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Search - "tech jobs"
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UPDATE: I have my dream job.
About a year ago I commented on Devrant that I was having some hard luck interviewing for development jobs.
Shortly after my post I decided to lower my expectations and took a job at a tech support call center.(3 month contract)
After getting a little experience(Not just a degree) I was able to land a hardware support job at a fortune 500 company.(Not what a programmer really wants 😂)
I worked hard and started writing tools at home to help with the job. I started giving them out to the other techs and put them on a little internal website for easy access.
About 3 months ago I just became a software engineer within the company.(after 6 months of hardware repair.) The main reason I got the job was because I showed them how much overtime and extra work I had done and that the techs relied on my software to do there jobs and that I was dependable.
It was hard work but it was worth it. And I built software that I never would have done if I hadn't taken this "lower job"
So keep your chin up and your fingers on the keys, I was in your shoes a year ago. 😉12 -
OH MY GOD, MY TEACHER DOES NOT TEACH MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE!
I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.
Whats with that attitude?
I absolutely encourage young people to learn technology in their free time and it absolutely helps at building a career and become good at programming. I don't think being around 18 and never having worked in a real job is the time to select "the most superior language and technology".
Actually, that time is never.
Technology is evolving all the time and different tech evolves in different paths for different purposes. Get rid of the idea, that there is a "best" and get rid of the idea, that you will always be able to work with what you think is best.
If you're really really really awesome, you can chose to do what you like most. Not awesome as in "i learned programming in my free time, now i'm better than my programming-for-beginners-course teacher" but awesome as in "start my own company and can afford to only take the jobs i feel like doing", that awesome. Most likely, you're not (yet).
In the real world, you will very likely sometimes be required to work with technology you don't prefer. Maybe with something you think is really bad. Probably, it's not that bad. More likely, you read it on the internet from someone whose self-image is based on on loving TechA and hating TechB. A lot of much hated technology is at least okay for it's intended use. Maybe not the most pleasant time you will ever have, but no reason to jump out of the window. Hey, and if you get used to it, you may even start to like it. At least, learn to retain some dignity when confronted with things you don't like.
You can still think that one thing is better than another, but if you make a huge drama out of it, you just make it harder for yourself. The best programmer is the one who get's shit done, not the one with the saltiest tears.14 -
I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.
The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.
Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.
There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.
I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.
I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.
If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.
pour another glass
Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.
When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.
Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.
The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)
Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.
Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.
The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.
If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.
I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.
We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.
sip
Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.
Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.
The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.
For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.
Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.
Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.
Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.
Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.
Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.37 -
So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.
Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.
He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.
What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!
Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'
He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.
Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.
So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.
So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!
Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.
Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.
You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.
Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.8 -
Social let's-help-female-programmers warriors piss me off.
The other day a massive email thread at work on how women are misrepresented in tech and how we need to help them and how using words such as "guys" is intimidating and generally patronising shit like "let's advertise jobs on websites like femaleprogrammers.com instead stackoverflow because there's too many white males on stackoverflow."
99% participants in this topic were guys.
One girl sent a message saying she doesn't want to be helped and she wants to know she has been picked for her skill and not filling in diversity numbers.
...would you believe she has been schooled on problems women in tech face by those lads too.
Like "woman, please... we speak diversity here"
So annoying....!!24 -
Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...
1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.
2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.
3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.
4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.
5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.
6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.
7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.
8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.
9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.
10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE
11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.
12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)
13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.
14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.
Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!20 -
I was messaged on LinkedIn by a recruiter while I was in the UK for my honeymoon. When we got back home to Colorado I called him back and everything went well enough that a tech screen call was set up between four or five guys on the team, and me.
I was expecting to be grilled about various Linux, networking, video transcoding, database, and transaction handling questions and problems, as that was the bulk of the job's description. But instead they just gushed that they'd used software I'd written at previous jobs and loved it.
It was very friendly and they never challenged me (not being arrogant here-- they literally never tested me) and we wound up just talking about, "the job," and about how the work sucked without the tools and apps I'd written.
I got an offer for $30k more than what I asked, the next day.5 -
Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.
Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
See where I'm going here?
Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.
Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?
I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...17 -
I’m a .NET desktop fullstack dev these days… Never worked web unless for my own small needs/personal projects.
I started using tech one way or the other by the time windows was version 3.1 and been through quite a bit ground-breaking changes in the industry of software development and the internet but if there’s one thing I cannot understand of it all, no matter how much thought I put into it is: How the fuck did we manage to make it so fucking complicated to develop anything these days?
I remember like it was yesterday that you could stand a website with HTML, CSS and JS, three fucking files and you’ve made yourself a single page site. Then came the word “Responsive”, “Responsive” written everywhere. Fair enough, grid system popped up. All of the sudden jQuery was summoned… and everything that happened after this point has been a fucking circus of high-pitched teens talking on conferences about fucking libraries and frameworks to make integration with real time, highly scalable, eco-friendly, serverless, data driven, genome aware, genderless, quantum technologies to interact with bio dynamically generated organisms, namely fucking users.
Every fucking bit of the process of building a mobile/web application seems to be stopped by yet another incredibly dumb attempt to suicide a developer. Can you go from starting an app and publishing an app without jumping through a thousand VERY specific hoops? No, fuck no.
I fucking hate it… It’s a bit hard to get Desktop dev jobs these days but for as long as I work on IT I will continue to stick to that area, until someone for the love of life comes up with a fucking solution to all this decadent circus of bureaucratic technocracy.
Fuck big industry, fuck tech giants, fuck javascript and webassembly, fuck kids putting ASCII art on console applications that I DON’T FUCKING NEED to install dependencies THAT I DON’T FUCKING NEED to extend functionality on frameworks that I DON’T FUCKING NEED… oh wait, I do need all this because YOU FUCKING MADE IT MANDATORY NOW! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!!!9 -
The most unrealistic deadline? Okay, here it goes. For context, this is one of my earliest jobs, and I’m actively using React.
— Kiki, I have a stunning idea! Let’s build a Figma clone!
— Okaaaay, 🧐
— You have two days.
— A what?
— I’ve just stumbled upon an amazing new technology. You maybe don’t know it yet. It’s called React.js, and you totally can build a full Figma clone in two days using it!
— …
— It’s a revolution, and you’re so ignorant for not following it. Are you even a real engineer?
— …
Two days later:
— Forget about Figma! Let’s build an online DAW for musicians!
That guy was nuts. I left when we had an executive meeting, I was explaining tech things, and he suddenly popped out a fucking tambourine and started striking it. One year later, he lost everything and went to get a junior C++ position at an outsourcing company.8 -
Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.1 -
I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.
As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.
In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.
There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.
I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.
The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.
And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.
Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.
And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!
The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!
It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.
I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.
Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.
Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.
This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.
Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!10 -
I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.
Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.
I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.
No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.
The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."
Fuck Everyone.
Time to find a new contract.11 -
!Dev
Can't stand it when you excitedly mention the Mars rover (or anything space related) to someone and they say "Yeah but what's the point you could be feeding the poor or sorting out the environment with that money instead"
...yeah, you could. Or you could be doing that with money from the army instead. Or football. Or any other popular sport. Or yaknow, you could personally be doing that rather than spending all your salary on crappy clothes you're going to throw away in a few months anyway.
And that's not even mentioning the jobs it creates, the people it inspires to go into science + tech fields, the scientific advances it makes for humanity, etc. If you're that against scientific advancement then please, by all means surrender your possessions and just go live in a cave somewhere.6 -
I've caught the efficiency bug.
I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)
I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"
My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.
But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.
Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.
So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.
After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.
The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.
Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.
Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.
From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.
So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).
They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.
In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.
I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.
I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.5 -
2017 was a dream come true literally.Long story short, I quit my job of 6 years as a PE teacher, studied Android Development through Udacity's Nanodegree program, moved my wife and kids out of our house (we were renting), moved in with my in-laws, Trusted God, learned how to build Android apps, applied at numerous tech companies, got offered 2 jobs, got hired as an Android Developer in Tennessee in December making almost more than twice I did as a teacher. My first day of work is January 8th. What a year it's been!6
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Overheating The Javascript Ecosystem
Paranoid thought: You know, in the course of every day, being the corrupt piece of shit that I am, whenever I see a scandal or what looks like shenanigans-in-the-making, I ask myself
"Wisecrack, is this a fucking scam or con of some sort?"
I was recently asking myself this about javascript.
Not the language per se, but the ecosystem.
I noticed how there are a thousand CLIs for simple shit. Another four thousand for page long libraries, for simpleton level shit (because prototypes are designed after satans own aborted love-child of object models). I noticed another eight thousand guys imitating steve jobs, talking at conferences and 'change the world' high-on-huffing-my-own-shit TEDX talks like rubyists that don't realize the world has moved on, all to hawk books and inflate CVs for cushy positions at major tech firms and the herd of dicksuckers following the next fad off a cliff like lemmings. And another eight thousand 'tech journalists' pushing them off the cliff while begging for outrage and hype dollars and slowly circling like vultures above the drain that is the ad-based economy.
And I thought to myself.
"Wisecrack, who benefits from all this noisy self-indulgent horseshit? Where is all the money coming from for all these books, conferences, meetings, publications, media, bread, and circuses?"
"I don't know wisecrack. But if I were the CEO of a big company, threatened by the prospect of a universal language, or universal platform, like flash, but one I couldn't kill like flash, I would try to do the most corrupt thing I could think of."
"Whats that wisecrack?"
"I would try to 'overheat' the ecosystem by selectively hiring people from that ecosystem, pumping money into a boatload of similar products, all in the hopes of provoking the equivalent of an immune overreaction, imitators all flooding the ecosystem with the same shit in different packages, self promoting sycophants, aggrenadizing social media idiots, tools sold as tools, hyped as 'the next coming of steve jobs', overcooked shit that focuses on ceremony over functionality, ritual over productivity, documentation over innovation like some sort of amazonion infinite nesting doll hellscape of documents linking to documents linking to documents, each one a new circle of dantes inferno, where the definition of anything links to another document that says "see also xyz", and I would convince them that they had done it to themselves."
And then I would push typescript as their lord, savior, and master. "
"How do you know all this wisecrack?"
"Because I am a piece of shit, and, this is what I would do in any executive's shoes."10 -
So I've been applying to jobs. I, purposely, have been putting down that I am female (since they all harp on diversity, I'd like to see if they even bother reaching out to me. Also anything to get my resume past the bots).
Spoiler alert - getting similar ratios to male counterparts, 100+ applications sent, maybe 4 phone interviews. No offers yet. Still made to do code challenges.
Well, I just found out where all that diversity hiring went to. Buddy of mine who works at a mid tier company said that they have a special program that onboards women into tech.
Specifically, women who have literally zero background in computers.
Teachers, social workers, etc. They get a week or so of some coding bootcamp and then get full time positions over more skilled applicants.
This infuriates me. I literally would be in a better situation to be hired had I not have had any technical background, taken this particular bootcamp and finally net the elusive entry level position I need.
And guess what? That move has antagonized the existing male employees who see that they have zero interest and zero competency instead of having an integrated workplace.
10/10 for incredible bullshit.6 -
Theory: zoomers are actually just boomers who come generationally full circle
Source: I work with clowns in their early 20s and the fact that they are young and were essentially born into tech and had it their whole lives literally has not contributed anything towards their understanding of basic tech concepts - if anything, it has made them more clueless.
The good news: now I know whatever is invented in the future, whatever tech comes to be, the next generation of clowns will always have many jobs to offer me.12 -
"Lawsuit Alleges Facebook Favors H-1B Visa Workers and Other Temporary Visa Holders over U.S. Workers"
And no one was surprised. Not that this will make a dent in the labor arbitrage problem, but at least it's evidentiary confirmation it's happening. If it goes through it'll likely mean a slough of follow-on lawsuits for the thousands of companies doing the exact same thing, and a cottage industry to find new creative ways to continue being predatory assholes.
https://justice.gov/opa/pr/...18 -
Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).
Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.
At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).
My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.
Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).
All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.
But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.
After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.
That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.
Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.
Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.3 -
Advice to new coders? I got multiple, unrelated to each other.
1. Start with the FUCKING BASICS !! Invest some time with fundamentals, don't just directly jump on frameworks like React or Angular.
2. You and everyone else are always going to blame your technical skills if you're unable to land a job. But you have to realize that is not always the case. Your attitude and energy towards the interviewer plays a vital role too.
3. You're gonna have to take a hit to your salary expectations starting out. It's just the way this industry works.
4. Think of yourselves as a freelancer working for companies. Those who call themselves Employees get stagnant and dependent on their company pretty fast.
5. Your objective is either to learn or earn. If there is both, amazing job. If there is either it's good enough. If there is none, time to jump ship !!
6. HR is there to protect the company from you not the other way around. Be better at spotting crocodile tears.
7. Try to find a WFH job over a WFO job. If you have an urgency, then either works but keep applying to WFH jobs. It's the best thing.
8. Focus on what you're building instead of what you're building it with. Devs have a tendency to fight over what tech stack they should use instead of focussing on the larger picture.
9. You're gonna get overwhelmed at some point when you're gonna get terms thrown at you like XML, JSON, API, Figma, Git, SOAP, REST. Don't worry though you'll get there.
10. You should know how to google your solutions, like really. This is like 60% of the job.19 -
Hired a designer below me.. guy never wrote a full back nor frontend... Used npm shit for all his solutions and worked his way above me just by kissing ass and polluting the codebase in such a way 70% would be open source shitty plugins for shit he could not do by himself code wise...
At some point he assigned some of his tasks to me and I couldn't work with his patchy framework that was non existent within the codebase I worked on ...
At some point between npm installed tantrums I got pulled up to HR because my code quality dropped... And it was this fucktart that accused me of this saying I could not do modern development...
In the end I either had to butkiss after his butts or just quit, so I did the latter... I told him and HR I owned alot more code quality than this asshat but just not his way of working and therefor it was more an issue of code equality I was never aware of ...
A month after that the company got overtaken by some silicon valley bullshit company buying up competition, and he is still working within that shithole dealing with 90's tech...
Was the best thing that happened to me, after that I grew alot in skillset and such by investments from other jobs and projects... If I would still work there today I would consider myself a caveman6 -
I am a woman with multiple years of experience in the coding industry , while in most of my jobs I have been the only woman in the team and I do agree there is a need for more women in the coding industry , however I really do believe workshops like shecodes are an absolute scam , the inclusiveness to bridge the gender divide in tech needs to start from the employers , all resources to learn to code are completely gender neutral and unbiased. I also find it quite hypocritical that shecodes was founded by a man and is taught by a man . Can anyone please shine some different opinions about this or does anyone else believe a similar thing ?32
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My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.
Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.
Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.
- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.
- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)
- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.
- Feedback is consistently ignored.
- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.
- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.
- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.
This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:
- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.
- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.
- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)1 -
Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.
They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.
Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.
So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.
Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.
Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.
However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".
Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.
In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.
Frankly, fuck those guys.
Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.
Let's see how this whole thing goes.1 -
This brings joy
https://reddit.com/r/technology/...
Bypass paywall:
A series of scandals and missteps has damaged Facebook's reputation so much that the company is being forced to pay ever larger compensation to hire and retain workers, according to industry recruiters, former employees, and data reviewed by Insider.
The company has always competed aggressively for talent, and the tech job market in general is on fire. But a deteriorating public image means the social-media giant now has to outbid other major tech companies, such as Google.
"One thing Facebook can still do is pay a lot more," said Jose Guardado, an experienced tech recruiter and the founder of Build Talent. "They can easily throw more compensation at people they currently have, and cover any brand tax and pay a little more to get people to come on."
Silicon Valley companies thrive or whither based on their ability to recruit the smartest employees. Without a steady influx of engineers and other technical experts, new products and important updates take longer to release, and rivals can quickly get ahead. Then there's the financial cost: In 2022, Facebook projected, expenses could jump as high as $97 billion from $70 billion this year, in large part because of "investments in technical and product talent." A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Other companies, and even whole industries, have had to increase compensation to overcome hiring and retention problems caused by scandal and shifting public perceptions, said Alan Johnson, a managing director at the compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates. "If you're an oil company, if you make cigarettes, if you're in cattle or Wells Fargo, sure," he said.
How well this is working for Facebook is debatable as the company has more than 4,300 open jobs and has seen decreasing rates of acceptance on job offers, according to internal documents reported by Protocol. It's also seen dozens of high-level executives leave this year, and recruiters say employees are now more open to considering jobs elsewhere. Facebook used to be a place that people rarely left, given its reach, pay, and perks.
A former Oculus engineer who left last year said Facebook could now be seen as a "black mark" on someone's career. A hardware engineer who exited in 2020 shared similar sentiments: They said they quit because of concerns about misinformation on the platform and the effect of that on children. Another employee said their department was dissolved in late 2019 by Facebook and, although the company offered another position that paid more, they left last year anyway for a different industry. The workers, and many other people who spoke with Insider for this story, asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic.
For those who stick around and people who take new jobs at Facebook, base pay and stock grants have gone up a "sizable" amount in the past year, said Zuhayeer Musa, cofounder of Levels.fyi, a platform that collects pay data based on verified offers and compensation disclosures.
During the second quarter of 2021, the median compensation for an upper-mid-level engineer, an E5, was $400,000, up from $380,000 a year earlier. For an E4, the median pay jumped to $276,000 from $256,000 in the same period. For both groups, the increases were double the gains between 2018 and 2019, Levels.fyi data showed.
Musa, who's firm also offers pay-negotiation coaching, said previously that the total compensation ceiling for an E5 engineer at Facebook was $450,000. "We recently had a client get up to $510,000 for E5," he added.
Equity awards at the company are getting more generous, too. At the group-director and VP levels, Facebook staff are getting $3 million to $6 million in restricted stock units each year, another tech recruiter said. Directors and managers are getting on average $1 million a year. In engineering, a high-level engineer is getting $600,000 in stock and a $75,000 bonus, while even an entry-level engineer is getting $50,000 to $100,000 in stock and a $20,000 to $50,000 bonus, Levels.fyi data indicated.
Even compared to Google, Facebook's stock awards are generous and increasing, Levels.fyi data shows. While base pay is about the same, Facebook offers more in stock grants, significantly increasing total compensation. At Google, entry-level equity awards range from $20,000 to $38,000, while Facebook grants are worth $40,000 to $60,000. Sign-on bonuses at Facebook are often about $50,000, while Google gives about $20,000, according to the data.
"It's not normal, but it's consistent with the craziness that's happening in the market right now," said Aalap Shah, a managing director focused on the tech industry at the consulting firm Pearl Meyer.10 -
getting into dev work is such a shit show. thinking back 2 years ago I decided to switch career so went on bootcamp and starting looking for junior role.
as you know full well all jobs requires 5+ years when the tech has only been around 3. Anyhow, got a junior full stack role at a start up, all good , great pace (cos of startup) and wide range of tech to learn. one minute i am doing great , next day I am not good enough and got let go (WTF?) ,also whats up with some backend devs Jesus why wouldnt you let me put a " on aws because you are the backend dev what the fuck is wrong with your ego man?
fun story number 2: after being let go of my first role due to being good dev for one day and bad the next. I went for an intern role for really low paid. well fair enough I am here to learn right guys? nope, i have experience with the main tech from my last job and I managed the take home test and despite I told them i have more experience front end they criticise my backend code , despite i was able to tell them what I have done not so well and I have found a better solution AT THE INTERVIEW. still not good enough. I was really doubting myself If I am that shit at being an fucking intern with a stack I have experience in.
fast forward another job interview I landed my current role with fantastic culture, good line manager & tech lead. nice colleague and I am being treated like a prince with the work i put in. Why is this industry so fucked?
so, folks out there trying to get into this game. dont lose hope, you can do it , you just need to get fucked a bit to know whats good out there!5 -
I finally fucking made it!
Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D
I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.
For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.
Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.
So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.
Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.
A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.
I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!
So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!
So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there! -
Consumers ruined software development and we the developers have little to no chance of changing it.
Recently I read a great blog post by someone called Nikita, the blog post talks mostly about the lack of efficiency and waste of resources modern software has and even tho I agree with the sentiment I don't agree with some things.
First of all the way the author compares software engineering to mechanical, civil and aeroespacial engineering is flawed, why? Because they all directly impact the average consumer more than laggy chrome.
Do you know why car engines have reached such high efficiency numbers? Gas prices keep increasing, why is building a skyscraper better, cheaper and safer than before? Consumers want cheaper and safer buildings, why are airplanes so carefully engineered? Consumers want safer and cheaper flights.
Wanna know what the average software consumer wants? Shiny "beautiful" software that is either dirt ship or free and does what it needs to. The difference between our end product is that average consumers DON'T see the end product, they just experience the light, intuitive experience we are demanded to provide! It's not for nothing that the stereotype of "wizard" still exists, for the average folk magic and electricity makes their devices function and we are to blame, we did our jobs TOO well!
Don't get me wrong, I am about to become a software engineer and efficient, elegant, quality code is the second best eye candy next to a 21yo LA model. BUT dirt cheap software doesn't mean quality software, software developed in a hurry is not quality software and that's what douchebag bosses and consumers demand! They want it cheap, they want it shiny and they wanted it yesterday!
Just look at where the actual effort is going, devs focus on delivering half baked solutions on time just to "harden" the software later and I don't blame them, complete, quality, efficient solutions take time and effort and that costs money, money companies and users don't want to invest most of the time. Who gets to worry about efficiency and ms speed gains? Big ass companies where every second counts because it directly affects their bottom line.
People don't give a shit and it sucks but they forfeit the right to complain the moment they start screaming about the buttons not glaring when hovered upon rather than the 60sec bootup, actual efforts to make quality software are made on people's own time or time critical projects.
You put up a nice example with the python tweet snippet, you have a python script that runs everyday and takes 1.6 seconds, what if I told you I'll pay you 50 cents for you to translate it to Rust and it takes you 6 hours or better what if you do it for free?
The answer to that sort of questions is given every day when "enganeers" across the lake claim to make you an Uber app for 100 bucks in 5 days, people just don't care, we do and that's why developers often end up with the fancy stuff and creating startups from the ground up, they put in the effort and they are compensated for it.
I agree things will get better, things are getting better and we are working to make programs and systems more efficient (specially in the Open Source community or high end Tech companies) but unless consumers and university teachers change their mindset not much can be done about the regular folk.
For now my mother doesn't care if her Android phone takes too much time to turn on as long as it runs Candy Crush just fine. On my part I'll keep programming the best I can, optimizing the best I can for my own projects and others because that's just how I roll, but if I'm hungry I won't hesitate to give you the performance you pay for.
Source:
http://tonsky.me/blog/...13 -
so I had coworker that I hardly knew that started hitting me up on our Lync chat system in a sort of creepy way. at first he would just ask my advice on things a lot but he seemed like he was always looking for an excuse to come by cube. then I completely changed divisions within my company. there was no reason why this guy should still be hitting me up with tech stuff but he would still every couple weeks out of know where wanna engage. he'd try to find some technical reason but nothing we did now even remotely related. so one day I kind of said to him why are u coming to me with these issues still. he said "u haven't figured it out yet. u don't know this but we know each from a long time ago". so now I'm like going through all my early schooling, college, other jobs with him. he says no to all of that. he finally says it's in the spirit level. like from another life and he's surprised I have noticed it. 😮😮😮4
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The story of how I got my dream job.
I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.
--A few weeks pass--
It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!
I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)
The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.
--D-day--
I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!
Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.
We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.
I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.
--Two days later--
I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.
--A few months later--
I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.
I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).3 -
In tech: too freaking many. A few days (I fell asleep at my desk for power naps).
Ever: 72 hours. I had 6 jobs with only enough of a break to drive to the next. Used lunch breaks to nap. -
No, you cannot ask us to move our tech meeting elsewhere because we're being "loud", for the same reason we don't ask you to leave the area because your non-work-related chatter is distracting us from our said meeting. It's the only video conferencing system in the joint, and it's not our fault you and your people sit nearby. How dare you go past us and complain to our boss as if we're nothing to you - just because you were recently promoted, don't act like you were never in the trenches with the rest of us. It's like you have no respect for us now that you've gone a step up the ladder. The next time you or your team members try to fuck with us like that over petty shit like this, we're going to bring the hammer down on your asses and burn every last vestige of self-worth you have by making sure you never get a moment's peace. It's bad enough you and your team suck each other off during our bi-weekly department meeting by patting yourselves on the back for doing what's supposed to be your fucking jobs - don't you dare try to drag us down to make yourselves look like fucking saints. That is where I cross the goddamn line.
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Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?
The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.
The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.
The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!
Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.1 -
Hey guys it's not a rant, but i feel this place might help...
I am a 20 yr old, second year guy ...have got some experience in core Java and after that, i have been doing android for 8months... Yeah , i coded some basic apps got my hands dirty on firebase, sql libraries and some connectivity...
Even got landed in an internship.
Today i feel myself to be an intermediate android dev , nd i know their are many things that can be learnt in android that i don't know..
But what after that?development as a carrier interests me, but i fear for a job security ... I could learn more of Android,maybe learn ios after that but their are always articles coming out that react is future, webapps will replace android and stuff like that...
I Have also heard stuff like companies today want to squeeze more out of their techs, so they want less and complete developers having experience in both web and mobile app designing and other stuff like that
Are you freakin kidding me? Android and ios alone are like drinking Pacific and indian ocean and to add web developing, its like drinking out every drop of ocean in the world.
I guess their are guys which exist with knowledge of all three, maybe I can cover them all too(someday) but that would take my whole clg life of 4 years..(I guess)
And no ,I don't have problems with that too.. I actually like developing but again i hear big words like cloud computing, AR,VR AI, data sciences, automation, graphics designing, game dev, and many more...
Basically i hear too much and i fear too much 😅 and i don't think closing my ears would be a good choice...
So, which ocean of carrier should i aim to go for?nd are my fears real? Do companies really prefer some web guy designing Amazon like apps over android-only guys like me?is automation nd templates really gonna take all we, developers jobs?should i look into ai/data sciences?
Well , i am a simple guy, who got his first pc at 17 so naturally, i am fascinated even by the working of a calculator app and anything relates to tech so am open to pursue my interests in any fields23 -
God I miss Stack Overflow Jobs. Put tech you want to work with, put tech you don't want to work with, get relevant results. Now? Search "frontend" in LinkedIn and you're getting "sugar production quality assurance". Fuck that noise.4
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All those website builders, tools and frameworks were designed to make tech illiterate people be able to create websites, so how fucking dense are all those people that publish jobs to create a website with a literal click & drag tool or website builder?!
Example: http://grapesjs.com/ is very popular amongst those searching - though this seems would have to be published manually after creating it, so I would understand help with publishing, but theres websites also mentioned like squarespace, which has seriously no excuses besides being that lazy and forcing somebody to chew it for you
I see maintainability of the website later on of course as a handy argument for them to use those kinda tools and websites, but what do you need somebody to do it for you from the start, if you plan on later then manage it the same way?4 -
Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem
Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.
Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.
This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.
I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.
Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?14 -
So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.
Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.
So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.
So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.
So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(4 -
In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)
The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.
Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).
Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:
- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.
Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?4 -
I recently joined to a company. I am recent grad. I was getting KT by my Manager during team on-boarding.
The manager showed me the tech stack they use for the application. It had the given logo.
My manager read it like this - "We also use Adobe here ....."
I muted my mic and laughed so hard, and now I am searching for jobs at some better company- where managers don't confuse AngularJS logo with Adobe.7 -
This post is about Americans.
Or to be more precise and put it this way, this post is about Indian Americans.
They made their way through everything and somehow landed in the US to shit on streets.
They feel themselves to be entitled to another level.
I work with multiple colleagues who are based out of the US. ALL of the American people are very friendly and accommodating since we have a timezone challenge.
BUT these Indian Americans think they run the world. Slight inconvenience and they create an issue out of it.
My entire non-tech team and I am struggling to align to these fucks and none of them are supportive. While scheduling a meeting
fuck it.. I am so done that it's not even worth ranting about it.
On the other news, I am in the job market, actively hunting jobs while they keep rescheduling meetings. I have a couple of connects with recruiters lined up.
I am expecting few interviews and maybe in some time, I might be able to close a decent offer. Fingers crossed 🤞🏻23 -
Applying for web dev jobs in a state I'm about to move to...yeah you thought tech interviews were hard! Try impressing someone over the phone and that's your only chance :/2
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i have been applying for jobs recently, and after getting some HR interviews that evolved to tech interviews, i just cancelled them all...
Every company seems to have hacker rank, and online coding sessions as tech interview stages which really stress me out. Its like everyone thinks they are google and its ok to make people go theough this pressure to join them.
I dont mind being given 10 days to implement a complex project, after which im either in or not. But 20 mins to solve something online while either the interviewer is watching me or the automated test is waiting to filter my application out... i get anxiety just thinking about that..
so im gonna stick with my current job for now, and focus on building my own business slowly on the side. I really felt anxious because of those tech interviews these past weeks and i feel so much better after cancelling all of them.
if a decent company comes along with the project approach, id love to apply, but otherwise ill just stick to where I am for now. dont know if im being immature or irresponsible career wise or if this decision will blow up in my face
stay tune to find out !15 -
Out of nowhere, someone called me from a jobs board and said that they really liked my profile and that they sent me a job invite and they were in a hurry to get someone new - with my profile exactly. I haven't logged into that jobs board for a couple months, but upon checking, I see that their company sent me an invite and that the working environment was great. Remote first, no daily standups, competitive pay, and the site was legit. So okay, I accept their invite.
The next day I got an email back saying unfortunately they would close the application because they were only hiring people with a couple years experience in some tech... which was listed in my profile in the jobs board.
I'm like lolwut you invited me, don't you turn that around like I'm begging you for a job.4 -
After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.
During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.
After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.
After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...3 -
It's been a long time since I've felt the need to rant about anything here. This is the only appropriate place other than Reddit I can think for for now.
Why the ever-living FUCK does every 'entry-level' tech job, even fucking DESKTOP SUPPORT, require more experience than the fucking DEVELOPER AND ENGINEER OF THE INITIAL SYSTEM COULD POSSIBLY HAVE?! I'm a fucking high school kid trying to find a decent job that doesn't involve sales bullshit, because if I go into sales I'll want to KMS. Put me in a back room fixing shit, monitoring shit, better yet scripting shit or something like that and I'll be FUCKING PEACHY. I will do wonders. But no, these people must think that my resume (WHICH IS 3-YEARS STACKED WITH INTERNSHIPS ***IN TECHNOLOGY***) is bullshit. WOW.
Fuck this. I'm sick of looking for these shitty jobs that'll make me want to jump off of a bridge into a cliff which I'll then voluntarily fall off of into shark infested piranha water. Can't there just be a simple "Hey, we need a guy who can fix tech, maybe help people within the company with their computer issues, you look nice" kind of job? I haven't had fucking TIME to get any kind of certifications yet. I just got into fucking college, FOR BUSINESS IT NONETHELESS. DOES THAT PROVE I'M AT LEAST FUCKING INTERESTED IN WHAT I SAY I AM FUCKERS?!7 -
1) Never be afraid to ask questions.
There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.
Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.
That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.
2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.
3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.
4) Find hobbies outside of tech!
5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.
6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.
7) Negotiate salary. Always.
8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.
9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.
10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path. -
What happens when you get bored of working as a software engineer?
3 years after starting my career as a dev, I'm already in the middle of a crisis, struggling to find motivations to stay in tech aside of the good salaries.
Don't get me wrong, I like solving problems trough code, designing complex solutions, I love software architecture. My problem goes around the jobs themselves, doing engineering for a living is just so boring, makes me feel so empty inside.
It is not the same doing something for someone else company than doing it for yours, I usually feel like I could be happier raising my own startup, immediately after that, I remember that I must stick around working for someone else if I want to put food on my table.
I have been thinking about quit and get a normal job, but money is a huge deal, i'm used to a lifestyle that is hard to backup without a salary like the ones of software engineers.
In short, I feel empty and hopeless. What are your toughs, are you going trough something similar?4 -
A couple nights ago I was thinking how can absurdly incompetent programmers exist out there (based on stories I read here), and I think I know the reason. They just don't like doing it, to them it's just a job. They get into the building, work and go home. They learned programming in college but probably never wrote anything for fun. Because of that they don't dedicate themselves to learning new tech, don't try to improve and be good at the job, all they want is the money to be able to survive and that's it. Since they don't have the curiosity to drive them forward, they just don't and keep writing shitty code.
I'm not saying you need to have a bazillion side-projects, work an 8h shift and then go home and spend 3h on personal projects, or that you have to breathe programming and tech. All I'm saying is that, to be competent and good (this probably applies to most jobs) you have to like what you do and have at least some interest in it.7 -
Trying to re-type a massive essay I lost because the app refreshed for some reason. I'll try to keep it short (spoiler: I lied).
Recently, I had a conversation with a couple of non-tech people about AI and the fear of computers making humans obsolete. I have some strong (borderline ranty) opinions about this, and thought I'd post here to see what reaction is get.
This is not a "machines will destroy us" post, it's more about the very legitimate great of losing jobs.
- AI is a tool. It's main use would to be help optimise the more complex routine tasks and free up people's time to be more creative in their jobs. Basically, it's the next step of automation.
- Human intuition can never be replaced. Sometimes, things just seem a bit off. Sure, an AI would avoid ever getting in that situation, but only if it had learnt it in the past. A human will always have to be at the helm of any such system.
- Achieving true intelligence and sentience is like trying to travel at the speed of light. The closer you get, the more challenges you face.
- Getting hyped by sensationalist news that claims the end is nigh because two computers optimised the language they used to communicate when trying to reach a goal is stupid. All this shows is that the tech is working as expected and the systems can optimise on the fly. To me, this was a pretty awesome moment.
Now, I'm not saying dystopia is impossible, neither am I saying that it is inevitable. Just like any tool presented to us, if we use it responsibly, we can make life and society a lot better.5 -
Recruiter answered me
Rejected
They decided to choose another candidate because... [the reason will be announced at the end of this rant]
...
I was working on my project
I am learning new tech
And shitting 10 times a day from these jobs and recruiters, the usual me
HE the recruiter contacted me a few days ago
HE offered me nodejs position
I AM the one who was HONEST and told him i dont work in nodejs i work in java
HE then continued the conversation
HE offered me a java spring boot backend position
I AM the one who read the requirements
🔥🔥🔥
REQUIREMENTS: 3+ years of experience
🔥🔥🔥
I AM the one who told him i have 5+ years of java spring boot and 8+ years of java experience.
HE said great I'll contact the clients and let them know
TWO WEEKS LATER OF SILENCE
"unfortunately they chose some other candidate because they need someone with 10+ years of experience for this role"
---
Are you fuc
Fucking
Ki
Wasting my Fucking time?
You decide to slam into my peace and offer me a job position with ALL THE REQUIREMENTS I FULFILL, JUST TO RANDOMLY REJECT ME FOR AN INVALID FUCKING REASON?
If i said i had 10 years of experience
They would reject me because i dont have 15+
If i had 15+ years of experience i would get rejected for not having 30+
If i had 30+ years of experience fucking your whole family and bombing them to dust like in palestine till their bones die and worms eat your fucking down syndrome brains, they would say i need 160+ year of experience
Fyck you
Truly.
From the bottom
Of my fucking balls and cum
From my fucking dick
From my fucking shit and asshole
From my vomit
I wish you death.
I wish karma to kill all of their family members (the clients who rejected me) slowly one by one. Final destination accidents type of deaths. Truly i hope you and wish you the worst.
[Here the intro continues]
I will repeat again:
- REQUIREMENTS: 3+ years
I have:
- 8+ years
They rejected me because:
- I don't have 10+ years
I told all of this to recruiter now. Politely but because im losing my patience i was very very passive aggressive with my response. In the context of
1. I TRULY dont give a fuck for your rejection (which is the truth)
2. Your clients are low IQ dumb as fucking retards because they choose people based on the YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
3. Explained him: IF YOU ARE SO FUCKING STUPID TO UNDERSTAND THIS COMMON SENSE, I'LL EXPLAIN IT TO YOU: CHOOSING DEVS SOLELY BASED ON THE YEARS OF EXPERIENCE MEANS YOU ARE FUCKING STUPUD. There are devs with 2 years of experience who are WAY smarter better efficient and more knowledgeable than some devs with 5-7 OR MORE years of experience. Thats because some people progress better faster or more efficiently in 2 years while others need 5 years. Etc. You're fucking stupid as shit for this sole decision
4. Indirectly let him know that i am not pissed off for rejection. I am pissed off for my time being FUCKING WASTED.
5. Also pointed him out: your job description says its looking for a dev with 3+ years of experience i told you i have 8+ and you reject me because I don't have 10+. Are you Fucking stupid? Fuck you. Truly fuck off. Get the fuck off my dick and eat the shits i shit straight out of my asshole. I'll shit in your fucking mouth you fucking bitch. Your wife also probably fucks some other guys while you're at work and she doesnt respect you or love you. In the matter of fact give me your fucking wife/gf and I'll Fucking fuck her to death
To the clients once again: Truly i hope Hamas fires a missile at israel but misses and hits your fucking home and your whole fucking family blows up to atoms and particles. Completely erased from existence.14 -
Hey! This is a followup to my last story.
TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.
First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.
Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.
One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.
The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.
I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.
Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.
Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...
Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.
One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.
I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...2 -
Tech management and leadership are the most toxic and cancerous folks of any organisation.
In all my past experience, I have encountered nut jobs.
If it were just me, then entire product or design org won't be suffering. What helps me confirm this hypothesis is every engineer who work for such retards is suffering and fighting for their existence.
We have monkey business going on with our CTO and his ass licking engineering head. -
I was curious about the geographical distribution of Top Tech Jobs (i.e. how many FAANG jobs are in Europe, where they are mostly focused, etc)... So I came up with a draft (prototype) of the Tech Jobs Radar:
https://jobs-radar.com/
I'm sharing it here just in case someone else is curious about analyzing such data7 -
🌎🌏🌍
The world needs to know the truth
👁️👁️👁️
🔥🔥🔥
Have to make a separate rant for this cause it deserves to be outlined and for the whole world to know the truth about my junkhole trash country Serbia (europe)
🔥🔥🔥
$1000 usd is 6 figures in my currency.
In economy schools they said
If you earn $1200/month usd in serbia you are in TOP 3% of highest earners
If you earn $2500/month usd in serbia you are in TOP 1% of highest earners
This must mean that i am now in TOP what 10% of highest earners in my country?
A bearly over 10,000$ usd a year, is TOP 10% of earners in Serbia. And i have to work 2 or perhaps 3 dev jobs as 1 person to be fortunate enough to be in those TOP 10%
And every day i keep seeing multiple 5 figure and 6 figure USD expensive cars, lambos ferraris brabus g wagons audi rs7 mercedes s class (2023) porsches, and when I say porsches people here LOVE porsches so much more than any other fucking car that porsche has became the most common car here that people drive! A used Porsche is at minimum 80,000$ usd!!! Thats 8+ years working my job, assuming im not spending 1 single cent, just to buy a used porsche, while hundreds of people drive them daily!!!!
My neighbor sold his mercedes s class and bought a GLS AMG 2023 brand new for over 225,000 fucking $!!!! Thats over 225 YEARS OF MY LIFE working this matrix job without spending a cent to buy that car. This is fucking RIDICULOUS
The world HAS to know the truth about corruption and slavery happening in Serbia. I will be the voice of truth that shall not be silenced. Anyone claiming otherwise is working for one of these corrupted shitfucks.
Incredible how corruption and unfairness sets you free out of the box than playing the matrix game. Unreal to me. I knew it was bad but i never knew it was THIS bad
If I was earning a normal wage salary i wouldnt be complaining. A normal wage salary for me is at minimum 100k a year. Or if i have to be generous then high end of 5 figures. Thats the only way to afford to buy one of these cars. Because how else do these fucking people buy them? Obviously not by working a matrix job
If you think i have unrealistic expectations then you need to unfuck your mind and realize that we are working a VERY difficult fucking job in this tech industry, SO difficult that a 100k should be the fucking minimum. Out of sheer respect towards this EXTREME HARD WORK, we DESERVE to get a high compensation in return -- not a fucking survival slavery wage salary bullshit! The moment you realize that you're underpaid if you earn less than 100k as a software engineer, is the moment you have unfucked your mind and now you have found the truth!18 -
I'm in a team of 3 in a small to medium sized company (over 50 engineers). We all work as full stack engineers.. but I think the definition of full stack here is getting super bloated. Let me give u an example. My team hold a few production apps, and we just launched a new one. The whole team (the 3 of us) are fully responsible on it from planning, design, database model, api, frontend (a react page spa), an extra client. Ok, so all this seems normal to a full stack dev.
Now, we also handle provisioning infra in aws using terraform, doing deployments, building a CI/CD pipeline using jenkins, monitoring, writing tests, building an analytics dashboard.
Recently our tech writer also left, so now we are also handling writing feature releases.
Few days ago, we also had a meeting where they sort of discussed that the maintenance of the engineering shared services, e.g. jenkins servers, (and about 2-3 other services) will now be split between teams in a shared board, previously this was handled only be team leads, but now they want to delegate it down.
And ofcourse not to mention supporting the app itself and updating bug tickets with findings.
I feel like my daily responsiblities are becoming the job responsibilities of at least 3 jobs.
Is this what full stack engineering looks like in your company? Do u handle everything from app design, building, cloud, ops, analytics etc..7 -
I’m so frustrated and I don’t know whether to blame my 2015 Mac, Audacity, both, or my present inability to be able to afford a new Mac because EVERYTHING/EVERYONE IN MY HOUSE IS BREAKING, NEEDS THERAPY OR BRACES, AND LIFE IS NOTHING BUT EXPENSES!
I had just finished tediously transferring, restoring, and trying to export tracks from some old cassette I had of a jazz concert I played in years ago. Audacity froze because my Mac is now apparently underpowered at 8GB of RAM. But Audacity autosaves and on restart usually can restore you back to where you left off. So I tried to force quit it.
I couldn’t even force quit the stupid app and had to totally restart. I think that ruined whatever autosave I had because it could only restore half of the work I’d done. Another freeze finished off the Audacity project, making it TOTALLY BLANK AND WORTHLESS. I just deleted the whole damned thing and will have to start over. I WAS MINUTES AWAY FROM BEING DONE AFTER HOURS OF WORK!!!!!
Now the Mac wants to update to a supplemental release. With each release this expensive boat anchor gets slower and slower.
I just wanna throw all tech out the window. Every damned thing is planned obsolescence in 2 years and made in China anymore and I HATE giving that totalitarian regime any more of my money. Apple is complicit. ALL computer companies are. They could just bring the jobs back here and walk the walk, but they’re all talk.3 -
Family support (2 phases)
When I was younger my mom bought me a 486 from the cow spotted company.
I didn't do much development as being kinda isolated in computer land didn't really make that easy to understand / do, but I messed with everything else.
At that time (somewhere near the invention of the wheel) just exposure to computers really gave a huge leg up on getting into tech.
Moving on until MUCH later in life I was working in tech, often with developers, but not in development. That company was acquired by an overseas company, the head of the new company appeared on the white house lawn and Trump said this would be great for America jobs ... so of course they laid a huge number of people off just before the acquisition.
I was kinda done with that corner of the industry, no matter how good you are / who you work for it was an area that just sort of decays in in importance. I'd go visit the developers and they'd share their excess free lunches they got each day.
Then I'd go back to my corner of the offices and read an email about how the quarterly crappy ass pizza party (that maybe cost a couple hundred busks) was called off due to "cost cutting".
By this time I've got a family and kids, and I decide to take a chance at starting a new career and they were kind enough to go along with my "sleep, care for family, school, care for family, code, sleep" lifestyle for a number of months.
And it worked out. -
Two (2) senior developers and one (1) senior tester left our team and I am left with two (2) Java legacy applications that are hard to maintain. Here is a list of things I hate about these old webapps (let's call them app A and B):
1. App A depends on 80% web services. If one web service for a product or warehouse goes down, work flow is impeded while prod support team checks with the core services team for repair
2. App B is a maven project with multiple modules dependent on libraries that are dependent on company's internal libraries. So if we want to upgrade to OpenJdk 9 and up, the project will definitely produce a lot of errors due to deprecated/unsupported codes
3. App A is dependent on Tibco and I have no experience on that
4. App B's continuous integration build tool is Jenkins and the jobs that build it has a shell script that wasn't updated during the tech upgrade enhancement. The previous developer who did the knowledge transfer to me didn't tell me about this (it should be considered a defect on her part but she already resigned)
5. App A when loaded in eclipse IDE is a pain to work with since it is only allowed to build a war file using ant. I have to lookup in quick search instead of calling shortcuts (call hierarchy) because the project wasn't compiled via eclipse.
6. It's impossible to debug app A because of #5
7. Both applications have high priority and complex enhancements and I have no other teammates to help me
8. You never know what else can go wrong anytime1 -
Halt and Catch Fire is having another great season. Lived those days and it is so true. CompuServe, Compaq, Commodore, 5 1/4", Tandy 1000, Byte Mag, Atari, The Well... The tech you see is really 1985ish. Attention to detail is appreciated by long time technologists.
H&CF is about building a tech business and much applies to today's startups. That two brilliant tech women are leading the charge adds to it. All the characters are great Cameron, Gordon, Donna, the devs at Mutiny and Joe channeling Jobs (in my opinion) is spot on.
Any H&CF fans have an opinion?4 -
I can't be arsed with jobs that mention tensorflow alone as their main tech.
If your company is willing to use tf and not keras, then y'all probably didn't understand what you're dealing with to begin with.
*Red flags and sirens in distance for bad designs* -
Whenever I feel down, I watch documentaries and movies related to tech. They bring back the motivation and spirit in me. :)undefined mark zuckerberg developer motivation linus torvalds movies dev steve jobs tech bill gates success2
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I look forward to the day that most jobs atleast in the tech industry are remote jobs so that you don't have to spend half the day in traveling and other unnecessary bullshit related to workplaces.1
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Anyone else here suffering under a tech lead who instead functions as a business analyst and ignores their dev process in favor of stakeholder demands?
Case in point: our tech lead actually said in our latest retrospective (yes, we're running on Agile) that we should align our schedule to business. So wtf are we even doing Agile sprints for effs sake (this we did not say for fear of losing our jobs) -
Does anyone think tech recruiters are failed used car salesmen?
Bad experiences this week
One reached out to me on clearance jobs to apply for a job that I applied for, interviewed and was turned down for because of course they do not know Javascript is not Java and they were looking for a Java developer. She didn’t remember and then never responded. Out of spite I replied all to the last email that company sent me but of course no one responded.
This person who says that she is a recruiter for GOOGLE does not know the difference from UX designer and UX developer.
“ UX design still involves coding... idk where you got information that UX designers don't code but they absolutely do. UX designers are simply front end software engineers that work on refining the user experience of a particular program app or website.”
I don’t know because I used to be a fucking UX developer and used to work with UX designers??? Who didn’t code because figuring out what humans what is tough enough on it’s own. UI designers may know html/css but that is it.
I know we are going into a recession and I need to start being nice to these dumb recruiters because I may need them one day.2 -
OK, we all hate Gates, Elon or LTT for some reason. All heroes in my eyes. Ok, I do cringe at some LTT stuff, especially when about Linux.
I've read a book about Gates (Very bad one), about Elon and Jobs. So, I think I investigated well.
But there, a list from people we all hate for some reason. Question is, who's your tech hero?
For me, it's Robert Nystrom. But being a dictator of own project like Torvalds is my dream13 -
How many Devranters are in this situation of being paid to do “fake work”?
https://businessinsider.com/tech-in...11 -
I told PM that a feature is only ready on Thursday. He goes and tells Tuesday to the business owner. Comes to me and says make it happen. Nope, sorry. Not going to happen.
Non-tech people should not make commitments. I long for the day their jobs become obsolete. -
Why don’t we make a pathos-filled video about high salaried software engineers suffering in big tech cities due to housing prices?
We can show a man who goes to some $20-30 dinner per plate with his wife and they come home to a studio apartment. They tip generously..
*Sad music starts*
“This is our life in Silicon Valley. And this is our struggle.”
We can even show one of them holding an iPhone 6s and that it starts lagging due to not getting that battery replacement from Apple.
“We can’t even dream about a house here. We have to consider going out of state where there aren’t even tech jobs out there!”
*Even sadder music plays*
But no joke. This life sucks. This is far from the dream life I dreamed off. This is reality.1 -
At this point, I feel so far from tech and programming so nothing is exciting anymore, although, I'm working as a "software engineer".
Every job feels deadend and requires nothing but absolute mundane skills. I mean "make the text bigger"-joke does not come out of thin air. No science, engineering, and little-to-no standards are involved in most jobs.
This leads us to this: you can get excited about rust, fp, extra dazzling clean code, uncle Bob's sect of salvation coders or whatever but you'll be hit with reality so don't get your hopes up.1 -
Bad English aside I am so sick of incompetent customer service reps. Holy shit it's like they will hire anyone these days.
Here just read from this script and not the code version. That's all the tech you need to know right here on this single piece of paper.
Fucking incompetent bastards need to go work at a non technical job like Burger King because tech support is beyond them.
They'd probably fuck that up to. That's a completely different rant, those who can't even do fast food jobs right. At that point just go get on disability because your fucked.
To be fair I will occasionally get someone in the tech support sector who knows their shit but it's few and far between and its always a welcome surprise.12 -
Been working shitty odd jobs since I was in high school and college. Spent the majority of 2017 looking for any entry level tech job just to see what kinds of jobs I can land with current work/school experience.
Needless to say I had the absolute pleasure of quitting a doctor's office that I spent five years at. Now I'm in my first week working in tech support where they're actually going to pay for me to take classes and get certs. Couldn't be happier and I'm writing this to send positive energy everyone's way.2 -
A tech as well as a life question (actually more of a useless sleepless thought) : What do you think is more important? Exposing yourself to multiple technologies, career paths and life experiences or diving deep into a single technology, career path and life experience?
I feel like being an expert in 1 tech might pay off in terms of job life , and it would be bad for a person who is constantly switching between career paths, but sometimes i feel like i should have tried other paths too. Not just the life of a techie, like people who are deep into media and journalism, accountancy or those film industry jobs ; politics or finances , etc.
Its like, we found an apple to be a tasty fruit and now we have to be the apple guy forever. The better i am in being the apple guy, the more i will have to eat apples and the more i will earn. Why can't i try pears or oranges?7 -
What about devRant start monthly dev challenges and winners gets Freebies tech stuff jobs and other shit11
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Alright my fellow devs and other tech related/adjacent people, we can easily glean from your rants and profiles what you do while developing. But I want to get to know the person behind the screen. After all we aren't our jobs.
So, outside of software development and related activities, what do you do in your spare time?7 -
Finding a Ruby on Rails developer job here in North Carolina fucking sucks. I got through three sets of interviews and they told my recruiter I aced them and answered their questions flawlessly but instead of hiring a ruby developer to 1-3 years of experience they now want to hire a software architect with 4-6 years of experience. This company wasted both of our times.
Finding Ruby developer jobs is hard and I’m looking into whether I should switch to another tech stack to make my job search easier.
Thoughts?7 -
I’ve now discovered that management actually decides for themselves what software engineering is. 🧐
It is getting increasingly common that in different architectural groups the decision has already been made… by management…without actually passing through our review… as a little more senior blokes and gals.
Not even a discussion? On the fit?
That leads me to the conclusion, since I consider the management (at least the two or three closest layers) are morons, good at talking but not really knowing anything about what we do (we kind of take stuff and make other stuff from it by using energy and other stuff in HUGE FUCKING FACILITIES AROUND THE PLANET), that even they did not make the decision. It was forced upon them. They did not decide either! Because they can’t! Because they are idiots all of them!
I have not investigated this issue but this is the logical conclusion. Or not.
Recently, for instance, decisions were made to route information flows by some tech. Some new tech. At some place in our eco-system. At a certain time. And, if we were to have reviewed this initiative in our process we would have said:
”Well, I hear you! But we are not going to do that right now because WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING HUGE GLOBAL PROJECT THAT CHANGES PRETTY MUCH FUCKING EVERYTHING AND WE CAN NOT JUST IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING EXECUTION PROCESS OF THE PROJECT CHANGE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MESSAGE ROUTING BECAUSE WE LACK THE NUMBER OF HUMANS TO DO THE FUCKING JOB. So, we need to take a look at this and to get a better understanding when we can make this happen.”
What is the point of having this step in our organization if it is just pass-through? What is the point? Meetings? Just having meetings? Spending time mastering the organizational skill of administrating meetings? Feeling important? Using big words (holistic being my favourite)?
Below, juniors devs are being hired doing stupid stuff that does not need doing. For months and months.
I believe now that half of the dev staff does not need to be there and three quarters of the team, service, delivery (etc) managers are unnecessary. I mean, the good juniors are going to change jobs soon either way and we are stuck in this vicious cycle where we are not being allowed to be innovative in software engineering. Stability is of the essence here but the rate of our releases are just silly slow. I would say that we are far, far away from any track that leads us to where we want to be. Agile. Innovative. Close to business. Learning. Teaching. Faster. Stability despite response to implementing changing business needs.
And then there are the consultants…
*sigh*4 -
I learned more studying myself and in the workplace / jobs.
The problem is money, what will you prefer: teach to a classroom or double / triple income working for a tech company.2 -
I just went to a new barber for a haircut. Costed me $8. The barber earned $8 in 20 minutes and immediately went to cut another guy. This means the barber earns $24 per hour.
I, a software engineer with a computer science university degree working in IT tech field as a java backend software engineer on complex government software that sells gas & energy, get paid, and I will be exact to the cent: $3.75 per hour.
This means a barber earns 6.4 TIMES MORE per hour than I do as a software engineer with a computer science degree.
This also means that, it takes me 1 WHOLE DAY to earn as a software engineer with computer science degree, what the barber earns in 1 hour.
Therefore, this further means, after all of life expenses food bills rent taxes etc, that i can barely afford to go to barber. A barber for $8, is not very cheap for me as a software engineer with computer science degree.
I can not explain the utmost disrespect towards me and disappointment to be working as a software engineer with computer science degree.
I, as a software engineer with computer science degree, feel like I am used as an african wage slave to work extremely hard jobs for a below average wage. I am saddened and disgusted. This is shameful and must be illegal.
After all of what I've been through and everything I've seen, it turns out school was everything BUT the path to success. School was a path to failure... A path to eternal wage slave and poverty...14 -
Why would anyone want to study and have years of experience in boring-ass jobs like QA, BI,specific enterprise applications consultant(e.g SAP/Salesforce), PC technician, helpdesk, integrator or sales.
I understand people who lack experience in more sexy stuff and have no choice, or do this temporarily. But I met some people who do it for years out of their own will. Why? There are far more interesting jobs in the tech world. -
My fiancee was a developer and is now starting recruiting. The recruitment agency knows that she's a tech girl. I'm trying to push her to get all the IT recruitment jobs, because we all know that java != javascript, she does too, but 99% of recruiters do not. Whats the best way you were approached by a recruiter? And should she show to the recruitees that she has tech knowledge? Would you , yourself look at a recruiter that knows about IT differently? Advice appreciated :)4
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How do i get the motivation to keep working on a job which requires me to constantly edit different excel files , knowing that it will only decrease my chances of getting a better job in tech in the future !? I dont think i can even find jobs which pay well now.1
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I’m currently working 2 jobs with over 60 hour work weeks in addition to my own SaaS company.
One job is full-time 40 hours, where I am a mid level developer and I just do the waterfall of tickets that is assigned to me. This place is unorganized and has almost no communication within the team.
The second job I am the Senior Dev and project lead. It’s a contract position that I put 20+ hours in on the evenings and weekends. Agile methodology, with a modern tech stack and I promote excellent communication as well as documenting everything.
I’m in a unique position because I’m able to see these differences and compare them side by side. My full-time job doesn’t really know about the second job. I get my work done, and that’s all that matters. This place is a mess. The project lead (CTO) is a helicopter boss that sticks his nose up at any type of formal documentation and practices. No tests are written.. no SIPs or deployment docs.. no stand ups or anything. I must also mention this team has 5 developers and a QA.. my team is only 2 developers and a QA. We get through tickets much faster.. it helps when I go over every single ticket that is created and add requirements and images..
I guess my point is... I’m about to be a full-time contractor because I can’t take this unprofessionalism anymore.
Just because these formalities technical take longer. It does decrease actual time spent developing a project. Spending a couple of hours on tests and requirements can save you days of back and forth in the future. Not to mention... document.. everything.1 -
Github-gardener is destroying the legitimacy of GitHub as a valid portfolio for applying in high-tech jobs, and it's frustrating. I will never stupe this low, and you shouldn't either.10
-
Been applying for jobs for a while and finally got 2 offers. The first company already sent me theirs, good money and tech stack that I'm used to but I'd have to relocate to another province and city.
The second company is the one that got back to me first, they haven't sent their offer letter yet but it's a good offer. Same pay as the one where I'd have to relocate (which I don't really feel like anymore).
And the deadline for the relocation job is today, I dunno what to do a d which option to choose between the 2.6 -
Serious question.
I’m trying to start my career as an entry level developer. I have had an internship for a short period of time before the company fell apart and had to go back to my retail job to pay the bills. My question is, where are you guys applying to entry level jobs at? Like I have tried LinkedIn. But I looked for entry level and it came up with a 7+ year experience description in my area. Or 2-3 years experience. I’m just trying to find an entry level job man. Like how hard is it to find that? I’m a boot camp grad as well. But even with recruiters it’s so hard to find a job in my area that would take someone on that is so green in tech.
400+ applications and like 50 interviews. Decided to put my specialization in sql and c# and focus more on those because that’s what’s more popular in my area (tulsa, ok). I’m not 100% the best programmer or developer. But man I have the drive to learn and I guess that’s not good enough without experience. I’m at a mental breaking point right now.4 -
I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.
I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).
I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.
- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience
However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.
I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.
What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.
This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid3 -
fuck it, tell me straight.
Can i live into this tech world with poor math skills and no interest in web dev and designing?
my experience as native mobile dev was enjoyable and still is, but i fear that this is not a very broad career choice.
You see their is blockchain, dapps , hybrid apps, webapps, server designing, tensorflow models and Ai models( though they can be integrated with native apps too i guess ) , and many more tech and therefore jobs that rely on knowing about the webdev. and all i know is how to make a decent native java app.
and why the fuck should i join this web dev cult? its such a fucking mess. 8 different types of text sizes sizes, <b> and <strong> being the same thing, do you know about a thing called abstraction? My android studio would give me fucking murder warnings if i even dared to introduce hard coded texts along with code. and here, an html page is basically text + attributes? fucking kill me.2 -
I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.
My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.
apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.
- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.
- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.
- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain
- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :
--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)
- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev
- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company
- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.
- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)
- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.
- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.
- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)
- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/13 -
!rant, more of an incredulous/cruelly amused "you had ONE job..."
so: biggest IT/PC/electronics store in my (and neighboring) country. their webpage, of course with the function to buy online, because of course.
the big green "Buy" button does nothing. doesn't work. doesn't react. I keep clicking it multiple times, shorter, longer, etc, because maybe their JS scripts are just shit so they slow.
nope.
okay. open devtools, JS console.
hover over the button: "Error: isMobile is not a function".
click the button: "Error: isMobile is not a function"
WAT.
search for isMobile in the script.
173 occurences.
fuck this.
console: isMobile = function(){return false;}
because I'm not on my phone.
click the "Buy" button.
works flawlessly.
...HOW?
THE WHOLE PAGE IS AN ESHOP YOU COMIC RELIEF INCOMPETENTS! =D
173 uses of non-existing function that blocks business-critical feature, THE ONLY CORE FEATURE FOR WHICH YOUR SITE EVEN EXISTS, and NOBODY, not the dev who fucked it up, NOT EVEN QA, noticed it??? =D =D
if I was the boss of the devs, or even boss of the whole company...
git blame
...and then i'd go the whole chain from the dev who caused the bug, through all of the QA people who "tested" that version before deploy, and I would personally, on the spot, fire each and every single one of them.
mainly because of who knows how much money this stupid not even a proper bug lost them.
but secondarily, because clearly none of those people give a single shit (n)or have an idea how to do their jobs.
=D =D
yeah but I was a good guy, filed a bug report in the "Complaints" section of their Contact form.
it goes to some call-center-like peon, so it starts with a sentence "forward this to your site's dev people outright to file as a bug, thank you".
but... HOW.... =D
HOW can you let something like this through? =D
the bottleneck of your whole user interaction, which forms first of the three steps OF THE MAIN AND MOST IMPORTANT FUNCTION of your whole business... =D
...I...
...does not compute =D
...BUT THEY USING ANGULAR, SO THEY ALL MODERN AND HIGH-TECH AND EVERYTHING'S FINE!!! =D =D1 -
I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.
I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...
At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.
This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.
So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.
Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.
I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.
It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.
I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).
We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.
I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.
But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.
So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.
So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.
Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:
- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.
- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.
So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.
So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.
I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.
I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.
After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time. -
I don't think I will be able to score good marks in JEE and get admission in a good University as i am not that good at physics and chemistry....will it affect me while learning CS subjects and applying to tech jobs?5
-
Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.
Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.
I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )
The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".2 -
Applied for summer co-op positions today. First time applying for tech jobs! So much more nerve wracking than applying for random whatever I can find jobs. I’m so scared and imposter-syndrome-y, but I know everyone feels that way... aaaah1
-
I love doing multiple tech things. Development, Ops and security. Why can't people see this as tech experience and not individual subdomain experience. Why can't people switch jobs easily over Dev, Sec and Ops?
Smh.1 -
"Averice - a serial novel"
2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.
A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.
"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."
we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."
He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past
A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.
"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.
and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.
and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.
do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.
our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.
there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."
He took another long pull from the bottle.
"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.
theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.
many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."
The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.12 -
So I'm having this return to the 70s mood. Not for the 70s themselves but for the pack of tech in everyday life.
Like besides email or worldwide message exchange and wikipedia, what have been the last true innovations?
Media streaming just killed and monopolized other industries. Sure, everything is cheaper, but let's be honest, how much music do we consume? Pretty sure like 80% of people listen to the same 100 songs in their whole lifetime. Do we need limitless streaming? Did it help us somehow beyond giving some dopamine shots?
Social media are and have always been crap for posers, advertising and bots. Small communities make sense, when properly taken care of. The actual issue with social media is the replacement of the so called "Third place". The place you go after work that is not your home. We don't know each other anymore, loneliness is apparently becoming pandemic and people are struggling with this. How is this innovative? For the real time news that are making people freak out?
And then, as I ranted before, AI. It's just... Statistics. Well applied statistics. Is it an actual innovation? No. Serves nothing beyond taking someone's job.
And before some retarded dickhead starts no, it will never create the same amount of jobs as a factory would've done 100 years ago, and prompt engineering is a lie told by the very guys who SELL those products to convince you that their crap is harmless.
Maybe it's about time to hit the brakes for a second and think if the simpler things (NOT the times!) were better, if maybe if we're getting lonely is actually our fault, it's our fault for not calling that old friend for a drink, it's our fault if we keep getting some dopamine shot every minute and are barely able to look people in the eyes, it's our fault for not behaving like human beings?
I hope any engineer will understand how this rant is about consumer-oriented tech and not tech in general.10 -
I’m in between jobs due to the pandemic and need structure in my life. I have ADHD and no structure makes me a sad panda. I’m desparately grasping for some online educational content bc my previous tech stacks are a little old and need to keep up with the modern stacks so I can get a new role and have a structured regimen that school gives.
Unfortunately most of these courses are just boring as shit video lectures where you watch the developer code! WTF!! They’re advertised as “you will code a real world application” and 🤣you get a certificate at the end!
So if anyone took a full stack curriculum using modern stacks like the MEAN stack where they actually developed something themselves, post it here please?6 -
So i want to know how finances work for tech companies. There are a lot of big numbers that come up when we talk about a company's finances, but i don't understand why the tech people are so down in the ladder, or why those no.s are not associated with the tech teams
Like here's a statement :
"company x is valuable at $42billion , their annual turnover is $5billion. With a profit of $2billion. The ceo has a worth of $1.4billion and company's share are selling at $1500 per share. Person a,b,c of the company hold's 2,3,4% in stocks and the investor sequoia capital is thinking of providing an investment of $25million"
This is a hypothetical company, but if this company is also providing its members of tech team @$20-200k per annum (depending upon seniority), then is it relatively too less? I mean the company is playing with numbers in millions, people are being attributed with billions and yet a developer has to satisfy in those numbers.
Is it because we are being paid by the no. Of hours/time? Because i want to know what other ways are there in which those managers and ceos and investors are being paid? I have heard far too many stories about devs leaving their jobs and starting businesses, and I don't think its only because their boss was a dick1 -
Should I be optimistic about my profession and growth as an android developer, or should i start gaining experience in other domains?
I am currently a Junior Android Developer in a small company which is a subsidiary of a bigger company (TATA) . I currently hold a working experience of 3+ years but in last 5 years , I have mainly explored Android App development the most. I did courses in it, then internships, then switched jobs to reach a decent salary package (more than INR 10 lakh per annum).
Recently I have been pretty worried regarding my career choices and i can't seem to be optimistic about my role as a mobile engineer. I joined my current company 4 months ago, but my switch this time gave me a hike of -10% (you read that right, it was a negative increment since previous company was asking me to relocate and i had no choice but to take this offer)
This switch made me worried not just because of the salary decrement but as a worthy candidate too. I know my tech stack well , but this time, I had very less options. I feel that the demand of a mobile engineer seems to be very less and I am not sure if its only me or for everyone in the same space as I am.
So , are jobs of Native Android Development really dying? My goal is to reach at premium salaries of INR 80-90 lakhs or 1-2 crores per annum, so can I reach there while just being a good android engineer? I am not sure what to run for. Please help
Some paths that i came to conclusion are for me, based on my limited knowledge are :
CONTINUE ON YOUR PATH : Stay in 1 place , grow as an engineer, get your salary/ role increase slowly and you will probably be able to reach that amount in 5-6 years
SWITCH YOUR PATH TO OTHER TECH SKILL : Do web frontend/backend courses in your free time, then grab a job of 4-6 LPA , start as a basic web dev, grow into senior dev and then reach that amount in 5-6 years (coz frontend/backend devs are the real deal?)
SWITCH YOUR PATH TO HIGHER STUDIES : do courses to crack foreign exam papers, then take out all your savings and got to foreign to pursue some masters in management, then do a job there and get settled / come back to India and grab a better paying job as a manager, then grow/switch into lead managerial roles and earn the goal amount in 5-6 years (coz foreign studies are the real deal/ foreign countries give fair wages to skill?)
GET INTO BUSINESS : start a business of something , grow it, reach that amount in 5-6 years (coz doing business is the real deal and only way to get lots of money in black/white)
Which do you think is the most accurate/realistic?12 -
Fucking American tech lead rejecting PR because he wanted me to change disallow_some_feature to prohibit_some_feature 😡
FYI English was never your fist language either. It was because (from what I have read on the internet)
You did not have a first language just that you adopted it. And “called it your own”.
And you go on and and about Indian accent !!!
F*c*k accent. I’ll rant about your f*c*k*n* attitude. Guess time to change jobs.
BTW American based projects would do much better (in your f’ing opinion without this naming convention)
(This is not targeted at all Americans, I have had some good technical feed back as well. With some really good edge case catches which I over looked, this is meant for one f*c*i*n* project manager/Dev)
Double standards 😡😡17 -
I starting developing my skills to a pro level from 1 year and half from now. My skillset is focused on Backend Development + Data Science(Specially Deep Learning), some sort of Machine Learning Engineer. I fill my github with personal projects the last 5 months, and im currently working on a very exciting project that involves all of my skills, its about Developing and deploy a Deep Learning Model for Image Deblurring.
I started to look for work two months to now. I applied to dozens of jobs at startups, no response. I changed my strategy a bit, focusing on early stage startups that dont have infinite money for pay all that senior devs, nothing, not even that startups wish to have me in their teams. I even applied to 2 or 3 and claim to do the job for little payment, arguing im not going for money but experience, nothing. I never got a reply back, not an interview, the few that reach back(like 3, from 3 or 4 dozen of startups), was just for say their are not interested on me.
This is frustrating, what i do on my days is just push forward my personal projects without rest. I will be broke in a few months from now if i dont get a job, im still young, i have 21 years, but i dont have economic support from parents anymore(they are already broke). Truly dont know what to do. Currently my brother is helping me with the money, but he will broke in few months as i say.
The worst of all this case is that i feel capable of get things done, i have skills and i trust in myself. This is not about me having doubts about my skills, but about startups that dont care, they are not interested in me, and the other worst thing is that my profile is in high demand, at least on startups, they always seek for backend devs with Machine Learning knowledge. Im nothing for them, i only want to land that first job, but seems to be impossible.
For add to this situation, im from south america, Venezuela, and im only able to get a remote job, because in my country basically has no Tech Industry, just Agencies everywhere underpaying devs, that as extent, dont care about my profile too!!! this is ridiculous, not even that almost dead Agencies that contract devs for very little payment in my country are interested in me! As extra, my economic situation dont allows me to reallocate, i simple cant afford that. planning to do it, but after land some job for a few months. Anyways coronavirus seems to finally set remote work as the default, maybe this is not a huge factor right now.
I try to find job as freelancer, i check the freelancer sites(Freelancer, Guru and so on) every week more or less, but at least from what i see, there is no Backend-Only gigs for Python Devs, They always ask for Fullstack developers, and Machine Learning gigs i dont even mention them.
Maybe im missing something obvious, but feel incredible that someone that has skills is not capable of land even a freelancer job. Maybe im blind, or maybe im asking too much(I feel the latter is not the case). Or maybe im overestimating my self? i think around that time to time, but is not possible, i have knowledge of Rest/GraphQL APIs Development using frameworks like Flask or DJango(But i like Flask more than DJango, i feel awesome with its microframework approach). Familiarized with containerization and Docker. I can mention knowledge about SQL and DBs(PostgreSQL), ORMs(SQLAlchemy), Open Auth, CI/CD, Unit Testing, Git, Soft DevOps Skills, Design Patterns like MVC or MTV, Serverless Environments, Deep Learning Solutions, end to end: Data Gathering, Preprocessing, Data Analysis, Model Architecture Design, Training and Finetunning. Im familiarized with SotA techniques widely used now days, GANs, Transformers, Residual Networks, U-Nets, Sequence Data, Image Data or high Dimensional Data, Data Augmentation, Regularization, Dropout, All kind of loss functions and Non Linear functions. My toolset is based around Python, with Tensorflow as the main framework, supported by other libraries like pandas, numpy and other Data Science oriented utils.
I know lot of stuff, is not that enough for get a Junior Level underpaid job? truly dont get it, what is required for get a job? not even enough for get an interview?
I have some dev friends and everyone seems to be able to land jobs, why im not landing even an interview?
I will keep pushing my Dev career, is that or starve to death. But i will love to read your suggestions! how i can approach this?
i will leave here my relevant social presence:
https://linkedin.com/in/...
https://github.com/ElPapi42
Thanks in advance!9 -
What are some other cool jobs I can do in tech besides code?
I am hating development and the mass confusion.
backbone.radio is a node
package but ALSO and actual application for internet radio like real radio.
Is in the backbone.js documentation...NO!
It on the marionette documentation which is built on backbone.
Guess what’s hard to search for?
Fuck it man😵9 -
So I've been looking for a job in tech but outside the development and coding, but still in the tech niche, something like tech sales if its even a thing, however I've yet to find something like this that isn't either an old post or expired already, or asking for way too much experience, so any recommendations will be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance,4 -
(Note for dfox: I love this place and i would really like to have all my posts/ ++s/comment data available to me . Current system does not allow me to see posts more than some months old. is it possible? I hope devrant is not deleting old posts)
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Stream of thoughts coming through
#justAthought 1
If you feel you are mentally unique (Not in retarded or disable kind of way, but having a different view of thinking, a different perspective, not-a-sheep-in-a-herd kind of mentality) , then you PROBABLY ARE, its just those who are not that mentally unique will find your thoughts absurd until you are proving yourself to be a successful person.
Even though you feel something is wrong in a current situation, and you can put some valid points in your argument, there would always come a point where your personal failures or average-ness would overshadow your valid points (kind of personal experience than a thought :/ )
#justAThought2 (Disclaimer: i am no fraud guru or priest, just a 9-5 curious , sleepless student-cum-professional)
I sometimes feel that the only good, meaningful goal that i could think for my life would be : to earn enough money to set up a small experiment environment , where I would initially take, around 25-30 people for 1-2 years. It would be an environment with totally $0 value for materialistic things like money, jewels, property,etc . Everyone is living free of tensions of basic services like food, clothes, house, taxes, work to live etc. Together we all will be collectively doing just these things: Making ourselves healthy , and more kind, spiritual towards other humans, animals, plants and environment, and thinking of ways to eradicate the value of "value".
We have already reached a point where we are generating even more harmful Technology than useful tech, how about changing the way of thinking and taking a small pause? I know a lot of people would be reluctant to do any work in such environment, but i believe one day or another, every one of these people has to come back to their usual jobs , but this time, not for money but for humanity.
Do you think this kind of environment is possible for the whole world? Because today most, if not all thinks that money is the ultimate goal. can we change that, and would that change be good?
#justAthought 3 (Disclaimer : 1. Its my mom's thought/whatsapp status , i kind off liked it. she is super religious by the way ^_^! | 2. more relevant for india/multi religious countries 3. for Indians: kind of thought from movie "oh my god")
There should be a regional law during so called "acts of god"(floods, earthquakes, other natural disasters) under which the donations given to religious places(temples, churches, mosques,etc) would be used to provide relief to affected areas.3 -
Will start work probably next week after lots of searching. Few months without work was good life relatively. Wake up whenever you want to, browse reddit how much you want to, way more time to do things that want. Now in new job especially on trial period I will have to learn lot, also that rush to work if I do not want to end work late makes life worse. Full time jobs suck. Half day work would be better but to get even little shorter work week is a big challange. At least when was fired from previous job. Fuck that.
Also probably will take a non remote position because they claim it is low stress. But I believe their codebase sucks, they do not write tests. But they say they are planning to start writing tests. But still most important thing is low stress, but question is how in reality will there be low stress. Or will they fire me quickly even without causing me stress. It would be ideal to learn at least all the tech they are using, so that I would not lag too much because of this, but I have no idea how to quickly learn, I thinik I would need 2 hours after work for learning, which sucks that I will not be able to enjoy at least after work time.
Plus the fucking traffic jams. Why they can't have remote position. Especially when covid cases are growing. -
[Career Advice]
Hi folks! I'm in a bit of a career dilemma for which I sincerely need your help.
TL;DR
How do I go from being a React Native Developer to an Android developer, considering I have 2x more experience with React Native than Android, with React Native being the more recent one ?
More details -
I started as an Android developer in 2015, using Java as my primary language. Up until the end of 2017 I kept working as an Android developer, adding different native mobile tech skills to my skillset.
At the end of 2017, my employer asked me if I could also learn React Native as he had many big projects that required a more hybrid stack. I had always been eager to learn new things (perks of being a programmer I guess), so I said yes and started working on React Native in 15-20 days.
From that point onwards, I kept doing more and more projects using React Native (in my day job) and over the years, I became more of a React Native Developer than an Android one. At this point in my career, I have about 4.5 years of React Native experience and 2.5 years of Android.
However, now I am at a point where I want to make a switch (for better pay and more exciting projects) but when I looked at the job postings for React Native this morning, they were all for startups with great pay but kinda average products, whereas the Android job listings were for companies like Uber, Reddit, etc. (basically great companies with good projects and great pay).
I really want to go back from being a React Native Developer to an Android developer full time but I don't know how. I've personally seen so many people switch jobs from one field (say React Native) to another (Backend development) - and when I asked them about how they did it, they said it didn't really matter to their companies what specific tech stack they'd worked with, which is kinda hard to believe because every job listing I've seen companies list every single technology very very specifically.
Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks for reading!2 -
I fucking hate our chairperson in our university
She always gloats that our university js the best in our country like wtf ever since the university got ISO accreditation they went batshit crazy with the students
They cant even land ABET-CAC. Honestly fuck them!! They even want me to shift to another course because i failed to attend 2 months of classes, I was treated for heart problem with proper med cert and all, but they still said that im not good enough that i cant survive in the field that i cant be part of the department because they want people who graduate from the university as top notch people. She even gloated that students in our department have freelance jobs before graduating. FUCK THEM!! Our profs doesnt even know how to properly be a thesis advisor, one of our profs teaching database file org. Doesnt even know hoe to code or even to query like wtf! One of our profs teaches ONLY 5 times in a semester
FUCK THEM THE CHAIRPERSON HERSELF CANT EVEN TEACH AND SHE IS STUCK IN THAT JOB FOR YEARS
Honestly this is why students are degraded! How can someone reach their potential with this how can a country prosper.
The throw that shit at me but i am a founder and president of a tech company running for atleast 2 years now (i dont let the department know of this) im doing shit just to make sure i get a diploma and support myself and the whole team but fuck then they cant even set uo a proper curriculum -
Do you ever feel your job is too demanding compared to other software engineering jobs?
I've worked in two companies for now.
First company, Kotlin microservices and we had QAs, didn't have to write a lot of tech specs and no post mortem or on call at all (not yet atleast), it was just talk to PO, he tells the business requirement, we work together to make tickets, no legacy code so was easy to know what to do for tech, no monolith to handle or anything, much easier, just code and meetings.
Current job is meetings with PO telling you what he wants, have to write a full on tech spec and also know business requirements and product knowledge as the current PO doesn't know anything about how the products work, writing huge tech specs, communicating on requests sent my clients on slack, pretty much always firefighting, the system is so fragile and legacy, coding is actually less its mostly spending hours finding out how this shittt legacy flows work (no docs) , PO pretty much does fuck all, just wants meetings and wants us to do very very stupid tedious low impacts projects. This bundled with oncall and onpoint and the absolute sheer amount of incidents our team is involved in (on average we have 4 a week LOL, varying size but they're all very annoying) and the overtime oncall benefit is so bad too, if you do get paged out of hours, you just get that hour back during work hours. In other companies like friends, you get paid for the whole time you're oncall, whether you get paged or not. I can't go out anywhere on weekends or anywhere at all during on call in case I get paged, which happens a lot. Its a cluster of a mess. This bundled with manager stoll not wanting to promote me to IC3 despite all I've done so far.
My question is, is this more normal than I think it is? Is this just how crap our career can be? Mind you I'm in the UK so not getting those mind boggling US wages sadly either. Have US colleagues in same team doing same job but obviously getting more11 -
I think for this one i had higher expectations which let to me being disappointed. Was a fun experience nonetheless.
So i am junior dev in a bigish company and i am pretty comfortable where i am, its challenging enough and fun enough. Pay is fine nothing out of ordinary but perks are nice.
But this job is the one i got out of college and it did feel that i got really lucky as i was preparing for leetcode and what not but the interviewer was pretty linient and asked me technical questions out of my cv. The questions were mostly about what i used and all felt quite easy and i was offered a role with a decent salary. Since then i have been working and learning and thing been pretty stable.
Recently i was hinted at a promotion by my manager so i have been working towards that. I have in the past got a lot of messages on LinkedIn from different recruiters but never tried because i was satisfied with my job and my visa condition made it a little tricky to hope jobs ( i work in eu as a non eu citizen). But i did fantasize that if i could just get an interview with a decent company and clear the technical round without much preparing and get offered a decent package just to inflate my ego and maybe use that to increase my current package.
So i got another message on LinkedIn and a startup was looking for a developer and i gave it a go. I asked the recruiter what is the expected compensation and he instead asked me. I said i want a big enough increase tk even consider leaving my comfortable spot, so i am looking for more than 35-40% increase If they can then i am willing to try. The recruiter said that their range is between 25-35 but can try 40 if the interviews goes well.
I went ahead with it and gave the interview, the first one was simple and the next one was supposed to be technical and was told its not leetcode but i will have to implement a feature into a project live on the video call. Which i did with some success, i was quite clumsy but i was able to do it with tests passing sl i guess that was fine.
I was really happy that i didnt prepare much and still passed a tech interview. I was recently told about the offer, its around 40% more than my current but there are no yearly bonus or even health insurance. If i consider the bonus and health insurance then the offer becomes like 20% increase. Considering i am already expecting a promotion and some salary increase this offer seems really lack luster.
Just wanted to talk about all this, can you get a really big jump generally or is it only 15-25 ?1 -
dude why there so many dum fuck in this industry like people who just graduated , and don't know shit about tech or anything but flex and complain about shit just can accept that they don't know any shit this many years fucking noobs nothing like why are they , this don't deserve jobs just make bug and always call for help like why cant they figure out their shit, its just cant just spoon feed they every time, like i dont know what happens to this people after or they just survives in it? just tired of getting my ass on whenever they suck dude they dont know how to commit git lol , but never accepts , i am not talking about one person its like a species now , they dont even try to learn even tho they get jobs for no way , itrsucks2
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What are you gonna do if/when AI replaces developer/tech jobs. Not saying it'll happen but what if.
Me, I will open a convenience or drug store where I live..16 -
I was watching an Ancient Aliens episode called "Beyond Roswell". The show described the idea of some of our tech being seeded slowly by introducing alien technology to specific companies. They suggested that computing technology has advanced very fast and introducing this tech could be part of that.
At first I was kinda pissed about this. I have read about the creation of the first transistor back in the 40s or 50s. WWII really advanced our need for computing devices such as what Turing built. Then I realized a lot of the explosion of computer tech did occur after key ET events. This kind of made me wonder how much is "us" and how much is ET tech. I also realized it can take a lot of effort to understand something really advanced. So reverse engineering can take a LOT of effort to figure these things out. Being seeded by external tech does not take away from humans at all.
A parallel to this is a programmer that learns how to use a C++ compiler. They could go their whole career without ever understanding how the compiler itself is doing its job. I find myself wanting to learn how compilers work and started down this path. I look at the simple grammar I have learned to parse. Then I look at the C++ grammar and think "How can I ever learn to do that?" So I see us viewing potentially advanced things and wondering how the heck can we ever learn to do that. The common reaction when faced with such tech would be disbelief and in some cases ridiculing the messenger. When I was a kid the idea of sending a picture over a phone was laughable. Now this is common and expected. It was literally a scifi concept when I was a kid.
So, back to the alien tech. I am now thinking it would be cool to be working with alien technology through computing. This is like scifi stuff now! So what if what we have was not all invented here (Earth). If anything this will prepare us programmers to get jobs working for alien corporations writing ship level programs and brain interfaces. Think of it as intergalactic resume building. 😉 -
I can't say how a CS degree helped me since I dropped out, but in all of my tech related jobs we turn down candidates with a CS degree left and right. Turns out showing up for class and managing to pass doesnt give you real world experience, passion, or even knowledge. I used to be a floor factory worker and my team lead was a CS degree holder.
But hey, maybe the crippling debt and super unrelated classes were worth it. -
Is it a problem if you’re a “full stack” developer but the company you work for has your title as “data analyst”? Meaning your teams builds and maintains every aspect of a website that the company employees use in their daily jobs and all that...
I’m just curious how that affects pay, your resume, etc. New to all things tech related so please excuse my ignorance. I just haven’t seen that before.7 -
Amazon joining the dol apprenticeship program for veterans
Only instead of being an electrician its for tech jobs. And its a paid apprenticeship.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/... -
Last week I got a call I thought it was a screen interview, but turned to be a technical interview for a job I probably applied for back in 2015.
Today, I got a call for face to face HR interview next week which is going to be in the middle of the day and the company is about 1 hour away from my home/work.
Right now, I am feeling good at my current company. Nice salary, only me and manager but we are hiring, and its close from home.
The other company, is a bigger company, salary is unknown, and working hours are less but if you count driving hours it will be much longer! And work will be related with SharePoint “0 Experience” and Web Developments.
PS: Both companies aren’t tech companies!
Even tho I am happy here, I have this thing inside me that asks me to change jobs and challenge myself learning about new technologies “Or technologies I have never worked with”!
However, If keep doing this I won’t settle and If I find myself stuck at a job I hate and try to move to other companies, they won’t hire me because I keep moving!
I hate overthinking these stuff,
and just need to get it off my shoulders!1 -
Are there enough tech jobs in canada? I am currently going for masters there.. don't know if its worth it to go in that direction.