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Search - "story of my life"
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A small story on digitalization
I had spent an hour in the bank with my dad, as he had to transfer some money. I couldn't resist myself & asked:
Dad, why don't we activate your internet banking?
''Why would I do that?'' He asked, ''Well, then you wont have to spend an hour here for things like transfer.
You can even do your shopping online. Everything will be so easy!
I was so excited about initiating him into the world of Net banking.
He asked, If I do that, I wont have to step out of the house?
''Yes, yes''! I said. I told him how even grocery can be delivered at door now and how amazon delivers everything!
His answer left me tongue-tied.
He said ''Since I entered this bank today, I have met four of my friends, I have chatted a while with the staff who know me very well by now.
Two years back I got sick, The store owner from whom I buy fruits, came to see me and sat by my bedside and cried.
When u r Mom fell down few days back while on her morning walk. Our local grocer saw her and immediately got his car to rush her home as he knows where I live.
Would I have that 'human' touch if everything became online?
I like to know the person that I'm dealing with and not just the 'seller'. It creates bonds. Relationships.
Does "online" deliver all this as well?
Technology isn't life #BeHuman
For those who are not getting the context, this things happen in India. It is truth not a fact.19 -
Post after a long long time...
Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.
Anyway, time for a story.
After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.
Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.
One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.
They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.
Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.
He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.
I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.
Day saved? Not yet.
Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.
My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.
I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.
Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.
And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.
I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.
I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.
I am hysterical right now.17 -
Story of WTF happened to my job
During my employment in (name censored) was stressful, They claimed I didn't complete my task on time which they constantly remove me from git and documentation(which have to follow their style of returning data), I kept emailing, slack, WhatsApp calls them, mostly and predictably got ghosted and blocked.
So How the fuck am I supposed to push my code or code without the documentation (I can actually, prevent refactoring every time, following the documentation is the good way to go.)
On the sprint review, they will complain about me not committing and pushing the code. (I did commit locally, but can't push, they removed me from the fucking repo) and not done.
Tried reasoning, telling the obvious reasons with them, doesn't work. They come out the second reason of me "NOT COMMUNICATING". Sometimes I can get to git merge from dev to my branch and get tonnes of fucked up code. I reviewed the code, and I can't tolerate it.
Lately, I overheard them mocking and cheering me about to get fired over a zoom meeting (I was in there, they forgot to remove me). Their conversation is about me being a coloniser, a jerk, betraying Chinese ancestors for being not Chinese enough.
I was like: "Why the fuck does their conversation sound like they are tucked in the Qin dynasty?"
Frequently I got labelled as unprofessional.
How is cussing about my ancestors, personal and life a professional behaviour?16 -
I got tired of relearning JavaScript frameworks and instead tried to escape their clutches.
Most of my developer life I've spent relearning how to do the same thing in a different framework.
And every three or four years its the same story, figure out templating, figure out building, complain on github bugs etc.
I am trying to reduce framework fatigue by allowing you to think "can I make my application with just vanilla JavaScript". The advantage of vanilla JavaScript is it write once - do not need to rewrite.
Do YOU think I will abandon ship and end up having to use a framework again?19 -
I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.
It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"
I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".
- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.
And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.
About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.15 -
Wish me luck. I HAVE to launch 10 websites (yes, ten) this week and half if not all of the clients don't know their DNS accounts or log ins. I foresee a lot of long nights in my near future. Story of our life, right?5
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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.11 -
I hate people who think they are always right.
A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.
Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.
And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.
Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.
This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.
In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.
So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.
Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.3 -
A /thread.
I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.
This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.
START:
As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.
The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.
These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.
These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.
And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????
While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.
500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.
A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH
In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.
EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.
This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.
ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???
are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???
Fuck You.
This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.
Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???
Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?
Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.
1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.
2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.
????
This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.
Will post part 2 later.7 -
So.. I'm giving one of my employers webapps a visual refresher, new company branding and whatnot.
And then I stumbled onto a check that is not returning what anybody expects, and, well , I'm busy fixing things, yeah..? so I go digging.. 🤔
```
function isDefined(obj) {
return !(typeof obj === "undefined") || obj !== null;
}
```
Here's the fun part, these particular lines have been in the code base since before 2017, which is when my Git history starts, because that's when we migrated projects from Visual SourceSafe 6 over to Git. Yes, you read that right. They were still using VSS in 2017.
I've begged and pleaded with my last 3 bosses to let us thrown this piece of shit out our second story window and rewrite it properly. But no, we don't have time to rewrite, so we must fix what we have instead.
I lost 4 hours of my life earlier today, tracking down another error that has been silently swallowed by a handler with its "console.log" call commented out, only to find that it's always been like that, and it's an "expected error". 🤦
Please, just fucking kill me now... I just, I can't deal with this shit anymore.5 -
many many times in the past I had this impostor syndrome in various situations but I never lost faith in my dev skills!
you have to be humble to realise that this situations are fine and that you will learn something from it (not necessarily tech things, but also how life works). Also you have to realise that development as everything else in life is just never ending learning endeavour! When you accept all of that, impostor syndrome goes away forever.
It's been around 3 years since I felt like impostor for the last time because I accepted who I am as a person.
It crawled up on me last week in a different way - I was thinking of myself - what if I am just really good at googling things and understanding how those things work but I am also very capable problem solver so I can understand the principle and apply it to my code.
Then I realised - ok, that's what programmers do! So that's the story of how the impostor syndrome actually become confirmation syndrome!
Folks, believe in yourself, be forgiving to yourself as we all were there, give yourself some time as people don't become good developers overnight - and this is OK.3 -
I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:
1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.
2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.
3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.
4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.
5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.
6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.
7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.
8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.
9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.
10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.
Except…
Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.
11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.
Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.
Two cents.1 -
!tech
i was feeling very disturbed thinking about this thing, so just wanna share here. trigger warning : this is about 2 recent news (1 national and1 international) about crimes against women and its affect on me, a male , somewhat privileged guy with rarely any women in life.
news 1 : some lady in iran getting killed by police due to religious laws . news 2 : a receptionist girl in india getting killed for not providing sexual services to hotel people .
i will come back to first news in a bit, but second news has shaken me to the very core. i saw a post where her dead corpse was being taken up by her acquitances and she is just ... lifeless, hands going sideways, face hung at one side, mouth open... damn :'(
read more here : https://indiatoday.in/india/story/...
i am not at all related to this news, but somehow, i as a guy feel disgusted and being responsible for this sad event. this is not an act of power or lust , this is an act of a horrible mentality.
i come from the city where the world's most number of hate crime and crime against women take place. and pathetic politicians and people of power blame it on women's dressing and mens "naive nature" and , "boys being boys, accidentally making mistakes" . little did anyone know that this mentality has been cooking in the streets for last so many years.
i am a single child with no siblings or grandparents, my relatives rarely visit me and my last 24 years on earth rarely involved any female companionship apart from my mom.
i like girls, i find them cute. i really want to be with someone, to have a consensus relationship. but the talks among my homie groups and other male friends have gone toxic to the level that a national issue syarted feeling relatable.
the feeling of getting affection from someone has somehow turned into a lust, a "game", a "service". one guy( who recently shifted to other state) would use to tell us how he would visit " red light areas" , another one(also left) once tried to ask for that "service" in a camp where we were staying during a trip, and used to tell how he would hook up with girls on Instagram.
we used to laugh at those things, find them interesting and enjoyable. i would think about them in deep, thinking that this is something possible, a transactional access to sex, with me now earning enough to afford it.
now, seeing this news i feel so shitty and being a horrible human. those thoughts were not originally mine, but i didn't opposed them. rather i laughed on it , and thought that once am even more powerful financially and politically, could even entertain that approach.
As a guy, i want to say i am deeply, terribly sorry.
This mentality needs to be changed. my homie group is not just the only group of males that has such vile thoughts having openly propagated. every park, every company meeting , every library, every gym, anywhere i go, i can just show up a coffee cup and shout "women,huh" and can get a laughter followed by several low voices whospers on which girl is a "s***" there .
there are multiple points of failure in our society that are causing these. the news 1 from the start of this rant is the very first : role of government and religion on controlling "dresses and behaviour" of women
another comes the role of sex, culture and gender education in institution. institutions in my areas are so fucked up: they teach how plants fuck and bees suck honey to a puberty hit student, but doesn't teach consent, relations and personal behavior at any age. my school would even try to sometimes make all girls sit in a seperate row and other times would force guys to sit with girls. don't know what they got for this authoritative behaviour, but that sure didn't impacted our brains very rightly.
lastly this needs to be made clear in evevry guy's mind that paid prostitution, forced prostitution and consensus relationship are 3 different things, and only a respectable , consensus relationship is something you should think about and prepare for.14 -
Today marks the second day of me having to build an email template and I never hated anything more in my life than that. WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE SO COMPLICATED? WHY CAN'T THEY UPGRADE THEIR STUPID RENDERING ENGINES SO WE CAN USE MORE MODERN METHODS?!? Sorry but I don't want to create an E-Mail and having to pretend its 1995. The table view is so outdated and I'm aware of the fact that some clients support divs but not Outlook (Outlook itself sucks pretty hard but thats another story). I just wanna be able to use grid, flex, etc. to build my template.
I HATE MY LIFE5 -
Need advice about switching to contracting.
TL;DR;
So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.
Now the full story:
Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.
Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.
Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.
Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.
So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.
Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.
Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!3