I had an interview yesterday with the CEO of a startup going into Series A for the position of Principal Developer, remote. I've only ever heard of 'tech-bros', but I was unfortunate to meet one in-person. It went something like this:

CEO-bro: Good morning.
Me: Morning.
CEO-bro: It says here on your resume you live in X. That place is a shithole, and I have to look down on you because of that, bro. LoL.
Me: ......
(40 minutes of self-promotion pass)
CEO-bro: Anyway, we don't pay high salaries but offer bonuses for high performing staff instead. I'll ask HR to send you an offer.
Me: Let me think about it.
CEO-bro: One question bro. You have siblings?
Me: One.
CEO-bro: Parents still alive?
Me: No...what?!
CEO-bro: Yeah, me too. People like us don't let anything get in the way.

I wrote them an email this morning withdrawing my application 🤦🏽‍♂️

this image is fully authentic image of me as a single developer in a startup. All the used technologies in a single project.

Manager: Alright, we've decided we're gonna just going to accept PayPal and also credit card checkout through PayPal in the next two days!

Dev: ...

Manager: We can achieve this timeline, right?

Dev: ...

Manager: Alright, awesome to see your motivation! Let's do it!

Dev: YOU ANSWER PHONE CALLS, TALK TO PEOPLE AND 'STRATEGIZE' ALL DAY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO RELY ON THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE USING THE APP WITHOUT ERROR. THAT'S ON ME, NOT YOU, SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

Oh boy, the startup managers are writing a roadmap today. Can't wait.

5 mIlLiOn DaIlY aCtIvE uSeRs By EnD oF Q1! (2022!!!)

1 MiLlIoN dAiLy ReVeNuE bY tOmOrRoW!

zErO bUgS aNd KnOwN iSsUeS iN sYsTeM bY 5Pm ToDaY!

tHoUsAnDs Of NeW cUsToMeRs WiThIn ThE nExT hOuR!

I worked at a startup. They wanted to "save" money. So they hired a relative of "Fred" named "Bubba". Bubba made a custom website. Like hand built gifs and who knows how hand crafted html. It was fine for a time. Then somebody was wondering why nobody was calling us at the company. No customers. Another relative named "George" (who was actually a business major) looked at the website. It had been hacked and replaced with Jedis fighting Sith Lords. Me and another engineer named "Zeus" said "fuck this shit" and said "we are redoing this shit".

So I logged into godaddy (I know, shitty) and installed Wordpress (kinda shitty). I proceeded to turn wordpress into a half decent page. Wiped out the shit that was there, reused images as it made sense. Created more images. Reduced images to 80% quality to take loading size from 10MB to <1MB. Then I also proceeded to do SEO work and get the website listed properly within about a month. Customers started calling all the time. I had a simple contact form that barely gets any shit on it due to captcha. The was 5 years ago. I left 3 years ago (still help them on weekends) and nobody has done shit with the website. They are still getting calls and it hasn't been hacked.

We don't talk to Bubba. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing. I wonder if he still does websites for his relatives. I honestly had no clue what I was doing, but my take on the approach was easier to maintain and even George and Zeus and the new manager "Ralph" can maintain it, kinda. Went from shitty static website to full on dynamic and interactive. Yeah, I know, "dynamic". But the manager was happy.

Sometimes you just do what you gotta do in addition to doing all the electrical and software engineering for a company.

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm in a few women in tech groups. A woman, who is a highly experienced developer, shared that she had a conversation with her male friend, who is a startup founder. He said that his criteria for recruitment are high levels of math and physics since high school and early interest in programming (e.g. age of 10). She said his criteria made her sad and excluded.

A fellow woman developer commented that it's reasonable to feel sad when you learn your good friend is an idiot. I snorted some Monster out of my nose reading this and I'm still coughing and chuckling.

To be honest, the founder's requirements do sound super ridiculous, and I imagine his startup is made up of clones of the same guy type, wearing different shades of gray t shirts and sandals with socks.

This happened today...
Manager: how long this is going to take?
Dev: 3 months
M: cool! 3 weeks then
D: no.. This is quite complicated and most of us are unfamiliar with the topics. It'll take us 2 weeks just to get started
M: drop the unit tests then. Just get the features done in 3 weeks. We have customers waiting
D: that's a bad idea. We'll end up with unstable co..
M: oh we also need to complete documentation, release guide, and this [shitty feature no one care about]
D: but that is even more complex. We don't have enough ti..
M: just copy it from stackoverflow. It'll only take 5 minutes guys

Worst part? This guy is technically sound and understands our pain really well. He is just acting dumb and trying to put the blame on us when the higher management asks

Second worst part? The whole team keeps silent when I try to convince him somehow and starts ranting after he leaves the call

I recently left a company where we had 2 hour long standups. I was so tired of them because half the time was deprioritizing what we prioritized yesterday. Everyday there was something more urgent coming up. It was a startup with 6 engineers. Sometimes the conversations were just random stuff that could easily take 45 minutes.

Now it feels so nice doing 15 minutes standups and then having the time to do the actual work.

My annoying 19-yo nephew wants to drop out of CompSci to "create the next billion-dollar startup".
I told him I would give him 10 rupees (USD 0.10) for 0.000000001% percent of his "pass me the butter at the diner table" company.
He accepted. Thus, his "heritage protein logistics startup" had an series-A valuation of a billion American dollars!
Hopefully he will stay in college now.

So one day on tech huddle my tech lead got frustrated, don't know why and told me - "the tasks you're doing can be done by interns"

I felt bad. Ofcourse I was putting my 100%.

That day I decided to put the resignation. I didn't discussed with anyone about it and sent the resignation email directly.

After serving 2 months of notice period I was able to land a better job successfully!

I called the lead on the last working day in that company and shared him the news about my offer letter and a little about the company.
His first question was - "Did you cleared all the interview process?"
In my mind - "That's only why I'm sharing the news here with you man! Stop thinking of me as a noob."
I replied with - "yes, if needed/the new company try to get feedback about me then please be honest atleast there by keeping your ego aside."

You shouldn't pull someone's leg if you aren't able to climb higher!!

Lesson I learnt;
DON'T STAY AT A PLACE WHERE THERE'S NO VALUE OF YOUR WORK AND THE DEDICATION TOWARDS IT!

Working in a startup isn't that easy, mostly for those where there's no work life balance.

After months of searching for jobs, ended up I got called by a guy who claimed that he would want to partner with me to start a company. Well, I would love to start one, not without certain knowledge.

The so-called "partner" has a very bad attitude, unable to communicate, blames others for his own wrongdoing, arrogant, gullible and ignorant.

He asked me whether I believe in a deity (God). He demanded me to swear to the "upper heavens" that I will get "eternal punishment" if I ever cheated or betray his every decision.

This is a huge red flag!

I just want to have a "will smith slap" him so hard.

I fucking got scammed.

Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.

Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.

Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).

Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.

Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.

And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.

My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.

I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.

But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.

Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.

Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.

Just startup stories:

Our backlog of tasks and bugs has officially reached 100+ tickets, all for me, the single software engineer at our "tech" company.

Huh, imagine that.

> turning the whole codebase into a muddy ball of dirt because the leader didn't like 1 (one) call to an async function on startup

Way to go buddy, you sure show them how it's done.

A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

Startup companies be like "we are hiring full stack developer"

Full Stack Developer = the entire IT department 😏

Working for a startup:
"Two weeks? I'll build you the entire platform, draw illustrations, animate them and set up the infrastructure"

Working for a massive corporation:
"Two week sprint? Obviously a team of 10 people can't do more than just check the existing code."

I don't understand working in FAANG. As an engineer, who inherently has an ultimate say in how the computer worlds you construct work, how do you live with acceptance that you have no say whatsoever in how your company is run? how do you accept doing work that you don't always see the product benefit of?

Yes, FAANG pays a lot to ordinary engineers, but when you were dreaming back when you were a STEM student with fiery eyes, did you really want to be an ordinary engineer, no matter the bankroll? After all, it's not the total company's revenue, it's at least the revenue divided by staff count. In Nintendo, salaries are way higher than in EA, because there are way less people working at Nintendo.

Take any unicorn startup that survived. If you work there, you will have a say, you have an impact, you see the results of your work, and you will earn much more.

I wanted to work at Google as a student, but now I feel like it's just a plastic dream pitched to those inexperienced who don't know any better.

Note that above I don't even touch ethics, like anti-suicide nets in Foxconn factories that make Apple devices, let alone Facebook's and Google's surveillance.

Maybe, if you're somehow an engineer who has proficiency but not care, or if you cared, but was broken, with fire in your eyes extinguished, and now you see your work as "just work", FAANG might be a good choice.

But I can't relate.

Fuck product managers.

Just the other day I was discussing our progress so far and this product manager shows us the timeline and his vision for the project.
Ngl, I haven’t seen such an ambitious fuck for so long. He doesn’t know how to do anything other than fucking spreadsheets. The only problem with his plan is that we don’t even have the team, just 2 pity devs carrying it.

I still don’t get it, why the fuck would a company with 2 devs need a product manager?

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

If you want to make a startup but don't because there is a similar product or "every niche is already occupied", quit thinking this way.

Yahoo could once easily buy Google. They even received the offer but rejected it. But as for now, Yahoo is nothing.

Tumblr was once a top social network, but they crumbled. Foursquare once was preinstalled to smartphones, and now it pretty much doesn't exist.

Blackberry was a giant, the number one smartphone manufacturer. Where are they now? It wasn't betrayal like it was with Nokia and Stephen Elop.

Matter of fact, I'm now working for the company that entered a heavily occupied niche and over the course of three years pushed every competitor out.

Sometimes giants crumble. Small products crumble way more often, just because there are more of them.

There is always enough room in every niche of every industry. Just enough for your startup. Now, as you can't hide under "it's already occupied, and I can do nothing about it" mindset, the only reason your startup won't make it is that you don't work on it. Yes, accepting it is way less comfortable than hiding, but now you're able to change things. You _can_ do something about it.

Evaluate your goals, ask yourself whether making this startup would be just wasted time in case it never takes off, and if you think it's still worth doing, do it.

There is always enough room for your masterpiece.

I got invited to interview with a startup(series B) by a former manager. I told them I had RSUs vesting in six months and that unless they could give me a sign on for their amount I couldn’t leave. The recruiter says “Don’t worry, we can get creative with the sign on bonus”
I go through their whole interview process and get the offer.
Sign on is 15% of the amount of my vesting RSUs, and a base below what I make now.
Why waste my time not telling me the comp range from the start and why lead me on with a comment about a sign on? I told you up front what I made!

Can someone please write a plugin that automatically translates bug tickets into startup-ese? It would make it very easy to present the most common offenders to higher management on quarterly reviews.

Example:
-
$< "screen A is all messed up"
$> "We are disrupting the establishment in screen A"
-
$< "API B is not responding, giving timeout errors"
$> "We are facing logistical challenges in API B"

FML or how I made myself unhireable

TL;DR: Working as a QA.
Changed jobs.
New job sucked.
Left after three months.
Got laid off from the next one after 4 months (not my fault).
Got depressed.
Got a Dev job back in the first company.
Job sucks, cannot leave… (5 months in)

Full rant:
I was doing pretty well as a QA Enginner. Started with internship, then junior in company A, then big pay rise moving to company B, where I quickly got promoted to Senior. As I was nearing 3yrs of exp, I decided it’s time for a change, as things were getting worse project-wise and felt like I was regressing. Also I was constantly bombarded with offers of +50% of my salary I could easily land, while company offered 10%.

Moved on to company C. This is where it started getting rocky. I was told I would be working on this one project, strictly test automation, nothing exciting but an easy gig. However week in, I was told to work on this other project 50/50. This was a startup kind of thing. It was a nightmare. Only manual testing. Most tickets had only a vague title, no description, no requirements, nothing. How do one test something without any knowledge how it should work? Besides that, the project lead on the client side was aggressive sometimes.
The workload was immense - 4 devs, 2 of them doing heavy overtime, so the output was like 6 devs and half of a tester….
Despite raising the problems, nothing was going to change, nor I could switch projects. The job began to heavily affect my mental health. Decided not to prolong my contract and left after 3 month probation period.

Quickly landed a job in company D. As my burnout as a tester kept bothering me more and more I decided that this was going to be my last job as a QA and next one will be a Dev. You see, I never enjoyed the tester part, I always enjoyed the automation part more. The plan was to learn in free time and after 18-24 months start applying for a dev role to see if I can land one (switching inside D was not an option). All plans went to hell, as I was handed a one month notice by the end of my third month. A month before my wedding… I was told the company was having financial issues and was laid off with about 30% of people in the company (mostly new hires).

I got depressed. I wouldn’t get out of bed for a few days. I never thought something like this would ever happen to me. Standing by my decision I was applying for development jobs, but most recruiters seeing either only QA experience or my recent 3 and 4 month employment periods weren’t responsive. Applying for testing jobs was a bit better but still nothing like before C and D.

Since company B I stayed in touch with my former manager, and he kept telling me that a new team has taken over most of the shitty work, and they are now working on cooler stuff and have more coming. He encouraged me to come back, as he has always thought highly of me professionally.
Looking at my options, I could probably get another testing job with lower pay, maybe I could land a junior Dev with like 1/3 of my salary or I could go back. So in my dark time I have reached out to my manager and just like that he got me a Senior Dev position, same pay as in company D.

Finally what I wanted right? Yeah… As soon I as joined all the new initiatives were being dropped one by one, and backlog got flooded with bugs and sh*t again. Five months in I hate my job again. Cannot leave cause no one will hire me…

Where I made the mistake?
Shouldn’t leave B despite facing regression and being underpaid?
Shouldn’t leave C no matter what?
Shouldn’t come back to B?

Thinking about switching jobs...

Do you prefer working in a smaller startup sized company, a bigger more settled one, or as a consultant?

Hey! This is a followup to my last story.

TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.

First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.

Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.

One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.

The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.

I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.

Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.

Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...

Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.

One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.

I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...

so... the next step from programmer/developer is always an entrepreneur/business?

i see my daily work : i open my laptop, i see tickets from my company which include bug fixes, new feature development, some discussions , etc. i fix the bugs, make the features, add my points in discussion and the day is done.
from company's point of view, i am an ideal developer. in some years i will become a senior dev, which i guess involves similar stuff but different weightage (or is it different? please comment) . after that, we become tech lead , then engineering lead , then mts1 then mts 2... etc

i am guessing you guys must have similar trajectories in your company. from what i know, some people don't continue this trajectory (from boredom, lust for money , other reasons) and instead go on building a new product / starting a company , going into managerial/ entrepreneurial role.

so this is one kind of goal : "i will learn tech enough to launch my own company and be a ceo of it". i can't relate much to it. why go into tech when you wanna launch a product? why not just go into business schools from the day1 and get business knowledge?

anyways the above are the questions that i don't really want an answer for, those are just my criticisms.

but my main question is : what about those people who DON'T want to go on launching some business?
- do you people exist?
- what's your goal? is it around the lines of "learning all the tech of the world to be the cto or chief engineer of a company"
- how do you plan to achieve it?

honestly i want to be the second kind of person, i.e the one who always codes/ aims to code but can't seem to find a proper path/goal to it. plus the job security that i have seen with businesses/entrepreneurs throughout my life, my introvert mind fails to see "just coding" as a success.

i am 23 , but i fear that when i am 40 and my 5 yo kids comes to home seeing his dad sitting against laptop "just coding" , they will feel more insecure against their friends whose father has some shop or founder of some funded startup

(40 yo dads, share your views on life too , please )

Wasn’t an intended attack but our virus software had an update that meant it quarantined one on the windows startup files. Cue every user being unable to start up their pcs. That was a fun day!

1. Update some packages
2. Linux machine stops working soon after
3. Panic
4. Go get windows machine to help me troubleshoot the issue
5. Starts windows update on startup
6. Panic some more

Small chaotic startup that never grew up (15 years atm).
Hosts/maintains a number of apps/sites for various customers.

At some point, someone decides that a CMS would be usefull to maintain the content across all products. Forgoing all sense, reason and the very notion of "additional maintenance and dev" it is decided that one should be built in-house.

Fast forward a number of years.

Ops performs routine maintenance on prod-servers. A java-patch accidently knocks out one of the pillars a 3rd party lib the CMS uses for storing images. CMS basically burst in to flames causing a.... significant incident.

Enter yours truly to fix the mess.
Spend a few days replacing the affected 3rd party lib. Run tests on CMS in test and staging environments. Apply java-patch. All seems fine.

When speaking to frontenders and app-devs, a significant hurdle present itself:
All test/staging instances of all websites/apps/etc ALL USE PRODUCTION CMS. Hardcoded. No way around.

There is -no- way to properly test and verify the functionality of any changes made to the home-brewed CMS.
My patch did indeed work in the end.

But did the company learn anything? Did they listen to my reasoning, pleading or even anguished screams for sanity?

No.

So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.

It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.

I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?

After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.

So this might be a very long post , but i am sure most of you can relate to it .

So , the year end . Time of joy and appraisals right?You have slogged your ass off the entire year and are expecting amazing ratings.Then boom , your piece of shit sadist manager starts of his review by saying 'there are worrysome things to discuss' after not saying shit for the entire year . I am pretty new to corporate , in fact 1 year old , still managed to handle devops for a team of 130+ , majority of whom have no work apart from playing a blame game and indulging in cheap politics. I mean , bro , I am literally your son's age , i dont see the point in playing this cheap shit with me.On top of that this sadist and borderline piece of shit manager has the audacity to say that I did not raise any blockers , while I have CCed him in every fucking mail possible.How big of an a****** can you be bro?
I counter his points for 40 45 mins straight ,leaving him stuck without words for solid 10 to 15 seconds many times during the 'review meet'. This guy is in the same place working on the same shit code , which 90% of this community can't even think of. Every thing is bloody manual and apparently ' I should have tried to streamline the entire f**** process' . Cool bro , why not open a startup while I am at it ?

Then this piece of poop gives me a rating which is just above the inconsistent performer bracket :) .

I just dont get the points what do these people get by giving shit ratings and not even having valid points to back up their fuck all arguments.This guy , throughout the duration of the call did not say 1 (bloody 1 ) good thing about my efforts. Past context is majority of the smart people who were literally running their pods single handedly , were under him and were fed up with not getting hikes and appraisals.Apart from me ,everyone resigned and left with hikes as high as 50% (LOL right).

But I have a year of experience and its really difficult to perform well in 4 rounds of bs compititive coding rounds, after which I get the generic ' oh you did well bro but we are moving on with other candidates' (FFS) .

I pray that even my worst enemies don't get such managers and I hope he rots in hell.

Amen and sorry for the cussing :)

we want you to be
- full stack developer (you do everything front end, back end)
- dev ops/SRE (you can sort out the deployment CI/CD pipeline, cloud platform services AWS/GC/Azure whatever)
- architect (you can design the software as well)
all in 1, you gotta be multiple roles/departments
good luck getting this experience on the job (hell in a startup is not for everybody and certainly not for me)

also why the fuck companies who aren’t startups ask for this idk

not sure if i missed any roles/competencies so far , don’t forget you need like >=3 years of experience possibly in every field for entry roles and more for anything higher than that

Deep learning is probably (????) the only research branch where every successful paper title needs to be a stupid acronym or meme

I work in a conversational AI startup and the new intern that joined yesterday didn't understand half the memes or acronyms (especially all the Simpsons related) because apparently he's "Gen Z" and all the paper title is "Millennial" humour

He's only 2 years younger than me. Am I literally at the millennial - GenZ border ? Or the intern is out of touch ?

100 dollars to rebuild the whole frontend of their startup. what sort of humans run these Nigerian companies ? smh

What do you get when you combine a greenfield project with a brownfield project?

A stinking pile of compost.

Help. We're starting to feel the effects of unnecessary micromanagement.

We're a small startup. The kind with less than 10 devs spread across different domains. We've been fine with a Kanban approach as the velocity/flow of deliverables don't necessarily warrant a Scrum approach yet.

Our boss has been wanting to adopt Scrum-style sprints, even shoved and assumed that were doing these sprints and demanding Scrum-style reports (and meetings!!!) when they are, in reality,
1) unnecessary
2) a waste of time

Absolutely none of the team members want this. But our boss insists on having it. We like our boss, but lately things are getting out of control

What can we do to mitigate and prevent this?

I have been coding since 2016, am I overthinking applying for jobs because Im not that "current"? (my React experience is not that deep, I have been working on our startup whos stack doesnt use React or any other front-end framework (only simple handlebars templating))

I have built an actual stable working web platform and mobile app through ionic, is this enough to get a decant non-junior job?
I have never actually worked at a company, its been freelancing and startup (we failed, moving on). Am I overthinking how good I need to be to get a job? I like this one local company but I dont want to screw it up, Im sort of delaying applying there because of it

I am tired of switching my role at a startup where I work. I was primarily hired as a backend developer but some times i have to handle sprints, i have to become machine learning engineer, a devops engineer and now even frontend. Yuck. I am sòoooooo tired..

Lol, installing an Abp package literally breaks startup, you don't even have to use the package, just install it and the shit breaks.

God I hate this bloated piece of shit framework, can't wait to move this codebase to Go.

So it me again and loviing my life at this tech startup..... i feel like I'm actually achieving something thogh at a slow pace
I know i can give out more to this startup.....but there is this 1 manager in our technical department......FUCK the old man thinks he knows everything and so damn arrogant.... at one time he made a fucking simple error which was fucking obvius but the man you cant tell him anything

if anything goes wrong or if anything isnt working the FUCKING old man is quick to throw the blame on people which i feel isnt supposed to be a mind set of some1 in the technical department..... I get it yes sometimes it will be the person making errors but even when you do it right and its not coming out as its supposed to be the damn OLD FUCKING MAN says you are doing it wrong.....then he steps in and bang....it fels and he'll be like "WHAT? HOW WHATS GOING ON...."

and me silently will be like MAKE IT WORK FUCKING OLD GENIUS
I cant even bring in new ideas and systems into the company......hell be like WE ALREADY HAVE SYSTEMS IN PLACE.... guess what..... no fucking system is being used

Not a rant.

I’m tinkering for some months at something . Something that i want to turn into a startup, but i feel a little burned out, i have all this thoughts now that’s a shit idea that no one would even want it , even though i had great feedback and some users are already using it.

How do you guys deal with things like this?

The thing about startups is that you have the opportunity to be involved in a lot of different things. I easily get bored with repetitively doing almost the same thing day in day out.

In my current company, I have been working on the same mobile app for close to two years. It’s the same basic thing, build UI, make API calls, and fix bugs. I am so bored that I’m fit to climb a wall. Anyways, I’ve started applying for backend positions.

But then startups are volatile and things are almost always unorganised.

Newbie here, is storing json in sql (as like column data) as weird as I think it is or are there valid use cases?

The one I heard, didn't get the details but something like "startup move fast"

So I’m tryina put together a resume and I see a lot of dev résumé talking about increased revenue from x to y or user base from z to w.

What I don’t understand is while yes the user base did increase from z to w it wasn’t just you that caused it. The entire company was working hard at it to get there so why are u claiming that it was you. And apparently recruiters love these kpis that u make out of your ass.

Should I give in and just put them in there anyway?

I worked in a startup so my job didn’t really have a definition of what to be told to do and do I had to deal with building front end with vue to figuring out how to automate our deployment flow and it’s really hard to quantify my performance like sure 3000 tickets solved but u don’t know what portion of them were full blown features what portion was just a one liner.

I've been at my new company for about a month. It's a startup that went from a dozen people last year to over two hundred right now. During the dot com era, that type of growth typically spelled disaster. It's crazy how many people I've met have only been at this shop for one to three months. Everyone is 100% remote, across multiple countries, and vast timezones.

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

for christ sake.. I ended up receiving all problems at a startup, I am alone every lvl of support from software exceptions to plc. Even for machines I have never received any training or explanation. How can a company afford mass holydays and rely for all level support on a single person who is still under training? I cant dug deeper in any issue because then I got overfilled with questions. I really want this week to end...

Dude ist sysadmin at server Pool hosting our app for the client.

Client: something minor is not working.

Dude: Let me just restart app, works at my windows laptop everytime or whatever.
*restarts app, hangs on entrypoint*

Dude: Dear client it's brocken.

Clients: *calls us in panic.*

Horus: Dear dude, when it hangs on startup consider to download an update because we fixed some issues with in theis area recently. Also maybe enlarge the docker compose timeout.

Dude: Still does not start up.

Horus: ok just call me on this Zoom link, then we can debug together.

Dude:...

Dude:...

Dude:...

Dude: oh i just saw it did startup mean while, it just took some time.

Fuck you dude, and your impatience!

the october of 2020 was the year when i started my first job. 9 months before that, i was under a severe depression and burnout (i guess?) and had made up a decision to quit android dev, an area for which i was passionate and had proven excellence before.

(just having a few good thoughts and going into a little nostalgia in this rant)

DR has been my goto place for every good/bad/shitty thought, so the rants on those days reflected my mental pain ( am gonna go check those after this rant) and confusions.i was so so much confused:

- "College is about to get over, i have to go earn bread for my family, what am gonna do"?

- "My jan Android internship had so shitty people, it was so much fast paced, they exploied me, mistreated me so much. am never gonna do android dev. should i take this shitty TCS offer of INR 300,000? i bet those guys will be nice atleast, they are a freaking mnc"

- "I don't seem to like anything these tcs people have offered me in their video classes. how am gonna survive my daily job life if i don't like these stuff?"

"FUCKING COVID IS THERE!! MY DAD's SHOP HAS CLOSED DOWN, WE ARE ON OUR LAST SAVINGS !! I SHOULD FUCKING DO SOMETHING, BUT A JUST A 22 YEAR OLD NOBODY!!"

this above, was my fight. to me these were the end of the world thoughts.

however the last day of college came, then the next day came, then another , then a week came and went, then months came and went , then years came and went and today after 2 years, i am just amazed at how things handled themselves. all the above points are now totally invalid in my eyes

i was shit scared to even open android studio after that jan internship. however, every thing i learned in between feb to sept ( and that includes my college stuff, some web dev, php, etc) i would find myself comparing it with java and android. and after spending some off screen time with friends nd family getting some relax, i started applying for jobs at startups. I only ever had confidence in java and kotlin , so 50% of the jobs i applied for were that of android dev.
and it was to no one's surprise that one android startup offered to interview me. i remember being terrible at ds algo, programming, java and even android at that time, yet somehow they saw some potential in me and offered me a role. the role they offered me was for an android dev with a salary of almost double the TCS's offer. this was even more terrifying for me because i was already burnt with a startup offerring money and exploiting me.

But my god how things changed .
This small startup company was everything opposite of that exploitive startup.

- From day 1 to my last day in that company, I had seniors who would give me time to understand stuff, ask questions that they would clarify, understand my knowledge and level and give me tasks accordingly, trust me of my time and my words and appreciate me. no one ever called after 6 pm or on weekends and no one ever counted my leaves or asked question about it.

- I was myself very scared at first, that someday they are gonna blame me, find me as some fraud , some masquerader unfit for the role, but these fears slowly went away. i just found myself diving deeper and deeper into code with full passion love and quest for writing bug free stuff.

- slowly and slowly they even stayed putting me as sole devs in management meetings, making me the front spokesperson for android tech in those meetings, the position that gave me so much confidence since, the people taking the top decisions will change their decisions based on my calls. I also felt a pull for exploring stuff outside my domain, sitting in calls of backend devs , react guys and designers, asking them questions and learning their stuff too.

today i laugh at the problems that life had put in front of me at that time. today my opinion on choosing mnc vs startup is not about who pays how much or where the job is most secure, but its about where i find myself motivated and excited to work.

money is not even a factor anymore. everyone (mncs included) is willing to give tons of money to the worthy candidate, so i won't be ever settling for a low paying job. the topmost priority is which company has the culture to let me grow and keep me on heals at the same time.

-----------------------------------------------------
(continued)

XFCE keeps crashing in the weirdest way when I boot, 50% of the time it works, the other 50% the startup applications launch like normal but the window frames and the bars are gone and none of the positioning shortcuts work. It's like an issue specifically with xfwm but I have no idea how the wm in particular could be fucked. I already know that the compositor can fail without taking the wm with it.

ProCoders ,first of all, is a team of talented software engineers who love what they do. ProCoders are an IT staff augmentation firm with more than 80 engineers on board who can manage any project. As a professional offshore software development team, our team can find the superior software engineers for your startup. Our company are experts in CSS, Node.js, Flutter, JavaScript, HTML, React Native, Ionic, TypeScript, Angular, PHP, Vue.js, Symfony, Ruby, React, Laravel, Ruby on Rails etc.

Hola community!! Everyone going over this, please read this once and honestly answer my query.
I am on a probation at a startup. When i will be full-time, then the startup has promised me to provide CTC of 7,50,000(inr) i.e 10,000$ (usd).
Now I want to switch this startup company. Here are my reasons -
1. Less people, more work. - Well, that's what we call a startup. The tech team consists of 3-4 members only and we ourselves have to do the whole thing from end to end. This consists of designing the architecture, PR reviews, qa testing and coding ofcourse.
2. I see myself that I am capable enough to earn 1.5 times more than the above CTC. Also, all my friends are earning 2x the above ctc.
3. Also, there is no senior in the team except founder himself. This really seems awful as can't learn from anybody.
4. Also, i have plans of higher studying due to which i have to entrance exams. So i need to prepare them too. Switching to an established company can mean more money and less work.
Now, can anyone suggest me whether my reasons to switch are legit or vague??