Very exciting news, just thought I’d share.

I was a computer engineering student before I left school to have my first child (and then second, third, and fourth).

I stayed at home for five years, out of necessity, not by choice, and struggled to get back into tech.

I eventually stared freelancing Wordpress sites, because in a small town, I didn’t have any other opportunities.

When not doing that, I took online classes and did side projects, mostly in Javascript.

This summer I got an internship at Mozilla through GNOME Outreachy doing python work.

It’s completely unreal to me...but I have been offered a contract-to-hire position with Mozilla.

After years of feeling like I would never succeed, I have my first real programming job.

Ridiculously awesome benefits and pay...

Holy fucking hell.

Talking to my son today about one of his CS classes, not sure which.

He says: "I missed the lecture yesterday, but I'm not going to bother re-watching it."

Me: "Why? You really should. You're paying for these classes AND you really need to actually learn this stuff."

Son: "Well, because I got 100% on my last assignment without going to class. I just Google'd everything and figured it out on my own from what I found."

My wife out of the blue: "DAMN IT, BUT THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS IN THE REAL WORK WORLD!"

Oh, you poor, uninformed summer child. I love her, but she just doesn't know that my son has already learned the key lesson he needed to learn from his schooling in order to get a job and make good money in this field! #ProudTechieDadMoments

I started studying computer science 3 years ago as a challenge for myself, try something new, do something I knew absoluty nothing about.

I was always the girl who didn't know as much as the rest. I took longer than everyone else, made worse solutions. I always felt like a burden.

Yet today, for the first time, I really felt like a real developer at my last week of my summer job. Explaining a five year older collegue (with a lot more (web)dev experience) about design patterns, git, c++, and helping him to understand and use it properly.

Apparently I was smiling like an idiot because he asked me if I was making fun of him, while deep inside I was just so happy to be helpful.. 😊

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

When I was 14, I was bad at many things. I sucked at sports cause I was weak and small. School was boring so I did not study. I mostly played games.
During a summer break, I wanted to change shit in WarCraft 3, as I heard from a friend that heard it from a friend, that you can do that. Many internet searches later I realised that you kind of just tell to the game what you want it to do, just simplified. If (target is enemy) do damage, for (every human player) make sparkly stuff...
After months of "playing" games, the new school year started and I got, for the first time, a proper computer class. Imagine my surprise when we started doing the shit I did all summer. That year I had 100% on all tests.
Many years later programming gave me friends, made my inner nerd and geek come out, gave me a free trip to the USA to represent my country, two TEDx talks, and finally a job that I like with the pay I can live with.

!Rant

Once I had a summer job at the town hall that ran some mainframe program.
The woman explaining this program was like 'now that you've pushed that we have to go back 3 screens and return to it just to check if the data has been properly updated.'.

I'm first thinking like 'wtf' followed by a 'could it be' and pushed the F5 button. The thing refreshed instantly and the women went wild! (That is after staring for 2 whole seconds with her jaw dropped at the screen, unable to grasp what just happened.)

HUU?! WHAT! WHAT DID YOU PRESS!!??? HOW DID YOU..??

Turns out she was been going back and forth these screens for over more than 20 years!

Ouch..

The beauty of our job. Glorious day sat with my back in the sun, coding, in the summer house.

!!rant

When I worked at a previous job, they only gave out decent titles (and salaries) to upper management. Everyone else... well... I was the Domain/Sysadmin, responsible for the domain and both DCs, upgrading the physical network (plus recabling it: the MDF was a *disaster*), as well as all backups, migrations, printers, servers, and workstations/lappys in the building, plus pushing software, antivirus, updates, security policies, etc. I had complete access to everything, and ofc was responsible for everything. Nothing on my network caused anyone (else) any trouble except one particular printer I wasn't able to replace. Also, nothing new appeared on my network without me noticing and tracking it down.

But my official title? "IT Assistant".
I made $11/hr.

Worth it? Take a flying leap into an overflowing outhouse during the height of a Vegas summer if you even begin to think so.

I eventually managed to switch to a developer position, and (after several attempts) got a ~$5/hr raise. The girl they replaced me with in IT with some ditz who had never installed an OS before, didn't know what the BIOS was, and couldn't figure out why a monitor... plugged into itself... wasn't working. Things went downhill from there.

I got my very first dev job! After first making it to an interview where I didn't think I did all too well, I got a boost when on the 22nd December they called me asking for a referral. I gave them one but the person could not be contacted before the 23rd - close to xmas.

After an agonizing wait over the xmas period I finally got the call today. One hell of a way to start the new year!

I got a summer job (full time student) doing actual coding! I am so pumped!!!

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

Life is mostly about waiting.

Waiting for code to compile.
Waiting for payment confirmation.
Waiting for food.
Waiting for gas to fill up tank.
Waiting for lights to go green.
Waiting for beer.
Waiting for waiter.
Waiting for call.
Waiting for school to finish or start.
Waiting for exam.
Waiting for job.
Waiting for application to start.
Waiting inside prison.
Waiting inside workplace.
Waiting for summer or winter.
Waiting for movie to start.
Waiting for girl to dress up.
Waiting for birthday.
Waiting for birth.
Waiting for death.

Fucking timers everywhere.

Someone got big sense of humor when developing this world.

Age 19, got a government sponsored chance to go to India to study. Was called to study for Law. But didn't like it. Decided I wanted to change to Computer Science cause that's what I was interested in. Go to India and apply for computer science course but not law despite Parents wanting me to do law because hey Lawyers job is a good status in society.

Got a spot in BCA (Bachelor of Computer Application) . Totally new in programming. Started with C. Was freaked out with all the new things. Variables, comments, Pre processors files. All was new to me. Although the lecture tried her best, I couldn't understand her well because of language barrier. It was a mixture of Hindi and English.

Luckily she gave me a book to read, Let us C. That book helped me a ton. I realized I really liked programming. When summer holiday came I taught myself C++ . Then next summer Java. Then Android. Then some Web Development. That was last summer. But I kinda settled in Android and did some projects in it. Right now I am about to sit for my final exam. Then I will try my best to get an Internship or a job.

noob misconception #378: during my first internship the summer after my freshman year, i was under the impression that if i used 1000 threads, my job would finish 1000 times faster. needless to say, my machine crashed in a second, and my manager thought i was an idiot when i was surprised it didn't work

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

Been looking for a part time game dev job to pass the time during summer break, got a reply from a guy.

This part came up some time in the middle of our conversation:

Me: So, do you have a version control system in place?

Him: Excuse me, a what?

Me: A Version control system, like Git.

Him: Ow, what's that?

Me: It is a way to host projects in a more productive way for two or more people. It allows us to share our work more easily and work on the same file without overwriting and losing data.

Him: Ow, like Dropbox?

He was developing the game solo thus far and no idea such thing existed.
:/

Today I learnt never trust a coworker or see them as a friend.

So I have been thinking of quitting my job to further educate myself. The work I sit with is mostly the tiniest CSS changes. Which is frustating and demotivating to work with.

One of my coworkers told me in confidentiality, that he was looking for another job in another company and he only told me. And wanted to keep it secret from everybody else. I felt this gesture of him trusting me meant I had to trust him back with something else. I told him that I am applying for an education for later this year. But I don't want to say anything before it has been approved.

He understood fairly well and we got to be a thing outside work.

Last week I learnt I was seriously underpaid compared to all other coworkers despite me being one of the people with the most responsibility. I felt this wasn't right, so I talked to the pay responsible and said this paygrade isnt substantial, and I felt it was demovating to go to work knowing I was the least paid coworker.

He understood fairly well he said and said he would bring it into management to discuss.

But then he said one last thing. "I have heard something about you applying for another education, is this true? Since I have seen you put your summer vacation really early this year"

I had to lie and say no, that was like before I knew I landed a job here.

I dont wanna say anything to my company before I get the approval from school.

But still now I am in this position of feeling stupid for trusting this coworker, mad that he violated my trust and feeling very guilty for having to lie to this person's face.

Three years ago, tried to learn some JavaScript, failed miserably. Two years ago, managed to learn some Java through Udacity courses. Last year I started learning native Android development and got my first coding summer job. Now I'm back to learning JavaScript through Freecodecamp and that bitch ain't got shit on me no more!

after publishing a few apps, building some websites, developing some basic operating systems, participating in a summer learning program at google and having got a job managing the computer science department’s website, today i start my intro to computer science class.

god i hate python

Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.

In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.

Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).

But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.

Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.

Took a job during the summer vacation and was expected to sit through excel and click products and fill in info (mundane tasks). Overheard the boss talking to the coworkers "We need to translate 77,000 urls into images, how do we split this work up?" I jumped in and said "I can write that in code so you don't have to do it" They all looked at me like I was some sort of magician O_O. Had the program running during the weekend on three computers and all of the 77,000 urls are now a beautiful mess of pdfs and jpgs. Do you have a story that made you feel like a wizard?

'bout to have a job interview for a summer job as software dev. :)

I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.

So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.

I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...

~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.

~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!

~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.

~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.

~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.

~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.

~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.

And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...

I've been asked to work a Sunday next weekend; and like an idiot I agreed. Wasting a beautiful summer day inside designing software for a company to push more fast food product and contribution to obesity and diabetes in the world.

This is my life, and I hate it here. I hate this industry. In my 15 years, I once took off for 11 months and lived out of two bags through Asia and Europe. I spent 5 months with just a car driving across America. It's fun, but non-sustainable and I had to find a job afterwards both times.

I need a way out of this cycle. I need to contact professors and get letters of recommendation and get into a PhD program (I have a masters already), but finding the time after exhausting days at work is .. well .. exhausting.

The most I can do after work is go hang out with friends or do something, but if I come straight home, I just fall asleep. I'm tired all the time.

Friend: 'im really anxious, i need a job this summer and i dont know if i can find one with my stack'
Me:'why, whats your stack?'
Friend:'php, mysql, javascript'
Me:'...DUDE'

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

Here is a brief list:
- Idiots from marketing
- idiots from sales
- the lawnmower man (while doing his job)
- sun
- AC off && summer
- no ventilation / fresh air
- civil defense siren tests (we're just next to one...)
- idiots talking to me while I'm on my headphone
- music stops
- phone rings
- light theme
- devRant
- MySql Workbench
- etc

Many years ago I had a job as web developer at a small promotions company. The owners loved micromanaging their 7 employees, down to the minute. Work started at 9am, if you were even 1 minute late, you were deducted 1 point. (Even if the weather was bad) Once you were at 10 points, you were disciplined by being given an unpaid vacation day. (Thanks for the day off!). At 12 points, you were fired.

It only took me about 8 months before getting my day off. Somehow I was able to time it perfectly to a job interview at a large company.

Luckily I got the job, and purposely was late the next two days so when they told me I was fired I could tell them I already got a new job (thanks to their 10 pt rule) and I'm out anyway.

At the new job, I'd often drive home and nap on my lunch hour. No one would notice if I came back an hour and a half later.

The owners of the 1st company divorced a few years ago. The husband and I have actually kept in contact over the years. He's a cool guy when you don't work for him. He invited me to a Green Day concert over the summer. Probably makes the above story a little less cool, but at the moment, I was burning bridges!

It wasn't me in the interview and it wasn't really an interview at all but here we go. I worked for a pretty shit company this past summer as a paid internship and while I was there they fired a Dev because he complained about how he didn't get a BMW i8 and they had to hire new help. So instead of doing a regular interview what they did was call people in and just have them work. Like no joke from 7-4pm they just did the job the didn't get yet. They also expected them to know how to work in there system. It was a WordPress development company and they had custom plugins and themes that they just expected people to know.

Also they said they would pay them for their work but I don't think they did, there were maybe 8 different people over a week who probably just worked for free.

!rant

Does anyone have an idea about a nice goodbye message to write on cakes for my last day on my summer job?

Requirements:

- Should be short enough so I can write it with a choco pen on 20 cakes of about 10cm each.

- Should be about me leaving (I worked on a terminal application in qt c++)

- Should have something to do with programming

!rant

Today is a happy day.

I just got a job to finance my last year of studies as a frontend dev for two months this summer.

I'll be working as an intern and won't get paid much, but it's still tremendously more than I would've ever made with any other shitty student job.

Best thing is that my best friend works at the same company and we'll be seated next to each other (he also convinced the HR to invite me to the interview, woul've been rejected right away without him).

So basically I am a lucky bastard and they even told me that if I'm doing well they wouldn't hesitate to hire me after my studies if I'd still be interested in a year ❤️

What I'm missing most as a student is to work in front of a computer 8 hours a day. This will be a welcome change and a nice addition to my CV.

Wish me luck! Starting right after my final exams on the 16th 😎

I had good support.

I got access to a computer at 10 when my mother brought home the ones they used for education to avoid them being stolen

That was a couple of sinclair ZX80

I the got to go to 5 different programming courses over the next 4 years before being able to get a summer job at 14 to by my own spectravideo 128.

At 1) I started teaching through mother job and at 18 I wrote my first commercial program for my father.

I am now 50 and still in the business:)

The whole summer of working 6 days a week at a dead end job, crazy hours, to tired to code or anything in the evenings, and feeling really depressed about everything.. Finally Monday, new semester in school is about to start. So eager to get back, to learn and have so many cool (hopefully) courses this semester. And it's only Saturday..

What tf is matlab
I got a job for the summer, and I had to learn it by myself
Is it really a pain in the ass or is it just complicated to learn ?

"Why don't you look for a new job?"

I have a monthly coffee meetup with an ex colleague, where we rant about each others frustrations at work. Since she used to be part of my team she knows everybody and can relate to my stories and updates. In short: she was the kick in the boot I needed to start looking, and after the summer break I'll start a new job making 45% more.

So pumped!! I just signed for my apartment for my first dev job starting this summer!

When you get a summer job at the university to improve internal tools and asking your guarantor why the crappyness of his code is evident even to a noob pythonista like me and getting the answer like "I'm writing this only until it does what I want" kinda frustrates and demotivates. I'm sure this is NOT how things should be done.

!dev
This was a long time ago when I was a pizza delivery guy (summer job). One of my managers could barely handle any pressure. He would often lose it during the dinner rush. He was disorganized and never gave clear directions to his team. One night he totally blew up. He threw a large pizza shovel across the kitchen. It went crashing into the oven in a loud bang. This was in full view of customers on the other side of the counter and several of us workers, all in shock.
It was my last night there as I had handed in my resignation letter two weeks prior. Boy was I glad to get out of there

I'm worried. I would love to internship for my current boss over the summer.
But there are only 4 spots and 10 people competing.

She basically wants an assistant to help with her photography gig. But many of the skills she's asking for are graphic design related minus the website building.

Fingers crossed that what little knowledge I have there can be enough to get me free housing for 8 weeks. Would also love the chance to build a website. Here's to the interview tomorrow.

(Keep in mind I am 16 and I have never had an internship or a job)

I have a potential internship that I can partake in over the summer. It is a mainly front-end job and it is paying 15-20$ an hour. However, the one catch but they use WordPress to code all of their client's sites. I have tried to use WordPress before and I have not had much fun. I feel it is more confusing than it has to be. Should I try again and relearn it to get some early job opportunity and expand my portfolio or should I try freelance work instead?

If you vote WP could you link some good ways to learn it?

As the saying goes "beggars can't be choosers" and I need to get a job.
I got approached by a recruiter in LinkedIn who had attached a PDF brochure.
It seems OKish, but the only part that worries me is "step 3" of recruitment process:
"Invitation to France and have a face-to-face technical interview and meet the team."

Will I be out of bounds if I ask the technical interview (if I ever make it that far) take place into Skype?
There are some savings, but going to France (somewhere between Cannes and Nice in summer period!!!) just for an interview that I might fail is a big gambit for me.

Years ago when I was younger than currently I got this first summer job as help in IT departament to answer calls from distressed workers.

Once this lady calls that "her monitor went black" and she cannot work, so I have to get her a replacement. They got only this big heavy CRT monitors as replacements so I had to drag it to 4th floor (no elevator) from basement.

As I reached her it turned out that her monitor is fine, only the wallpaper was changed to black, that what she was meaning :p

Well, at least I got some exercise back then.

Turns out a massive dev team saw that i tracked down the makers of the PoC PS3 N64 emulator and (successfully) asked for them to release their source and they stole my fucking summer project for themselves. I mean, that's how open-source works, and they'd do a way better job than me, but for fucks sake...

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

My boss is the CEO of the company, it's a small company with less than 15 people altogether. Now in the office it's even less there's 7 of us every day, the rest are remote or the boss.

The boss last week Thursday night sent an email talking about vacations, keep in mind she's currently on her third vacation in 6 months.

In the email she says no one but 'special' exceptions will be allowed to take summer vacations from now on, and if you would like to take your vacation you have to give a minimum of 4 months prior notice

Now I personally don't take vacations, (never needed to, no job before this was stressful enough to make me want to take one) but everyone else in the office is working on their resume's and planning to quit before the new year.

apparently being overworked and thrown under the bus time and time again, as well as an abhorrent number of other issues isn't enough to make people quit . but take away their vacations in the most hypocritical way possible and that's the straw that breaks the camels back.

I finally got a car, I've been practicing driving, and hopefully before September I'll have my license and that'll make it easy for me to get out too before things start collapsing too fast.

Very much! My internship during school turned into a full-time job over the summer! I don’t make crazy money, but I LOVE the work and cost of living in my area is pretty low compared to the rest of the country. So, I’m great! 😁😁

Did I ever tell anyone how much I hate phone interviews? I have had them where people were on speaker phone and I could hardly understand them, foreign accents I could not understand or people reading questions off of the internet. I usually have to do these while walking around the parking lot on my job. My hands and ears freezing in the cold or 100+ degrees in the summer. I just hate it. Now I feel better. Oh yeah I have a country accent so I am doomed from the start anyway. ByVal or ByRef ? Difference between abstract and interface? Here we go again.

Summer starts now!
Things to do.
1. Get better at overwatch
2. Learn 3d modeling
4. Learn animation
5. Learn how to apply programming to animation to make the process quicker

6...do job bc I need money.

I Started in 2012 at 12 years old with Minecraft as an introduction to computer programming. I created a few of my own mods and released them to the forums. I think my name was "lilwillis2" if you want to look them up. Once I created mods, I got into game development. I used The Cherno's game programming tutorials and a few others on youtube. After having my fun with game Dev and the debt of College soon to come, I got into developing my own apps, which got me into using react-native. React native made me realize that I should probably try to stay up to date with the latest frameworks and languages, so that I can create a surpieror product in much less time. It also made me realize how quickly programming changes. Last year, before getting into react-native, I got a summer job using Django and mezzanine at a local company as a web developer and they want me to work there again this year, maybe even on a salary with a pay raise. I recently turned 18 and I already look at code I wrote a few months ago as crap 😂, but hey it means I'm improving quickly!

BTW, if anyone knows any tips on paying/saving for college, please do let me know!

TLDR;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can anyone tell me how to become less resentful and less bitter? I am becoming a miserable fuck. Its true that I burned out in this job after doing 100hrs overtime during previous month, its also true that I am pissed off about having to wait 8-9 weeks for my raise to happen. I cared so much that I burned out and now Im trying to set some boundaries but damage was done and Im struggling dealing with it.

I took 6 days off to disconnect from work (still was responding to some major blockers and monitoring stuff). Today I got back at work and interacting with two incompetent devs immediately sets me off. Imagine taking 2-3 days and extra meetings to do a simple fix which shouldnt take longer than 30min. My mind was blown and still gets constantly blown about how ineffective some members of team are.

I am becaming a ranting fuck. I even noticed one person escaping my rants once he sees that they are taking longer than 5min.

Right now I started setting boundaries - I clock my 8 hours, disable slack/email notifications and get the fuck out from the office. I dont care if I will have to sit in traffic extra 30min during summer heat, Im done with putting in overtime and caring so much about being efficient. I will just start working on my side project and put my love/learnings in that. Hoping that by the end of year I will have couple projects to show in my portfolio so I could find a better paying job...

In the past I was the sole dev responsible for apps and I was communicating with ceos/ctos/product owners/designers directly. This is my first position where I work in a dev team and boy oh boy out of 8 devs barely 3 are competent enough but their output is how to say... Not the biggest. Anyways...

Transition to boundaries and 'normal life' is so hard. Nobody told me that I will have to learn to work with and tolerate such retarded and incompetent people. Im talking about illiterate monkeys who cant even read or write. Im amazed how they manage to code.

Hey everyone! This is a long one so get comfy~

TLDR; I'm glad to be back in the presence of all you awesome people. 2019 was a dream and I have a lot of you to thank for that.

If you've noticed, I've been away for a while. I took a sabbatical from a lot of my socials (including github - or at least public github :( this summer. Let me explain:

In late April/early May, I applied and got an internship at RBC (a big bank company in Canada) found out I'm getting flown out to San Fran for a talk I gave at a summit, and got accepted to this 2 week physics [Quantum Cryptography] camp @ UWaterloo. So I had quiet the summer. In order to throw myself into work and friends and all that, I decided that I was going to take a break. Although I took a break from Github I was still active on Github Enterprise for my job but outside of that I didn't do much.

Don't worry though, now that it's fall/winter season, I'll be in my room for way too long so it's back to the usual grind. Currently, I'm in the process of planning a hackathon, prepping for picoCTF 2019, filling out University applications, all while dealing with school :) I've got a lot of projects/things coming up so ya'll will hear more from me :D

CSS is magic.
CSS is a katana blade.
CSS is a tiny bristle scratching Gorilla Glass Victus. It shouldn't exist, yet it does.
CSS is a plastic-based sticker that you peel off, and it leaves no residue behind.
CSS is a summer breeze of 2004 that you felt while riding longboards with your girlfriend.
CSS is plugging a '86 Les Paul into a Marshall JCM800 and switching to a dirty channel.
CSS is diving into a freshly made bed after an evening shower.
CSS is getting your winter coat and finding a hundred dollar bill in the pocket.
CSS is the front right burner.
CSS is stomping onto a Big Muff pedal before you do solo.
CSS is David Gilmour inviting you for lunch.
CSS is cracking open a cold bottle of Perrier.
CSS is falling asleep in the attic hugging your loved one and watching the stars.
CSS is a glass of just below the room temperature cold pressed orange juice after you run 5k.
CSS is stepping on a scale and seeing yet another pound of body weight gone.
CSS is a supportive, beautiful person saying they love you just after you escaped an abusive relationship.
CSS is putting on your cold white gold Rolex in the Friday afternoon before meeting with friends at the bar.
CSS is discovering your old Sansa Clip+ and booting RockBox.
CSS is giving cunnilingus to Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
CSS is finally feeling empathy to another person after two years of therapy and realizing you're alive.
CSS saying "unleaded" after you pull up to the gas station in your vintage 911.
CSS is your ex-boss apologizing to you after they hit the rock bottom.
CSS is smelling her hair in the back seat of a Maybach taxi.
CSS is giving presents to your grandparents.
CSS is hitting bong while watching Home Alone with your friends after New Year's Eve.
CSS is getting a new job that pays 3x your old one and removing your old job's Jira bookmark from a bookmarks bar.

I own a start up with two friends of mine - one is great with business, and the other tries to be both a developer and on the business side. I'm fully on development and I find it extremely frustrating to work with him. He copies and pastes code, doesn't understand it, and worse still will never admit it and digs himself in deeper into the hole he's dug. He doesn't code as a hobby and it's purely just assignments in university that he spends any coding time on. I've tried helping him to improve over the past few months, but nothing seems to ever do anything as there's no desire to solve problems - just really dollar signs in his eyes is probably the only reason he's in computer engineering. Recently we got a contract with an organisation to make an extremely simple app for android and iOS as the first stage of their planned development. As I did the most of the work on another project during the summer (while juggling a job with another company as an internship), I asked if he could take this so he can try to improve and equalise work so he does his share. Not only did it take 3 weeks, but it's shoddy as hell and looks like it was done in the space of an hour. In reality it took days for him. It's unbearable! The android code I saw was clearly just copied from various sources and mashed together - there was no planning, no understanding of abstractions, and was legit a giant class or two with extreme amounts of redundancy. Hell, he even asked me for help for trying to implement fragments when I pointed out that making screens with buttons and such will be extremely difficult if he is only passing in strings. Any of you guys experiences something like this before? I'm planning on bailing in the coming weeks once my exams are over with for university as it's becoming unbearable.

(first time here)
I'm doing a summer internship at a web development company (my first experience; I'm still studying)... I'm being too greedy or stupid to hope to get a job along the end?

Dear php. You weren't my first one. But you were my first serious one. The first i made money with. We had a great time together until ajax came. Do you remember? I did more and more with js later but you still where my main. You even exposed your source code to me. Time changed. They started to hate you. And yes, they where right in some points. But they never saw your good sides. I saw them. I stood with you. But i was froced to wrote backends in typescript, in Java. And you know what: i didn't feel so bad. For gods sake, I fucking enjoyed it, php!

When did we become so alienated? When did I staet to write my dayly heller scripts in bash instead of you?

Yes, you improved. Hack came, than php7, php8. You archived a lot. You finally brought types. There was a time when I thought everything that stood between us will be overcome. That we will be together forever.

But recently i had this conversation on DevRant with nmeri and did some research afterwards. And I learned, maybe you will never have generics. It just don't work out, php, I am sorry. It's not your fault, it's mine. But i dont think i can live without a proper type system for the rest of my life. Not after i taszed those other languages.
I don't know when it will happen. When i switch projects this summer maybe. Maybe next year, when i start a new job. Who knows. But it will happen: you won't be my main anymore at one point. Maybe we can stay friends but i want you to know, that i am open for something new in my life. Something with generics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks
Have a nice day.

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

That's how I keep my cool in the summer.

A bit improvised, maybe a little unsafe, but it does the job quite well.

I know that my job searching is just a small chunk of what grownups and people after school and early duties do, but what I've went through while searching for a job in the summer was a hellish nightmare: out of ~60 companies i ever nudged, only ~3 companies returned to me.

0 RESULTED INTERVIEWS. ONLY PHONE CONVOS.

unelated, but i am currenty working on the big altrant QoL update - the stupid visual glitch in the title in the profile screen is already fixed!

Okay i am torn here.
Specifically for Indian devs(better if you into android)
Would you be willing to work for Rs 10k per month for 6 months at a startup as your first job?

Perks:
- nearby job. Its like 20 minutes metro ride
- known people and code base. I had worked with them last summer and know all their codebase. Its very large and will make me learn lots of new stuff.

Cons:
- nothing formal: its a startup, they don't have any bonds, they don't give any equity, any bonus, any compensation stuff etc.

- Too less salary: lesser than that of a delivery guy or auto driver

- Too much work load: they are going to fuck me up straight in terms of work. They got only 1 super man sikh who made the whole stuff and who wouldn't be there most of the time. I have to read his code, understand it , learn all the libraries and then make new features all by myself

- Too much pressure : they are going to take away my 6/7 days and then may call for update on sunday. Plus they will be expecting me to complete a task(which includes all the stuff i added in the workload point) in like 1-2 days

- better options available (i guess?) : If i don't go there, i would either continue to apply for more Android related jobs, or would start learning more on competitive i.e changing the whole path stuff,etc.

"We can’t just design an item that looks great. We also have to anticipate how it is boxed up, distributed, and shipped, as well as whether or not a seventeen-year-old kid with a summer job can stock it on the store shelf without ruining it." - Robin Perkins

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

Just started a new job as a software developer, even though I basically applied as an embedded software developer. I knew from the interview there was gonna be alot of legacy / high level stuff and they were pushing me away from embedded with the promise I could do it 'later on'.

Finally started and it turns out there's a shit tonne of legacy Python code for their non-existent test framework that's basically tied directly into a Qt GUI app and I'm doing shit that nobody else wants to do. Can't see myself wanting to do this for anywhere more than 2-3 months. Should I just bail now? Seems a bit dodgy if I leave having only worked there for a week? Job actually pays really well though.

Plan was to take an extended vacation around July/August, so quitting this early and then telling another employer later on that I need to bail for summer seems wrong also, not to mention COVID sucks and is making everything hell now.

Hello DevRant,
I need your help
I'm currently studying Game design and development first year in The Netherlands and I love programming but I hate designing. I was thinking about changing the course to something like Ethical Hacking or Computer science. The reason why I want to do this is that they teach us openfl until second year and I feel like I learn nothing until now.
Do you think would be better to change the course or to stay but start programming in something else? And what programming language would you recommend?
P.s. I also want to apply for a part time job/summer school to gain experience but I had no luck at all.
P.s.s. You are the best community for me!
Return 0;

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

2023 will be remembered as the summer i wasted searching for a 🤡 job

still, i'm slowly working towards fuck you money and soon it won't matter

and imagine... they said i don't know redux, when i've been using it before redux toolkit even existed 😂

what a time to be alive

So in the context, I ragequitted my school at the end of the 4th year (out of 5, so no diploma). I was broken, poor (the only money I got was my parents), and mad as fuck.

I took a 2 month vacation during the summer where I did strictly nothing, then I sat down to my computer, opened Rubymine and started building my new website (current version actually, new one is in progress)

Right after that, I downloaded the trial version of Adobe InDesign and created a better / updated version of my old CV, and put it on LinkedIn, Viadeo, everywhere. At first, it didn't work much since all my experience was about underpaid internships, so I honestly had no work experience on the paper.

Then, while answering to a job offer, I put my CV on Monster, before I realized I should have done this from the beginning: next 3 mornings I had 5 phone calls, and 2 appointments per day for 2 weeks 😁😁

My current job was one of the firsts that called me, but made me wait a whole month (through appointments & shit) before answering me "Yes" one tuesday at 10 pm, on my way to take a shower. It's been 10 months now 😁

Alright, so, let's say you're me. 16 years old, just started a summer job at a networking company. It's me and three others, and the people who hired us, quite frankly, aren't as prepared as they should be. So we get our first task at around 4, are told it's meant to last the week, and go home. Get back in the morning, find out someone did all the work overnight

4 months ago, my team had the task of redesigning the login page of our main app. Really nice design. Since it was fairly simple, it was given to one of our summer camp guys to do something useful. After he finished, it was stuck on merge request and no one bothered to check it, as it was not important for our PO's, it simply got forgotten...
Last week, since I was bored and remembered about it, I decided to check it and fix the small issues it had, without telling anything to our PO, just did it, asked for code review and added it to our latest release.

Today I overheard 2 guys from analytics team:
"Hey, have you seen our new login page?"
"There is a new WordPress developer so he just does his job well"

Our application is not in WordPress, only our company's website is!
Our application is in Angular!
There is no new WordPress developer! We only have an offer looking for one!

WTF

Career fair update:
At the fair I bee-lined right to a company I'd talked to at a hackathon before. The person I talked to there was extremely enthusiastic, and called me a "really strong candidate," and even talked about providing housing for the summer near the workplace!
I'm contrast, AMD's interviewer looked extremely uninterested. Pretty sure they just grabbed some random engineer who didn't want to be there.
Microsoft had a line so long that the fair ended before most of the people even got to talk to Microsoft. Needless to say, I didn't even bother.
Qualcomm seemed cool, that went alright.
Overall, really happy with how the fair turned out, and really excited with how likely this job looks for me.

Anyone else out there got any QlikView Certs? Got mine this summer for a summer job. they paid for the training and everything.

First job while in college... Was working for web dev team lamp set up before lamp was lamp (year was 2000).

Had deadline one week after summer vacation. Worked non stop a couple of days to get shit done and didn't make it. Got in a conflict with my manager in front of the team and I blew my steam off. Quit on the spot.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't be a fucking idiot when estimating work.
2. Be cool with other teammates, nobody cares about drama and nobody has to feel sorry for you.
3. Uhm, plan? Had entire fucking vacation to get work done. I was a fucking moron.
4. Burning out is stupid and unproductive.
5. Your manager can be as poor in management as you are. Your job is to try to make them better at it, as they have less visibility in the details.

Next job in grad school. Worked for a security company. Direct manager had the bright idea to make execs sign the change requests. WTF. Code was in Perl/php, a mess. Team rewrote back end DB access , taking over six months, or more, failing twice the deadline. After a final 48 hour burn out, we ship and get laid off the week after.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't work for dicks.
2. Don't be a dick yourself.
3. Don't work for dicks.

Third job was in silicon valley. It was a great company, and I stayed there for five years.

- I have done this, this and this. I'm an amazing programmer even though i copied it from SO.

- Allright, could you explain this part since you did not write one single comment.

- (insert generic bullshit excuse)

you don't think he's the one getting the internship amd the summer job since he's the loudest? dear god, my fist, his face.

Had far too sparetime and found out that Wix wasn't making real websites. Found out that a pretty cool tool named "inspector" existed and then I was in. I used all the time I could afford by taking courses, study and get a small job last summer. Then I became a member of devRant aaaaand then my productivity decreased dramatically 😁

I see a lot of awesome "I got the internship! 🙂🙂🙂" Or "I got the job! 😆😆😆" which makes me super happy and I wanted to be one of those people that got to celebrate on DevRant someday :)

Unfortunately, I was just one slot away from being selected from the internship I really wanted this summer (4th out of 50. 3 positions). But I'm not going to get my hopes up. Gonna interview next year, complete some more side projects, learn more languages, and come back as a better developer 😎😎😎

It seems like there is a whole another grade of fear — Basilisk grade. It’s impossible to experience it and walk away without serious consequences.

Imagine: I’m barely 20. It’s my first real, official, high-paying job. I’m already a team lead. A big Russian non-govt company with a blue logo. Huge new office in Moscow.
My “childhood” is officially over — I’m not playing around anymore. I’m an adult in every sense of the word.

Several weeks go by. Maybe even a month. Just a regular day at the office. I’m waiting for the coffee machine to heat up, and suddenly, it hits me. I’m here, at the office. Moscow, a city of 10 million people, is beautiful in the summer, yet I can’t just leave the office and go for a walk whenever I want to. When the day is over, it’s already evening, and I barely have time for myself. There are other people around me, with way higher positions, but their schedule is just the same as mine: nine-to-six. My adult life just started. I have forty years of this ahead of me. No matter the company, no matter the position: unless I’m the CEO, I’m doomed to get to work in the morning and go back home in the evening. And then I retire, old and not that beautiful anymore. And then that’s it.

I was never the same after that day. People are plotting my betrayal behind my back. They all act as one. Just out of my frame of view, their heads are turned to me, and they all look at me with the same devilish grin. There are no people — it’s all one huge shoggoth that lives under the office floor, and my colleagues are its ugly tentacles wrapped in human skin. I start missing deadlines. I become paranoid. Next thing I know, I’m at the psychiatrist’s office, being prescribed aripiprazol — a strong antipsychotic that is designed to literally make you slower. Anxiety worsens. I develop restless legs syndrome. I lose my ability to sleep. My intelligence is slipping away. I’m fired.

I have the return to Saint-Petersburg, cariprazine prescription that felt like lobotomy with extra steps, losing my ability to read, delirious manic episodes ahead of me.

It is only now that I kinda-sorta tuned my medication scheme in by going through countless psychiatrists of all sorts. But I sure as hell work at a place where I can do whatever I want if I meet deadlines.

Guys, I need an advise regarding summer jobs:

I have had this awesome summer job for 2 summers as a mountainbiking guide, which is fun, has awesome perks, and pays relatively well.

But it doesn't really net me any useful experience, so should I seek a job as a programmer instead?

I'm studying first year bachelor's, but I have experience, so I should get a job nevertheless.

Finding internships as a college student is aggravating... I applied to 12 different companies in the last month and have only heard back from one and now I'm stressing out because it's getting very close to summer and I have no job. I have to pay for college and food and all that shit somehow but I can't exactly do anything about it besides apply to more companies and just sit and wait

Trying to find a summer internship. It's mandatory for my degree, so I need to find someone who wants me. 😓 Suggestions?

Question for the hiring managers out there: When reviewing applications for an open role, what specifically stands out to you about an applicant? (Assuming that the ATS gods don't just automatically filter the application out.)

Is it their achievements at previous companies? (Ex. Boosted ARR by 200% or decreased monthly churn by 30%)
Is it their career trajectory?
Is it their resume writing abilities?
Is it their education/certification credentials?
Is there some degree of "brand shopping" involved? For example, does seeing an average resume from a former Google employee with 2 YOE get you more excited than a well-written resume from a candidate with 7 YOE who worked at a lesser-known company?

I suppose much of this depends on the role and its needs.

Just given the market right now, I'm curious how hiring managers are making selections from their undoubtedly vast pool of candidates. I've heard that almost any job positing now is getting 500+ applicants within the hour, but with the caveat that 490 of those 500 applicants are completely unqualified (Like a Shift Manager at Chipotle who worked an IT help desk summer internship applying for a Senior Software Engineer role.)

Ultimately, what aspects of an applicant combined with their background and resume makes you say "Wow, this might be the one" while reviewing applications for a role?

!rant
TL;DR - not sure if I should take a full-time gig at my current pretty good job, or go do an internship with AWS for the summer.

Needing some wizened development career advice, guys. I am coming to a small crossroads at the moment.

I am in my last year of school getting a BS in Computer Science. I love it. I had a pretty sweet job at a cool startup, until recently, when they were bought by a bigger company. This turned out to still be alright though, since they hired everyone on to the new company to keep our codebase alive and well (it's a pretty good product that they don't want to get rid of). Except they hired me as an Intern instead, which I thought was weird, but they said that's normally what they do with peeps that are still in school. Whatevs. But then I got offered an internship at some company called Amazon Web Services to be a Systems Analyst Intern (basically cloud support engineering from the sounds of it). And then I told the cats at the new company that I was considering this internship and they started saying they'd consider giving me full-time. And they didn't want to lose me.

Well... my thing is that both are tempting. Like the company that'd offer me a full-time gig would be cool because I'd get to keep working on the projects I'm currently on and I'd be immersed in a good development cycle and whatnot. Probably more full-stack programming, which I like a good bit and want to master more of. The Amazon thing seems cool, but I worry that it'd be more of a support gig. And as well as they pay, I may not get as good of development experience. Granted I was told I could definitely get into scripting to automate various things. But I just don't know how much would actually be that. Except having Amazon on my resume would likely be pretty great to have also coming out of graduation.

Down yet another avenue of thought, the AWS internship would only be for a few months in the Summer. So there's a chance I could come back and I could get my old job back. But maybe they would see me as disloyal or something and not want me to come back. I would also likely forfeit my retention bonus (which is an ok amount, but not a deal-breaker and it's spread out over 3 years) for staying on with the company after the acquisition.

I just don't know. Would it be better to stay where I'm at or go on a wild adventure over the summer? Help me, DevRant Kenobi you're my only hope...

Any tips on getting a summer tech internship/job? Where should I look?

Finished the semester in college two days ago and now u have a 3 months break.......

aaaand I'm bored already. I don't even have anything to rant about XD

Not having a summer job sucks.

Started my very first (summer) job as an IT agent in customer service for my city less than two weeks ago and finally moving out from the formations to answer the phone alone.

I must've listened to around 30 calls and already there's stories I could make tales of.

I now understand the job of customer service.

I can't do my job without internet. Guess which construction fuckers couldn't keep their shovels in the right holes and knocked out our power and connection to the interwebs. That's right. Those numbskulls right outside my building. The same ones who've been incompetent enough to have this project going on all. summer. long.

Hello everyone, looking for some career advice here.

First of let me list my credentials off here. I graduated in 2016 with a BS in Computer Science. While I was working on my degree I worked as an engineering for 3 years in a cell phone repair company. What this entailed was managing/reverse engineering a software solution of one of that companies vendors, writing documentation etc (it started as a summer internship and became a job that I worked full time over Summers and up to 30/week in the school year).

Anyway, the vendor I acted as a point of contact offered me a job before I graduated and I started with them in May 2016 as a junior most Dev. Since then I have have maintained the same job tittle (software developer), however my duties have increased.

Currently I maintain several of our build servers, manage software releases (as in I am the lead developer of this application) for the service that makes 90% of this companies money, and am the subject matter expert for everything regarding smartphone diagnostics. I've literally been entrusted with access to all of the company servers for if something goes wrong. I'm also training our newest developers and being told I'm doing a good job at doing so.

Currently with my job on a day to day basis I'm working with Java, Android, C++, Golang, MongoDB, iOS in Objective C, and Python

(Please note this is a small company of less than 50 people)

Currently I'm only being paid 60k USD and am wondering if I should hold out for a raise or consider looking for a better job? ( Please note I live in the east coast in an area where the cost of living isn't absurd).
Because this job was practically handed to me I don't know what to expect and feel imposter syndrome as I think I deserve better pay but think I don't have enough years experience. All advice is welcome

A big development company needed summer interns, the job required java and the likes and it was the first big interview i've had. This wasn't a problem, i thought, until i got there. worth noting is that Im still in school and and the last time i used java extensivly was a year prior to the interview. I completly blanked on the, rather basic, questions. needless to say, I didnt get it.

I'm a student, got an internship for the summer.

I thought i was going to be writing C++ code, as that was the job description.

Instead I'm doing fullstack development for a build test automation tool.

It's not terrible (there's definitely a loy of nice stuff), but i definitely do not want to do fullstack permanently (no offense).

Hopefully i can get a non fullstack job next time, but i wish I'd done that this time.

Instead of doing the daily task on the computer for my summer job...I wrote a program that did it for me daily...Best summer job ever

Last course complete! It's summer leave baby! Oh, and then that full time job as well... But hey, still!

Yesterday we got the news that another contract is ended. I’m almost looking forward to mine. I guess i’m next this summer. And on to job #6

Currently waiting to get paid for a freelance job I took over the summer. First time making money off of my work and I couldn't be more excited.

Not the best way a co worker has quit and not dev related. From a job I had for only a month the summer before I got my first position with the company I'm currently with. It was factory work, pretty crappy, no air conditioning, this guy started just after me hardly ever did his job and was just generally annoying as hell. One day I'm brought into HR and asked if I fucking shower. :| I do and did every day. Deoderent and all. I explained it's a hot work environment. They said I should just shower more. I've never heard such a dumb complaint filed against anyone. Of course I wasn't going to smell like daisies, it was hot as fuck in there. Anyway a week later got offered a new job, I didn't give any notice just walked to HR at the end of the day the day before I started my new job, said I'm out. They asked if they could get 2 weeks notice, with out hesitating I stated no, I start my new job tomorrow, here's my badge, bye. And walked out. :| This wasn't the only thing that made me quit but it was kind of a tipping point. Like ok don't like sweat smell? Then don't be on top of me or find a job with air conditioning.

Got a summer internship in a semi public sector company.
I went there full of joy and readiness to tackle new problems and learn how to deal with proprietary software development.
Instead I was greeted with an IT Help Desk job and I have to fix printers and help people find stuff in the software they're using which was last updated 2004.

I love what I do, I love designing and building well-crafted software, and so it eats up a lot of my time.

I constantly remind myself that, while being a software developer is a good profession, it is not enough for me. I am focused on building products that offer real value, in return for money. Because, capitalism...

I remind myself that money doesn’t raise itself, technically-excellent networks full of possible partners and employees don’t build themselves either.

Therefore, I force myself to go be social from time to time.

But it is a struggle, that I don’t do a good enough job with! So I’m going to do better this summer

So I'm in my last year of university. The GPA is high. Did one internship the summer after second year in one of the best companies in my country. Third year in my department we do a semester long internship for 5 months, I joined a company and worked on back-end using Go. This was the spring semester and I wanted to continue working in the summer. The internsip company didn't tell me anything so I looked for a job. Found one that paid great, I was getting the salary a new graduate was getting. I worked as a full-stack there. Mostly prototyping, the company was new and I was in the R&D side. After 2 months the company had some budgetary problems and we parted ways. I was in the market again for part-time job in my senior year and because of my prior experience with Go, a friend mentioned me to a company executive he met and I had an interview and got in as a full-stack part-time dev. This was for some background information.

My story is;

The work is actually great in terms of what I do. I'm learning a lot here. The problem is that I'm having imposter syndrome for the first time ever. The projects are demanding and because that I'm part-time they take time to finish. There are no due dates or anything but sometimes the CEO is coming to me and saying "Aren't you finished with it?" or "Are you going to finish it soon?". Because that I'm more qualified in Javascript and React when they gave me my current frontend project I told them that its better if they give javascript/frontend projects from now on so that I can do a better job finishing them. What the CEO told me after that was, "Then hopefully you'll finish them sooner.". The people are nice and stuff like this only happened 2-3 times and the lead that I'm working with acknowledges my pros and cons and we have a good relationship, when I do something wrong he tells me why and how I can improve my code. But I just can't get over the syndrome and for some time I actually thought they would fire me when they get a full time dev.

Everything is great for some time. It's my fourth month and I think I felt this way because this is the most demanding job I have with senior year and also I didn't know people that well because I was the new guy. Although I still have concerns, have you ever felt this way? If you share tips or any recommendations I would feel great.

Thank you for reading.

I need help.

I am 15 years old and I'm looking for a summer job which is computer-related. I have experience in web development and I'm struggling to find a job in a field that I can connect to. Any ideas?

So i am at an MNC as a summer internship, me along with 18 other students from my university cleared this hackathon and got selected for this internship,
Few things you should know
1. Amongst all the other candidates i had the most work experience
2. I had worked with a lot of python and JavaScript
3. I legit have more skills then almost everyone working in my team

So, I don't know how but the HR decided i should go to this team, where there are no developers and are people of age 30 who have no idea what django is,

I was fucking frustrated but i let it go, thinking i will just solve this problem and will change my team, calm down

They told me about the project. I said okay give me access i will just finish it.

5 days no signs of access anyhow, so, i sucked it up and tracked all the network request and made my own api,

Then I was happy i get rid of this project,
But then they had bigger plans they ask me to add features on this project but there is a catch you have no access to any accounts, do it on your own,

Like What the Fuck, before giving an intern any project don't you have the responsibility to check weather the fucking project is possible i am just wasting my summer internship. I thought I got a big company it will help me grow i will get job security, but noo wtf, i am hell of frustrated

It all started on a nice summer afternoon. I was minding my own business just using my wonderful laptop with Windows 10 software installed. Then I woke up and realized the truth. I am sick of the scams, the lies, and the games. Today you will all see the same colors as me.

Most of you are probably on a Microsoft device and have had problems with it. A great example of Microsoft's failure is the line of phones they attempted to market. I was forced to own one for a period of time and it is absolute agony. Never force this way of life on another human being. While we are here, why the fuck is Optifine only available for Java Minecraft. Why even have two versions of the game when they cost the same?

These petty offenses are nothing compared to what I am about to tell you. As we all know, Bill Gates is friends with Mark Zuccerberg. Mark is known for his cult of reptile info scammers. Just this association alone is a red flag. This means that Bill Gates is a reptile as well. Reptiles only trust other reptiles.

These "people" are lying to us! Bill Gates just wants you to think he stepped down so he doesn't get the hate and shunning that comes with liking Microsoft. It was just an excuse to get his cult followers to do his job for him so he could run the new world order and the pedophile ring that he co-owns with Jeffrey Epstein. You think Satya Nadella is the "New CEO"?! Bullshit. He is just another Microsoft fleshlight.

Not only is Bill a disgusting liar, but he predicts the future and uses it to his advantage. This is how he has built his cult following and his multi-company empire.

You people need to wake the fuck up and boycott Microsoft. You are all being subliminally brainwashed into thinking it's okay and that "It's just the software" NO. Stop supporting pedophiles. Stop supporting reptiles. Stop supporting shitty products, and STOP LICKING THE CORPORATE BOOT. In conclusion, fuck Microsoft.

Is it normal waiting 10 weeks since raise request to actually get a raise?

I understand that its summer, vacations are here and there, our branch is in EU and headquarters are US, but its been 10 freaking weeks.

Long story short I joined this company 5 months ago and because of a break I lowballed myself. After 3 months before my probation period I asked for a raise. So 10 weeks passed and since then I got a pat on a back saying that feedback is positive, but I cant pay my bills with that positive feedback.

I seriously started polishing my skills and think of leaving in a few weeks to couple months time because this is unnaceptable. I have no love for this job anymore and I will do bare minimum just like half of my team and if they dont like it they can fcking fire me (which never happened in 6 years of my career).

My asked bump is 43% but the thing is if I go contracting I will get 65%-105% more.

So fuck your corporate red tape, fuck your incompetent sleepy employees who drag everything out for weeks, fuck your vacation and fuck your 2 months bonus at the end of the year. I dont want to became a slow incompetent shit like all of you.

I am a graduate student having a hard time finding an internship. I wasn't ready while the big companies were hiring for interns. 200 leetcode questions later I am confident I can crack an interview and now nobody wants to hire.

Most of the reject letters are pretty messed up stating that they have "found more talented individual" or "found a better candidate".

Applied to almost 200 companies, not one reply. :( Hope this doesn't happen during full-time job search.

I was rotting in my room practicing for the interviews and applying for the last two months during this winter break. Hope I don't sit idle during my summer break. :(

!rant

This summer, I started interning as a TA in a firm which basically is a job portal but also has its own training courses.
We hit all time high of $1M in revenue this month, and we got an email. A fking EMAIL.

I'm graduating soon from a college, and tbh I only had internships in web development. I really want to land a job when graduate next summer... But it doesn't seem I match any of the job descriptions, the skills the companies want. I don't know what's the next step, should I find a low skill cap job and teach myself the languages in the part-time? what did you do to land a software engineer job when you first graduated?

I have been an expat since graduating and have been moving a lot. More than a decade ago, when I was still young, I was in a relationship with a woman, Sylvia, in a country where we both lived. Sylvia wanted to settle down but I was not ready to commit so young. We clearly had different expectations from the relationship. I did not know what to do and, well, I ghosted her. Over the Christmas break, while she was visiting her family, I simply moved out and left the country. I took advantage of the fact that I accepted a job in other country and did not tell her about it. I simply wanted to avoid being untangled in a break-up drama. Sylvia was rather emotional and became obsessed with the relationship, tracking me down, even causing various scenes with my parents and friends.

Anyhow, fast forward to now. I now work as a math teacher in an international school. I have been in other relationships since, so Sylvia is a sort of forgotten history. Sadly, till now. This week, I learnt that our fantastic school director suddenly resigned due to a serious family situation and had to move back to her home country over the summer. The school had to replace her. We are getting a new director. I read the bio of the new boss and googled her and was shocked to discover it is Sylvia. We have not been in touch and do not have any mutual friends anymore. I am not a big fan of social media and had no idea what she had been up to since the unpleasant situation a long time ago.

I have no idea what to do and how to deal with this mess. It is clear this will be not only embarassing but I will also be reporting to my ex. I am not in a position to find another job at present. There are no other international schools so finding another job in this country is not an option. Even finding a job elsewhere is not possible on such a short notice. These jobs usually open for school terms so I have to stay put for few months. But more importantly, I am happy and settled here so do not want to move. To make the situation worse, the expat community here is very small and tightly knit so teachers also socialize a lot.

Do you have any suggestions for me how to handle it and what should I do? I understand that this would not have happened if I did not ghost her back then, but I cannot do anything about it now. I gathered from the comments that readers usually have a go on people like me for “bad behavior” but I am really looking for constructive comments how to deal with the situation.

Advice/input welcome:

I’m nearing the end of my first year of a 2 year SE program at college. I’m considering leaving at the end of this year and looking for a job, but I don’t have much of a portfolio and feel insecure about my ability to make it in this industry. I know it’s probably just impostor syndrome, but it’s a really hard feeling to shake. It’s a trade college, so the program is designed to have students work ready by the end, but there is a certificate for having completed the first year even though most students do both years.

I’m competent with java, web dev including JavaScript vanilla and bootstrap, ok with python and a lil c++, and I used c# over last summer in unity to develop a game I never finished. 2nd year is mostly more of the same, just more in depth. I’m feeling like idgaf about school anymore, and there are some things happening in my life that would benefit from a full time salary and a decent health care plan.

I spoke with an alum of the program who left after one year to work, and he strongly suggested I stay for the 2nd year, but wasn’t clear on why he thought that.

So what I wanna know is, from folks in the workforce, do you think I should stick it out for the last year and then look for work? Or would I be ok to just... go and start looking for a job now?

Hey guys I am going to finish my 3rd year of Engineering. And I am planning to do a summer intern. I need to create a resume. Can someone suggest me some good tools to create my resume and also the proper formats and everything. Thank you!

I can't help but stress out about finding work in development. I just want an internship / entry level summer position to put myself in a better position for post college and to explore and learn in new environments. But it seems like my best chance for scoring that internship is building a solid portfolio or experience, something that I haven't had time to do..

I wrote my first line of code (that wasn't HTML or CSS) when I got to college. Since then almost all my time has gone into my cs engineering curriculum and working a real shitty blue collar job during breaks (for 4 years now) because Im broke and got denied by the 20+ positions I applied for. I can't really do anything with the code I wrote for my schoolwork because I can get fucked if I post it anywhere or share it. I have loads of ideas, but am worried that they are too big to do while maintaining my GPA and scholarships. It sucks too because I am a quick learner, and would even venture to call myself good at what I do.

So since I have hardly been able to pursue any independent studies, I haven't been able to really explore the field, so I don't even know what to areas i need to focus on to make myself a better candidate. So basically I'm broke, don't have shit for pet projects, don't know what I want to do with my life, and can probably expect to work like a dog next summer too because I've heard most companies hire for the summer in the fall.

I don't write this because I feel bad for myself. I write this because it's likely that most people here have been in a similar situation. I also don't like to make excuses for myself like I have been doing. Any advice folks? What should I be doing differently?

June 15. Freezing as fuck. 2019 i remember as the worst year because it was cold until may 25th. Thought it couldnt get worse than that. It has happened for the first time ever. Great fucking job 2023. You've outfucked the fuckery and took the 1st fucking place for the worst shithole year. Even covid year was better than this. What is this bullshit. I am tired of freezing to death in the middle of summer. In the middle of JUNE. Fuck off

It really depends on what time of the year it is. During the fall and spring semesters, my dev life and social life are about as balanced as they're going to get. From working on things in the CS class to socializing with the people I've met in those classes, this part of the year is pretty balanced in my opinion. During breaks and the summer, however, I don't really have a dev life. I don't have a dev job, so really the only times I do have a dev life is when I willingly decide to work on a side project, or have to update some major stuff on one of my three personal websites. Other than that, the only life I have during those breaks is my social life with the buddies I play PC games with on Discord.

I will say this, though. The day will come when I will be having to balance a dev life and a social life year-round. To be honest, I'm not really looking forward to that day.

So last summer I got a job as a software engineer. It went great for a while, and it came time to go back to school. I'm a senior in high school, and the Sterling Scholar for computer technology, plus I'm in charge of my high schools website. It's getting pretty hard to balance this all out, and I've been considering pausing work until school is finished. What do you guys think? 😐

Not quite quitting a job but my course in college. Had 5/6 lecturers in my first semester last year that were totally unprepared and some were even clueless on simple things. One line was if I had five more minutes it would have worked when showing us how to code in python(he was using Java conventions) this was 10 minutes after the lecture should have finished. After 3 months of that utter crap and a summer of studying for repeat exams(had mumps for the original exams) I was ready to quit. Good thing the year I was in was good fun to hang out with other wise I would be working in McDonald's right now

Anybody know of any tips to find a summer dev job as a high school grad?

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!

[ not rant ]

Hello everyone, so I just finished school and I need to start high school. But between we have summer. So im interested if you know some sources where I can get job [15 years old] if I can get job bc I think I'm a decent programmer [HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MYSQLI]. Thank you

I'm looking for a summer job, and am going to have an internship interview at a programming place :D

Do you guys have any advice for it? I'd really appreciate it!