You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I had a friend who hated VS Code like a fuckton alot however, most of my friends are VS Code users and he's the only one who uses atom. He say that it's greater than VS Code and code then would die sooner.

Fast forward to today, he now ranted at my Discord DM about atom ahving slow startups, extensions that doesn't work, that kind of shit, not to mention hentried to commit improperly indented code (we have nazi style enforcement in out projects regarding codestyle) and made CodeClimate ranted over it.

"That's what you get for shitting VS Code" I said. Hours later, he tried VS Code and he instantly fell in love with it.

One down, more to go

TLDR - you shouldn't expect common sense from idiots who have access to databases.

I joined a startup recently. I know startups are not known for their stable architecture, but this was next level stuff.
There is one prod mongodb server.
The db has 300 collections.
200 of those 300 collections are backups/test collections.
25 collections are used to store LOGS!! They decided to store millions of logs in a nosql db because setting up a mysql server requires effort, why do that when you've already set up mongodb. Lol 😂
Each field is indexed separately in the log.
1 collection is of 2 tb and has more than 1 billion records.
Out of the 1 billion records, 1 million records are required, the rest are obsolete. Each field has an index. Apparently the asshole DBA never knew there's something called capped collection or partial indexes.

Trying to get approval to clean up the db since 3 months, but fucking bureaucracy. Extremely high server costs plus every week the db goes down since some idiot runs a query on this mammoth collection. There's one single set of credentials for everything. Everyone from applications to interns use the same creds.
And the asshole DBA left, making me in charge of handling this shit now. I am trying to fix this but am stuck to get approval from business management. Devs like these make me feel sad that they have zero respect for their work and inability to listen to people trying to improve the system.

Going to leave this place really soon. No point in working somewhere where you are expected to show up for 8 hours, irrespective of whether you even switch on your laptop.
Wish me luck folks.

So I just had this job interview with a "startup" (side note: who the fuck still calls limping companies "startups" in 2024? That is sooooo 2010s).

There was this tattooed and very pale girl (you just know the vibe), the mandatory Norse bearded tall guy and the balding, "I'm-in-my-fifties-but-I-am-not-a-square, maaan" sleasy-looking white guy in a button up shirt but no suit jacket. The whole stereotypes gang came looking for their missing nerdy Indian.

The sleasy bloke goes on and on on a looong tirade on how they're "a tech innovation academy", how they "move fast and break things" and they "run smoking hot", so that "long nights are to be expected".
So, they usual red-flagging shit.

Then they all went on a "but we're not like all those companies that look exactly like us" word salad about "sustainability and a healthy work life balance", with their "highest value" being "the utmost respect at all times". I'm nodding my head at the meaningless splurge until they fart out the sentence "for example, cussing while talking with colleagues is a fireable offence".

If some hustling enterprise rather prefers a posh working environment, one can adapt to such circumstances. Provided, of course, that said enterprise adheres to the administrative coherence expected from a culturally refined institution. Mostly by compliance, from the leadership, to a rigidly predictable working schedule.

Now, if the bloody curs want coder dogs that work assfucking hours with a shit eating grin, they better swallow our fucking sailor mouths. Fuck, I've done twenty hour shifts getting my ass kicked in dark startup fisting/rush rooms. If unable to yell at any blabbering cocksucker to go stick his fucking opinions up the bitch who crapped him, then I ain't gonna bloody be there.

TL;DR they can either have a "utmost respect" working environment XOR a "fast and hot" daily hustle.

After they crapped out that oxymoron I could barely hold myself to avoid saying "sorry, I do not partake in any of the psychedelics you must be on".
On to the next interviews!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am really tired of broke startups and their bullshittery.

So in my 6 ppl dev team management had to do cuts and pulled a jira report of story points sum of the past 10 months, it went like this:

1. 307
2. 307
3. 283
4. 274
5. 257
6. 220

The 6. Guy is a teamlead so he was safe. 4 and 5 guys were fired with zero notice and 1 weeks severance pay (we are contractors).

Best part is that remaining 2. And 3. devs produce very low quality code. But hey, they have enough story points. Managament didnt even bother to discuss with teamlead about who to keep. Workload is the same, we were told to "level up".

You can't make this shit up. US based startups man.

Y'all, are internships in your area paid, unpaid or u need to pay to get one?

Our uni made internships mandatory! being from one of the country which produces largest number of engineers per year. Every godamn student from our uni is running around to get an internship! And there arises these dick heads with so called made up startups which has never done a godamn single project, just legally registered before the dawn and puts up advertisements for internship trainings!! All our uni needs is a fucking certificate from a technical company which is legally registered. And these assholes provide internship to those who pay them hella amount, and attend there couple of days just to get the certificate!! No developers! Just some random guy talking about html and css! Now thats Internship!

Fucking shit! Making money by looting students in their hard times! Students get the certificate that satisfies the uni, but for fucks sake at least bring an expert to guide them! No!! Need to stand up against this shit!

When I was in school, people came to me every once in a while, wanting to make a new great MMORPG with destructible terrain and factions.

Then came the guys who wanted to make a new amazing app that will help them fix some minor life inconveniences (like tracking expiry dates on the groceries in your fridge).

And now there are guys who want to make blockchain, IoT and chatbot based startups.

I just want to watch youtube and post shit on the internet. :(

(tl;dr) Protip: never take internship/training/job offers from startups.

Fucking piece of shit startups hiring innocent interns from University, hoping that they are full stack developers to build their shit website.
"I will throw challenges at you".

You fucking scum, I need a proper mentor to teach me something which is not my fucking domain. You expect me to know nodejs and reactjs, and if I don't know that means there's something wrong with my learning process?!!

I'm looking for an internship which basically means that I get company exposure to proper training unlike being your fucking slave, you uncultured swine.

Seriously, recruiters, these days jack off to google buzzwords.

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.

New wave of startups using blockchain tech in their pitch deck. I wonder how many of them are full of shit and its just a replicated db?

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

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

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

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

And, it finally fucking hit me.

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

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

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

I AM SO DEPRESSED.

Last job search was in mid 2020. I thought I had a pretty good offer: getting 40% more in gross salary. But then I asked some pretty standard/clarifying questions about benefits and all the red flags started coming out 🚩. They really used the pandemic to sell ppl short. TLDR I turned down the offer.

PTO was the dealbreaker. Their PTO was 16 days: 6 holidays plus 10 personal days. Even though any paid time off is PTO, I thought it was pretty gross to count holidays in the PTO bank like that. My friends agreed with me.

Yes, this is a US company.

Then shit hit the fan when I asked about sick days.

Me: What’s the policy on sick time?

Talent/HR: We have a flex time policy, so you don’t have to take time off for a one hour doctor’s appointment.

🤨🚩
I didn’t ask about flex time.

Me: The PTO is really low.

Talent: Well, you could use your sick days for vacation.

🤨🚩🚩

Me: I just asked you about sick time and you didn’t mention sick days. What are these sick days?

Talent: Oh, well technically the personal days are 5 sick days and 5 personal days… [I swear this is what I heard over the phone.]

🤨🚩🚩🚩

Me: 😤 This isn’t going to work.

Talent: I can see about getting you more PTO.

Talent comes back with 5 additional personal days. And it wouldn’t be included in my offer letter it would only be a note in my file. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

The gross thing was this startup was in the healthcare space: it’s a prescription meds delivery service/pharmacy. I know ppl say startups are the “throw money at you and go cheap on benefits” type. But how can you be in a healthcare space and not give ppl decent PTO? And during the pandemic and pre-vaccine existence? They were trying to con me. It was bizarre because it’s not my first job search. I was still employed so I wanted a new job but I wasn’t desperate.

I couldn’t see how anyone would accept that abysmal PTO offer. Maybe if they were really desperate or naive. I suspected this company had a big PTO disparity because I’m positive most employees would have negotiated for more time.

It was hard to turn down the money because I was afraid of not finding a job. Luckily, I did get an offer with really great benefits from a different company later on.

Entrepreneurship is a gamble. Problem is, you re not dealt any cards. You re dealt a gun with one bullet

you know what im tires of?

Finding a good domain name for a potential business, unregistered, and then using algorithms, the registrar itself snipes it and cybersquats it as "premium".

In otherwords, if you do find a good name, theres no point becauss it'll just be immediately labelled "premium" by an algorithm and lock you out with 5,000 dollar pay wall.

people in 2003 didnt have to deal with this shit. Registrars should be allowed to do this.

Five domain names now, out of a couple dozen I tried, the five good ones I came up with, all five, "premium".

It wasnt like they were even .coms or common words either. Hell one of them had a number in it.

Nope "we have determined spontaneously, through algorithm, you haves selected what may be a valuable domain name, thank you for the service of identifying it for us, we will now reserve it, even though no one else wants it, at a prohibitively high cost."

Like a homeless women finding a winning lottery ticket in a parking lot, and the rich fucking owner running out demanding that she give him it because it was lost in HIS public parking lot.

Like you motherfuckers dont already have enough? You know what a good domain is? Its a basis for credbility. Its the difference between whether people use your service or not. Its the foundation for excitement or interest.

And here we have this "algorithmically marked as premium" bullshit, fucking the poors out of any chance of even a good start.

"Haahahaha cocksuckers, you're not internet startups in the early two thousands! If you dont habe five grand go drop on a dpmain name that isnt even fucking owned, enjoy staying part of the fucking lowerclass!"

These fuckers. Cant believe this bullshit.

Just another day in motherfucking america, where you have to start rich to even get ahead. just one more way gen x, gen y, and gen z got fuckity fucked right in the ass.

fuck this country so much. fuck it all.

never even gonna have a chance to own a home or anything else.

nobody ever offered me a real fucking chance, not once in my god damned life. not even my fucking parents.

might as well drink myself into a coma.

I think I just miiiight have found a new job, but before, some comments about the state of the data engineering industry:

- Sooooooo many people outsource it. Man, outsourcing your data teams is like seeing the world through an Apple Vision Pro fused to your skull. Fine if it is working well, but you will go blind of your subscription expires. Or if Apple decides to ban you. Or if they decide to abandon the product... you are entirely dependent on their whims. In retrospect this is par for the course, I guess.
- Lots of companies think data engineering *starts* with an SQL database. Oh, honey, I have some bad news.
- Quite a few expect MS POWER BI will be able to deliver REAL TIME DASHBOARDS summarizing TERABYTES of data sourced from SQL SERVER (or similar). Facepalm.
- Nearly all think the handling of data engineering products is just like that of software engineering. Just try. I dare you.
- Why people think that "familiarity in several SQL dialects" is something to brag about?
- Shit, startups. Startups are dead, boomers. Deader than video rental physical stores.

That's all. On to the next round of interviews!

the moment when you say fuck this functionality and let’s get rid of this 15 screens and replace them with simply point and click and they say but google did it like we wanted… Well google is valued trillion dollars and we are valued nothing. If you want this shit pay million to some developer so he would do one thing and deliver this…ok it’s not needed, fucking 12+ years making startups and delivering projects and still need to deal with morons who say google did it, yeah ask them to develop some functionality for you and fuck you too… I saved you year of work you morons and you fucking complain, dude you need to start selling your products and I want to enable it to you, if you don’t understand that shit then fuck you…

I actually only started programming a little less than two years ago. I entered my freshman year of college as a mathematics major, but as time went on I ended up enjoying coding in C++ much more than trying to work out partial equations.

I have since become fascinated with many aspects of computer science, mainly web development and systems programming (I discovered Linux and the command line only a year ago and I'm practically in love). I've since been working for a couple fairly new startups with duties from developing a mobile native app in AngularJS/Ionic to migrating content to new servers and developing custom themes on WordPress. I have deep, deep aspirations of eventually being employed by Google as a Senior Software Dev (although I'd definitely prefer working for a company that would allow 100% remote work 😁). I've even finally began developing my own projects, ranging from a URL shortening service to a basic online encyclopedia.

I wanna spend the rest of my life doing this shit. Hell, I hope I die at my computer.

tl;dr fuck me, I'm stupid, I suck at my job and I wanna die but can't complain because I'm labeled ungrateful

I am -this- close... -this- close to strangling someone, or myself for that matter, over trying to finish this goddamned website that I regret taking on just because I needed the money.

You make me rework my website design three times and eventually end up micro-managing me and keep on making me make small changes that even I can't figure out, nor can anyone else for that fucking matter because you want it to be 'perfect'. God I'm so irritated right now let me fucking sleep. I want out so bad but fuck me sideways with my gaping asshole I need the fucking money.

I wanna quit this shit so bad, it's making me hate myself and throwing me into an existential crisis whether or not am I even a good designer / developer because I just can't satisfy this perfectionist asshole and need to greet him with a smile every fucking time to maintain good terms between our startups.

Moved to a totally new city to start a new job, thought it'll be amazing as the company is good. Came and saw a bunch of motherfuking smokers who smoke at the main gate of the office, the HR does not respond to my queries, doesn't have time to interact with a new recruit, and I have still got no company mail or email id. And oh, I have the entire GitHub access and the android code cloned on MY PERSONAL COMPUTER, the rights to which were given by the CTO himself.
Guess what, time to say bye to this shit. I'm moving back.

Culture.

Everybody seems to fuck it up. (Most ignore it entirely)

Everybody seems to undervalue it’s importance. (Its value cannot be overstated)

Everybody seems to think it is a luxury for successful companies. (Instead of being a major part of what got them their success)

Everybody seems to think having beer in the fridge is culture, or some other perk. (I like beer and shit, but that’s not culture unless your company makes fucking beer!)

Everybody seems to think that a value statement is culture. (Your employees don’t give a fuck if you want to “provide value to X industry)

And guess, fucking, what...

Everyone is wrong. That’s why 9/10 startups fail, because the founders and CEO are dumbasses.

Here’s some pretty simple advice for life...

“Don’t be a fucking dumbass”

- Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what exactly does "Learning" mean in a tech industry?

From my experience,
"learning" from college's pov
"Welcome to the class. your parents has paid us already for this. Now we are supposed to stand here for next 6 months, study very slowly and learn about the topics of our curriculum and give a test on it. we might as well make a good nice project to check our knowledge"
(worst college will also add "Sorry the above message was just fiction, i am here to drink tea & enjoy my day,while you guys are here to enjoy,mark attendance and get a degree because we only care about our reputation and we are gonna pass you anyway")

"learning" from startups pov:
"Here is an idea, here is a design, here is your months salary and here is your deadline.
Make a 100% polished,working product out of it before the deadline. You are solely responsible for this project and you have to figure out on your own how to make our fantasy idea into reality before deadline hits( else you are shit).
This way you learn.
We will also provide you with a free all time learning course on how to be fine without getting any respect for your hardwork and tolerate our insults, which will help you in the life long journey of dealing assholes.
Our company is great and providing you an amazing learning opportunity, kiss our feet."
(worst startups will also add "We don't have/ wont provide you any seniors to help you with this stuff, the internet is your source of truth"/ "if you don't hit the deadline, your salary will get deducted"/ "work on weekends to hit the deadline")

"Learning" from an MNC pov (never really experienced those but from what i have heard):
"Welcome to our company. we here provide you with a similar experience as that of your shitty college during training period and then put you in low brain-ish low paying repetitive job for life until you leave us or we find a replacement for your work or salary"

So a friend / batch-mate in our accelerator asked me if I was okay with installing a monitoring software for a client our startups are collaborating for. And the said client was ranting how I've been appearing offline to him since morning...

Bitch I'm already letting you monitor my shit from morning to night, I don't need your French ass snooping around what I'm doing outside of office hours.

Fucker.

So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.

context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.

in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.

BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.

so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.

boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?

what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.

but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'M JUST FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.

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

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

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

I hate the company (agency) I moved to...I've negotiated good pay and the project for cutting edge medical product which will change the world (cancer diagnose and it actually works).

Now the dark side I've got shit tier laptop which I don't want, overtime is payed 30% less, all the people in the agency from development team don't know shit and are mostly I would call them juniors (of course who would with enough seniority work with shit hardware and almost not payed overtime), only tap water and since this is the old part of town you instantly get sick, they treat people like shit.

The product dark side. We are actually working on crm for doctors to input patient data, we cannot have any real data because we are the agency people, product is being led by the guy who has 0 production experience (they choose the database basically with coin toss and emulated the mongodb in postgress with jsnob, they don't know how to build their own auth system hence my previous rant about b2c, they are using cognito and now moving to auth0 which probably won't fit their need because a lot of stuff needs to be custom), they are choosing every hipe tech out there without any prior experience. It's chaos...

I'm trying to guide them but i think this will be a huge expensive failure and that i need to leave asap.

There I feel better now, moral of the story, choose startups wisely.

Hey! Just curious, is it normal that a technical test/challenge takes me more than a day to do?

I have been interviewed for a front-end role, and was given a react challenge. They said that it shouldn't take more than 2 hours ('hopefully' is what they added at the end). But i've been doing this challenge for a day now and it's only 60-70% done.

It's not complicated, and I do know how to do it, and, even, do it properly, it just takes a lot of time for me to code, i.e. develop components, change webpack when needed, read react materialize-ui (css framework) docs, then destructure json response from the api they provided and put this information on a page, then try to compile to the right format (they want single .html element with inline js and css as a deliverable).

So my question is, am I shit or is it unreasonable for a company to ask do so much coding or a little bit of both?

What's your experience usually when looking for a job in 'hip' and 'cool' startups?

Was hella drunked yesterday. Guy at work brought me to some place called beer garden. Tf do u order in a beer garden. Whack. They drank 2 huge beers and so did i. Its like 1 or 2 liters no idea. My vision was delayed and blurry. My head hurts now too. They good ppl but i hate alcoholics and average people with no ambition other than to go out talk unimportant stories which wont buy me bread and drink alcohol. Im a fucking businessman. I want to talk about ideas and creating businesses especially tech startups or saas. Im a fucking God. I deserve to be surrounded by highly ambitious millionaires like myself who dont drink or talk shit, but talk only money talk. I can do moneytalk all night long. Any improvements on what can get me bread is ALWAYS highly more valuable topic than shittalking non bread topics. I hate this and i feel bad for these good people to watch them slave their life away not trying to be rich like me they're content with being average and it disgusts me because when ur average ur just 1 slip away from becoming poor or homeless. I'd rather steal millions and rot in jail for the rest of my life than work for matrix as a slave to eat crumbs for the rest of my life...

I am feeling a lot doubtful right now.

I am an average undergrad student who has been dedicating efforts in java/Android for most of my college life.

As of now i have decent command over java , launched 2 simple apps on playstore, worked as an android dev intern in 3 companies and make decent medium complexity apps. I will say i am 40-60% down the path of an expert native Android dev.

However apart from Android, am dumb as a stick. I know shit about ai,ml, web dev, js , react, hybrid stuff, and am not very good with competitive programming and system topics ( os, Algorithms, networking, etc)

So this closes a lot of doors for me. I can't apply to some top tier companies as they would either want expert competitive skills or expert Android dev skills.
I had bad experiences with startups which are usually willing take rejected students like me for the post of a droid dev... there is usually low packages , high pressure, and treatment like a slave

So i am very unsure what to do next. I have tried to learn web dev/ ai-ml-data sciences. They are not very interesting to me, but again, what is interest really :/

What should be my focus now?
A) I could be learning competitive and other interview related topics so that i could crack interviews of top companies , and later try to get a position of android developer there.

B) i could focus on become better in Android and start learning things that i don't know like rx, kotlin, etc. I could then hope to crack interview of medium sized app dev companies which would mainly focus on my android knowledge in their interviews

C) i could increase my skill set and learn web dev or ai/ml topics to increase my recruiter pool. It would be like option B, but i will have more medium sized companies willing to take me.

Currently i am in a shit storm. I am about to go into a mass recruiter company in which i have heard would be doing more or less data entry work