Me: I have been working for you for almost 12 years now, and I feel that my current pay is not comparable to the work I currently produce. Therefore, in order to secure my future as your employee, I must request an immediate raise in pay to a level that is acceptable.

Boss: I can't afford it. If you want more money, you need to bring in more clients, plain and simple.

Me: I'm serious. If I don't get a raise, I will qui---

Girlfriend: Babe, stop talking to yourself and come to bed...

Me: Okay... [looks in mirror] This isn't finished...

Me: I'm really underpaid and you know that. You gotta do something about it.

My Manager: It's on my radar. It's complex. Things like these never move quickly.

*Few weeks later*
My Manager: Hey what's the status on that new POC?

Me: It's on my radar. It's complex. Things like these never move quickly.

*Radio silence in the room*

So I had a job interview and got offered the job on the spot, then I went back to my manager at my current workplace to raise an issue about me being underpaid for this months wages and this is how the conversation went.

Enjoy.

Remember. Jurassic park failed because every other thing was built while sparing no expenses and only one programmer was underpaid.

Don't underpay programmers.

That's me

Today, I have a meeting with my managers. I’m going to demand more work and higher pay.

Wish me luck

I have what seems to be an unpopular opinion about buying software as a software developer.

First off, I support open source all the way. There should always be free and open tools for people to use if the need or want to.

Second, if you underpaid, broke, unemployed, or a student then this doesn’t apply to you. You keep pushing forward!

With that said, let’s get to the meat of it all...

I pay for good software. Even when it is expensive. Even when there are “workable” free or open source solutions.

I do this for a number of reasons...

1. They are better, hands down.
(Tower > GitKraken, SourceTree, GitHub Desktop) (Kalidascope > every other diff tool) (JetBrains IDEs > Atom, Brackets ...)

2. I’m no longer a broke student. I make enough money to buy them.

3. Most important: I’m a fucking professional software developer, not a fucking joker.
- If I was a carpenter then I could always hammer nails with the back of my work boot. It’s free and paid for and will do the job. Instead I would buy a good hammer because I’d be a professional and not a fucking joker complaining about the price of the tools to do my job.

4. I use a Mac, sometimes Linux and NEVER Windows. Which means I have a platform that actually has useful apps built for developers who are willing to pay for it.

5. I don’t get caught up in developer circle jerks about how all development software should be open source and free.

————

So there you go.

Does this offend you?

Good!

Come at me bro

Always deliver the goods.

Even if who you work for are idiots, and the product is useless. You never know who will see what you've done.

- I did a six-month underpaid project for ShittyCompany.

- Strived to write it nice and clean with unit tests and good(barely) documentation.

- Got a call up a year later from a consultancy company who integrated with the application I wrote. Now I work for them, and it's as close to my dream job as I could hope for.

Dear Marketing Guy,

You had no right to manipulate the perfectly working "WordPress" site, but since you have done it by injecting a script you found on the internet in functions.php, It is now my unpaid job to fix this mess.

Yours truly,
Underpaid Developer

P.S. Fuck you

Just got a call from recruiter. I was asked what amounts of € would make me consider switching. I named an amount that seemed surreal. I think I heard attempts to control chuckling, followed by 'well almost all our clients could offer that much'

shit. I think I'm underpaid...

I worked as a freelancer, with no formal jobs, from 2009 through 2016. But my situation wasn't the best one, I had to accept some underpaid jobs and was on the verge of going crazy with some pretty nasty clients too. Also, PHP was tiring. :(

Then I found out about a headhunting website and decided to give it a try. Filled some forms, did some tests and built a profile and a small CV, then kept doing my jobs.

Of course, since I didn't have formal training (I've a BA in advertising, not coder at all :P) I wasn't expecting much. Also, I'm self taught, and I feel I'm kinda mediocre at coding.

Despite that, in less than 2 weeks, I receive an e-mail calling for an interview. I asked for the interview to be as soon as possible, which was the NEXT day.

They also told me that, if possible, I should fork a repo and do a test that involved consuming JSON and building an application using Node/Bower/Angular.

Up to this point I only used node a tiny bit, but I've NEVER EVER used Angular and Bower, and kinda almost freaked out. I spent the whole night reading tutorials, documentation and building the application, checking almost all details I could from the JSON file and building it as detailed as I could, then went for the interview.

Turns out both intervewers were pretty nice and cool, and checked my GitHub, some work I did and told me that my application passed the test (and I even did a but further than they asked me to). I was also told that I was the only intervewee that did NOT have formal training in computer science or something related to it, which kinda made me feel a bit worried.

I was asked to wait for some time until they decided on the results.

2 weeks later I was told that 2 people, among 30, were chosen and I was one of them! I was also told that they liked how my GitHub was well-documented and organized, and the range of projects that I had.

I worked there for only 4 months until a new CEO entered and change things a bit (cost cutting and all that yadda yadda), and I was laid off. Although a bit short, I was happy that I ended my work there on good terms with everyone on the team! Also, I'm still working with the people I met there on some freelance projects! ;D

I'm really honored to have met, worked and to still be working with the guys from there. They were all better than me in different things and it was an eye-opening experience, which most certainly made me a better dev today.

Also, working with them and learning from them renewed all the passion for coding I've lost from previous jobs, so I'm more than thankful for this. :D

P.s.: sorry for the long text and bad writing, I kinda didn't sleep because of some work-related issues :P

HR manager: we just realized we underpaid you a lot in the last 4 years, for all the job you are doing. You'll get 30% pay rise from now on.

Outer Me: thanks, great!
Inner Me: ....shit...

I got the raise, I looked for another job and found it in 4 months. 60% pay raise, better role.

I noticed at our company we have 4 kind of developers:
1. Developer who can do psd>html, write some custom js code, put templates on cms... He usually doesnt care about the code. We call them just frontend developers.
2. Developer who work with frontend frameworks, can create SPA, knows a little backend, can code APIs... - Superstar frontend developer.
3. Developer who knows both frontend and backend and can create websites without anyones help. Full stack developer.
4. Full stack developer who does everything above + does mobile app development, IOT dev, cybersecurity, servers setup and gets paid like the first one. Hello, its me.

The straw that broke the proverbial camels back.

You all know my story by now. Pretty shitty company with assehole boss. So I'm supposed to be off this week, sure I had one or two things left to do but I was planning on doing them this week anyway, just in my spare time

On Monday, I get an angry phone call.

"Why aren't you in? Someone said you're on holiday?"
"Yeah you knew I was, YOU moved my holiday to this week."
"But the Mac's still aren't working, this site isn't completely finished yet and we have this *ridiculous feature* we need by last year."
"I have spent around 8 hours trying to fix the broken Mac's that you ordered but I'm not an Apple technician so I can only do so much. I'm waiting on client approval for the site and that new feature is insanely difficult and I need some time to do it. I can work on it from here sometimes but it's not going to get any easier."
"*clearly very angry* I asked you to do ONE thing while I was away and that's still not done. Work from home this week and finish everything."

At which point I sat there in disbelief for an hour before searching for a new job.

The fucking audacity is unreal. Now I know I should have finished that one feature but I also need time not spent fixing fucking 10 year old Mac's or redesigning fucking leaflets or telling people how to change a gradient in InDesign.

I am already severely underpaid and already give up my evenings and weekends for this shit. I've given up most of my first fucking week off in almost 7 months for it too!

Fuck. No. Fuck this. I'm out. I'm taking a shitty job somewhere else as a junior where I can actually learn and enjoy my fucking job.

I just want to add my 2 Cents to the all this GDPR chaos. Because I feel lots of you are missing the point here.

When reading here about GDPR I hear all kinds of fair statements of how flawed it is and how it's mainly hurting the small companies etc etc.

I agree, at this state GDPR might actually be doing more harm than good.

However, I don't think that is what it is about. It's about going in the right direction. If you read/look over the course of history we've had several technological revolutions. Industrial, renaissance. They all start the same:

"This technology is going to change everything, it's going to solve all our problems!" It's something holy. Something that shouldn't be touched or regulated, only embraced.

But as we all know it wasn't all that pretty.

Industrial revolution was hard super underpaid, dirty work. Children had to work too. People were getting sick. Lots of alcoholism, depression.

And what made the factories start taking better care of their employees? Regulation.

Once fines start to come, companies will have to adapt.

We have to learn and understand that these systems like government, company, capitalism. They're built for reasons. They all exist for reasons. And only when it is in balance, things will flourish.

So I encourage you all to stay as critical as you are, but to give it a chance. To have a bit of faith.

It might just turn into something worthwhile!

Thanks for reading!:)

My colleges and I were talking about salaries in our company. Our team as about 10 members. Many of us are receiving interesting offers from other companies, and we concluded that we were being underpaid.

In this life, unless you ask to, no boss will raise you, even if you put some extra effort and work the shit out of you, to bring that profit, new client or something else good to the company.

Nobody was interested in talking directly about that to our manager. Just a side note, our manager is an awesome senior developer and a very nice guy. It shouldn't be too hard to talk about this issue to him.

I waited until our annual performance and salary revision to talk about it. Everyday our team talks about this. Everyone is going crazy.

So I went straight to the point, during this meeting with our manager, and said that we needed to be raised. All of us, because other companies were offering much better salaries.

He said to me: "Take this paper, write down what value should every one receive, including myself."

I took this opportunity and put down the values, raising about 600€ for each one.
I looked at it and said: "This looks ok. I'll will ask your colleagues to do the same task. Wait here."

So he went and requested everyone to do the same thing, without explaining why.

Guess what happened? Some mother fuckers actually cut on others salaries, instead of raising everyone equally.

Anyway the manager said he would show that to the CEO, and maybe something would happen.

We were all raised in the values I said so, because the CEO want us to be among the companies that pay the most.

After the backstabbing, no one ever talked about that. Except for 3 good fellow developers, that thanked me for my initiative.

Boss told me he couldn't raise my salary, since according to him, I was already overpaid. Months later they suddenly outsource some positions, including mine. I got 6 months with payment as a parachute. But I also got a new job that pays $15 000 more each year...!

It's nice to have double salary for 6 months...

:)

Temporary coworker with 10+ years experience, working on C++ codebase with me since 3 months, just asked me what the continue-statement in C/C++ does.

That must be either a sign of an upcoming apocalypse, or me being heavily underpaid.

A few months ago I was working on a (totally underpaid project) where my friend and I had to basically rewrite the entire program our client was using.

So we started planning and wrote all sorts of documentation to show the client our ideas for the new flow of the program, the new structure of the GUI and a few more details of what would the inner workings of the new app. He seemed to like all those ideas and gave us the green light to go through with the project and start coding.

We spent a couple of months coding, redoing the front end from scratch (with a different framework even, so I couldn't reuse any code from the old version) and completely redesigning the back end so it would be better, faster, more scalable etc etc etc. During this process, we obviously showed the progress of the app to our client, explaining everything we had been doing, and he seemed to like every new version we showed him.

When we were in one of the last stages in development (basically sending versions of the app to the client for evaluation), the guy suddenly changed his mind. After agreeing on everything we had been showing him over the last months, he sent an email saying:

"...the new system makes the app too complicated. I want this program to be as simple to use as possible; so we should revert the "Policy" system to essentially what it was in the last major version. The only change I want to make is [...] and everything else is essentially the same as the last Policy system."

So basically he wanted us to FUCKING UNDO EVERYTHING WE HAD DONE AND REVERT THE FUCKING PROGRAM TO THE FUCKING VERSION HE HAD BEFORE HIRING US!!!! WHAT THE FUCK????

YOU WANTED US TO CHANGE YOUR APP AND THEN YOU SUDDENLY CHANGE YOUR MIND AFTER 3 FUCKING MONTHS WHEN THE PROCESS IS DONE???

GO FIND A SWORDFISH TO FUCK YOU IN THE ASS, IM NOT WORKING FOR YOU ANYMORE

God, it feels good to let that out.

Was on edge..
Had no job, no money, got kicked out by my family(what left of it) depression kicking in, desperately trying to do anything to hold on
Had studies, in automation and robotics and other software skills, but no time to find a company to work..
Decided to try working at burger King, I mean, was that or selling myself, so I got called passed the interview, ( quick info - 60% of young people in my country can't get a job, have to lie on their cv because they have too much skills (there's still that wrong idea that studies get you a job))
Have too much studies for the job, I have to sign a contract saying that I accept being underpaid (by the law I have to be paid under the minimal wage for my skills)
This triggers an alert on social employment center and I started to work for another company two days after as a front end developer and it dude.
Refused the bk, yup they weren't happy about it, but I mean who really wants to do a 1 year trainee flipping burgers...

In India, an Intern should be renamed as "Ramu Kaka"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Probably more of a revenge story,

I've been underpaid during my first job, so I made myself indispensable, working tirelessly despite the small wage, until I am the sole developer responsible for all front end matters.

Then when the time is right, I left the company like I have no regards for money, leaving behind all my "legacy". Undocumented codes, "unconventional" naming, and bunch of stuff no other present devs could decipher.

I kinda feel bad to whoever had to modify my code, There was once a very hacky handlebar template that I wrote with word wrap, so bad it almost had 500 characters for one line of code in one html tag contained inside <script> tags, and several lengthy one liner of javascript loops

My biggest regret: Going to talk to my boss that I want more responsibilities. Now I am an underpaid boss of 7 people, and the sadest part is, that I have no time for coding anymore 😠

I now see where they went...

Well now, I wouldn't want to mention anyone specific since talking about someone behind their back and calling them 'weird' isn't very nice. 🙄 But absolutely HYPOTHETICALLY speaking, if I HAD a weird coworker, they would probably...
- ... strut about the office, telling all how great yet underpaid their work is
- ... write lots of 'concepts' because coding is for lowly programmers
- ... insist that the code they have to do when boss is looking is simply too complicated for unit testing, and 'that's great!'
- ... brag about their/wear to work a ridiculous array of ties in every colour imaginable, when everyone else shows up casual

- ... trap people into listening to them talk for hours about...
-- ... ties
-- ... their misspent youth
-- ... how awesome they are/were/will be
-- ... why it's a good idea to eat cheese

- ... never let me forget I'm female, coz *insert BS reasons why all devs must by nature be male here*
- ... send me little unsolicited notes and mails with funny (sexist) jokes *har har*

- ... be let go, at which point everyone else discovers why they had so much time that they could spend chatting away at the watering hole
- ... earn the eternal hatred of anyone picking up the pieces of their 'work'
- ... try to steal our customers away who will laugh in their bloody face

Just my theory, of course..

Long rant, sorry.

I’m pretty upset, or let’s say: I want to kick asses and chew gum but I’m all out of gum(The duke TM).

Yesterday we had a discussion in the office about salary basically.

Context: The company has about 150 employees and earns a lot of money. I’m the lead dev for about 1.5 years since I joined.

So I talked to our CEO/HR about a raise since I was hired as a normal fullstack dev(title is lead dev now) but have to:
train my junior(PHP), frontend guy(react), our QA(Automation with cypress atm), our junior devop(gitlab, jenkins, docker) and even assist marketing with GTM and adword campaigns.

I’m a jack of all trades basically since I was a freelancer for big brands for a long time.
I’m fine with helping/training, I like it a lot but I still have to watch everything and be fast with my own stuff. If anything goes wrong, people call me.

That will change since I train them all(They will all be independent soon) but still, doing everything for the same pay feels wrong.

Bottom line: CEO told me it’s cool that they can use all my skills but I won’t get a raise.

The worst/strangest was: My coworkers heard about that(as always in an office) and were like: Everybody should get paid equally because we’re all a team. Uhm, ok?

I just contacted the head hunter which got me that job. I guess I’ll just see what the market has to offer.

It should never be about money but this was confusing. People telling me we should all be equal who are on their mobiles 3h a day and feel underpaid. Check yourself, really.

People who think their pure presence is enough.. Germany -.-

February. The month where rent is really too damn high.

"No We Will Not Code for Free"
(Parody of the "Cheers" theme)

We're underpaid, clients' scope today takes everything we got.
You turn to us with all your troubles cause "companies charge a lot."
You want our work but you won't pay.

No we will not code for free.
You are not exempt from our fee.
If you want a free site, build it yourself. We're not your coding slaves.
We won't build your crap no matter how much you plea.

"Paying us back" don't mean a thing, money talks, bullshit walks.
If you want a cheap site then go to Geocities.

So recently completed my first overworked and underpaid freelance job, I'm like totally a developer now right

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

Security rant ahead, you have been warned!
As part of a scholarship application, our government requires a scan/copy of the applicant's credit card. Since the IBAN is now on the back, you have to send both sides.
The back is also where the CVC (security code) is. Any bank will strictly tell you NOT TO EVER SHARE IT - not even with them!
To make things even more fun, you now have the option to send this over email which is, of course, NOT ENCRYPTED!!!!!
I'm basically sending all the info needed to steal all my money over an unencrypted connection to an underpaid secretary, who will print it out and leave it on their desk for anyone with decent binoculars to see.
These people are fucking insane!!!!

Worst things about being a dev? Boy, this will be a long one!
- Whatever I do, be it hard work or smart work, I feel I am always underpaid.

- Most people who don't know tech feel my job shouldn't take that long. "Oh, a website that should be easy." "Oh, REST services, that's cute!"

- Most people who know a little tech will be like, "Here is the code for this on Google, then why are you charging this much"

- Companies like Microsoft and Apple who are too cool to follow standards.

- Always underpaid!

- The friggin compilers and random environment vars. Sometimes you make no change and the code works on a restart. I mean wtf!

- Having to give/meet deadlines, when we know most of the times things get out of control.

- Having to work for jerks mostly who don't know squat, and can't tell the difference between a CPU and a Wooden box.

- Sometimes I wanna take a break from my laptop(traveling and stuff) , those are the times I get the maximum work load!

- Did I mention we are always underpaid?

- Because of the kind of work I do, finding a girl has been challenging. Where the heck are they!

- We have to stay always updated. Often we deploy something using a framework and the next day we see an update.

- Speaking of updates, I hate having to support for OSes like Microsoft.

- Speaking of OSes, I hate Apple!

- Speaking of Apple, I feel we are underpaid, de javu?
...
How much would you hate me if I wrote "just kidding" ?

At my previous employer my boss asked me how long a project would take. Told him about a week maybe two. He then informed me it was due that day. Apparently the client gave it to him months ago. I worked a 35 hour weekend to make it happen. Then he complained that my weekly time sheet was higher than normal. He didn't think it was accurate and underpaid me. So glad I got out of agency work.

There is this group called LUKI e. V. that advertises using linux at church instead of windows. First of all, I think it is a horrible idea because the people working at the church, based on my personal experience, can barely operate windows. Windows is just the better and easier to use option for people who don't know much about computers.
Also, and this is where it gets hilarious, their main argument for switching to linux is that it is a "fair" software (as in fair trade). How? I don't think Microsoft devs are underpaid child slaves. And even if so, how would you change that with a software alternative that doesn't cost anything?

I'm starting to think we might need a global union for developers. I have been reading the comments today and it looks like a lot us getting way underpaid.

New features should be a moment of joy if they are released. So far so good. People really liked the idea of working together on opensource project. The app is updated. But then we encountered a major problem. It looks like some of us are getting so underpaid that they can't pay for the 14 dollar it cost to start the opensource project they want. We must rebel against this.

14 dollar, how much is 14 dollar. How many hobbies cost 14 dollar to start up. From running to collecting stamps. Its going to cost you more And how many hobbies are you as passionate about as your own open source project.

The next great thing is that it is show in the place where developers are eagerly looking to join a opensource project. And will probably join you're product because I'm sure between all of us there are tons of wonderfull ideas just waiting to be build.

And for me personal I do not mind supporting an app that I use almost every day. And just keeps growing without annoying ads.

So you should be more then willing to pay 14 dollars. And are ready to start recruiting your team.

And if you really can't pay. Your house burned down, you needed it for food. Your only pc is beyond saving. You can be a positive force in this community and do pay with upvotes.

But if you are to much a cheapskate to pay 14 dollars well, I think I was clear enough.

End of adventures of the COO and Start of a new beginning

It takes years to improve a company and takes only a few months for a dumbass with shit for brain to take it all down

After four years working ( underpaid ) in a digital advertising agency helping the company grow, getting global exposure and few awards later, last Friday was my last day

To all the future and current CEO's out there, Don't hire someone just cause you know them, hire them for their skills or their brain power

I've seen fucking clay pots with more brains than this COO

Just finished a project that was estimated to be 8 weeks long with 2 devs. I was given the project 2 weeks ago with no one else to work with. It's going to a few hundred thousand users tomorrow.

Still underpaid and stressing over rent.

Definitely still not getting that salary adjustment...

Fuck this shit. 😐

Sometimes I really hate reading comment section and rants from

"my coworker/senior-dev/manager/boss/professor doesn't know X. I'm so much better and so underpaid"

It's like something is new to you or you didn't know something your mostly a dumbfuck which doesn't deserve his position or shouldn't be there ignoring all the other shit which brought you there. Ignoring a person's background or function. Sometimes this stuff is funny because you think he/she should know X but to call someone dumb/stupid/moron or so just because of this, I'll never get it people must have hughe inferiority complexes or so

I was underpaid and doing a job I didn't really like, I stuck with it for 6 months and told my boss about it. He didn't do anything about it. Our head of department told us at a meeting that as a young professional, you own your career path. I quit the following month and all of a sudden, my boss was ready to listen to him. I told him it was too late, I own my career path and this isn't good for it.

In knew it was bad at the time, but holy shit have I realised how shitty my last job was!

Underpaid (though still not doing too badly), underappreciated, and no promotion or raise despite promises of one for over a year. Of course the minute I handed in my notice, they immediately offered me a 15k raise and "oh, we can get you involved in the management side in 6 months".

Guess what bitches, my new job * is * being a manager, and I get a 20k pay rise. 2 weeks in and I'm loving it, wish I'd switched sooner!

The catch is, I'm now a manager. Does this make me the future bad guy?

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

When your manager casually mentions that you're(me) going to learn developing apps for iOS, when you obviously have a built in hate for Apple.

You just sit there thinking about how the fuck the situation escalated unexpectedly quick.

50-60% are
Underpaid corporate slaves.

So...Just got moved from salaried to hourly for an already extremely overworked, underpaid position. Lost our flexible hours and our platform is moving to drop and drag...Watch them say no overtime now. Beyond pissed!😡

I am sad, I am not getting paid for last month's work as it was some "mis-communication" and my contract was available till August! 2 options

> set opacity of the website in such a manner it partially shows anything
> set the website on fire

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 :(

I work full time in backend web development and my sister that's in retail makes double what I make in a year... I need a new fucken job.

Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.

My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.

To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.

We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.

Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.

Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!

maybe Step 2 didn't make it.
maybe it decided to leave and disappear.
or maybe, it was destroyed by an underpaid, overworked dev who holds grudges against Step 2.

Wherever you are, I'd miss the step that I didn't have to take to make the plugin works.

Oh so day continued....

My boss just asked me before I left... You know that report we wanted automated, you said you'd get it done by today, is it done yet?

Me: well uh who dragged me into a PROD issue because no one else knows how to investigate... EVEN THOUGH I BUILT AND SHOWED U HOW TO USE THEM... SEVERAL TIMES. (no i didn't say this last but that's what went on in my head).

Oh and I figured out what the issue was...

I'm used to being underpaid by bad clients, but today I'm getting paid $100 to write a bash script that configures an ARM-based Debian machine to act as an AP. It's refreshing

I'm a developer, member of the A-Team. Actually I'm the leader of the A-Team.

We are incredibly skilled. Our problem solving capabilities is amazing, almost 100 times more effective than the rest of people. We produce code 10 times faster and better than anybody else. We have THE knowledge.

We can save the company in case of emergency.

For that reason, it's of paramount importance to nurture and protect the A-Team.

- When there is a bug, A-Team will not correct it. Because, if A-Team is busy, and bad shit happens, the company could be destroyed and we couldn't help

- When there is some important features to develop with a deadline, A-Team will not participate: A-Team must stay alert and ready in case of emergency

- If huge catastrophe happens and long hours, night and weekend are needed to fix it, A-Team will not risk burning the A-Team because it's the only high skilled team we have. The company cannot afford to have an A-Team member exhausted, underpaid, unhappy leaving or sleepy. Therefore, the company will sacrifice other less important people.

A-Team is company biggest asset and must be protected in any kind of situations.
The company should also pay training for them in order to increase their skills and make them unreplaceable.

These are my conditions. I'm the leader of the A-Team. You can't afford to loose me.

Do you guys think it's fine to leave a company even if you're a team leader and currently working on an important project for them?

Because I feel sad, underpaid, and abuse on this company.

P.M (calm) : You are not taking ownership of your works as others. You are only just doing it .

Me (concentrating face) : Inside -> I am fucking underpaid for a long and a month delay in salary. What the fuck are you expecting . You are saying this when you are about to give me a rise ?

Back on dev rant, been a while. Been two Jobs later...
Was extremely underpaid at the previous job.
Started a new venture two weeks ago. Long story short this company outsources their developers to other companies. The job I applied for is 'Junior Developer'. JUNIOR DEVELOPER!!!
Yet I'm being outsourced as an 'Intermediate Developer'.
Honestly I like the challenge, but businesses need to treat their employee's properly and not manipulate their young developers so they can get more money for cheap.
Really now, I've been dealing with this everywhere I go and it pisses me off.
On top of that I have no Senior Developer. I am the only developer. The other six, including my boss, are DBA's and don't know C#

Would you leave a job that is kind of fun and not that tiring if you feel underpaid?

I feel so underpaid for this project! 😤

I work at a company that sees front end developers as, basically, lab rats. I make less than my coworkers, who are all underpaid, and also turn out more clean code (based on mutual agreement, plus the only person who documents anything) than the rest of the team, and at much higher quantities.

Why? Because I get my ass handed to me by depression and anxiety every morning, and end up coming in ~1 hour late everyday. (For nearly a year now, even with medical intervention)

I'm probably going to be fired for it fairly soon, as well as get swallowed in medical bills.

On the bright side, I finally fixed a bug with my portfolio website that I've been working on, so I've got that going for me which is nice.

Too many projects, too little time and didn't get a raise. So I now work on projects that people I like ask me to. Ignoring the other pm's while looking for a better job.

Currently working on a new project with a group of people, (about 8 guys, no ladies 😒).

Anyways, out of the eight, there are only 3 devs, 3 designers and 2 main idea guys. I'm a member of all 3 sets and to top it of, the other designers don't know what they are doing.

Life is beautiful, fucking beautiful.

I really really want to change jobs and pursue being a game dev.

I am so tired of our company kissing our clients' asses, out of fear they might leave, making the developer work an extra mile without the appropriate salary for the extra work, which now I realize why we have alot of sh*ty projects.

I think there is a clear line between customer service and being suckups.

:(

Allright, so now I have to extend a brand new application, released to LIVE just weeks ago by devs at out client's company. This application is advertised as very well structured, easy to work on, µservices-based masterpiece.

Well either I lack a loooot of xp to understand the "µservices", "easy to work on" and "well structured" parts in this app or I'm really underpaid to deal with all of this...

- part of business logic is implemented in controllers. Good luck reusing it w/o bringing up all the mappings...
- magic numbers every-fucking-where... I tried adding some constants to make it at least a tiny bit more configurable... I was yelled at by the lead dev of the app for this later.
- crud-only subservices (wrapped by facade-like services, but still.. CRUD (sub)services? Then what's a repository for...?). As a result devs didn't have a place where they could write business logic. So business logic is now in: controllers (also responsible for mapping), helpers (also application layer; used by controllers; using services).
- no transactions wrapping several actions, like removing item from CURRENT table first and then recreating it in HISTORY table. No rollback/recovery mechanism in service layers if things go South.
- no clean-code. One can easily find lines (streams) 400+ cols long.
- no encapsulation. Object fields are accessed directly
- Controllers, once get result from Services (i.e. Facade), must have a tree of: if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice1.Item1) {...} else if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice2.Item4) {...} etc. to build a proper DTO. IMO this is not a way to make abstraction - application should NOT know services' internals.
- µservices use different tables (hats off for this one!) but their records must have the same IDs. E.g. if I order a burger and coke - there are 2 order items in my order #442. When I make a payment I create an invoice which must have an id #442. And I'm talking about data layer, not service or application (dto)! Shouldn't µservices be loosely coupled and be able to serve independently...? What happens if I reuse InvoiceµService in some other app?

What are your thoughts?

I've got a mate at my current work. Most of what we do is insult each other, but there's a real respect there. We were both in similar positions in the company, where we were overworked, underpaid, undervalued and pretty unhappy. He was so helpful when it came to traversing the politics of the company, and how to work out what to do. Plus we get really drunk together all the time. I'm leaving my present company in a few weeks and I'll probably miss having him around the most.

you literally change about 80% of your business flow then demand new features/modules for literally at least once every 3 months, then you are angry why your 2 underpaid, overworked programmers can't catch up.

Came back to work while being sick due to lack of sickdays. I'm near comatose from headache and coughing going zombie around the office.
PM: How you doing?
Me: Underpaid, overworked and sick. Can't do shit about the latter.

We had this social network in Norway, called Nettby (similar to MySpace). Where you could write HTML code on your profile page, and add css of you had a premium membership. That's how my interest for web started. i had no idea what I was doing.

Then I made a website for a LAN-party for my hometown, with booking seats and payment, and the works.

Made my first commercial website a year later, I was 12 at the time. 6000 NOK (underpaid, but for a 12y/o it was a lot of candy)

Fast forward to highschool, teachers say computers are a waste of time, and I'll never be successful in life with that.

Turned 20 a few months back, I run my own corporation, and work at mid-Norway's largest production company (web, 3d, video, graphics)

I recently found out, by resorting to methods that don't need mentioning, that i was severely underpaid for the type of work I'm doing, acoeding to company standards.
I promptly asked for a raise and they agreed...but...
It seems that for this to happen, i jave to undergo a 3 month trial period and also that none of the work performed thusfar will be take into consideration.
To add insult to injury, the appropriate pay grade would litteraly be double what I currently earn and "no raise can surpass a maximum of 30% of the current wage" due to what I imagine to be a rule extracted from the sacred company bilaws that were etched in stone and cristened in the blood of former employees...
Does any of this seem fair? It doesn't sound fair. (Excuse any typos or grammar issues but this really got me mad)

Trying to manage and develop five massive projects does not leave much free time and does not do much for my sanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I am working in this small company (9 employees - 2 developers me inclusive) in the Netherlands, already for 8 months. My responsibilities are mostly back-end development with PHP, but sometimes they ask me to do front-end apps too or even mobiles apps (with react js/native). And I have 4 years of experience. At the moment, I am responsible for 5 projects. In fact, if I quit, company is going to have a lot of problems, because no one can overtake my projects, they will need to hire someone else.

So, I get 1950euros/month, which is really low for developer with my skills in the NL (I agreed on this, because at the time I really needed the job and I am not a good negotiator), and I feel like the company is taking advantage of me. But from the other side, I like my colleagues, bosses and the projects I work with, they are awesome, comparing to my prior experience. I even get the freedom to experiment with new technologies.

So I am going to ask for a raise, but is there a limit for how much should I ask? I would like to get at least 2.5k, which is already 30% increase, but salary.com says I should get 4k. So, I wonder isnt it a little too much?

I never asked for a raise before, so I would really appreciate some advice.

I'm working in a really really small start up company (I'm the only developer here with the owner being a programming professor in the local uni).
It's my first job after leaving uni and I knew it was a risky decision that I've made but it was my hometown and I could save some extra money by saving on rent and food, also I've always loved a good challenge.
But the challenge isn't working as excepted. It's been a year since I've started here and there was no planning for almost nothing, it's a "do as you think it's best but I'll probably won't like so you have to it again" kind of methodology. Also I've been hire to do an hybrid mobile app and I've ended up doing a full e-commerce website with shitty outdated technology that I've had no experience in using.
So for me I'm more than done. I'm tired of having my suggestions being completely ignored, of the lack of planning and instruction and the fact that I'm being underpaid for what I do.
Fuck it, I'm looking for a new job.

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

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

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

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

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

My first job as a student was at the institute. I was working realy hard. Doing my best. Closing issues lika a boss. All my code was reviewed by senior.
Two other student has this simple program to make (gui for some functions and some graphs). They have no idea how to make it. Their code was worst than spageti and in four mounths then didn't even come close to the end. Noone even looked at theri code.

We were paid the same money!

I have been developing this bias in my mind about people with MBA degrees/ Management roles.

Like for example, I can't deal with my managers who has no programming expertise, but they are there just because they have a huge work ex(idk in sitting and playing on phone?) or have an MBA degree.

I feel in a tech company; management, ppt, excel people should be eliminated. I'm not saying all the roles but just a few who have little to no contribution.

When a team works on it's own and delivers and maintains the system. It's these managerial people who take credits. It's these people who get hikes more than necessary.

For years, developers are treated like call center people, like sheeps, they aren't valued, and are highly underpaid!

Do you think MBA people will be jobless if we empower developers to the point where we won't need MBA degree holders with "Time Management" as their core skills written in LinkedIn Profiles?

What makes Managerial roles so special?

Correct me if my bias is wrong.

P.S. This whole rant was about MNC's in India. I can't tell for other countries.

#include <advice>
using namespace plz;

So I have a soft cozy internship for a large retail corporation, the workplace is fantastic and the people are nice. We run into problems where this company outsources to India for almost all of its programming leaving their "software engineers" to answer emails and support 15 year old applications. This is obviously not the work I want to be doing. I want to create. This company also pays slightly less than average for an entry level programmer. I have one year of college left as well. At the end of this internship it is almost guaranteed that I get a full time offer but I only get 2 months to accept or decline. I feel like I'll say no.

So I guess what I'm asking is, should I turn down the safe first job and go for work that will make me excited in the morning or take the easy soft underpaid email answering job?
Thanks guys

So I've been working with this company for like 3 years now, my only issue with it is I'm kinda underpaid (1.3K/month in Italy).

Today I had an interview at another company, like 1km away from this one, and it feels promising, the only difference would be in the products: here I make web-based stuff and VR apps, in the new one, I'd just be there incapsulating AI into other stuff for medical and industrial usage, using python and a lot of other stuff I never used or that I haven't used in the past 3 years or so...

Current company is made of me, boss and dude who works on social medias
New company is 17 people and many of them are engineers, mathematicians... more focused on what I actually do/like to do

Current company would go through quite a hard time without me (hardest projects were entirely developed by me + design/css from boss/other)

What would you do? My dream job is to make videogames with my own ideas (but can't rely on that to earn money)

I'm just a developer. So why the heck do I have to spend whole days talking to potential bussiness partners, discussing possible deals, preparing plan for next year and organizing various coworkers (including some managers) to fulfil the other deal that I haven't helped to negotiate. If I wanted to track so many things, speak to so many people and not write a single line of code whole days, I would have became manager and would ask for different salary!

Local underpaid developer with stress related hair loss thinks of reasons to die while excessively paid boss looks over his shoulder and asks him if he can do some overtime.

Into a bunch of open source hogging meat heads because no one likes paying for things their own peers toil days and nights creating and creating more under documented over expensive licensed stuff (because agile) while throwing buzzwords to clients just make business while simultaneously choking the life out of underpaid overworked devs and engineers with the skill of running away from responsibility trying to save their own skin with the inept ability to look like a hero/King at the end of the day with a single mail sent with psychic communication or the lack thereof with people who are slogging their asses off to fix a problem created to the vulnerabilities and bugs introduced due to the impatience of the same moron who couldn't afford to give his employees/subordinates more time to figure out an elegant solution to a non existent problem created in the confusion of improperly documenting unnecessary requirements of an ignorant or unknowing client who is way too eager to process way too much load with way too less resources all the while whining about lack of features theyre not gonna use.

Knowing way more than what your current job needs, and enough to get a decent position, but no degree/certs/multi-thousand dollar sheets of paper to prove it and being stuck in a dead end job

What's the best way to ask my IT manager for a first year review? What's the best way to approach it from a junior position where I feel I'm being underpaid and overworked?

I have worked for a company where almost everyone want to leave that place. People receive gifts to compensate for being underpaid (dinners, chocolates, shirts) etc. Now they’ve just got GPTW certified. What a fuck? I can’t believe in these surveys and rankings anymore.

I wanna change my job. But since i am frigging underpaid ( almost 2 years exp in web dev) i need an increment before leaving the current mediocre company inorder to increase my Expected CTC for the new company. I need a plan for approaching the CEO.

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

What's worse than being underpaid for your work?
Asking you to make stupid and pointless changes to it time and again.

Joined my first software engineering job a couple months back...

Is it okay to feel being underpaid over time?

Today is a great day. I was asked to rewrite my code to an API I suggested from the beginning of the development of the app but they didn't allow it to me cause it was a payed service. They preferred the free one instead that is not the best but is not half bad. I'm counting on finishing my internship next month cause I need a dev job to get out of my shitty, underpaid job as a steward and rewriting the code will take the very least 3 extra months. I just want to finish my internship so I can build my portfolio website, start the Udacity course for full stack developer certification and get a goddamn dev job.

How to go from a fixed job to freelancing in sites like toptal and so on? I feel like I'm a bit underpaid for what I do.

Staying in my previous position as long as I did. I was underpaid, underutilized, and stuck using an aging subset of technologies.

Happy and underpaid Vs "overpaid" and bored - which option you would you choose?

It's funny.

When you are underpaid, you boss treats you well. Grants you everything you wish, etc.

After one year, when you request a raise, and asking to be paid NEAR the salary you deserve, and after you agree, he starts to act cold.

When you receive a merit increase...check the web and still slightly underpaid for your position.....

Wondering if I should say something....

The new feature on Stack Overflow tells me that I'm way underpaid. Guess I should ask for a big raise or start doing less lol