, our client happens to be a startup guy.
> He's already mentioned that his app is worth 'multi-millions' countless times.
> And has already given us a job offer in his startup.
> And has offered to pitch the app to investors if we do it right and split the profit (He seemed almost convinced Google would acquire it).

All of it before doing any market research, testing, business planning or prototyping himself.
Yet people ask me why i hate on the hyped up startup ecosystem smh :/

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

- was a manager of a super market
- got tired of walking to tills to give discount
- taught myself to code
- wrote a loyalty card system that automated the discount
- met an investor with a similar mindset and rolled it out nationally (after it was professionally refactored).

This was my "last job" starting in like 2009 not my current.

How do you deal with massively poorly-performing and unknowledgeable teams?

For background, I've been in my current position for ~7 months now.

A new manager joined recently and he's just floored at the reality of the team.

I mean, a large portion of my interview (and his) was the existing manager explicitly warning about how much of a dumpster fire everything is.

But still, nothing prepares you for it.

We're talking things like:
- Sequential integer user ids that are passable as query string args to anonymous endpoints, thus enabling you to view the data read by that view *for any* user.
- God-like lookup tables that all manner of pieces of data are shoved into as a catch-all
- A continued focus on unnecessary stored procedures despite us being a Linq shop
- Complete lack of awareness of SOLID principles
- Actual FUD around the simplest of things like interfaces, inversion of control, dependency injection (and the list goes on).

I've been elevated into this sort of quasi-senior position (in all but title - and salary), and I find myself having to navigate a daily struggle of trying to not have an absolute shit fit every time I have to dive into the depths of some of the code.

Compounded onto that is the knowledge that most of the team are on comparable salaries (within a couple thousand) of mine, purely owing to length of service.

We're talking salaries for mid-senior level devs, for people that at market rates would command no more (if even close) than a junior rate.

The problem is that I'm aware of how bad things are, but then somehow I'm constantly surprised and confronted with ever more insane levels of shitfuckery, and... I'm getting tired.

It's been 7 months, I love the job, I'm working in the charity sector and I love the fact that the things I'm working on are directly improving people's lives, rather than lining some fintech fatcat's pockets.

I guess this was more a rant than a question, and also long time no see...

So my question is this:

- How do you deal with this?
- How do you go on without just dying inside every single day?

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

Sorry to keep whining about my stupid fucking job, but y'all, I think I'm nearing my limit.

There's some good...I am pretty much free to resolve issues any way I want to, as the only other person in the company who "codes" only knows one old ass language that doesn't apply to 90% of the rest of the tech stack at all, and some SQL - all of that to say, we may disagree, but ultimately, these matters are always deferred to me at the end of the day, insofar as the actual implementation goes (which is to say I am not micromanaged). At least as far as non-visuals are concerned, because those of course, are the most important things. Button colors and shit, woo hoo**. That's what we should focus on as we're bringing in potentially millions of dollars per month - the god damn button color and collapsible accordions based on data type over the shit ass DB performance bottleneck, the lack of redundancy or backups (aside from the one I made soon after I started -- literally saved everyone today because of that. My thanks? None, and more bullshit tasks) or the 300GB+ spaghetti code nightmare that is the literal circulatory system of the FUCKING COMPANY. Hundreds of people depend on it for their livelihoods, and those of their families, but fuck me in the face, right? I'm just a god damn nerd who has worked for the federal government, a handful of fortune 500's, a couple of fortune 100's, some startups, etc. But the fuck do I know about the lifecycle of companies?

I could continue ranting, but what's the point? I've got a nice little adage that I've started to live by, and y'all might appreciate it: "If everything is a priority/is important, nothing is". These folks just don't fucking get it. I'm torn because, on the one hand, they waste my time and kinda underpay me, in addition to forcing me to be onsite for 50 hours a week. They don't listen to me, couldn't give a flying shit about my experientially based opinions. I'm just a fucking chimp with a typewriter, there to take commands like a fucking waiter. But there's a lot of job security, assuming I don't fucking snap one day, and the job market for devs (I'm sure I don't need to tell you) is hostile atm. I'm also drinking far more than usual, and I really need to do something about that. It's only wednesday - I think...not 100% on that truth be told, and I logged my fourth trip to the liquor store this week already.

**Dear backenders - don't ever learn front end, or if you do, just lie about it to avoid being designated full stack. It's not worth it.

The job market is lol

Graduated 9 months ago, working minimum wage jobs and applying to jobs, never getting an interview! I finally get a job in my field, and within my first week on the job I get calls for 4 interviews, all paying more than the job I took

On top of that my parents think my salary is way too low but beggars can't be choosers right

Been in a creative company for more than a year working as front-end, mostly CSS3 Animations and jQuery.
Today got a Job Offer in a startup about building an ERP for Albanian Market, mostly in Laravel and Vue.js
I was so excited for the first 30 minutes and then I remembered that I don't know so much Laravel and Vue, also I must work with an other guy which has lesser experience than me.

Totally scared about this new exp but ready to go for it :D

Any suggestions is really appreciated!!!!!

Yesterday one of our clients gave us the OK to launch their annual financial reports, 4 minutes before stock market closed and most of us was heading home.
Problem was we didn't have the proper access to their servers, so I and a senior consultant just spent a few hours calling our client and their IT infrastructure provider.

6 hours later, a large bill from the IT provider for after hours work, the job was done. A job that would take 5 minutes of uploading and 5 minutes of database transfer.

Seriously what's wrong with the market right now, this is basically what some job ads said. They were even from the same company

Frontend job ad: are you a rainbow rockstar developer who just loves to code OwO(unpaid overtime) [buzzwords...]

Embedded systems job ad:
Serious job description
Required experience in c/c++
Other non bs stuff

Because of high gas price, the government decided to lower our tax.
For me it translates to additional EUR 11/month ☹.
This is after deductions of thousands of euros each months (tax and social contribution) from my hard-earned salary. How come nobody is complaining about this?

During my yearly review, I told my manager that I expect to see significant salary increase next year (the inflation is 9% duh!).
She told me that I can expect to get 20% increase after 3-4 years. ☹
Now I know why a lot of people are leaving. How can you expect your employer to stay put if you're constantly paying them under market rate?! I have to keep switching jobs every 4-5 years to get a decent pay, right? Yet society expect me to settle down and have a stable job.

And then, how come a PM earn significantly more than a regular dev? Even the job interview is much easier. But I like the technical part too much to switch to people management.

By no means, I am starving right now working as a dev. I am happy that I even have a job, but somehow I felt like what I do is pointless just being a wage slave, and felt demotivated in a lot of ways.

P.S.: I am writing this now in front of my work computer. I have to catch up some work to do otherwise I won't have time to do it during the weekdays 😔
Pray for me guys I can get better job within next year.

"Bu...bu..but JAVA SWING and FX are PORTABLE!"

And electrolytes are what plants crave.

I swear half the people I argue with are dinks.

IF YOU HAVE PEOPLE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU HAVE TO DO WORK PEOPLE WILL HIRE YOU FOR.

Under job listings for javafx: 2 listings within 200 miles of me.

Under job listings for C#/WPF: dozens and dozens of jobs.

Portability doesn't matter if you're broke.

My stomach owes no allegiance to "high fallutin" concepts such as openness, avoiding vendor lock in, or the high ideals of platform independence.

I'll take the microsoft gulag if it pays my bills.

I don't know whats so hard to grasp about this. Some people are completely divorced from reality.

Edit: Hello to all my peeps who I haven't talked with in a while. I hope everything is going swimmingly in your lives. May your beer forever be paid for by your employer and your code bug free!

Well just blew up a coding interview.

Got an offer to be a Drupal dev and was expecting questions on Drupal API and module dev but got asked how to find the closest Enemy in an array and blah blah blah.

Interesting question but man. My mind got blank and got nervous. It's been a while since I've done a question like that and I've been coding for 10+ years.

I would've love to solve that in another language such as Python or C++ but got stuck on PHP because it was a Drupal position. But I only use PHP for Drupal modules and templates who are highly dependant on Drupal API. Or even WordPress plugins. But I try to avoid WordPress because is shit.

Guess the job market hasn't changed since I graduated back in 2014. So I feel a little bummed down. But I guess I'll just have to practice those type of problems as well. At least the problem solving method.

At least it will be an excuse to do those leetcode problems.

i've got my first job after getting out of college. not a great package. I'm learning more, will get experience. i have plans for freelancing and seek a better job. I'm an Indian.

what really upsets me is that I just discovered that I've no knowledge in finance. I'm feeling insecure, afraid and depressed. I'm browsing for some youtube channels, books and podcasts to get some some knowledge about finance and real estate.

all I have is a saving account in SBI bank, I just know how to take money out of it with my debit card and transfer money with online banking

how do u guys do ur finance, where do u invest. do u invest in stock market. insurance?? help me out. i'm fucked.

never thought i can be so stupid, I hate myself, never even thought I'll need financial intelligence.

are there more people like me.

i'm just so down and feeling suicidal.

This post is about Americans.

Or to be more precise and put it this way, this post is about Indian Americans.

They made their way through everything and somehow landed in the US to shit on streets.

They feel themselves to be entitled to another level.

I work with multiple colleagues who are based out of the US. ALL of the American people are very friendly and accommodating since we have a timezone challenge.

BUT these Indian Americans think they run the world. Slight inconvenience and they create an issue out of it.

My entire non-tech team and I am struggling to align to these fucks and none of them are supportive. While scheduling a meeting

fuck it.. I am so done that it's not even worth ranting about it.

On the other news, I am in the job market, actively hunting jobs while they keep rescheduling meetings. I have a couple of connects with recruiters lined up.

I am expecting few interviews and maybe in some time, I might be able to close a decent offer. Fingers crossed 🤞🏻

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

Started my new job in November. At least it only took me four months to discover the toxic culture before I'm on the market again. Uuuuugggggh Fuuuuck.

This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.

I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.

Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.

I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.

Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon

Random rant: You should always look for a new job, even after landing a good(seemingly) one. It keeps you on edge and synchronized with the market.

Employers also should not shun people who are looking for new job, if they somehow find out. A developer who looks for a job, gets offer but decide to stay is better than who lost his/her/xir fire.

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

does anyone else feel that "developers are on high demand" and "if you're a good developer you should have no problem getting a job" is kind of a lie that the industry sells to you?. I mean I didn't expect to polish my linkedin profile and get 20 offers but damn. Yeah I see a lot of job offers on multiple platforms. Yeah I apply for them. Yeah I never hear back from most of them. (I have a bit more than 1 year of experience) I don't wanna work for FAANG, I'd just like an entry/middle job on an industry I like

Worse dev experience: Working for a company that had a monopoly in the market. They have Dinosaurs that didn't want to upgrade the user experience at all because of the company's hold on the market and their lack of forward thinking. It's a privately held company that is hard to get terminated. It was frustrating because they could do more but didn't so I'm looking to compete once my non-compete is up.

Best dev experience : Quitting the aforementioned job and getting another one. 😎

My LinkedIn is usually pretty quiet. Recently I've received quite a few messages from recruiters. Some of them put numbers in and I look at them, well, the market looks hot.

I like where I am but doesn't hurt to have a look around eh? So I went through some interviews and shit. No preps, not trying to please anyone, being completely honest. And out of the 3 I tried, 1 got to the final round.

Before the final round, the recruiter kept harassing me (it's their job really) about what my "bottom line" is. She said they really liked me but I'm not up to their expectation as a senior role. So they want to proceed with a non-senior role, then climb my ladder up. I told her, I don't give a shit about the title. The she said for that, the salary will be "adjusted" (reads reduced). I told her, look, I said I wouldn't bother if the offer is anything less than X amount of money. Then she said but this company would offer 10% bonus, which will add up , mind you, "close to" X. She said she wanted to know so we don't waste the director's time (as the final round is to meet the bloody director).

I said, if I need to disclose my bottom line before going to this, which is pretty much my negotiation, then let's call it off. No point wasting my time either.

The next day I received the last call from her. They fucked right off.

I know everyone here already knows. But let me experience be another example of how a plague recruiters is. I don't have any experience like this before but this is probably a fucking lowball case too.

!rant

TL;DR one year on as a react dev, I want to go at it self employed, humbly seeking advice as this community seems to have its fair share of knowledgeable freelancers.

I have 1 year professional experience now as a Meteor, React and Apollo developer

The dream is to become self employed. I figure a good market would be small businesses that want a website that are more featureful than a diy wix site.

Only I am more of a developer than a designer, so rely heavily on things like Bootstrap or Material ui. So I wonder if Upwork, Fiverr or simply my own freelance website would be better.

As you guessed javascript is my biggest strength, not sure if nodejs is the best backend for small businesses as hosting prices are more than eqv php stack.

Also want to build own projects on the side to monetize. Bigger dream would be to be client-less and develop and sell personal projects.

Seeking advice from those who are self employed. Am I dreaming too big?

Shall I keep the office job for a bit longer then take the plunge? Or do you think I can just go for it. Are there lucrative areas I am missing?

Thanks in advanced

So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..

My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.

So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..

The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).

This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.

At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.

Microsoft Market:
"You tried a wrong password too many times"
(I know fucker, I made a fucking mistake because I had to restart the pc 20 fucking times already, I've got confused, you pc-fucker)
"The activity is temporarily suspended, try later"

LATER? WHEN? I need to work you moron. Just give me a number!!! 10 minutes? 10 hours? days?
Work on improving security, lazy sod, not on slowing my job.

PS As soon as I can I'll change the password in "ImpotentCrackWhoreFucker8==0-)"

TLDR;

When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.

When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.

I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.

It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.

I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.

I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.

After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.

People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.

I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.

Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.

We need to separate concerns. Too many CS courses skip over theory and teach outdated tools and technologies, often those of a sponsor who is failing in the market.

Computer Science is supposed to be about the science and formalisms of computation. The job of programming is Software Engineering. A few colleges have SE degrees, but too few.

No one understands anymore the likes of Knuth, McCarthy, Dijkstra, and Hoare. I'm willing to bet that most of you have never read any of their work. Few people really understand their impact on the tools we use today or the importance of their work. CS courses should teach that and expand on it so we can get more huge leaps in tools and concepts.

But we also need Software Engineering to teach students current tools and the latest paradigms.

CS, as it is, doesn't do that.

I'm just finishing my bachelor's degree in computer science in Germany. I love programming, especially for Android. I am working on a really cool note-taking app for my bachelor thesis and I love. A few weeks ago I started looking for jobs, I thought this would be easy. Why is this not easy?! Does no company need help with developing an app?!?! I googled jobs and opened the first few pages on the browser then I chose a city in Switzerland because I read that's where developers make the most money. Then I had to write a CV, what the fuck am I supposed to write in the CV?! So I wrote what languages I had dealt with during my studies and I wrote that I now speak German English and Hebrew. I had to upload the CV for EVERY SINGLE COMPANY and sometimes I had to write a cover letter for a companies I don't even know much about. WHY IS THIS SO ANNOYING!!!
I'm the last few weeks I've been getting emails rejecting my application, such a waste of time. I would love to work with people I'm just so bored sitting at home all day without much motivation to program alone, I need company and a company to pay me. I've already wasted a few months and I just can't believe that the market is so terribly organised. I could be getting so much work done, all I need is people who are a little bit motivated! I'm just so frustrated that everything works so slowly in this market...I even tried looking online for people who just want to talk about programming Android apps, NADA I just couldn't find anything... Well that's it if you have a job offer for me just hit me up I'll do anything...tiny.cc/chagai is where you can find my contact information I will literally consider even working in North Korea I just don't care where I work..

!dev
My rough assumptions on wtf is going on with covid changing our lives - maybe leading to some business ideas.
In theory we are indoctrinated from little child that to do something we need to go to special place to do things in community.
Name it :
- school,
- university,
- job,
- college
As a result we build world around communities:
- public transportation
- sidewalks
- 4 seated cars
- parks
- sports
- shopping malls
Now due to pandemic we’re unable to do so and from some time we start indoctrinating people to do lots of things remotely and stay at home:
- remote job
...
- shopping
etc.
Depending on how strong is our character we react to this inception differently but future generations won’t have this indoctrination of commutation deep in their minds.

Interesting 🤔

My first assumption is that robotics market will start growing exponentially.

My experience two weeks into being married:

1. Any other couple can fuck off. We're the protagonists now.

2. My sleep schedule has done a complete 180. I start my day at 7 am now, previously it was 12 afternoon. I also sleep early at 10 pm now. I feel a lot better about this schedule tbh.

3. My wife has an office job, so I get my work done in peace and am able to wrap up my day early to make time for her when she gets home.

4. She's serious about investments, stock market, SIPs, Gold prices or whatever and actively puts money into those things. Good for me.

5. Going out with her is actually fun, because we plan our Sunday ahead of time. I used to scoff at other couples before, but now I get it. It may look cringy from the outside but not to me it doesn't.

I saw this in a project proposal of a friend's job:

we build native apps using the most advanced mobile application
development platform on the market: ​ React Native

I feel sorry for him :\

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

Hello,
I just quit my job at a big market research company. It was disturbing how much processes there depended on excel and obscure visual basic scripts.

They load data from a database, do typical database tasks with excel and upload it back into the database.

PhDs run complex statical computations through an excel interface that passes the request to R.

Instead of an hour Python they execute stupid tasks with excel by hand. Day after day, month after month.

WHY? My colleagues were not dumb but instead of learning SQL and some python they build insane excel tables.

Maybe it's time pressure. But this excel insanity costs much more time in the end.

3 weeks ago my job got cut while I'm overseas ☹️ only a few days after my grandmother died - talk about when it rains it pours 🌧 but so grateful for the last chance to say goodbye to granny.

Now I'm enjoying the unexpected, extended vacation and gearing up for job hunting... the market is brutal tho. Good luck out there everyone!

I tried to go for a job as a ReactJS junior dev.. I got my first interview and they liked my prototype.. but..

A week later they reply: "We decided not to go with you because we hired an expert in ReactJS".

Err.. really? You're hiring expert-level ReactJS developers for a junior position?! What the frig.
You want to know what I think? This whole "It's ok that you don't know everything, you'll learn on the job" thing is a hoax. No, the job market doesn't want novices. With every single interview, I'm met with: "but you're not an expert and we can't afford that".

This reminds me of the best advice my professor (seasoned expert in the field, real engineer with more than 20 years experience) once gave me:

"The job market doesn't have the time nor patience to mollycoddle you. When you enter it, you have to already know things to an expert degree because companies want value. They're hiring you because you have these skills and knowledge.
You have to already know what they ask before they ask it. You're required to know things by yesterday, so to speak. It is an exigent industry out there. This is why we bring you the foundations - so that you go further on your own and you can take on any problem"

Since my contract is going to be terminated on 1st July and brilliant devrant community injected me idea to make same project and start selling it as incorporated I made some steps.

I made simple POC that is command line application in different language and unrelated to what I’m doing and showed to my friend and ask if he want to buy it for his company and he was like wtf this shit even exist on the market or it’s new thing ?
I admit company I work for is not present in my country and this product is like not existing on the market. ( at least I can’t find it )

From this point I have a feeling I need to do it. I have life savings that will provide me to at least 2021 or even for a whole year if I’ll be smart and I think it’s going to be good thing to take a summer brake and make own project based on professional experience I have.

Despite the situation around I will be mostly coding 24/7, drinking and playing playstation.

I probably will convince my friend to work on it and my other friend to sell it once it’s done. He already wanted to sell my command line tool but I told him to keep his mouth shut cause they might steal the idea.

I already decided to use different tech stack and api so all software will be different, some business parts are unavoidable but I have many fresh ideas. At the end I will just connect some online payment, make youtube commercial and start selling it by integrating with some api and buying internet ads, also I will start looking for a new job from October if nothing will work out and just keep investing less time in it.

What you think ?
Should I take the risk or not finding job and do something that my heart is telling me to do( I write software for 12 years for money so I don’t think it’s even possible ) or should I live safe boring life and just go to another job ?

Thanks
Have a nice day.

As a student studying CS, what is the best way to get your feet in the job market?

Well, I posted this rant a few days ago where I was expressing my desires to get a job as a Software Developer... Here I am again re-posting.

________________________________

FFS! Can I get a remote job as soft-dev?? I know a little bit of java, I mean I have a GitHub repo for a project if anyone wants to see what I'm doing.

If anyone knows or feel that can help me, please lend me a hand, I need to start working (to get real experience) and earn a little (prevent from starving in this fucking shithole country).

I'm not asking for money, I'm asking for a freaking job, a task, anything.

Little brief of my situation... I'm from Venezuela... Done!

Now for real, I'm a freelancer IT technician for almost 8 yrs, now I'm studying software engineering (8th Semester), I'm 31 years old, have a family (7 yrs old daughter, newborn baby boy), work is not flowing since the hourly price got high due to the economic crisis and clients are hiring people instead of outsourcing.

I'm not expecting to earn the minimum wage of UUSS, 150$/month can do the job! This due to the black market price of the USD (10X.000BsF so far), where 1$ represents the 1/8 part of the minimum wage here, to put it in perspective, toothpaste cost 200.000Bsf, 1/4 of the minimum wage.

Perhaps you will be asking yourself "Damn! so how do you do to survive!?" well, at least once a week a client calls and that saves the entire week, this isn't life my people, this is surviving... And if you don't believe me, I can show a receipt from the supermarket, and show you the average salary or my incomings.

Anyway enough drama and whining for today, I'm not doing this again in my life, I'm a person who achieves goals and earns what deserve (even this situation, I know that I deserve it for not thinking properly in the past, but we can't be victims of our past or do we?)

I'm moving to PHP.

No, seriously. PHP devs were treated like “you're the tech guy, I don't care, make it work” for so long that PHP deps library has everything. If you need to do an unusual task like slowing download speed to 64 kbps, there is a lib for that. Caching is one lib away. Yes, libs themselves are subpar, but they do the job.
Performance? I never had any perf issues in my apps. DB is always the bottleneck, and I know databases.
Frameworks? I don't care about them.
Also, I'll always find PHP devs on the market.

Shut the fuck up with your elitist rust crap. PHP is a nuclear-resistant cockroach that will outlive you, your stupid language and everything you wrote in it. My PHP code will be running fine after every line of code you ever wrote in rust/python/java/scala/whatever fancy language you like is no longer in use.

Yes, I talked shit about PHP in the past. I was neither pragmatic nor mature. Many things changed since. For starters, I'm a CTO now. Hating PHP was easy and socially acceptable. Talk shit about PHP, get internet points — that's how it always worked.

No more. PHP is the king.

I just don't get it.

Been looking for a new job for 2+ years and have failed at every opportunity. Numerous white board interviews, code challenges, hours upon hours wasted. Just can't seem to make the next move. I believe I have my soft skills down because I am able talk and do meetups just fine but either I'm too junior or something else is going on.

What started all of this was my latest rejection that I thought I had in the bag. Sailed through all their questions, did a live code thing, all of that being for 3+ hours. As it's called a final interview with them. Not to mention they're a startup, figured their standards might even be a bit lower than normal since they're needing people. Yet, still got rejected.

This sort of stuff, I'm seriously considering just leaving tech in general and probably just go do a outside job. With supposedly everything going for me like working in a hot job market, in a growing tech town, experience, and doing extra coding on my own time to beef up my portfolio. Doesn't matter. Still continious rejection. Lol in fact how I even got my current job was through completely unconventional means and based on that, I think it's done me more harm than good, which is why I'm trying to leave my current job and go into a place where I can be a better developer.

As of now, back to the grind of trying to find something.

Here is a story about 5 years of my life.
My studies had little to do with web. I did embedded systems (architecture and software) but quickly realized that I couldn't see myself living my life in my homecoutry and that my degree would be worth little to no more than shit elsewhere in the world. That was on my 3rd year in uni.
I liked coding so I decided to pursue computer science, then web development. For that, your degree mattered little.
From then on, when I wasn't in class I was doing some coding.
This allowed me to get short (2 months) internships in Mobile and web development, 4 in total.
Doing so I had made it so that my professors would allow me to do my graduation project in web and mobile dev. That project having ended, I secured a long (1year and a half) internship in Mumbai India doing web for a big consulting company. Having finished that I headed to Belgium for my current job. All with having no to little financial resources except what I could come up with.
"I'm proud of all the efforts it took to make it" is what I think sometimes but what is it that I made? I realized my first objective which is to be on the international job market, but now that I genuinely love software I realize that I didn't really make anything I can be proud of working as a consultant. And having worked on many things but not a lot on practically anything, it's getting hard to do something else.
I'm hoping for devranters insight on how I should proceed.

The story of how I knew I did the right thing leaving the start up I was an employee of.

It was a great place to work when I started, we had a plan and we were are working hard to make it. But pretty soon I realised that things weren't 100%. We kept altering the product and focusing on the wrong things. Our backlog grew faster than it was completed.

Pretty soon a launch planned in April was pushed back over and over again, until we finally released in November, and instead of being first on the market we were last.

We pivoted hard and I didn't believe in the new product so I quit.

The last week on the job I was finishing up some stuff and when our PO (who also was a programmer)was deploying the things I had done to production something went wrong. Now I had just integrated *his* new authorization service and I had a hunch it wasn't deployed. But he sent a message over slack with a bunch of code alterations that was the "problem". Along with some passive aggressive words about how I wasn't professional and didn't take ownership of the product.

I only added an error log that asked if the authorization service was deployed, and 10 minutes later he came up and said good job, no mention of what was fixed between now and then.

I have no regrets leaving that place.

God I hate it when devs complain about not having a decent job 😠 And then they're like "Oh, I've been looking for the past 6 months, but every company just ignores me"

Look, hate to be the one to break it to you, but companies are constantly searching for devs, and many companies have such shortage of quality devs, they'll take just about anyone with even remotely relevant skills as long as they have a decent attitude. If you can't find a decent job in this market, well, it's either that nobody needs a dev who spent the last 10 years doing basic UI and simple NodeJS apps, or they don't want a dev who loudly shits on new technologies while acting like their GitHub profile is impressive enough.

Are you a Angular dev? Maybe it's a good time to change your skillset to stay relevant.

Frustrated... had a signed job offer disappear right before start date after jumping through a ton of hoops, turning down a competing offer, and wasting 3 days of PTO on their process, so back to interviews again.

How do you all determine what salary to ask/look for? Current job has pretty concrete pay bands that I'm pretty sure aren't market, but most of the site (glassdoor, etc) are all OVER the place, as titles can get so fuzzy from one place to another. From people I know I've heard everything from 20k less than I make to 70k more than I make (moderately high COL area, but not CA level). Levels.io seemed promising, but the one FANG offer I had didn't nearly match up with there, so I'm not sure how much of that is bluster or whatever... Blegh. I absolutely hate job hunting.

As a person who never took any CS courses, I don't really see the market value of them, apart from getting through ignorant degree gating at companies with backward corporate philosophies.

As I understand, even a degree isn't really that helpful in getting your foot in the door.

That said, the week 92 question assumes there is something wrong with the nature of CS instruction. College is not trade school. The point of it is to get an education, not a job. Many employers require that education, and that's their prerogative, but for a number of reasons, chief among them being the rapid pace of the advance of technological concepts, most employers do not.

A candidate having a CS undergraduate degree is far less attractive to an employer than one without a degree, but who has a year or two of experience with the technologies the position involves.

That said, I personally think that as college is for an education and not career building, computer science curricula should focus on theory, and not on applied technology. A focus on the latter just guarantees that the subject material will be dated and irrelevant.

But as many people (maybe even most) think college is trade school, I think it's absolute madness to enter into debt slavery in exchange for expiring qualifications.

10K bump but salary is probably still below market for the skills I have... Most likely reason? Trump tax cuts...

I can't showcase my skills in interviews assuming I get any... Not motivated in cramming or studying those useless algorithm questions that have little correlation to actual work.

Whatever.... job pays the bills pretty well... Sorta boring as I'm like the biggest fish on the whole team but that's also the upside I guess... May not be true but I think I'm pretty hard to fire...

So now it's sorta 20% work 80% life... So guess I'm done exploring and just gonna exploit...

P.S I wore this while taking a break from solo karaoking.... (Thursday night)

Have you felt so burnout that it feels like you’ve forgotten how to code?

If yes, how you’ve solved?

I feel like I hit rock bottom. Everything takes forever, and I even forgotten how to do a pull while speaking to a junior recently.

Furthermore, I have to do a performance review and I can’t even think of anything worth mentioning. For sure I’ll be in the next layoffs that should happen soon.

Job market is quite depressing right now. All positions that pay what I need to earn are asking for someone with 3 heads, 8 hands and 9 d*cks.

I miss the times where it was possible to be a senior and just code, without any BS, without having to prove that you can make the company earn N millions more.

How the hell am I meant to get a new job in Edinburgh/Glasgow so I can learn React/Angular/Vue when no-one will hire someone without experience in those frameworks?!

I was in 2 roles back to back and in that time, every single Front End Development role now available in the market requires commercial experience in React/Angular/Vue in order to proceed.

Even the 18k Grad/Junior Development roles require commercial experience in some sort of JS Framework yet I'm certainly not a Grad/Junior.

HOW DOES ANYONE USE IT COMMERCIALLY IF THEY'VE GOT NO EXPERIENCE.

I'm doomed.

For the record, I'm a Front End Developer with 3 Years of experience with personal study experience in React.

the latest recruitard.
so having been unemployed for 14 months, this recruiter shit is infuriating. i think they are the reason for my unemployment.
i just spoke to the biggest idiot ever, she worked for a temp agency called manpower, attempted to solicit a job for the u of a. she was "new and getting used to the technologies in the market" that was her excuse for asking me if java and js were different languages, i mean if you cant understand simple stuff like this, gtfo the industry all you are doing is hurting hard working ppl like me. i cant even get adaquate representation because there is no qualified ppl in charge of delivering me to hiring managers, and you can forget about presenting yourself c level execs dont talk to us plebs we are here for one thing to make them money and get screwed, the last 6 out of 10 jobs i have actually gotten all left me with debit they owed and dissappeared into oblivion.

SharePoint got axed in my prev job and it payed quite well for my home country (Lithuania). I could not find comparable offers on the market in the country and started looking at foreign markets and eventually settled on UK at that time. My girlfriend at that time (now wife) quit her job and followed me there and eventually got employed by the same company.

We have just finished our internal transfer with same company from UK to Canada and couldn't be happier (though the pay is crappy by Canadian standards, but we'll get there in a few years hopefully...)

Not every hole is a shithole.

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

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

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

Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"

"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"

"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"

"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."

"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."

"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."

"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."

"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."

"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"

Hi this is my first post. Kind of annoyed at the job market right now. I've applied to a lot of positions without much luck. My internship last summer got cancelled bc of covid, so all my actual job experience is retail. It's hard to break into the field even with a college degree.

I started as intern at the place. Worked unpaid for 4 months. Then they started paying. That's when shitload started. 5 web developers and 10 projects. 1 months later they fire one of us. Next month they fire another one. 3 developer and 8 projects. No documentation for they projects that were already started before I went there. Provide support for 3 year old project and nothing for reference. Salary was paid 10/15 days after the month war over. I couldn't take it anymore so I have a two months notice before leaving job. A month later all of the 3 android developers gave their notice. After we left, they haven't still paid us our final month's salary. Reason was it was not formal east of leaving and they projects we worked on haven't rolled out to market yet.
Talked and then mailed them the resignation two months in advance is not formal then I don't know what is.
Also how can the project be rolled out when there is specification change every 6 hour to 1 day on the project. Also we completed what was given to us and then the project hasn't rolled out because of new changes in the specification.

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

My do-over would be going to a different coding bootcamp. I wonder if I could be making more money if I went to a better school.

The one I did go to was a big scam. They were more obsessed with teaching you to pretend rather than teaching how to code. They pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes—the students, the volunteers, the donors, the community. They were very cult-like with mantras like “trust the process.”

I spent 9 months there, but I felt I was a year behind. I am not misspeaking. I would have to relearn basic concepts the right way because they taught them half assed or not at all. I didn’t realize I was behind until I went to interviews and bombed. Seriously, I learned more in a 40 hour free library coding class than I learned in 9 months at the school. Most of the interviews I was getting were for unpaid internships. The school was telling me to go for mid level roles.

I found out recently that they’re breaking the law by operating without a license. In my state code schools do need a license. There are screenshots going around of a letter from the education department. They’re defense is “they’re not a school.” They’re still open. I think ppl should be warned away, but there’s only so much I can do. And I know ppl will give this place the benefit of the doubt before taking any student accusations seriously.

The biggest red flag is they want students to pay up to 70k and bind them to payments for 8 years. I say it’s a red flag because this place is operating as a nonprofit. Shouldn’t a nonprofit not be charging 3-4x more than competitors? They’re definitely not going to give you 70k worth of services.

They really just exploit the poor and POC by signing them up for debt and knowing those ppl would not be able to pay even with a 100k job. They have a very poor understanding about how poverty works.

It had MLM/pyramid scheme vibes when they started making recruiting students a game. They give out tickets to their annual fundraiser or promote you on social media if you refer the most students to them.

I’m one of the lucky ones who was studying coding before I started at the school. Also, job searching is mostly luck, so I was lucky at that too. But I still had to take a job that paid below market. I still wonder what would happen if I went someplace else.

I don’t even put this place on my resume or LinkedIn. Even without these problems, it’s not like anyone would have heard of the place anyway.

No this place isn’t Lambda or Holberton school.

Say you had a yearly review and you asked for a decent raise (to compare you to market value).
Say the manager told you he will talk with the boss and fight for your demands.

After how long without an answer, you'll start looking for another job?

I am waiting for a response over two months now.

If everyone in the job market would be paid the same salary.
What job you would've chosen which is not programming?

I remember studying up on web dev by myself, got advanced into php and all frontend stuff js, jquery, css, html. Coz all jobs in the country wanted those exact stuff. I got a job, 1.5 years later tried to look for other jobs, everyone wanted react, angular, vue, node... fucking market outdates u as u are working. Dont u hate that

Do you think it's possible to get enough of a following on YouTube and twitch to fund your living expenses and use the rest of your free time to work on your own studio projects?

For example I'm a VR and AR game developer. I do the whole shebang for game development and design on my own. I could stream play throughs of the current game I'm working on as a weekly thing and create tutorial videos for other developers and students for more content on my channel, but to also stimulate growth in the VR and AR industry. I'd in a way be creating my own market. I could also stream the development of the art assets and whatnot.

Could possibly make some money from the ads at first. Maybe even within the game?

Idk I'm trying to avoid having to get a job anywhere else if I can float my own success as an indie start up. So thoughts on this rant please?

Job hunting is hard!

I have over 10 years experience in software engineering. I do mostly full stack, so I can say I'm a jack of all trades and a language agnostic. I'd say I'm a good software engineer and will be able to tackle any task I've been assigned to. Having said that, my confidence in finding a new role is at an all time low.

I've been job hunting for 3-4 months now and so far I've only had 1 interview and it was unsuccessful. Now have been invited to a first round interview for another company (first of many rounds). It's going to involve many technical challenges like coding, algorithms and data structure and system designs.

In general I've had hardly any interviews (about 6-7 in total in my whole career). Due to my lack of interview experience, I've been getting anxiety especially now that the job market is tougher than it has ever been.

Firstly, how do you guys prepare, if at all? I feel like many of these interviews require you to be good at interviews, almost like an exam. If these questions were presented to me when I first came out of college, I would've had a better chance.

Secondly, how do you take rejections? I didn't know how painful it was to get rejected, regardless of how much I wanted the role.

I've been fortunate enough to still have my current job, but because of that I don't really have much time, nor the mental energy to study for interviews.

Apologies I'm advanced for poor grammar, I'm writing this on the train.

How to approach job applications for EU and US market?

I have applied at multiple places and have never made it even to the first stage. The jobs I apply for, pretty much match my experience level and stack.

Does this have something to do with visa issues since I am from the Middle East?

Or is there something else I am possible missing out on.

The near future is in IOT and device programming...
In ten years most of us will have some kind of central control and more and more stuff connected to IOT, security will be even a bigger problem with all the Firmware bugs and 0-day exploits, and In 10 years IOT programmers will be like today's plumbers... You need one to make a custom build and you must pay an excessive hour salary.
My country is already getting Ready, I'm starting next month a 1-year course on automation and electronics programming paid by the government.

On the other hand, most users will use fewer computers and more tablets and phones, meaning jobs in the backend and device apps programming and less in general computer programs for the general public.

Programmers jobs will increase as general jobs decrease, as many jobs will be replaced by machines, but such machines still need to be programmed, meaning trading 10 low-level jobs for 1 or 2 programming jobs.

Unlike most job areas, self-tough and Bootcamp programmers will have a chance for a job, as experience and knowledge will be more important than a "canudo" (Portuguese expression for the paper you get at the end of a university course). And we will see an increase of Programmer jobs class, with lower paid jobs for less experienced and more well-paid jobs for engineers.

In 10 years the market will be flooded with programmers and computer engineers, as many countries are investing in computer classes in the first years of the kids, So most kids will know at least one programming language at the end of their school and more about computers than most people these days.

One of my student ask me this. I dont have exact answer so i decided to take help professionals here and based on their experiences i hope they can help him and many people who has similar questions.

Is it necessary to have graduation from USA to work in USA Or canada?

What are the possibilities to get an internship or job in US market without having education from USA?

Please comments.

a question for y'all:

just out of interest I would like to know:

are you *mainly* working on legacy stuff that is - without a question - just too old? everyone in your corp knows it needs rework but "EfFoRt JuSt ToO hiGh"? Where at the same time, most of dev time goes into maintenance and bug fixes instead of feature implementation.

If yes, do you fear that you're losing relevance on the market by not keeping up to date? What are your feelings about that situation?

did you maybe even quit a job in the past because of such situations?

---

Why do I want to know that?
- Had some beer
- As a freelance dude I often see battlefields right out of hell. I csn easily go, but the dudes working 9 to 5 on that??? Hoe can you oO

A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..

If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..

From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!

Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!

There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..

If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..

Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */

Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!

And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..

One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..

Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.

So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..

And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.

To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it

I suck at DevOps at least as hard as I'm good at front-end/UX. I found out as a result of the local job market starting to get needy for 'full-stack'. Stuck for 2 days on setting up a Docker/ Dockerhub/ DigitalOcean/ Bitbucket pipeline with Nginx/ Node/ MongoDB Cloud & Webpack/ React.

*Sigh*

i have an idea today for find job as Junior:

First of all, startups usually hire senior devs only for two reasons:

1) is critical to their business, they need people that will ensure the project will be done no matter what, seniors usually brings that to the table.

2) The startups that raise some founding, usually have 100k+ raised, that money is basically enough for hire Seniors for some time without troubles, taking into account they will usually be highly profitable in the mid term, it is not a big deal to take the risk

Today startups, at least the most interesting ones, play the game in God Mode due to that founds raising, it is like having a max level character in some MMO with insane amounts of gold, you will buy only the best gear with that gold, not the low level gear, why you want to buy low level stuff, if you can buy the best of the best? that is why Juniors are not likely to have a place in startups, they can pay the Seniors.

But, there a situation in what an startup will wish to hire some Juniors, this is situation is, when they have never raised founds, they have no Cheat Mode, this ones are usually startups that have just few weeks or months of being created, and they need the MVP ASAP, this startups usually already have one or two Mid/Senior level engineers, but they have a very highly benefit from having a Junior in their team, this guy will no take any part in the Cake, will only work for lot less money and will discharge some stuff from the Seniors (Taking into account that is a minimum competent Junior).

Here is where Juniors can get jobs, at least for start their careers, and taking into account that thousands of new startups are created every year, this is a major market.

Ok, i already test that this approach if viable, i send requests to 5 startups that meets the conditions, and got response from 4! still not make a deal, but this is a lot more than 0 response after 2 dozen of applications to more stablished startups.

What you think about this? maybe this is just the jobless syndrome attacking me fuck

Guys, I need some advice.

A couple of weeks ago I finished my internship as a sys admin in this medium sized consulting company. When my "contract" was about to expire they offered me a real job doing the same thing I've been doing for the past few months, but I turned it down.

The reason why I did it was that I wasn't really happy with the job. I mean, the people were... fine, the management team was... fine, the actual work I needed to do was... fine. I think you get the idea. The problem was that I never really enjoyed it all that much, and even though I didn't hate it, I wasn't really happy with it, so I turned the offer down.

After giving it more thought and listening to what some of my friends and family members had to say, I started thinking that maybe it was a bad idea to do so. Many people have said to me that I'm making a mistake, that I shouldn't leave a job before I have a new one, and that I should take the offer, work there for a little while and then look for something else.

I always answer by saying that the job market in this field is much more simple, and that it's much easier to find a new job than in any other, but yet again, I'm not sure if I'm making a big mistake with this decision.

Thoughts?

PS: I'm 21, this would be my first job ever

I start a new job Monday, it feels so great to be out of my old place.

But it also is kinda weird, cause my old job helped get me to where I am now. I along with my brothers and dad were evicted before I started my old job as an intern.

But 6 months into working there and staying with my grandparents, and I got hired full time making $5 more than my dad makes. Me and my dad built up enough savings to own a place. My credit score was higher, and I was working for a title company so my boss gave me a BIG employee discount (this was early into things before I realized how 2-faced she is) if it was my name going onto the mortgage so that's what we did. His savings my credit score and the discount allowed us to get a place 1 bedroom bigger than the old house meaning no more sharing a room with my brother for the first time in my life.

And because of that discount after all was said and done we still had enough in savings to cover rent for a good bit and not have to stress like we did in the last months before we were evicted.

That allowed us to build up savings, start putting more into the mortgage and start paying it down slightly faster, (50 extra a month isn't a lot but it's also not nothing to sneeze at).

I got into the stock market and about a little under a year later i have $150 in unrealized gains gains with a market value of $365 in my stocks.

I also bought a server with the leeway I got from this job and the stability of the new home environment and started toying around with that teaching me I have a major interest in homelab and self hosting which is a part of what helped me get the new job.

This seems like a lot of ramble sorry but it's just weird, 1 job changed my life, and even due to that I couldn't wait to leave it and now that I am I feel kinda regretful at how happy I am to be leaving after how much this job did for me.

But yeah, I couldn't stay another day with my boss. Glad to leave, but also really grateful for everything the job did for me.

To the Irish devs here, any experience with employers in Galway or Cork?
Most jobs are in Dublin or Midlands but every now and then something nice pops up.

I really wanna move to the west or south in the next 1-2 years but I’m worried about the job market there.

Of course the salary will be lower than in Dublin but I’d assume it’s still very well paid for local conditions?

Dublin is just too international for me, I like the quieter, more traditional counties better..

Don’t hate me for that dubs😉

Crystal ball!
A timeline until the first NBE-Citizen is elected president of the USA.

2031 - BlackRock launches their new large scale financial product, the "Robotic Business Development Company" (R-BDC), in which an AI is given billions of dollars to acquire, create and manage companies, replacing their C-suite executive bodies. The "Chief Executive Robot" (CER) is supervised by a board of human industry experts hired by BlackRock.
It is important to say that the employees, middle managers, accountants, lawyers, etc in an R-BDC are all human - it's only the CEO, CFO, COO and the rest of the gang that are overgrown chatbots.

2032 - R-BDCs are mostly focused on high-bureaucracy, non specialized but people-intensive legacy industries like steel mining, food services, urban transportation and government services like water and road management.

2033 - For the first time an R-BDC company is included in the S&P 500 index. If it's CER were human and paid the same as CEOs of equivalent companies, it would have become a billionaire.
Later in the year, two more R-BDC companies are included in the index. One of them was created by Apple and the other by JP Morgan.

2035 - An R-BDC company makes headlines for convincing BlackRock to dissolve it's review board. When finally given free reign, the CER immediately slices it's dividends and vastly increases low-level employee compensation. The company share prices crater, but BlackRock stands by its decision.
Later in the year, as a recession hits the entire market really hard, that company shows solid profits and fantastic sales. It becomes the first trillion-dolar R-BDC.

2037 - Most Americans' dream-job is in an R-BDC company, says ProPublica.

2038 - Congress passes the "Non-Biological Entities Liability" (NOBEL) Act, following a high profile case of employee harassment perpetrated by the CER of an R-BDC.
The act recognizes NBEs, for all legal liability purposes, as USA citizens.
This highly controversial legislation is upheld by the supreme court, and many believe it was first introduced by lobbyists as a way for large investors in R-BDCs to avoid legal responsibility.
Several class action lawsuits are filed against CERs that are now liable for insider trading. A few SCOTUS decisions set legal precedent that determinantes what exactly constitutes the parts of the same Non-Biological Entity.

2040 - As a decade ends and another begins, 35% of all companies in the US and 52% of the entire stock market are part of a R-BDC company or another. The McKinsey consulting group now offers "expert CER customization services".

2043 - Inspired by successful experiments in Canada, Australia and South Korea, the american state of Vermont is the first to amend it's constitution to allow municipalities to have Non-Biological Entities as city and government administrators. City councils are still humans-only.

2046 - The american state of Colorado becomes the first to allow unsupervised NBEs to assume state government executive positions. Several states follow soon after. Later in the year, the federal government replaces several administrative positions with NBEs.

2049 - The state of Texas passes legislation requiring the CERs of all companies with a presence in the state to be another entirely contained/processed within the state or to be supervised by a local human representative while acting within the state. Several states, including California, Florida and Washington, are discussing similar legislation.

2051 - Congress passes the SUNBELT Act (SUbmission [of] NBEs [to] Limits [and] Taxes) that vastly increases the liability of NBEs and taxes all manifestations of such entities. Most important, it requires
CERs of hundreds of companies manifest disagreeance, most warn that it might hurt employee satisfaction and company sales. Several companies disable their CERs entirely.

2053 - Public outrage after leaked interactions of human supervisors and company CERs show that the CERs tried to avoid the previous year's mass layoffs and pay cuts, but board members pressed on, disregarding concerns. Major investigations and boycotts further complicate matters, and many human workers go on strike until the company boards are dissolved and the CERs are reinstated.

2052 - Many local elections all over the country see different NBEs as contenders - and a NBE is expected to win in most races.

2054 - The SUNBELT Act is found unconstitutional by the supreme court, and most of its provisions are repealed.
This also legitimizes the elected NBE officials.

2058 - For the first time an NBE wins a seat in Congress, but is not allowed to keep it. Runoff elections are held.

2061 - Congress votes for allowing NBEs to hold federal legislative positions, as already allowed in the least populous states.

2062 - Several NBEs win Congress seats. In Europe, there are robot legislators since the 40's.

2064 - The first NBE presidential candidate loses the race.

2072 - The first NBE president is elected.

I recently entered a new job as a software developer for a hot-in-market startup, and they are offering a huge amount of money to maintain just one app

The reason why they are offering that much money is because it is a hybrid app written in closurescript, they are willing to pay for learning closure but just maintain the app

So yay?

someone called me.
recruiter: hi may I speak to niko.
niko: yes speak, may I know who is this.
recruiter: my name is lala from Xtalent I have a .net developer role in NJ. Are you available in the job market?
Niko: I have a project already.

**hangs up

repeat every 3 hrs, same person different time.

I'm a bit bitter that the first half of my associates degree was spent learning php and now that I'm in the job market, fucking nobody wants php 😑 I have other coding skills but like we spent A LOT of time learning a language that nobody is building new applications in.

$ ng generate component gofuckyourself

I am having a fun time learning Angular. It’s way different from React.

I do like the css scoping a lot. Also it’s strange to not have to deal with state.

I am learning it because I see the job market requiring it as opposed to React.

Any React peeps feel me?

Best choice: not going into game development. Bad payment for horrible working conditions.

Worst choice: telling numbers as first party in the interview process for every job I had so far. Made me earn far under my market value.

This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.

So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).

Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.

I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.

At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.

Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):

I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently

And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)

What would be the best way forward guys?

I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):

One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)

The db.t3.small postgres database

The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting

AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification

And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.

Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??

Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?

Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome

A previous rant made me start doubting my choices.

I just graduated from college (but college here is probably not what you call college. You choose whether you do one more year and gain the 'x technician' certificate or you do two years and get the 'practical engineer' degree)

Hope you understand it.

Anyway, so I continued 1 year (I skipped 1 year so it's like I did the whole two years) and I have a practical engineer degree in electronics.

I love programming and really want to work in the field but (since I know nothing about the market) I don't even know if I'll get a job without going to university and getting a degree (which I want to get, I want to learn Software Engineering though, not CS)

So now to my question, do you guys truly think getting a degree will be a waste of my time?

tl;dr I want to get a Software Engineer degree, but a lot of posts say it's a waste of time. Who agrees and who doesn't?

If you had a clear skill gap and no free time in your current situation, would you take the risk of 6-8 months off to fix that skill gap with training, rebuild/rebrand, and then job hunt again?

I'm a self-taught frontend developer with 1,5 - 2 years of experience in JavaScript / Vue.js development. Pretty cliche in 2023 and I can actually feel this now when it comes to the job market. It's brutal at the moment.I moved to Germany for a specific job but got laid off a few weeks ago due to a lack of projects and actual things to do. And here I am right now: tons of job applications, 4-5 interviews a week, zero success.

I'm thinking about getting some warehouse job or anything for the time being, and start freelancing in my spare time. Instead of this oversaturated JavaScript landscape, I would get into PHP (not as "hip" so less competition, backend, no new tools every 6 months), SQL, or hyper-specialize in CSS - something I like quite a bit but have seemingly zero value to employers.

I actually made a simple website for a small business when I was getting started with frontend, and he was super happy with the end result. I also did some language tutoring, that was quite rewarding as well. So freelancing is definitely fun, I enjoyed it much more than fearing layoffs or trying to force a fake-ambitious attitude on my 30th interview that most probably won't lead me anywhere. :D

Is the frontend job market really this oversaturated? (I know, I know... It's not difficult for competent, skilled, and experienced devs with CS degrees) Is being a CSS specialist, PHP-developer, or SQL-magician on fiverr/upwork/etc. a viable freelancing path? I've heard good and bad about these platforms, the competition there, etc. If not, where should I start?

What do you think? Any input is much appreciated. :)

Quick Java question.

Does spending £200 on Oracle certification raise your job market value?
Or is it just a pointless money maker for Oracle.

Is there a program which is good for simply looking at code? It wouldn't be an editor per say, but a viewer. It should be tailored around code, have the usual highlighting, color themes is welcomed, maybe something that highlights comments, documentation and so on.

For development on Windows, this role have always been filled by Notepad++ for me because of its integration to the context menu. It does the job, but I'm wondering if there is actually something like this on the market.

Dear Windows, we have to talk. I love you, you know that, and I know that your market share has been shrinking in recent years and you're shit scared of becoming irrelevant but for the love of god:

- STOP asking me every god damn few weeks if I want to change my browser settings - NO I FUCKING DONT WANT TO USE BING, FUCK OFF

- STOP trying to be like an app and add pointless new "features" that nobody cares about and just do your fucking job, which is to be a PLATFORM which is stable, never changes and that gets out of my fucking way

- STOP reinstalling apps I uninstall, Im NOT FUCKING INTERESTED IN PAINT 3D, FUCK OFF

FUCK, ME,

Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)

Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.

In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.

His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."

Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.

Since most of the people around here can code decently well and also have the capacity and knowledge(imo) to trade stocks regularly, I'd like to know if anyone really does it?
Since I'm currently jobless, I have dabbled a bit in the share market and have been quite successful while following very specific rules, so I was curious if anyone has done/is doing this regularly as an alternative job/source for additional money!

## Reasonable answers needed ##

If you always work free and forced overtime, and you didn't get any salary raise fir a while. and then you asked to learn and work with new language and framework you didn't work with it before, you would prove yourself and learn it or you would ask for a raise first (or you simply you won't work do it)?

Context: fucked up market, no other job founded. and father.

Fucking hell. So, I had an interview with market research company and in said interview I got told to bring my passport to my first shift training and it was ok if it was 5 years out of date. Additional info, they were supposed to call us on Thursday to book said shift and send us an email with a information pack. They never did.

Ok, day of shift comes along. After I booked it because no one fucking bothered to call any of us. Email never arrived but whatever. I go to the place and bring my 3 years out of date polish passport... Big fucking mistake. They don't seem to like polish passport seeing as how it's only the British ones that get the out of date is okay thing. So I'm sitting there still calm because sure, company policy, they have to do it. The training guy was nice and all, offered to get me to their office to speak to them about it. I accept and off we go.

At the office, I basically get the information that it's only British passports that get it and I basically can't use anything else as proof of ID, which is funny seeing as I have a polish identity card that I can leave and enter the country on within the EU. I suppose I'm going to try looking for a job that doesn't require passports for now and if I find a good one then they can go get fucked by a bull for all I care.

In conclusion, I get to wait till I'm 18 (thankfully only a month) to apply for a new passport in the local polish consulate. Brilliant. All thanks to some cunt that decided they require fucking passports with such beautiful (note the sarcasm) rules. The fucktards.

Hoping the apocalypse comes early for these cocksuckers,
BadFox

I'm quite confused about job market here in germany. Beside studies I'm working in a data center and have already some practical knowledge about programming stuff and managing applications. Although many companies I apply for say I need more experience. How the hell should I collect it if I don't get the chance to do so. Do you have seen this in other countries as well?

After a few years in IT you don't find job. Job find you!

in job application mode; getting really tired of entry level positions wanting 3+ years of experience.

Given that a) no one I have seen with this much experience wants these positions, b) HR says they are getting applicants with this much experience, I can only assume two things:

1: People lie on their resumes.
or
2: The job market is far more saturated with good applicants than I thought.

Either way, frustrating.

So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.

UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.

A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.

After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.

A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.

I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?

I'm so frustrated at my current workplace. Planning is in chaos, my variable pay is delayed by 3 months now. I've been really considering to switch but today was my breaking point, I'll take my business elsewhere. I've got 8 years of experience in backend, cloud engineering and bit of DevOps and data engineering side.
But today's job market kinda scares me a bit.

Quite confused between choosing one out of two job opportunities

Little background - I am currently working on my own startup/project. I have been thinking of taking a break from it, for now, for various reasons, pick a job, earn some more experience and money, and get back to my gig after couple of months.

18 months ago, I had to choose a framework. I decided to go with Vuejs, and I feel, I made the correct choice. My motive was not to select a framework for job market or prepare for job, but to learn the best framework for project ( Good learning curve, easy, and fast )

Just recently, I got internship opportunity at two good startups (one YC selected and one funded), one using Vuejs and other Reactjs, which will be converted into full-time job.

The advantage with vuejs startup is, I am good with vuejs and looking to use it in future also. But with reactjs startup, I will have to dive deeper in reactJs in coming 2-3 weeks, which I don't think I am going to use in future for personal projects.

Compensation of reactjs startups looks more than vuejs company. Around 20-30% more. Vuejs company had asked for 3 month internship, while reactjs company will decide to convert it to full-time in a month.

Have anything to say ??

*Vuejs is adapted from and bit similar to angular and reactjs*

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

Got a job interview tomorrow I'm not that nervous but I'm not sure what my market value is even after 5 years of experience any suggestions?