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Search - "working on startup"
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I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.
In the offline event:
1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.
2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.
3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.
4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).
5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<
6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.
7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.
All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.
Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)
Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.16 -
First world problems...
I've been working at this startup as a tech lead for a little over a year, and we've grown from 3 to over 150 employees, and a bit over a million end users.
I've spent tens of thousands on high end displays and chairs for your lazy butts, on external consultants to help and train you, even those fucking dirty recruiters have leeched their shares of the pie. I built an amazing luxury kitchen with a fridge, beer cooler, induction plates and a blender for all your crossfitting bodybuilder meals, but forgot to think of my own needs.
NOW I JUST WANT TO BUY A GOOD COFFEEMAKER AND ALL THESE FUCKING TEASLURPING FAKE DEV-BROS SUDDENLY START SCREAMING ABOUT BUDGETS AND HOW COFFEE IS NOT NECESSARY IF YOU MEDITATE. FUCK YOU, WE'RE LIKE THE ONLY STARTUP IN THE COUNTRY RUNNING A FAT PROFIT. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR STUPID MINDFULNESS IOS APP. GIVE ME MY FUCKING ESPRESSO OR I'LL BLEND YOUR BALLS INTO A PROTEIN SHAKE.25 -
Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
I was working in a small startup with very cool people as a GameDev. One day I turned towards my colleague to tell him about a joke I just read and I saw flames coming out of his CPU. He was so focused on his work that he didn't notice.
I yelled "OH, SHIT' and quickly reached to the main switch and turned it off. Everyone turned towards me to yell at me, but then they saw the flames and everyone ran outside.
After few minutes the flames died. My colleague was in shock to lose his work as the HDD was completely burned.11 -
practiseSafeHex’s most incompetent co-worker follow up: Candidate 1, “T”.
(For those wondering WTF I’m talking about: https://devrant.com/rants/1148190/...)
Forgot to mention something that happened with T that I find hilarious. T had a pretty profound effect on the company / team. It was a small startup, CEO + 4 of us, so we were all kinda close.
The day T was fired we decided this was too big of a moment to forget, so we created T_____ day, and to this day despite all working in different places we still meet up for drinks on October 24th to celebrate getting rid of that nut bag.2 -
Every day.
I am a PHP developer.
Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.
It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.
First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.
They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.
Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.
PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.
You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.
PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.
Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.
When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...
PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.
Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".
Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.
Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.
Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...28 -
Alright so here goes, I currently work at a promising startup. Absolutely love it; nice, hard-working colleagues but there's only a couple of us so we all have to wear a multitude of hats.
I don't mind being on support duty or helping out a customer with a technical question but one thing that really gets to me is lazy people.
We have some instructional videos (made in-house by yours truly) around certain functionality in our app which can't be simplified any further and they're condensed to about 50 seconds each.
I receive an email from a customer saying that he wants the instructions in screenshot form instead of watching the video because he 'detests' watching videos.
I must admit, I was a little hurt because he dismissed my videos so easily without even watching them. Just because he really doesn't like to watch videos? I was dumbfounded.
Me putting (most of) my rustled jimmies aside, I take about an hour to screenshot and document each step of the instructions and send them to the customer with a note: Be careful, if you scroll too fast it turns into a video.
I receive a response saying he doesn't like to watch videos because he is deaf but he did admit he had a chuckle.
Morale of the story lads, keep the sass in in your IDE's and out of your customer interactions.
True story.7 -
My asshole coworkers talking about how programmers without a degree are worth shit and cannot achieve anything in industry besides working from startup to startup.
Well, surprise, I'm sitting right next to them, in the same big company and I don't have ANY higher education at all.
Just because I prefer more hands-on experience than theory stuff doesn't make me worse developer than those bastards. I just learn more from working on something, than from sitting in classroom and taking notes.
Fortunately people at HR and boss also valued my previous experience when they hired me, but now having to work with those guys every day is killing me.13 -
Where do I even start?
Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.
Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.
Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.
Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.
I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.
The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.
I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.
The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.
The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.8 -
Me 5 years ago : "Guys we are gonna have a perf..."
CEO : "Not now, we need to deliver that functionality asap"
Me 3 years ago : "Guys, performances/scalibiluity will hit us like a trucK'
CEO : "Not nowem a new functionality needs to be done ASAP"
Me 1 year ago : "We are gonna be hit by a tank. We won't even understand what happens"
CEO : "I'm sure we can manage"
2 Days ago : Plateform quasiment down, response time in MIONUTES instead of milliseconds, database on fire.
CEO : "WHAT THE FUCK !!! GO FIXC I ASAP WE CANNOT HAVE THAT SHIT HAPPEN".
This is a brief summaru of working in a startup.11 -
I hope everyone at Microsoft working on Windows 10 dies a horrible death and gets eaten by dogs. FUCK YOU windows!
I have a dual boot machine, logged into windows after a while(months) . Fucker 5 hours to update. Now that it's updated, I did the task I had to do and shifted back to Linux. Now all my other drives, which I didn't so much as touch with windows are fucking read only for some reason!
2 fucking hours spent on trying to find the problem, now I realize thag that after the fuckmaster's update, They reset all my settings and the dicklickin Fast Startup was on again!
FUCK YOU AND YOUR SHITTY WINDOWS TEAM MICROSOFT! CAN'T EVEN PERSIST USER SETTINGS DURING AN UPDATE THEN HAVE THE BALLS TO TELL ME "ALL YOUR FILES ARE EXACTLY WHERE YOU LEFT THEM".
Dear head engineer at windows team, or product manager, or whoever the fuck is in charge of this shit, JUMP UP YOUR OWN ASS AND DIE WITH A DILDO IN YOUR MOUTH YOU DIPSHIT!19 -
Experiencing it right now.
As I type this I am sat in hospital having lost power to my hands over the weekend.
I work a day job, I have my own startup that I’m working on and I’m also freelancing on another startup.
Just been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. It sucks. My hands feel about as a strong as a particularly weak 4 year old girl.13 -
What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?
Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?
For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:
1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.
2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.
3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.
4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.
5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.
6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.
7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.19 -
Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)
First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:
Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).
We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".
1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.
1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"
Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.
CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.
When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!
So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.
I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.
Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.
Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.
Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.
So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off
I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine
.... happy job hunting everyone!10 -
Yesterday I fucked up big time.
First time in my career (I’m 23).
I just started working this week at a new company startup that had no programmers before me. They have a bunch of websites under their control that were on all different hosting solutions, and we decided to move them all to AWS.
I moved a few and was managing the folder rights on the server.
What happened next made my heart skip a few beats.
Bear in mind I’m not an expert in Linux.
I wanted to chmod to the folder I was currently in, and typed ‘sudo chmod -R 770 /‘ thinking for a while that the ‘/‘ would do it on my current dir.
Fuck. As I saw what was happening I pressed ctrl + c as fast as I could. But the damage had been done.
Fast forward a couple hours I deleted the broken instance, and created a new one from scratch. Had to do everything again but managed to do it in just a couple hours, moving as fast as I could without making such stupid mistakes again.
I was honest about it from the first minute it happened, and told my boss right away that I fucked up and had to start over, with a couple of hours of downtime.
Luckily not much was lost and I took a snapshot right after I was finished and will look into auto backups next week.8 -
Apparently some trust fund kid from my uni is now a CEO - I guess it's nice when your daddy buys you a startup for Christmas.
Makes me wonder if I wasted my good years working hard on my skills instead of getting myself a "daddy".38 -
Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.
Me: ok.
[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]
Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.
[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]
Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.
Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.
[two days later shows to Manager2]
Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.
Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)
Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]
...
Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)
Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf
Me: I quit
- - -
Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.4 -
!!pointless story
Bug report comes in from a coworker. "Cloudinary uploads aren't working. I can't sign up new customers."
"I'll look into it" I say.
I go to one of our sites, and lo! No Cloudinary image loads. Well that can't be good.
I check out mobile app -- our only customer-facing platform. None of the images load! Multiple "Oops!" snackbars from 500 errors on every screen / after every action.
"None of our Cloudinary images load, even in the mobile app," I report.
Nobody seems to notice, but they're probably busy.
I go to log into the Cloudinary site, and realize I don't have the credentials.
"What are the Cloudinary credentials, @ceo?" I ask.
I'm met with more silence. I use this opportunity to look through the logs, try different URLs/transforms directly. Oddly, everything seems fine except on our site.
I check Slack again, and see nothing's changed, so I set about trying to guess the credentials.
Let's see... the ceo is basically illiterate when it come to tech, so it's probably not his email. It's a startup, and custom emails for things cost money, and haven't been a thing here forever, so it's probably oen of the CTO's email aliases. he likes dots and full names so that narrows it down. Now for the password.... his are always crappy (so they're "easy to remember") and usually have the abbreviated company name in them. He also likes adding numbers, generally two-digit numbers, and has a thing for 7s and 9s. Mix in some caps, spaces, order...
Took me a few minutes, but I managed to figured it out.
"Nevermind, I guessed them." I reported.
After getting into Cloudinary, I couldn't find anything amiss. Everything looked great. No outage warnings, metrics looked fine, images all loaded. Ex-cto didn't revoke payment or cancel the account.
I checked our app; everything started loading -- albeit slowly.
I checked the aforementioned site; after a few minutes, everything loaded there, too.
Not sure what else to do, and with everything appearing to work, I said "Fixed!" and closed the issue.
About 20 minutes later, the original person said "thanks" -- never did hear anything from the ceo. I've heard him chatting away in the other room the entire time.
Regardless, good thing for crappy passwords, eh?15 -
A client came to the startup I was working at, to discuss a potential schools/universities based project. Their requirements were as follows
1. Full control of every class's daily routine (based on teacher's availabilities).
2. Multiple-choice exam feature (Timed).
3. Individual dashboards for teachers, head of departments, the Headmaster for every school onboarded on the platform.
4. Scores analysis of every student in every class (Report card).
5. Attendance feature for every student.
And so on.
Guess their budget for the above.
200 USD. FUCKING 200 US Dollars !!!!
My stomach hurt that day from laughing.8 -
I'm a freelance iOS developer / UI designer and working on a pet related startup. I deal with lot of pets. My parents thinks that I'm full-time dog care taker.7
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To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
Was working in small startup with great people on new projects, but for very low salary and shitty conditions.
Changed job to big company with nice salary and great conditions, but people are assholes and have to work on legacy stuff mostly.
Guess you can't have everything.1 -
A few interview tips from the other side of the table:
1. Bring a laptop
I mean come up man! Bring a laptop. Especially if there was some kind of project or challenge to present. I have seen so many people do a big UI design presentation and then come in like “can I use your laptop???”. Of course you can, but your looking very unprepared.
2. Ask for clarification
Communication problems happen in business every day. Different cultures and accents can cause issues. The important part isn’t wether you understand everything said but that you ask enough questions to make sure you eventually understand. Most people just wrongly assume things and start rambling.
3. Know what kind of company you and talking to
In my case, this is a startup. We aren’t IBM or Amazon or Google. We work hard and we play hard. Work life balance is important in life but if your very first question is “work/life balance???” then you played yourself. Wait a bit, pepper it in on the sly. Just don’t ask it right away, it shows us that you aren’t ready to work harder than usual if needed. Maybe try “so how do you like working here? How are the people, hours etc?” Or something besides the first question being a bad signal.
Just some random tips for an interviewer.
From me to you, don’t make me have to tell you like DJ Khalid would ...
Congratulations, you played yourself.23 -
In 2018, while working in Tokyo for a Fukuoka-based startup, one of my co-workers insisted that he wanted an SSL certificate installed on his local dev machine, but he didn't know how to do that. So I created and self-signed one for him. When our CEO came to visit our Tokyo office from Fukuoka, the coworker proudly showed him how his browser would display that green lock icon when visiting localhost:3000. This apparently impressed my CEO, because a few days later the coworker was invited to work at the HQ in Fukuoka while everybody else at the Tokyo office (incl. me) was let go.
This coworker would also only copy whole open source repositories, foo/bar/g all occurrences of the project name with our company name, and tell our CEO that he wrote that code.
I don't know how to deal with this bullshit.9 -
The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...
I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.
Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!
I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.
RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.
Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.
We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.
Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!
I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.
I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!
But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.5 -
!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.
It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!5 -
Once, at my first job, the CEO of the company sent a group email in which he essentially lambasted my ability to do my job.
I wasn't even hired as a programmer, I was a data entry guy who learned how to code on the job, and at this point I was literally the only person writing code for the company. I regularly worked 12+ hours every day, and even though I had to learn practically everything on my own I was still getting things done -- at least, I would have gotten things done if the CEO didn't keep pulling me off of my projects to work on whatever his latest ultra-important-idea-of-the-week was. I was even working for an 8 hr/day, 5 day/week salary, putting in extra hours for free.
But no, my sacrifices and hard work weren't good enough in the CEO's eyes, and he chose to say that to multiple people in an email, including investors in our startup. I don't remember exactly what was said, but whatever it was made me so livid I couldn't do any work; every time I sat down to code, I thought about that email and it so infuriated me that I couldn't concentrate. It took me twelve hours just to calm down enough to get back to coding.
After that, I refused to communicate with the CEO except through my boss, the CTO.7 -
So today I basically "lost" the chance to enter this remarkable security StartUp. The dream made true... a couple of Python nice scripts, the logic test that wasn't that big, everything was going well.
I met the CEO, damn! He seems to be a great dude. But suddenly, a wild co-founder appeared.
The dude started to talk about money and how he didn't perceive me as a Senior developer (not even if my results were telling him the oppositive); he ended up with: you seemed to be Mid-advance.
I was like: Ok, I understand. Wasn't that big because I knew that I could have demonstrated my skills.
Then he asked about my salary expectations, I answered to him my realistic expectations, that to be honest, it wasn't a lot of damn money! Because, I really was expecting a chance to learn more, have bigger challenges, bring value, etc.
He said: Okay let me check this with my partner. But, that was a week ago.
Anyway, today I received an email from the CEO, with the typical apologize telling me that the vacancy will be paused by the moment.
Oh, I didn't mention that one friend of mine is working there and he told me a couple of hours ago that they have hired a Junior developer because he was willing to accept what they wanted to pay him. Puff it broke my heart, but I wish him luck because even though I was dying to be on that security StartUp, I’m not at the point to accept a misery of money to work harder, I just felt frustrated with that stingy guy.14 -
The PCs in our school have a software called "Dr. Kaiser" which purpose is to prevent changes to the disk. I thought it's working like DeepFreeze for OSX devices; having a copy-on-write feature or something like that. One day a friend of mine (kinda newbie in hacking) said he wanted to create a backdoor in the system so you can login as the local administrator of the device. He replaced the "sethc.exe" in the windows directory with cmd.exe on a live distro and claimed it was working perfectly. It turned out that "Dr. Kaiser" is indeed loading the default image on startup, but doesn't verify checksums for system files (and also doesn't include the files in the default image). Long story short: You now can open a cmd with System permissions on every PC in the building.
This. Is. Stupid. It should be forbidden to sell this software 😖6 -
Startup.
Our intern is a weird bird. He is an immigrant (like me) and should be working his ass of to become an FT, and then tie the H1B. I never had an opportunity like this.
Instead the dude sat on his hands for four/five months since hired. He was managed remotely and fairly low touch. He was doing some light support work initially, though I had not heard anything from him.
I take him on now as his ass is about to get dropped. Manage him much more directly (small tasks several checking per day, you get the picture). We need to deliver something relatively simple in three weeks.
On Thursday I find out that the dude has no idea of what Spring is (we are a Java shop). Dude, you have had access to our fucking code base for five months, didn't it cross your mind to poke in? Maybe do a little research and see what this thing is that we are using ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE? I sit two desks from you, why the fuck didn't you ask me a question? This ain't fucking socialism where we have a five year plan.
I swear, two things I dislike: incompetence and laziness. And incompetence can generally be cured with some lecturing if the other party is willing to listen.14 -
I had a short gig for a startup where I was meant to migrate the entire backend to serverless. It was my first time learning what serverless was and I had just been working on the app for around 2-3 weeks.
Boss rolls in with his leased Tesla and sort of hints at me being finished with a certain area by the next day, giving me a wink as if he's just trying to motivate me to keep on struggling.
Turns out he decided that he wanted a fully fledged demo and went off on me because I hadn't finished migrating the UI for that certain section (just the backend). I decided that there were better things to work on while I was at it migrating the backend. Had I known that he expected some form of fancy demo, maybe I would have done things differently.
He then proceeded by letting me know that he could have finished my work in half the time it took me and decided to remind me that I had a probationary employment. I left the company two weeks later and the app never got released.2 -
Favorite/most hated language? (I love a good flame war)
Why did you quit your previous job / Moment you've considered quitting your current job?
Why do you think Linux is so much better than OSX? (Ahh yes I feed on apple flavored hipster tears)
What side project are you currently working on?
If you had the best teams and unlimited funds, to be used only on a serious project using both Blockchain, IoT and AI, what would you create?
If you forgot how to code, what other career would you pursue?
What is your "I was so busy wondering if I could, that I forgot whether I should" concept/idea/project?
How many chicken eggs would fit inside the moon if it was hollow? (I like retarded interview questions)
If you started a startup, what unique perk would you offer your developer employees?
Do you under- or overengineer?
Most unnecessary feature you ever had to create?
Most necessary feature your boss/client denied to approve?15 -
When I was in college in 1996, one of my roommates had a “Web 101” class. At that same time, the office of a government agency I was working for had asked me to publish a website to let the public know what they were doing. Prior to that I had bought an HTML 1.0 reference and had been fiddling around with some things. I got excited about it all when I realized that just within 2 weeks of using the book I had passed up the entire class my roommate was taking and apparently knew more at that point than the professor. I published the agency site, then went on to build sites for the Uni and freelance clients, and then to apply to teach a more advanced class in the Continuing Education courses the Uni offered to adults in the community. All of that got me a job at a startup which led to the rest of my career. That was pretty dang exciting to me.1
-
So rewind back about 24 years. I was a little kid who thought computers were the coolest thing evar, and our family had just gotten our first machine (a monstrous tower from a company named CyberMax, running Win 3.11 on DOS 6, 33MHz and a 250MB hard drive).
My aunt (big into coding at the time) came by with a box full of disks and loaded the machine up with all kinds of games and fun stuff. One of the thing she installed was Hoyle Classic Card Games (https://playclassic.games/games/...)
My parents fell in love with this and played it for hours. The problem was, the process to get it started, while not complicated, was still a pain in the ass. You had to either hammer F6 to get the startup menu and type a bunch of commands to switch to the directory and start the game, or let it boot into windows, then leave windows for DOS and do the same thing.
On a lark, when we had gotten the machine, mom had also bought this little dos programming handbook. I can't find it nowadays, but it went into very exhaustive detail on the cool things you could do with batch files. I was a voracious reader, especially on anything to do with computers, and one of the things the book covered was how to write startup menus using the CHOICE command! Little me figured out that you could write this into the AUTOEXEC.bat, and have a menu come up on every start!
It took me a couple days of piddling around (again, I was like 6 or 7, and this was the first "program" I'd ever written), but I eventually got it to the point where you'd turn the computer on, and the first thing it would do is ask if you wanted to go into windows, or if you wanted to play cards. I was proud as hell when this was set up and working!
I didn't do much writing of programs since then (I was more interested in games at the time), but yeaaaarrrs later, I encountered Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, fell in love, and I've been hacking code ever since2 -
Want to make some friends quickly?
Just go to any pseudo startup incubator in a university (all business people with an idea), mention you are a coder (mimicking the typing on a keyboard to make sure they understand) and all of the sudden you'll have a crowd of people around you that "need to talk to you"
The other guys working with me have to physically protect me every time someone finds out1 -
Once had a manager who would refuse to review anything on the basis he "didn't have enough time". Not just code reviews, but also customer comms, support messages, documentation etc. - anything that it's good to get more than 1 set of eyes on. This was a small startup so me working pretty much solo - it wasn't like there was anyone else able to review anything like this.
Fair enough, you might say. He trusts me. Just put it out there.
...but then *as soon as* it was published / sent / committed / whatever, he'd then magically find 5 minutes to glance through it and point out how rubbish / unhelpful / ridiculous the work was, and how it should have never gone out in the first place, and why didn't I read through it before sending as I'd clearly realise how stupid this was.
After a few rounds of this I actually flipped out on him in the office, called him out on his BS and told him to think for 2 seconds about how ridiculous this situation was. In fairness to the guy he did back down, take note and it didn't happen again, but damn, those times were some of the most frustrating of my career to date. -
TLDR - you shouldn't expect common sense from idiots who have access to databases.
I joined a startup recently. I know startups are not known for their stable architecture, but this was next level stuff.
There is one prod mongodb server.
The db has 300 collections.
200 of those 300 collections are backups/test collections.
25 collections are used to store LOGS!! They decided to store millions of logs in a nosql db because setting up a mysql server requires effort, why do that when you've already set up mongodb. Lol 😂
Each field is indexed separately in the log.
1 collection is of 2 tb and has more than 1 billion records.
Out of the 1 billion records, 1 million records are required, the rest are obsolete. Each field has an index. Apparently the asshole DBA never knew there's something called capped collection or partial indexes.
Trying to get approval to clean up the db since 3 months, but fucking bureaucracy. Extremely high server costs plus every week the db goes down since some idiot runs a query on this mammoth collection. There's one single set of credentials for everything. Everyone from applications to interns use the same creds.
And the asshole DBA left, making me in charge of handling this shit now. I am trying to fix this but am stuck to get approval from business management. Devs like these make me feel sad that they have zero respect for their work and inability to listen to people trying to improve the system.
Going to leave this place really soon. No point in working somewhere where you are expected to show up for 8 hours, irrespective of whether you even switch on your laptop.
Wish me luck folks.3 -
I think my biggest problem is not being able to let go.
I love this product and believe in it 100%, but I CANT FUCKING STAND ANOTHER MINUTE WORKING WITH THESE FUCKING CLUELESS CLOWNS WHO ARE GOING TO DRIVE IT TO THE FUCKING GROUND!!!!!
...you know what? fuck 'em, I meanwhile reap $400+ monthly checks from Udemy, while our "best startup / amazing startup / omg wow lol i'm a fucking idiot" has earned a TOTAL of $200 in the past FUCKING YEAR
YOU FUCKING CLOWNS GET YOUR HEAD ON STRAIGHT OR I WILL TAKE THIS COMPANY OVER AND CONTROL ALL DECISIONS, IGNORING ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING YOU THINK IS 'WISE' YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT 'WISE' IS YOU FUCKS!!!!!!!
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? YOU DON'T EVEN REMEMBER YOUR BITBUCKET CREDENTIALS!!!! YOU CAN'T EVEN REVOKE MY ACCESS
AAAAAAAGGGGGG YOU FUCKING CLOWNS GODDAMMIT THIS IS SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING I CANT EVEN I NEED TO SMASH SOMETHING TO GET THE RAGE OUTAASDASDJKLFJ;KLAFDSJKL;AFDSJKL;AFES L;KADFS AF LSAFS DHI;A EGWHIOAEGW IOAEGWHIO3 -
Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.
You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.
BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.
So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."
And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!
I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.
Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.2 -
My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!3 -
So one day on tech huddle my tech lead got frustrated, don't know why and told me - "the tasks you're doing can be done by interns"
I felt bad. Ofcourse I was putting my 100%.
That day I decided to put the resignation. I didn't discussed with anyone about it and sent the resignation email directly.
After serving 2 months of notice period I was able to land a better job successfully!
I called the lead on the last working day in that company and shared him the news about my offer letter and a little about the company.
His first question was - "Did you cleared all the interview process?"
In my mind - "That's only why I'm sharing the news here with you man! Stop thinking of me as a noob."
I replied with - "yes, if needed/the new company try to get feedback about me then please be honest atleast there by keeping your ego aside."
You shouldn't pull someone's leg if you aren't able to climb higher!!
Lesson I learnt;
DON'T STAY AT A PLACE WHERE THERE'S NO VALUE OF YOUR WORK AND THE DEDICATION TOWARDS IT!
Working in a startup isn't that easy, mostly for those where there's no work life balance.2 -
So sometime back I was working as an android developer for a startup managed by a guy who wasn't much of a techie. The team wanted a share image to facebook option in the app, which required FB SDK integration into the app, which in turn will increase the app size and request more permissions. On discussing this with them and asking for the app secrets, they said that I'm being ridiculous, and denied me from giving the app secrets, citing the reason 'They're called secrets for a reason'.3
-
Because I’m a fucking cowboy and a charlatan, and because I hate sleep and despise feeling refreshed and happy, I’m working pretty much full time as a contractor (I’m the full stack dev. I do everything) on a (well funded) startup alongside my day job.
Tonight I had to make some quick (lol “quick”) changes to a core piece of the platform.
Now before continuing please refer back to the first line of this rant.
So instead of writing new functionality, I copied and pasted another section.
I renamed all references of “new_order” to, cleverly “new_order2”.
I know.
I deploy to production...
My phone starts blowing up. In short, everything is fucked.
I’m going over the query, checking the production database. Why is this manifesting like this? It all looks correct.
2 HOURS of broken sales, pissed off customers, pissed off service agents and I see that there was still one reference of “new_order” that should have been “new_order2”.
I am a piece of shit.4 -
So I just had this job interview with a "startup" (side note: who the fuck still calls limping companies "startups" in 2024? That is sooooo 2010s).
There was this tattooed and very pale girl (you just know the vibe), the mandatory Norse bearded tall guy and the balding, "I'm-in-my-fifties-but-I-am-not-a-square, maaan" sleasy-looking white guy in a button up shirt but no suit jacket. The whole stereotypes gang came looking for their missing nerdy Indian.
The sleasy bloke goes on and on on a looong tirade on how they're "a tech innovation academy", how they "move fast and break things" and they "run smoking hot", so that "long nights are to be expected".
So, they usual red-flagging shit.
Then they all went on a "but we're not like all those companies that look exactly like us" word salad about "sustainability and a healthy work life balance", with their "highest value" being "the utmost respect at all times". I'm nodding my head at the meaningless splurge until they fart out the sentence "for example, cussing while talking with colleagues is a fireable offence".
If some hustling enterprise rather prefers a posh working environment, one can adapt to such circumstances. Provided, of course, that said enterprise adheres to the administrative coherence expected from a culturally refined institution. Mostly by compliance, from the leadership, to a rigidly predictable working schedule.
Now, if the bloody curs want coder dogs that work assfucking hours with a shit eating grin, they better swallow our fucking sailor mouths. Fuck, I've done twenty hour shifts getting my ass kicked in dark startup fisting/rush rooms. If unable to yell at any blabbering cocksucker to go stick his fucking opinions up the bitch who crapped him, then I ain't gonna bloody be there.
TL;DR they can either have a "utmost respect" working environment XOR a "fast and hot" daily hustle.
After they crapped out that oxymoron I could barely hold myself to avoid saying "sorry, I do not partake in any of the psychedelics you must be on".
On to the next interviews!7 -
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 -
The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....
After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.
They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?
They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???
I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.
At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.
I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.2 -
So a little story about finding your way. I worked at an IoT software firm, very well established. I had a hard time with the on boarding process due to some factors, and I must have lagged behind their mental schedule for my growth. It was clear nonetheless that I was a quality coder and had made some friends there.
It wasn’t enough for the ensuing corporate bullying. It went by and I took it. I became the yes man just so I don’t frustrate anyone enough to turn away my ask for help. This made things worse and before long, I a grown man went to visit my mum and all but cry at how small I felt, after all my hard work getting to the company.
I felt sick with failure but I knew I couldn’t go back. I emailed my resignation and dropped off my company laptop.
4 months later I am working at a medical startup with my own projects, that I have 100% control over. And the quality of my work and ethic is pleasing upper management in all the right ways. I’ve never been happier, and there are barely any perks on paper. No free lunches on Thursdays or discounts at the local high street. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life because I said NO to feeling or being treated any less than I worked and progressed to be.
Don’t let other people stop your potential for their own ego, or any other reason. 😊 -
When my company moved to the big city we all got new equipment. I selected a ThinkPad and two 24" Dell monitors. Most got themselves a MacBook pro and a 27" Samsung monitor.
Once the new great arrived I started my journey to free the poor ThinkPad from the spy-software that is windows and install Arch.
Everything went smooth until I connected both monitors via MST to the single mini Displayport. Screens flickered, flashed or started dark. Even the display inside the ThinkPad. After half a day of trying to get MST to work with the Nvidia/Intel hybrid graphic inside my ThinkPad I installed Windows on the second ssd and got some actual work done.
The next day I finally managed a static xconf that had all three displays in just the right configuration and I started to work on Linux.
The story would end here if Arch wasn't Arch and I had not installed updates when I did.
After about 6 month of happy working on Linux Paradise I updated Arch since it was overdue (two weeks without). Shit hit the fan. Cinnamon's display manager didn't like my xconf and crashed during startup. Sadly from previous experience I knew that this was the only dm that would work somewhat stable with my hardware comp. I tried to debug, created multiple issues on the various GitHub repos and invested another week into it before dropping Linux again.
I never doubted my knowledge of Linux more than during the times I tried to get MST working with Nvidia/Intel graphics on my ThinkPad.
Recently I switched to a 27" one monitor setup and I'm back on Arch without any trouble because MST isn't in the mix this time.
I guess the story had a happy end after all3 -
I see loads of students here.. and loads of freelancers and startup joiners.. all varieties...but one.. Anyone has a 'normal' 9-5 or sth (dev) work? Does that even exist?! Anyone stands up when the 8h are up and can leave the work behind?
I can't.. even when I leave the office I have algos & code stuck in my head..trying to solve the problem I worked on..
How do you handle non dev life? Is there anything left in a day?
I usually work monday-friday on avg 9h/day and have no idea how to manage not being fucked up at the end of the week. :\ I am trying to get back climbing, but usually I am just soooooo tiiiiireeeeeed after work.. I wanna sleep but when I close my eyes I see the code.. at least one core still left working..19 -
Hello, world!
Soo.. I am half way done with Pre-Release 10!
Woohoo!
However.. The update log is already as long as the full update log for the last update.. Which was twice as long as the log for the update before..
I'm Starting to notice a pattern.. XD
This is all good and well, but I feel as if I'm overworking myself. I'm getting stressed out, and I'm not spending near as much time with my girlfriend. 3: But, I'm having fun. I'm genuinely enjoying myself, and I'm making a ton of progress in such a short amount of time. I also have a new team member!
Idk.. I haven't done anything the past two days really. Work nor spending time with my girlfriend. I'm stressed, and I'm not sure what I should do. I'm sooper modivated to keep working, but I feel that my situation will only get worse.
---
Because I'm sure some of you will be interested ('cause my game is very popular in this community <3), here is the update list so-far. Do note that this is not the final list, and things will be added, and may be removed.
As you can see below, this update is mostly focussed around API's. Specifically Modding, and the new FileSystem. On top of this, I will *try* and tinker with the official Patreon API for Java and see if I can't intergrate that into my game. I'll also work on a ModManager, but I'm not sure if either of these will make it into this release. I also have plans for new Apps and Commands for this release, as well as working and polishing up existing Apps and Commands.
---
* Closing the game with X button (and other ways) now also calls preExitTasks()
+ Added AddonLoader. It's literally a Mod-Loader. (Your welcome :3) A tutorial coming soon, but just know that it's standard Java codeing and you simply need to drop the mod.jar into the game's addons/ directory.
++ Added "API" - This is a bunch of methods that are added for the Mods to use. These Methods likely wouldn't of been added othewise.
+ Added in-game FileSystems (Folder, files..)
++ Added FileNavigator API for traversing the in-game FileSystems
* Fixed a major bug with the "debug" command where you could no longer run any commands after enabling debug mode.
+ Added GameSave creation
+ Added System creation
+ New Save + localsystem are generated on startup
++ Added WindowBuilder API for creating Apps. This makes creating Apps much, much simpler, and is intended for not only us, but use in Mods.
* We re-wrote the Console Class from scratch, and turned it into an API for creating custom Terminal Apps. (Commands are now created using the Command Class and are then passed to Console and registered as either a Local or Global command)
++ Added Command API for creating commands. These commands execute Java code, much like a JavaFX Button would, on each call. You also get everything after the first [space] of the command that was passed, as a String.
* Re-wrote ALL previously implimented Apps.
* Re-wrote ALL previously implimented Commands.
+ Added "debugtest" command to test debug mode. (This just prints a totally boring random message, and you shouldn't try it.) [Note: This "command will not exist" when debug mode is false.]
+ Added "cd" command. ("cd ~" "cd .." "cd /home/folder" "cd etc" "cd /")
+ Added "cat" command. ("cat file" "cat /folder/file")
+ Added "mkdir" command.
+ Added "rm" command.
+ Added "dir" command.
If you're new and you have no clue what I'm talking about, here's the info page: https://trello.com/b/0bH2SjQf1 -
Have a couple I want to air today.
First was at my first gig as a dev, 4-5 months out of school. I was the only dev at a startup where the owner was a computer illiterate psycopath with serious temper tantrums. We're talking slamming doors, shouting at you while you are on the phone with customers, the works...
Anyways, what happened was that we needed to do an update in our database to correct some data on a few order lines regarding a specific product. Guess who forgot the fucking where-clause... Did I mention this boss was a cheap ass, dollar stupid, penny wise asshole that refused to have anything but the cheapest hosting? No backups, no test/dev/staging environment, no local copies... Yeah, live devving in prod, fucking all customers with a missing semi-colon (or where clause).
Amazingly, his sheer incompetance saved my ass, because even if I explained it, he didn't get it, and just wanted it fixed as best we could.
The second time was at a different company where we were delivering managed network services for a few municipalities. I was working netops at that time, mostly Cisco branded stuff, from Voice-over-IP and wifi to switches and some routing.
One day I was rolling out a new wireless network, and had to add the VLAN to the core switch on the correct port. VLAN's, for those who don't know, are virtual networks you can use to run several separated networks on the same cable.
To add a VLAN on a Cisco switch one uses the command:
switchport access vlan add XYZ
My mistake was omitting the 'add', which Cisco switches happily accept without warning. That command however can be quite disruptive as it replaces all of the excisting VLAN's with the new one.
Not a big deal on a distribution switch supplying an office floor or something, but on a fucking core switch in the datacenter this meant 20K user had no internet, no access to the applications in the DS, no access to Active Directory etc. Oh and my remote access to that switch also went down the drain...
Luckily a colleague of mine was on site with a console cable and access to config backups. Shit was over within 15 minutes. My boss at that time was thankfully a pragmatic guy who just responded "Well, at least you won't make that mistake again" when we debriefed him after the dust settled. -
I will give you a reverse rejection. Went to two interviews on site with company. They asked me a question, and I struggled. Solved the question one hour after the interview :) asked me to come for a second hands on interview, make some changes to sample code. Did that reasonably well. I rejected them because in both times the engineers we're sitting behind their laptops and were working. 0 interest or engagement on their side about the candidate.
That startup failed some years after.1 -
Was invited to work on a new startup which had 2 founders and 3 devs including me.
Within 2 years, founders started fighting related to equity and stuff. Those mfs Finally dissolved the company.
We 3 became jobless but continued as a team and with the contacts we got from previous startup we started working on projects outsourced by other companies.
I was the designer, and the other one a passionate android and ios dev, last one was a pro php, node.js dev. We were super productive and fast. Worked together alot until one of us got a really good job in a company.
We still work on some crazy projects, discuss random shit, help each other with their projects whenever we meet on weekends. -
> Startup: ok listen up, we got this super cool thing we want to do with Twilio. Doesn't get any easier: some calls to book a restaurant, you ask for booking data and save that on some db.
> iHateForALiving: I'm on it. We got a couple weeks of development, never worked with Twilio, but should be easy enough
> Startup: Hold it big guy, we can't just write code like this. There's this OTHER developer with a super cool framework he wrote himself, it supports OAuth2 and multitenancy, written in Huskell, microservices to authenticate several apps all working concurrently in our environment, some orchestrator, cloud computing on AWS, you're going to love it. There's this Postman project with 200-something calls (the ones I need for my project, one and only consumer for those APIs, are 5 including the login)
> iHateForALiving: You are aware you'll have approximately six clients and they'll pay some 30 bucks each per month, aren't you?
> Startup: You don't understand, this infrastructure is CRITICAL for the future of our company
> ffwd 6 months
> iHateForALiving: guys we had this 2 weeks project and it's taking months, I'm ready, what is going on there?
> Startup: someone killed our DB, the OTHER developer pushed on git the access credentials :(
THE FULL MOON IS DRAWING NEAR AND THE FUCKING WERECODERS STRIKE AGAIN! -
I have a friend who likes to change his tech stack every time he reads about a new technology online.....He started working on a startup idea of his.....He started with Larvel.....then came NodeJS...Then came .Net Core......Then Go.....And yesterday he told me that he is thinking about making it in Vapour.
Him: how long do you think it will take me
Me: ........Forever4 -
I joined (still under probation period) in a startup founded by an 18 year old.
I work after my full time job for them and thought itd be fun but the kid made a slack channel and asks for progress updates everyday and feels a bit in a haste to get the product up and running. He seems to think I will be working every weekday from the second i come back home till i sleep. I have a party today that im going to and im sure he will ask for progress updates and when I tell him im out and wont work today he’ll probably say something like “the faster we do the project the better”.
Im not sure if i should leave now while its easy or i should stay for the money ($900 a month). Like i really dont feel like tolerating a demanding kid who cant wait for his app plus id much rather be working on other things just for fun like making rust crates. but at the same time the extra money is nice.
Thoughts?15 -
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.23 -
Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.
He was my friend and I trusted him.
It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.
A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.
Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.
I got frustrated.
"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".
Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.
My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.
I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..
BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.
They switched to a different server.
They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.
I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.
I almost ran out of bullets.
Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.
I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.
So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.
Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.3 -
I never thought clean architecture concepts and low complicity, maintainable, readable, robust style of software was going to be such a difficult concept to get across seasoned engineers on my team... You’d think they would understand how their current style isn’t portable, nor reusable, and a pain in the ass to maintain. Compared to what I was proposing.
I even walked them thru one of projects I rewrote.. and the biggest complaint was too many files to maintain.. coming from the guy who literally puts everything in main.c and almost the entire application in the main function....
Arguing with me telling me “main is the application... it’s where all the application code goes... if you don’t put your entire application in main.. then you are doing it wrong.. wtf else would main be for then..”....
Dude ... main is just the default entry point from the linker/startup assembly file... fucken name it bananas it will still work.. it’s just a god damn entry point.
Trying to reiterate to him to stop arrow head programming / enormous nested ifs is unacceptable...
Also trying to explain to him, his code is a good “get it working” first draft system.... but for production it should be refactored for maintainability.
Uggghhhh these “veteran” engineers think because nobody has challenged their ways their style is they proper style.... and don’t understand how their code doesn’t meet certain audit-able standards .
You’d also think the resent software audit would have shed some light..... noooo to them the auditor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” ... BULLSHIT!9 -
A few years ago I was working in a startup where the designer was given way too much decisional power (he was friends with the owner).
He had a tendency to keep editing parts of the design during the development phases, so when we had to work on a new big section of the application, before starting the tront-end development, I asked him to confirm that the mockups were final.
He confirmed the design was final and was not going to change.
10 days later, of couse, he sent a new, completely different, set of mockups. The startup owner expected the new design to be implemented without moving the deadline.
(I left that startup shortly after. The issues with the designer were just the tip of the iceberg.
The owner tried to keep a payment hostage to "force" me to sign a new 1 year contract. He backtracked when he thought I was recording the call. I got my payment and left.)1 -
I fucking got scammed.
Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.
Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.
Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).
Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.
Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.
And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.
My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.
I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.
But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.
Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.
Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.5 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
Managed to land 2 interviews:
The first one was for a startup that was looking for a react programmer (I've never used react before).
The later was a php job at a big company. They told me they used cakephp which is a framework I had not used before either.
Still, I'm more familiar with php than react so I felt more confident with the second interview. However, I felt there was a lot of good chemistry going on in the first interview.
The interviewer was incredibly nice (he was the lead dev, not an HR person as opposed to the second interviewer)
He gave me a small react test to be completed within a week. I barely managed to do it in time but I felt good about the solution.
Just as I was sending it, I get a call from the second interviewer saying I landed the php job.
I wasn't sure if my novice react skills would be impressive enough to secure me the react job (and I really needed a job) so I accepted.
After explaining everything to the guy who was interviewing me for the react job, he understood and was kind enough to schedule a code review where he walked through my novice code explaining what could be improved, helping me learn more in the process.
I regret not accepting the react position. The PHP they got me working with is fucking PHP5 with Cake2 :/
Don't get me wrong, I like the salary and the people are nice but the tech stack they're using (lacking source control by the way!), as well as all the lengthy meetings are soul-draining.6 -
Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);
Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.
I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.
He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.
Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.
My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.
Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.
I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.
So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?
He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.
Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?
I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.
What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?
Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀8 -
I work at a startup. My boss wants me to work on a project which will create a lot of value because it will be one of it's kind. So it will become a part of the company's IP.
Should I ask for equity (to be provided on completion) before I start working on that?
If yes, how do I ask without being offensive?11 -
A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.
In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.
Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.
But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.
Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.
I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.
Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.11 -
I quit my job 1 year ago about and am working freelance now. next step is make tutorial vids then once I get that solid it's on to my startup which is in the data analytics field.4
-
I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.
The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).
Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).
So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).
Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.
So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.
Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.
The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.
First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"
What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!
So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."
Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!
A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:
E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him
That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"
So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".
Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.
Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"4 -
I am just sick of the things that's been going on.
Joined a mid level startup as full Stack developer working on angular and node js . Code base is too shit and application is full of bugs(100+ tickets are being raised for bugs)
Since the product owner(PO) wants to demo the application he is pushing for bug fixes.
UI code:
1. Application is not handled for responsiveness all these years, it is now being trying to address. Code base is very huge to address though .
2. The common reusable components of UI has business logic inside. Any small change in business logic we are forced to handle in common components which might break up on another components.
3. Styling in 40+ components are made global. Small css change in component A is breaking up in component B due to this
4. No time to refactor.
5. Application not at all tested properly all these years. PO wants a stable build.
6. More importantly most of developers have already left the company and we are left with 2 developers including me.
I am not in a position to switch due to other commitments adds up a lot to frustration11 -
I have been working on an app for the startup i co-founded as only developer fulltime for the last 8 months...
I have yet to buy my first bread from the money i dont earn..
woops...2 -
I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!
Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.
This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).
People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).
To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.
FUCK THOSE PEOPLE
Now it's story time...
---------
I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.
We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.
The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.
So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...
"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"
So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...
"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."
10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.
We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"
So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.
(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)
PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."
ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."
<PO then shuts up in disbelief>
ME: "So are you finished?"
PO: ...
ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"
PO: Yes, for now.
ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.
PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?
<I expected this>
ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.
PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.
ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?
PO: I have other things I do then.
ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.
PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.
ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.
Then I walk away.
That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...
PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.
ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.
FUCK THOSE PEOPLE6 -
Around 2 years ago, I had first discovered DevRant.
I was an intern in a startup then, and I was working on ElasticSearch. I remember making rants about it. The internship ended. So did my relationship with ElasticSearch.
This week, a new intern joined our organisation (a different organisation). He was assigned the task of deploying ElasticSearch, with me as his mentor. All was going good, we migrated data from MongoDB to ElasticSearch and all.
Back then, I used to curse the team lead (leading a team of interns mostly), for not helping me properly...
I wanted a publicly accessible dashboard, since we can't really see the Kibana dashboard with SSH :P... So, we implemented user authentication using X-Pack security. And here we are, stuck... Again... I'm unable to help the intern. The World has come to a full circle.
PS: I have to just guide him while doing my own User Stories.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions... -
dev, ~boring
This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.
I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:
1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by
I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.
At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:
"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"
As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.
In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.
Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).
I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:
1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth
Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:
- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it
Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:
- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy
/rant2 -
If you are more interested in “being right” (aka winning an argument) than learning from experiences (both your own and others), then I will not waste my time on you.
Story time:
As a member of a startup accelerator I had the privilege to run into many types of people.
There were 2 entrepreneurs who liked to argue a lot. They would argue not just with other members but with advisors, investors, EIRs, everyone. They were much more interested in “being right” than learning from the experiences of those around them.
They flustered many people, but sometime we would have REALLY seasoned investors or entrepreneurs speak to us. Those folks never got flustered.
I needed to know why...
So I pulled aside one of the bigger investors and asked him why. This was his response.
“I’ve invested and advised on every type of company you can imaging, with every type of entrepreneur. There is a lot to be learned from that experience. But if you are more interested in winning and argument than learning from experiences and creating a good business then you are not worth my time.”
He would give his advice and then go right back to his email for those folks.
Smart
1 of the 2 entrepreneur I mentioned actually turned it around. Once he found out that the investor had invested in and almost identical company in the same space and that they had sold for 100M+ he finally started to listen. You could see him really fighting the urge to argue, but he did it. That guy ended up being successful and is on track growing a company today.
The other guy had no success and is still on the Slack group of the co-working space arguing with anyone who will engage him.
I know which one of those I would want to be.
PS. If this hurts your feeling and you feel like commenting. Feel free. You’ll look very cute.2 -
Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".
Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM. -
Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.
While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).
In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.
As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.
I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.
The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.
I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.
The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.
Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.
I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.
Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.
So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited! -
I’m 2 months into my current job at a startup, and I’m starting to lose it. My PM doesn’t have any background in tech, features keep changing every week, and more requirements are added every other day.
To make things worse, I’m the only dev on board right now, despite the company burning ~$80k on a sweatshop to deliver code that’s barely half working.
When I asked if they’re getting another dev onboard, the co-founders said they couldn’t justify another dev since they blew a fat load on that sweatshop…
Time to get on the leetcode grind again 🙃2 -
What the fuck is wrong with these kind of people?!
So I recently appeared for an android dev job interview in a start-up; the whole time the interviewer (he was the CTO) looked super excited and into my work. I am a fresh graduate with 0 experience in a professional working environment but have a history of a couple of successful apps on the play store since 3 years. The entire time we discussed future plans for the startup and how I was going to contribute towards it. He seemed very interested in my deep learning projects for android and wanted to have similar projects for his products. In the end, he asked me to develop some 'test' projects that can be integrated into his start-up products and told me he'll hire me if he finds it to be as per his need. So I worked on these 'projects' for a month and submitted it to him. He replied that he's impressed with them and will contact me shortly to confirm my job.
That fucker has been ignoring me ever since. He's not responding to any of my e-mails or messages. I feel like a shit right now. How to deal with these assholes?5 -
@Owenvii made a post over at (https://devrant.com/rants/2359774/...) and I want to write a proper response.
The biggest thing you have to look out for as a new dev is the jobs which you accept to begin with.
This isn't minimum wage no more, this is "big league", well, maybe not apple or google big league, but it's not $9.25 an hour either.
Basically you don't want to work anywhere where 1. your labor will be treated as a highly disposable commodity. 2. where the hiring manager doesn't know how to do the job themselves.
The best thing you can do is, if you're new, and just breaking through (and even if you're not), is ask them common questions and problems/solutions that crop up doing the work. If they can answer intelligently that tells you the company values competence (maybe), enough to put someone in place who will know ability from bullshit, merit from mediocrity, and who understands the process of progressing from junior dev to a more involved role.
It also means they are incentivized to hire people who know what they're doing because the training cost of new hires is lowered when they hire people who are actually competent or capable of learning.
Remember, an interview isn't just them learning about you, it's your opportunity to interview *them* and boy, you'll be making a BIG mistake if you don't.
Ideally you want them to ask you to pair program a problem. If your solution is better than theirs then they aren't sending their best to do interviews, and it tells you the company doesn't fire incompetents. The interviewers response can tell you a lot too, if they critique your work, or suggest improvements, and especially if they explain their thinking, that is an amazing response to look for, it says the company values mentorship and *actual* teamwork (not the corporate lingo-bingo 'teamwork' that we sometimes see idolized on posters like so much common dogma).
Most importantly, get them to talk about their work and their team. If they're a professional, it'll be really difficult to pry anything negative about their co-workers out of them, but if they're loose-lipped and gossipy thats a VERY bad sign, regardless of what they have to say.
Ask to take a tour and do a meet n' greet of who you will be working with. If they say no, then it's no thank you to a job offer. You want to take every opportunity to get to know everyone there, everyone you'll be working with, as much as possible--because you'll be spending a LOT of time with these people and you want to rule out any place that employs 'unfireable' toxic assholes, sociopath executives, manipulative ladder climbing narcissists, and vicious misery-loving psychopathic coworkers as quick as possible. This isn't just one warning flag to look out for, it's the essential one. You're looking for the proper *workplace culture*, not the cheesy startup phrase of "workplace culture", but the actual attitudes of the team and the interpersonal dynamics.
Life is really short, and a heart attack at 25 from dipshit coworkers and workplace grief can and will destroy your health, if not your sanity, the older you get.
Trust and believe me when I say no paycheck is too grand to deal with some useless, smarmy, manipulative, or borderline motherfuckers at work constantly. You'll regret it if you do. Don't do it. Do you fucking do it. Just don't.
Take my words to heart and be weary of easy job offers. I'm not saying don't take a good offer that lands in your lap, I AM saying do some investigating and due diligence or the consequences are on you.1 -
"come work from the office! we now offer an on-site masseuse with quick massages!"
WTF? No. First of all, the office is in the wrong fucking continent. But let's focus on the bogus "masseuse" crap for now.
We are a 3000+ full-time employees company. If all were to come to the same overpriced pile of fancy rocks at the same 60 hours interval (spread over 5.5 days), it would mean 1.2 minutes per massage per person per week. So to let each person have a single 15 minute massage session per week, there would have to be at least 12.5 masseuses available at all working hours.
Let's say 10 masseuses to account of those people who would not have a weekly session.
Now, let's say each masseuse is a no-strings-attached independant contractor making USD 3000 per year on a 60hour, 5.5 days full-capacity work week without breaks, vacations, benefits or sickdays (European readers may faint, but it is not so uncommon in other parts of the globe).
So this shit costs 30k USD per year.
I would much rather have 10 more USD per year than this useless "look how young and hype we are!" startup horsecrap.
"it would actually be more like 2 USD per year" was the rebuttal to my (way more politely phrased) argument above. "there is the whole overhead costs thing, and, besides, we will only have one masseuse available at a time"
Oh. So besides all the marketing, the whole point is to let a person have like four sessions per year.
Office Perks. Are. Not. Real.4 -
We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.
Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.
Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:
Day 1:
We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?
Day 2:
We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.
Day 3:
We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.
Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.
Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)
I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.
Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.
Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.
Day 5:
End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.
Day 6:
Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
Day 7 (Today):
Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.
What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.
Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.
You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.
When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.
Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.8 -
This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.
For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.
For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.
This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.
Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.
Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.
Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.
Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.
But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.20 -
The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.
Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.
Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.
A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).
This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.
Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:
1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.
2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).
3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.
4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.
5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.
He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.
Here are some shitty stuff he has done:
1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.
2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.
3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.
4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.
One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.
While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.
Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.
I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.
Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.
Thanks for reading this far!5 -
Started new job at startup and finished all the development environment setup started development it was going smooth for one week.all the created API were working fine on the next day morning without any changes API's were giving cors error.asked my senior what must be the problem he said bypass cors and figure out the problem after trying for 1hrs i couldn't figure out what was the problem but API's were back to normal without any changes. then after sometime same day in zoom call i asked what was the problem he said show me the error but I couldn't reproduced the same cors error he then lectured me for 1 hrs and after that he said that learn to solve by your own dont come with silly mistake like this to me.
I don't know what was the problem he even refused me show to what the problem was.6 -
Seeing how cool the community's work stories here, and how they know a lot and how they work in organized companies makes me feel like an absolute piece of shit who's lacking a lot of industry skills.
Remotely working for a startup that lacks any sense of organization, CTO is a volunteering web developer who never shows up. A lone wolf I am. I never signed to be a lone wolf. A product that is based on an absolute garbage product that is in turn based on another utter garbage product. It feels so much pain every time I have to deal with that garbage that I end up watching some stupid anime instead. Decent salary for a junior, very friendly people, and a very empowering non-profit cause but still... technical side is just shit and I don't think I can keep with this.
Sigh :(6 -
Being a junior and part of a small team at a startup, working with a new software architecture, even the team lead is a beginner in it. It feels like I'm at an echo chamber, there's nobody expert enough to look up to if stuck, decisions seem to be based on opinions rather than an architectural design kinda point of view.
Ugh, I hope I'm not the only here ever feeling this way.7 -
We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.
Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.
The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.
We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.
Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster. -
I've been working like a mad woman in a startup for 3+ years now. They feel like 10. Or at least the tech stacks we went through.
Never, ever join a startup, regardless of compensation, unless you know you can emotionally and mentally recover from that startup failing as if it is yours, not your bosses. Otherwise, it's just a shitty short experience.
My long experience is shitty, but man. I don't know.Those who built google, wanted to make a search engine. Did they know they're gonna be good? NO. This is the result of them being good. They now have that great product that succeeds and is able to become a self-referential piggy bank. You cannot be a self-referential piggy bank based on a fucking belief and idea, and a bunch of VCs who already put money in you. You know why? BECAUSE GUESS WHO IS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR SUSTAINING YOUR START UP NOW?
The bloods and passions of youth, that join your startup, thinking they can make a difference, and you just undermine them constantly thinking that no engineer can make a difference if they can't ensure compliance with your dumb funding strategy.
Don't even get me started on the fact that most people who work for startups, rely on either laziness or passion. It's like a bunch of kids in art school, whose professor doesn't like anything they make, but they still kinda like it hoping one day they leave and become artists themselves. Then they discover that this shit professor actually taught them nothing about creativity in the real world, and what it takes to push something out.
And, it finally fucking hit me.
The reason startups will never work in this year, and beyond, AND TILL I SEE A CHANGE IN ATTITUDE IN 10 YEARS.....
The market won't fucking allow it with the current strategy tech companies are a fan of: hire a bunch of passionate devs who wanna learn a tool through doing our unique work. Doesn't matter. DIVERSITY. THE UNION IS THE PASSION. That's dumb as fuck.
Why?
Here:
- Passionate people do not have to use passion as an incentive, the passion was there, and them getting their idea made or money is the incentive
- If you hire a passionate person - even if they are the fucking best - you just made their passion a tool, in getting your PRs done and shit epics scoped AT BEST, and so the tools you're teaching them to use are getting away with doing less impactful, productive, creative work.
I AM SO DEPRESSED.3 -
If you want to make a startup but don't because there is a similar product or "every niche is already occupied", quit thinking this way.
Yahoo could once easily buy Google. They even received the offer but rejected it. But as for now, Yahoo is nothing.
Tumblr was once a top social network, but they crumbled. Foursquare once was preinstalled to smartphones, and now it pretty much doesn't exist.
Blackberry was a giant, the number one smartphone manufacturer. Where are they now? It wasn't betrayal like it was with Nokia and Stephen Elop.
Matter of fact, I'm now working for the company that entered a heavily occupied niche and over the course of three years pushed every competitor out.
Sometimes giants crumble. Small products crumble way more often, just because there are more of them.
There is always enough room in every niche of every industry. Just enough for your startup. Now, as you can't hide under "it's already occupied, and I can do nothing about it" mindset, the only reason your startup won't make it is that you don't work on it. Yes, accepting it is way less comfortable than hiding, but now you're able to change things. You _can_ do something about it.
Evaluate your goals, ask yourself whether making this startup would be just wasted time in case it never takes off, and if you think it's still worth doing, do it.
There is always enough room for your masterpiece.2 -
# Retrospective as Backend engineer
Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.
## The Interview
As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.
One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.
## The Rejection
And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.
They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.
Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.
## Ironically
After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:
The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.
- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`
---
The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.
## Value as Backend Engineer
It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.
- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.18 -
I know this is the problem that I need to work it out. But still I would like to share with you guys here.
I start to feel bored after working in current company for 5+ years. I love my colleagues, I love my job actually. But after 5 years, I start to feel that there is nothing much I can learn from working in this company. And that really makes me feel uncomfortable.
So I get on LinkedIn to search and apply new jobs, I think it's good to talk with experts from other companies, to know more about what's happening in world. And perhaps to find a new opportunity.
Then I happens to find a startup which is doing something fits my background, and more advance. I feel like I will learn a lot working there.
The startup is also very interested in me. So the CEO and me have a quick chat on Skype 3 days after my application. We talked a lot and feel right to each other. Which I think I am highly possible to be hired. I am really exciting.
But later, I just hesitated. Because it is an Europe company and I am born and live in Asia. Going there may sacrifice time with my family and my friends. I am afraid I can not fit in at new company. I don't even 100% sure that I will like most of the things at new company.
I know I need to make decision on my own career. I just want to share the story, it makes feel less anxious. I am talking to my manager (which is my good friend) today. I hope everything go well.7 -
I used to work at a startup company that was so mismanaged that they lost track of when the Visual Studio licenses expire.
So during a critical week, the Visual Studio instances stopped working, and they have to scramble getting new licenses, which took a while.
In the end, the client lost confidence, pulled the plug on the project. I also lost confidence in the company and bailed out. Less than a year later the company went totally bankrupt.2 -
My job environment is either fucked up or am too young to understand what a job life is.
I was hired to intern for a startup having 2 main bosses/founders . one of them is mostly administrative and comes to office daily. He sets some tasks and i have to complete them, as soon as possible or sometimes till a deadline. He has little knowledge about the complexity of wotk so usually he says "just complete it as soon as possible so we could release it" but we haven't pushed any updates since i joined (of course i have completed some tasks, but they are just not pushed to the release version)
The other one , as i ranted previously is a completely different story.I think he is an elder bro or senior of the other boss,but he is just a superman: dealing with the distributers, commanding the hardware ppl, discussing with the othr boss, handling the server and most importantly the guy who wrote all the code i am working on. So he comes extremely rarely(1 or 2 days / week) , tries to communicate with me , but is immediately diverted by some other call/person and goes away.
The problem is : am feeling a little helpless. They give me tasks and i start working on them with excitement .( I don't believe myself to be a terrible beginner: i have been learning/working on android development for past 1 year, i know my things. And even if i don't, i know how to search/debug and produce results) . So as usual, i start and try to apply my skills / search for things i don't / try to understand his large,overwhelming and confusing codebase and at the end am stuck at some point where i don't understand what to do next. Sometimes its a bug which doesn't seems to fix, sometimes its a thing thats in the codebase but i couldn't find or sometimes it's just something i couldn't seem to understand why isn't it working. At that time, I only wish that boss to be here and look at what and how i have done, if its a correct approch and how can we together take it to completion (or simply wtf am i doing wrong, see my shit and tell me) .
But again, the tech boss is busy or wouldn't have time to understand my problem in our short , incomplete meetings. But he or the nontech boss will definitely have the time to ask the sttus of project and pressurise for the "deadline" .
Like today, i was so stuck at this fucking one line error that i couldn't detect that i just messaged him that am leaving for home 3 hours early. He came running and for the first time in history gave me a complete undisturbed time. It was such a small mistake, but i wasn't able to catch on my own. But when i told him, he immediately caught , changed a single line and the code started to work.
I am feeling irritated. Is this all a correct environment?2 -
Very soon I am going to do the following things,
- leave the working and high paying world
- build another startup from scratch
- jump into a very new and controversial industry
- fight against extreme misinformation and prejudice in the above industry
- build some amazing technology that I hope will actually help people
- finally, publicly be my real and genuine self
I am both very frightened and very excited.
Trending more and more toward excited every day.
Can you relate to that? Then let’s chat on the comments!8 -
Now everyone were sharing their worksetup I thought I would want too to.
So here it is.
I have two laptops (one belongs to startup I work at) I use same keyboard mouse for both using synergy.
I have my editor and node server in one laptop and I check them out on other laptop (both are medium range laptop hence they are not exactly powerful). I am running Linux mint in both.
Then I have some embedded stuff on desk which is my hobby(currently working on esp8266 dev board that I built).
You can also see a projector clock I built projecting current time on left beside my bigger laptop. (Projection is on wall beside it)1 -
How to deal with situations when in work people are overstepping personal boundaries too much?
My situation is that 2 months ago I started working in a very small startup and it currently consist of 3 ceos(main ceo, marketing ceo, product manager) and 3 employees (backend, android and ios).
What I currently dread is tea breaks. There is one at monday before work which lasts for 1 hour. And there is another one at Friday after lunch which lasts 1 hour again. I hate these Friday talks about "what are your plans for the weekend" which then triggers a circlejerk of ppl trying to impress each other about what they are going to do on their weekends. Same happens on mondays they circlejerk about how their weekend was amazing.
My situation is that I came to this country just to get skills and make shit ton of money when Im at it. Besides my fulltime work, I also am freelancing part time in my previous gig and also Im managing 2 other hobbie projects. I like to keep myself occupied during weekends so they usually consist of shopping/pc repairs/gym/working on my hobbie projects.
So basically when I tell them what I've done over the weekend the ceo's don't seem to be impressed so they start suggesting me to do something else. I completely loose any motivation of sharing my personal life when they start telling me what to do with my life.
I don't feel like exploring the city or meeting new people since maximum Im going to stay in this country is 6-9 more months. Then I'm probably going back to my own country.
Anyways even overall, I started dreading this companies culture. The politeness is so fake. For example there is an employee which has worked 3 years for them and the ceos haven't even increased his salary. I joined 2 months ago and I get paid more than him! They dont value loyalty at all since immigrants can be replaced easily. Another example: 2 weeks ago it was my birthday and no one from ceos even shook my hand, for them it was normal to just say happy bd during a standup.
So fking weird. I feel like I'm seeing redflags every day and not sure how long more I can stay here.5 -
So I set up a raspberry pi to control my bedroom lights last year. I decided I wanted to add some more features to it and for the first time since I created it, started looking through the code I wrote.
First thing I noticed was the excessive amount of files I have. Like I get that I just wanted to throw this thing together as quick as I could but did I really need to create a file specifically for storing a 1 or 0 depending if the lights were last turned on or off for a startup check.
Secondly, I seem to have 2 index.html files for some reason.
And finally, the code itself is pure spaghetti. The website is running with a python script, which sends calls to a nodejs server, which executes additional python scripts to control the lights. No comments anywhere, and badly named variables are also a great combo.
And finally there is the occasional "Why the fuck isn't it working, fuck it I'll just unplug the pi and reboot it" that I have been dealing with lately.
Oh and don't forget that the log file is spammed by a debug message that is printed every minute.
God I feel so ashamed. I was proud of this until I looked at it just now.6 -
My first rant. Woohoo!
Honestly I do the whole shebang ussualy depending on what the needs are from network to servers to coding because for some reason nobody has any technical experience where I work.
I just started app development for a gamedev startup and I am in sheer awe of the amount of transpiling/compiling etc that needs to be done for an multiplatform app for iOS and android with js(x)/typescript, html, css.
I remember when I could just write some spaghetti code to make it working by following a couple of tutorials. Then refractoring and testing it for a couple of hours and be done with it. push it into production.
Now I am lost having to learn OOP, functional programming, reactjs, react native, express, webpack, mongodb, babel, and the list goes on and on...
Why not just make a new backend that does all of that in another language which supports all of that.
I have no formal education in programming/coding and the last time I learned JS it was just some if else, switches and simple dom manipulation.
I just want to get to coding a freakin' game but I have to learn JSX for the front and typescript on the backend.
I am this close to going back to ye ol' lamp stack and quitting this job. 😥5 -
I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).
I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.
After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )
After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.
Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.
I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )
Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.
Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.
I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.
Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.
Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.
Well we’ll see.1 -
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?5 -
Hi there fellow Devranters,
I am new here but my problem is pretty old. You see i stumbled into coding totally by accident. That was about 5 years ago. I have been learning ever since.
But the problem is that each day I just feel less and less of a programmer, more of a failure. I started with python, from sololearn to various ebooks.Then C++ and finally Ruby. But I still feeal weak.Despite the projects that I have worked on I still don't feel good enough. Most especially in Ruby.
I have a friend who is also into coding and coincidentally started about the same time as I did.The difference is that he learnt at university and I am self-taught.We used to talk a lot but we don't anymore,I feel too ashamed, an impostor even. I am scared he'll ask me something and I won't know anything about it.And I once taigjt him OOP. Right now I can't even code a hello world program without reading a whole ebook on python just to be confident.
We had dreams with my friend on a dozen or so projects that would have put us on the software dev map, but I keep avoiding him so much we have barely started any. I am afraid he'll find me too amateurish to work with.
I learn everyday to expand my knowledge,I have subscribed to a gazillion software related stuff on all social media platforms I happen to be in.But deep down I feel insufficient. I have been going through rants since the few hours I joined and it doesn't sound gibberish to me.Neither does other people's code when I go through it.But I am ashamed of mine I end up deleted after it runs successfully.
I just don't feel like a software developer, I don't even know what it takes to be one even. I learned 10 languages focused on 3, laughed at memes only devs get, used linux and loved it too but still I feel like an impostor. I used to be happy about all the things I taught myself, I onced dreamed of working at Google and later having my own startup back home.Now my friend and a couple of his friends have a small start-up and I feel ashamed of myself.
I don't feel like what I know is enough and learning only makes me feel worse, so bad I am scared of coding again now.Yet I just can't stop learning, I feel incomplete when I don't do anything dev related,but I don't even feel my speed is fast enough when I type on my keyboard.
😥😥6 -
Why do German companies hate paying interns decent wages?
I just had an interview for an internship at a decently funded startup, and they proposed MINIMUM WAGE as a salary. Acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, too.
I do have a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering and some actual working experience as a developer, yet they suggested they’d pay me even less than that if they were legally allowed to. Is that their way of saying they don’t want me after all? They did invite me to a second interview.
I get that interns generally aren’t as productive as senior devs who spend years on a certain project, but minimum wage? Fuck that!
Luckily, they’re just the first company I talked to, but I do feel a little offended.15 -
For the people working on small startups:
How do you keep updated on best practices, engineering, and all that when you're 24/7 focused on the startup (implementing, testing, fixing stuff)?
I feel like I love doing things the best way, but we always go with the "do fast, break fast" and it always feels like a mess because the engineering is done after a really small MVP is done (and after a long time usually).
I was hoping to be able to at least do a really small engineering part *before* starting anything new, but CEO always wants stuff done *yesterday*. But for this I think I should be reading more, and playing around with new patterns and all that, so at least I know out of the box what would be a good thing to start with and not having to change the entire project/script from scratch.4 -
Prequel to my previous post:
I received an offer from a startup that did not meet the originally advertised salary range. In every other aspect this place seemed like where I'd enjoy working the most and each previous interaction made a very good impression on me. So needless to say this was quite a shock.
They immediately apologised and explained the situation. They only now started to expand to and hire from my location (which can be verified) and I would be the very first person from this location (seems true too but I could only really verify this after joining). They explained the salary range I had seen was for their main hub location (accurate too) and said that the recruiter who posted the ad did not adjust it to mine. I asked why tf they didn't notify me of this earlier and they said they are super busy with everything, are new to location based salaries and normally don't check the recruiters posts as it should be her work.
Now, even if this is totally true, it was an awful sudden shock and felt a bit like a scam - totally contradicting my previous impressions.
Here are a couple of other points that I'll just sum to save time:
- before seeing the job ad I had a *reasonable* salary expectation even lower than their actual offering
- on the ad, the bottom end of their salary range far exceeded my reasonable exp.
- the relative level of my position would be even higher up the range that I have seen realised would be top 5%
- having had seen the ad, I started to have an *ideal* expectation being the bottom of the range
- in first interview I told them my exp. is the bottom end of their range +- a bit
- I told this to a dev guy who has no fucking idea about this stuff and I don't blame him but he noted this down to higher management
- generally I have not been very precise of my expectation as previously I only had lower class dev jobs, this would be the first decent.
- Hence I have seen an enormously high variation in salaries offered to me so this advertised range whilst high seemed possible
Now, with all this in mind I posted here a question about what some of you would do in my position.
I received the following group of responses:
- it's a scam, bad place, run
- it's an intentional (common) trick
- people make mistakes like this esp. startups so find out if this is intentional or not
- just decide if their current offering is reasonable for the position and location, ignore the rest
- just decide if the amount is enough
- location based salaries are retarded, don't work there (I kinda agree and also don't)
- if they can afford the higher pay in another place they should have no prob. meeting the range
- it's more important that you'd enjoy it there if the pay is sufficient for general needs
- company culture is generally more important these days
- fuck recruiters and hr people (amen to that btw)
Here is what I did:
Regardless of whether I believe them or not I hyperfocused on the potential scam/trick aspect.
I told them that every other interaction with them was positive and would love to join them but this was a really bad impression and feels like they are playing with me. I made up some bullshit previous examples of companies trying the same trick on me (which obv. never happened).
Then I said that I think to resolve this they should invite me to their main office for a day (all interviews had been online) and if after that they are still not ok to offer me at least the bottom of the adv. range then we can part ways. Otherwise this should ensure both of us that we are a good match, etc.
They seemed to love the idea and said that I should go there for x till y (3 days) and if we don't hate each other by the end I'll get the amount at the bottom of the range and they apologised again about it looking like a scam, etc.
So thanks a bunch again to those of you who provided valuable input. -
I've been working on an Emscripten emulation layer for a fledgling startup, and it's just a huge bitch. Seriously, Emscripten is the worst designed project I've ever seen. It embeds constants into a js file that it spits out. It turns out you can't fucking run the wasm that Emscripten emits without these magic constants from the js file.
Additionally, all the wasm imports that emscripten specifies are weirdly cased, with apparently no naming convention. They also use some weird, shitty vararg implementation when it already fucking knows exactly how many arguments are going to get passed to an import.
Also, there are a ton of broken things left over from when emscripten compiled to asm.js that they never bothered to replace with features from wasm. God knows how it even works. -
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 -
Im a junior android dev working in a startup. Wasted whole week on trying to parse some retarded json data generated by junior backend guy.
Im talking about objects with other objects as their elements, no use of arrays.
In the end had to redo his data in proper order so I could parse properly. Fkin waste of time.
At least now I know how to do his work, and won't be afraid to confront him with detailed criticism.2 -
TL;DR: my boss is a dick and I don't know what to do.
Been working at the company for a month now, I enjoy the atmosphere and the culture (startup btw) but I really cannot stand my superior - there's only two of us in the team. Any screw up he blames it on me without a second thought. First week in he assigned their new website project to me and honestly they have quite unrealistic deadlines. I mean they didn't even have the infrastructure for it nor the manpower to build one yet it needs to be finished by the end of this month. On top of that the spec keeps changing literally every 2-3 hours.
Also since I've forgotten to mention the guy I'm working under is one of the founders so I can't really go and talk to someone about it. I feel pretty screwed over, anyone has any advice or been in a situation like this? Is it too early to quit?1 -
?
I am working as intern with a super cool startup. I love working here.
But, for the past few days I've been busy with college, exams stuff. This has affected my work severely. I'm constantly past deadlines etc.. The startup understands the fact and also puts no pressure on me for to show up every day and decreased my workload.
College work will be the same for the next two months. I don't want to underperform at the company, at the same time cant do away with my college too.
It's like a relationship where you love the girl a lot but are genuinely too busy to spend time with her.
I'm meeting my supervisor today. I need a subtle way to let him know of the same. I know this would mean me leaving the company, but I want to join them back after two months. Or at least be a work from home, part time employee.
I'm in serious need of some help.9 -
I have been a professional Dev for about a year for a cyber security startup. Unfortunately, startup died do to finance mismanagement. My lead Dev said that he wanted to start a co-op contract business and since we all work great together than we should stick around. So we tried to obtain contracts and it is going much slower than imagine. I am going on my second month of no work or contract work. I'm working on my own site to do some freelance work on the side for myself offering ever, marketing and ERP software services. That is the goal for side hustle. However, for the main hustle well I'm stressed now of being home and we'll meetings not turning into money. I actually want to call it quits and do my own thing and look for normal gig. It just feels rough as he has been my mentor and offered me my first software gig. I don't feel like I own anyone anything I'm regards money or time. However, I do feel bad of I take off it will hurt them from being able to handle larger contract if they do get one.
Note: I'm pulling from my savings
Thoughts??3 -
So this might be a very long post , but i am sure most of you can relate to it .
So , the year end . Time of joy and appraisals right?You have slogged your ass off the entire year and are expecting amazing ratings.Then boom , your piece of shit sadist manager starts of his review by saying 'there are worrysome things to discuss' after not saying shit for the entire year . I am pretty new to corporate , in fact 1 year old , still managed to handle devops for a team of 130+ , majority of whom have no work apart from playing a blame game and indulging in cheap politics. I mean , bro , I am literally your son's age , i dont see the point in playing this cheap shit with me.On top of that this sadist and borderline piece of shit manager has the audacity to say that I did not raise any blockers , while I have CCed him in every fucking mail possible.How big of an a****** can you be bro?
I counter his points for 40 45 mins straight ,leaving him stuck without words for solid 10 to 15 seconds many times during the 'review meet'. This guy is in the same place working on the same shit code , which 90% of this community can't even think of. Every thing is bloody manual and apparently ' I should have tried to streamline the entire f**** process' . Cool bro , why not open a startup while I am at it ?
Then this piece of poop gives me a rating which is just above the inconsistent performer bracket :) .
I just dont get the points what do these people get by giving shit ratings and not even having valid points to back up their fuck all arguments.This guy , throughout the duration of the call did not say 1 (bloody 1 ) good thing about my efforts. Past context is majority of the smart people who were literally running their pods single handedly , were under him and were fed up with not getting hikes and appraisals.Apart from me ,everyone resigned and left with hikes as high as 50% (LOL right).
But I have a year of experience and its really difficult to perform well in 4 rounds of bs compititive coding rounds, after which I get the generic ' oh you did well bro but we are moving on with other candidates' (FFS) .
I pray that even my worst enemies don't get such managers and I hope he rots in hell.
Amen and sorry for the cussing :) -
So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.
It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.
I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?
After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.3 -
Long story ahead
Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.
Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.
I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).
So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”
This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.
Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.
Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?1 -
So I work at a startup working on “cutting edge” technology with two other devs. Our lead engineer is an interesting fellow. The guy never ever writes a single line of code, just looks for similar projects online and receives a lot of credit for it, I have to hand it to him though, he has an ability to scheme through information and pick the gist of what’s going on but when it comes to detail, he’s seriously lacking. We recently started a projects a couple of weeks back and it was supposed to be an easy two days of hacking and we would be done but instead the guy looks for code online copies it I change the necessary variables to match the use case then it doesn’t work. So we’ve spent weeks debugging this code because someone is afraid to get their hands dirty. I can’t complain to the bosses because they’re not techies and the trust him more since I’m still new to the company.
I love their attitude though, they honestly believe they have a chance against some giants in tech and from the actual talent I’ve witnessed they’ll only get there through sheer luck.
I have to sit there and listen to them shit on more successful tech companies and that they have better ideas.
Maybe someone can change my mind on this issue as I’m still young and new to this industry.8 -
Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.
Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).
Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.
Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:
1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.
2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.
3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.
Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.
My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.
How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.
In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.5 -
I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.
While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.
Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.
So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.9 -
Hi guys! I need your help.
I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.
The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.
If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.
What do you guys think?7 -
This was initially a reply to a rant about politics ruining the industry. Most of it is subjective, but this is how I see the situation.
It's not gonna ruin the industry. It's gonna corrupt it completely and fatally, and it will continue developing as a toxic sticky goo of selfishness and a mandatory lack of security until it chokes itself.
Because if something can get corrupted, it will get corrupted. The only way for us as a species to make IT into a worthy industry is to screw it up countless times over the course of a hundred years until it's as stable and reliable as it can possibly be and there are as many paradigms and individually reasonable standards as there can possibly be.
Look around, see the ridiculus amount of stupid javascript frameworks, most of which is just shitcode upon vulnerabilities upon untested dependencies. Does this look to you like an uncorrupted industry?
The entire tech is rotting from the hundreds of thousands of lines of proprietary firmware and drivers through the overgrown startup scene to fucking Node.js, and how technologies created just a few decades ago are unacceptable from a security standpoint. Check your drivers and firmware if you can, I bet you can't even see the build dates of most firmware you run. You can't even know if it was built after any vulnerability regarding that specific microcontroller or whatever.
Would something like this work in chemical engineering? Hell no! This is how fucking garage meth labs work, not factories or research labs. You don't fucking sell people things without mandatory independent testing. That's how a proper industry works. Not today's IT.
Of course it's gonna go down in flames. Greed had corrupted the industry, and there's nothing to be done about it now but working as much as we can, because the faster we move the sooner we'll get stuck and the sooner we can start over on a more reasonable foundation.
Or rely on layers of abstraction and expect our code to be compilable on anything the future holds for us.2 -
Have a question about my career:
So far my career out of uni has been like this:
8 months in first place working as C# .NET dev, creating native desktop apps for windows. job was shitty, was not getting any best practices skills so I left.
12 months in 2nd place working as android dev in a startup. was working all alone and had to rebuilt my app up to 5-6 times to learn best practices. startup didnt care about android app at all so I left and now doing just some small freelance work for them.
3 months in new startup as android dev.Today I was told that its decided to focus on iOS and do all marketing (also uplift of new design) only on iOS. basically for next 3-4 months they don't plan to do much on android side. they saw that I showed some interest in backend and now they are asking me to talk with two other senior guys about starting with some small tasks for me on backend.
Our backend is mainly using python. Also backend guys will be pretty busy for next few months because they will have to deliver many new features in next few upcoming months. I've talked with one of them and he said that this is a bad idea to force frontend to start working on backend. However I feel that he's sort of gateekeping and probably just doesn't want to help me with getting up to speed.
In my defense, my knowledge doesn't end with C# .NET desktop apps and native mobile apps for android.
I have hobbie projects (gameservers) where I worked on websites (php,html,css,javascript,mysql) and also was taking care of a java based gameserver which is hosted in a linux vps.
Also I've had a small hosting "company" where with available tools I've managed to automate VPS(virtual private server) ordering, web hosting ordering and domain ordering. Basically I owned a dedicated server and did everything using whmcs, cpanel and proxmox virtualization.
I trust myself in learning this backend stuff and doing whats required, however I learned everything by myself and I won't follow all of these best practices.
Should I accept more responsibility on backend or should I continue focusing on android?7 -
I just don't get it.
Been looking for a new job for 2+ years and have failed at every opportunity. Numerous white board interviews, code challenges, hours upon hours wasted. Just can't seem to make the next move. I believe I have my soft skills down because I am able talk and do meetups just fine but either I'm too junior or something else is going on.
What started all of this was my latest rejection that I thought I had in the bag. Sailed through all their questions, did a live code thing, all of that being for 3+ hours. As it's called a final interview with them. Not to mention they're a startup, figured their standards might even be a bit lower than normal since they're needing people. Yet, still got rejected.
This sort of stuff, I'm seriously considering just leaving tech in general and probably just go do a outside job. With supposedly everything going for me like working in a hot job market, in a growing tech town, experience, and doing extra coding on my own time to beef up my portfolio. Doesn't matter. Still continious rejection. Lol in fact how I even got my current job was through completely unconventional means and based on that, I think it's done me more harm than good, which is why I'm trying to leave my current job and go into a place where I can be a better developer.
As of now, back to the grind of trying to find something.7 -
Im ok with working for your startup for 2 years for peanuts. Im ok filling in 5 other types of jobs on the way while u still fucking micromanage everything, rendering all designers useless and making them leave after a few months. Im ok telling u its ok when u say u know how hard it is to keep going cause im such a positive team player. Im ok buying my own computer cause u r too cheap to buy a device that can run fucking Safari. Im ok working day and night for years carrying your company on a promise that when u sell i wont be forgotten. Im even ok with new people making way more than me from the new investment for which i worked my ass off for years, almost burning myself out. But if you sell the company for big money and get rich without even telling me, I WILL FUCK YOU UP.
p.s. true story, second employee, got taken advantage of heavily. still working there acting like im not in the know, waiting for next move.4 -
1. Update some packages
2. Linux machine stops working soon after
3. Panic
4. Go get windows machine to help me troubleshoot the issue
5. Starts windows update on startup
6. Panic some more -
I've been away a couple of months.
I finished uni. I got a job at a startup. My mental health improved. Current boss is nice, during december I was going towards another burnout due to huge task assignments. When I expressed this concern, he understood and reduced the sprint task number.
I hope I'll stay here as much as possible.
I've been living with my gf for over a year now. Pretty exciting, although intimacy is kinda fucked. We haven't had sex for over a while now.
I'll start hit the gym soon. I need some kind of workout or sport.
I hate my city at this point. Too big, public transport suck and going out for anything that's not a pub requires at least 30 minutes by car in the traffic. Parking is plain hell. Cabs are out of the question, too expensive. Yet I need to go out. Can't stay this much inside the house or around the neighborhood.
Since I'm working remotely I'm thinking to travel with my laptop. I need a better one and more money, but I'm starting to work on an external project. Still have to discuss my hourly rate but it won't be much given my limited experience.
I want to start studying again. Not for university or anything, just to keep myself in training, but I feel like I don't have time. Probably it's because I'm an unorganized person. Will figure this out.
So this was my answer to an unasked "how are you?".
Did I miss anything? How are y'all? -
due to some error on GCP, my and friend got locked out of a prod server over ssh.
And the fucking admin was not giving us privileges to do it through serial port, why you ask cause submitting keys from dashboard was not working.
Later, found out google runs a startup script from startup-script metadata tag.
It felt like showing a middle finger to the admin and google -
Its only 5 months left till my graduation,and my mind is getting fucked up.
The current startup i am interning with is a lot stressful and demanding. I am giving my 1000%, only because this is the only place to.. how can i explain..
if world is a race of horses, then i am the tortoise and these guys are the only slow horses that i think i can catch up with. These people are your next door app dev startup, releasing multiple apps fastly and trying to hit the magic recipe. I am not sure if i am learning anything besides how to search stuff on my own and produce faster results. But still, better than nothing.
However i am a far sighted person and am not sure if this is the future that i want.
I am currently giving 14+ hours to this startup as an intern (including all the traveling from home). The only relaxation i could make in future is to shift near the office which will save me 3-4 hours but then what?
I am currently running out of goals. My childhood was shit, but i want to make my youth meaningful.
Leaving my home means leaving the only 2 people (mom/dad) currently present actively in my life.
My college would be over by then, all my colleagues are all on their own ,going into different companies. We don't meet now leave alone meeting then. I am also not much into( or have the time to be into) online games and anime where those guys meet/chat
Not that i was able to gather courage to get into some relationship or talk to people till now. I don't have much talks with my officemate or gals coz 1 :i am so full of work and (2) i simply can't
Currently i spent my whole Saturday sleeping and watching movies and Sunday doing the office work.
Is this going to be my whole working life now? I often think other people's jobs as less demanding but i don't think that would be the case.
I just want to be in touch with people, the people that i know, the people i can trust somewhat.
When i was in 7th std, life was so easy. There was this just 1 irritating thing called school that we had to attend.
After that, we used to run down to nearest park in our shorts and cricketbats or rsckets, play till our heart's content, then sit in some friends house for hours and talk shit , then come back home , do some irritating study, then go back to watching television and playing online games with those same friends , while deciding the birthday party of some guy and game plans for the next day.
Damn5 -
So I'm in a scenario I'm uncomfortable, need some encouragement from fellow devRanters. (Looong post)
I've been working at this startup for about 10mths (since I graduated). They have been really good to me since the start, and overlooked some fuck ups I did at first.
But now I've been way more experienced , picked it up really quick. And I've basically redesigned several of their admin solutions and data products. Also, I'm basically their entire data analysis team now. I do backend (node, PHP, MySQL) and analysis for them (stats, deep learning, python, big data packaging for clients).
But seeing as I've moved in their company, and have been consulted on several major decisions, as well as built a really good relationship with some of their clients. I still haven't seen a raise, moreover I've been told that I'm expected to work from 8am to 5:30pm (9.5hrs no overtime pay). Which really pisses me off, since I know I'm worth more than what I'm paid (about 40k a year).
My brother (who's also a dev) suggested to tell them that I'm not happy at work due to this. And quit if they don't react well.
How should i bring this up? Should I really quit? This is all new grounds.6 -
Hi there, I don't know what to do...
I got interviewed, and offered by two companies.
One startup, being around for 5 years, they loved me and they offered me a whole project to lead in a team of three, starting from scratch, in something that I am really interested in, plus the location is central and amazing.
The other one is a bigger company, located a bit far away from the city centre, the position is senior but not lead, is not an agency but they work on a huge range of products, so I will never get bored working on the same thing all the time.
Pay is the same, the first one I possibly could negotiate a bit more, the second one I can't for sure.
I am a hit scared of getting bored in the first one, even though I have been working on single products company all my life, now I wanted to change.
What do you guys suggest? Any other parameters I would need to consider?7 -
I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.
Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.
My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.
I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.
I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.
After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.
I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.
After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.
So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.
Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.
TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.3 -
Was working on an issue that had to deal with destroying a session on browser close. Took me a looong time to realize that it wasn't working because my firefox and chrome browsers were set to restore sessions on startup
-
Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?5 -
Me: Yea, Linux is great! Screw Windows!
*Touchpad stops working on startup
Me: It's fine, it could happen on Windows...
*Laptop fans start blasting at 100% during class
Me: It's uhh, probably just a simple thing, nothing to worry about....
*Restarts computer after updating. Screen completely black, even after restarting multiple times.
Me: Oh FFS....4 -
Working for a startup building a device / app that let you answer your landline phone on your mobile, and get notifications of missed calls etc.
While developing I purposely didn't secure the endpoint that controlled push notifications.
I waited for the boss to sign up, went to the DB and stole his token. From time to time i'd send a request telling him he missed a call from his wife or son.
... then kicked back and watched the madness and frustration ensue. -
Working with a group on a startup idea. We have weekly Google chat meetings with the full team and sometimes me and the other two founders have side calls. Our group is getting bigger so the weekly is getting longer so the 3 of us were talking about ways to make them more efficient. One was, background distractions like TV, random people talking in bg, kids...
So then yesterday the 3 of us went over a different topic and the guy who had brought up the distraction issue was in the bathroom shaving and trimming nose hairs the whole time. He kept asking questions about the agenda which we all had access to. I shouldn't even care much. I drink through the meetings anyways.2 -
After 3 months of working as android dev, startup decides to freeze android work for next 4-5 months in order to focus on iOS. Meanwhile I'm being asked to start doing backend work. Need advices on what to do next. Below is the link to my reddit post and would appreciate any input on the situation.
https://reddit.com/r/... -
[Background]
Back in September I joined a startup after my first job in MNC for about 1.8 yrs as a fresher. I always wanted to learn, but the experience in that MNC was not at all fruitful. So ai decided to join a small/mid size company or a startup. To my luck, I got in this small startup in a week after my resignation as a front-end dev (always wanted to be).
It's an automation company, so you can find software, electronics, even mechanical engineer.
The team was almost a year younger than me. It was a team of around 12 people, in which 5 of them were from Business development.
The tech team was too driven and knowledgeable. Always trying new stuffs and motivating to do the same. I was highly motivated by them in my initial days, watching them working on new stuffs.
So I started with revamping their website completely in Angular 4, and did it in around a month or so, being new to Angular. Outcome was pretty satisfactory. I wanted to work on new projects, but just to get the cashflow in they started getting in WordPress projects. It was frustrating, I wanted to work more on new technologies like Angular, React, etc...but just for the survival of the company I had to work on WordPress, so to respect their urge to get going I kept working on 3-4 projects in parallel, and mind you the clients were from hell !!
Fast-forward 4 months, I am still working on few WordPress websites, and one internal GPS based project in React. And I haven't received my salary for past 3.5 months, since the company is still struggling with the issue of funding and getting money from clients. I kinda liked working there because there was lot to learn even though they are so young, but I had bills to pay too.
And I am in dilemma to leave the company or not, because I already stretched 3 months out of good will and guilt of leaving the company in high time. So i finally let the CEO know that I cannot stick for any longer. And i was done with the false promises of getting the salary "next month" everytime. All the money getting inside of company was invested heavily on the product we were building and no one was getting the salaries. Others were fine since they were founding members too.
Long story short : I finally left immediately and now working in a good company as a React dev. I hope they do well and I would love to see them grow, but please *STOP* making false promises and hold on to employees on a lie.1 -
!rant
Interview on Monday. Buzzing! The company is pretty cool, they have a startup buzz but part of a wider umbrella of businesses so don't suffer from the financial uncertainty that destroyed my last company (that and my old boss was pretty clueless about everything except sales). They also give time for personal projects, allow remote working, bonuses if the company does well and provide its employees transparency to its finances.
In short, I'm not going to be a cog in a big corporate wheel. If I get this.
Well they liked the code I produced for their programming test, so good start.
Meta: categorised this as rant because it's tech related, but obviously it's not a rant, what's the protocol? Random?2 -
I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. We brought on a vendor to provide us some fancy OCR tool. It barely works. It's been barely working. And the vendor is so adamant it works it's so difficult to get them to send people onsight to work with us. We complained about it to the exec and we got "Oh they're a tech startup. You have to help them along with developing their process blah blah blah". Well they don't want help we offered they keep existing their shit is top secret (and it works). When they make changes remotely it's like they blindly make a change and then throw it to us to test. When we can get them to come in they hang around till the problem is fixed (more than once we've had to tell them how to fix it.) and they fly as fast as they fucking can through the door. A guy on my team even built something similar backed by Azure but we were given directive to work with them. And now we're getting pressure about delays in launch. But it's not our fault. The vendors asshole lying CEO keeps making shit up and we're told to work with it. Yet it's our fault that we missed deadlines? fuck this place !!! fuck all of this !!!6
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Startup needs app done for MVP at a money fair. Startup finds good team. Startup plans every little thing written and has most of the app screens ready. Team signs NDA to see screens and docs. Startup keeps working on docs. Startup postpones dev start to after the fair! Thank you for wasting team's time! FUCK YOU STARTUP! BTW, that's a great app you have there... on 'paper', though it is just useless piece of crap. Great job you headless fucks!
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Need some advice. I'm 19, working on my own fintech startup. Should I apply to Ycombinator or finish high school first? The prototype is basically ready, but the Winter 2018 YC is taking place while I have school. What should I do?8
-
Tldr: boss needs his priorities sorted
So as I already wrote about this issue earlier (in a comment) now it's time to actually write the rant...
I'm working between the holidays, not much just doing planning with the boss. Mind you, startup company, so limited resources and all, that's why I'm on planning as well.
So he goes to the whiteboard and draws a line in the middle, writing headings to each side: Need (Panic) and Nice (ASAP). It's starting off well.
We add about 10-ish items to each side, which is kind of okay - then he starts highlighting with different colors within the Need list saying okay, red circles we need NOW, green circles... "Now but later".
How do I not laugh? And now he wants to do even more priorities within these sections and a Soon list just as last time...
This is getting really ridiculous.
Send help (and coffee)3 -
[Seeking Advice / Legal / Opinion]
Hello world, (TLDR at the bottom)
I'm the co-founder of a small startup and looking for advice from people of legal background or similar situations. (Any help making the reddit post more active will also help a lot: https://reddit.com/r/legaladvice/...)
Just as a backstory for better understanding:
a couple of years ago, me (early twenties, male) and another guy (late thirties, male) started an entrepreneurial journey, got in an accelerator program and some investment, and things always looked well.
We opened the company and started working / selling our services. Step by step we started recruiting, and getting some clients, and business is going well... ("well" as in, small revenues but not spending more than we earn).
The thing is that me and my co-founder's relationship has been degrading over time and I think it would be better for us and the company to split up and go our own way. He has the majority of the shares and I don't mind leaving it all behind for the sake of the company and mental health.
This is in US, if it helps, and we both have At-Will employment contracts.
My main question is, *if I do sign a termination contract*, from what I read, I'm obliged to remain reachable for a period of 12 months (plus all those IP related stuff, not sharing confidential info, etc).
[1] Is there anything I should be careful about and get some kind of protection or get some more information before resigning?
I'm afraid that if I leave the company it affects the business negatively, as we both work 16 / 20 hour shifts many times and my work would not be easily replaced by anyone in the current team. We are hiring more people right now, and some seniors, and I was thinking on staying one month dedicated only to training them... [2] Could this be specified in some contract that I am resigning from "today", but stay 30 days focusing on training new people, or anything similar?
I don't mind staying in touch and help whenever they could need, but I will not be available 24/7 and I will obviously need a job to pay living expenses, so I don't want to affect negatively my time in other jobs or personal life and be kind of protected against anything that he could do to make me stay continuously connected or compromised.
I'm interested in knowing any opinions and advice you guys may have, and feel free to ask some questions if you need extra details.
I just want the best for the startup but cannot hold much time in the current environment.
TLDR: Relationship between me and co-founder is getting worse, thinking on resignating but want to keep some sort of protection against anything that could make me keep compromised to the company.7 -
I was talking to my non tech friend, one friend of her who is working at one big kind of MNC (Mobile network companies) asked me what do you use in VFox.
I have no fucking idea what's VFox. I said I have no idea what is, we don't use it. He immediately asked me what technologies you guys are using (I am working in a startup)?
I said we are using Ruby, Ruby On Rails and Python, Djanho. He said you use all the old technologies.
I was like: WTF :😂, Okay tell me what are the new technologies? My friend interrupted us.
Later I googled to see what is VFox. It is actually a hosting company and this guy who don't even have any idea about AWS, GCP, using VFox saying Ruby and Python are old technologies. Lol.. -
!rant
So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.
But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.
Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!
Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.
Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.
So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.
Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.
So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.
So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.
Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad. -
Need some advice here.
So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.
I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.
I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.
Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.
In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.
I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.2 -
working at an MNC is like dating the hottest girl in campus. everyone stares at you, but only you know of the tantrums and the expenses that you have to take.
Every random aunty and uncle I come across gets a wide smile on their face when i tell them my company's parent company name. i goto this temple , and there, one uncle was introducing me to his wife "meet X ji's son , he is at Y company" .
previously when i worked at a startup, most of the time , people were like "huh? what does this company do?" and when i would explain them how our DBs are sending billions of notifications and interaction each second, they would be like "oh , so you work at IT" , YES DUDE, YOU WANNA GIVE YOUR DAUGHTER'S HAND NOW?
And this mentality is sick. i loathe the place where i currently work. i loved my previous org and now am just here coz my mom is too scared to let her son live in a different state.
The only reason a person works in a company is money and WLB. Indian service based MNCs don't give a penny more than basic industry standards. and when they want their employees to be available 2 days a week + x number of days when any CEO , ED or other sugar daddy is coming to office, you get an idea of the shitty Work life balance.
my previous company was a b2b startup, it always paid me more than industry standards and we had wfh until a notification came to enforce hybrid working bh end of 2024. till now not a single person from my team has relocated. All i had to do was to *plan* for living in a state and my mom got cold feet :/
i think so much about my future. i earn decent, so i wanna spend it to live and grow.
i wanna go party at friday nights and go on night outs. i wanna meet this cute school crush at anytime after office and don't worry about the 9 pm curfew. i wanna go look for a new home in a different area and get out of this parking hellhole. i wanna prepare for exams and do a hugher studies from aborad.
everything needs money and growth mindset. money makes money and i am trying to earn every minute. but a chained mind cannot fly . a non growth mindset will not let you evolve. and someone needs to tell it to people who control my every . fucking. action
i have seen people switching from one big name to another. i personally feel that you are just too comfortable in the environment of big names and deliberately ignoring the smaller names which are doing the actual build fast and break reality stuff. reward is proportional to risk and if you are okay with just attributing to a big name, then that's on you20 -
I started working for a startup as Server Administrator/ System Integrator beside university to get some dollars with easy work and nice people.
((I Know two of the C*Os so I got a had feeling with this. Besides the upcoming story I'm still really happy with my position and career chances here. God bless my Department which has the most funny/rude guys, love you.))
tl;dr:
Guy fakes his Skillset and fuckup whole department, can´t do most of his basic tasks. I had my first and hopefully last interaction with this bastard.
Heres how everything started:
I was more and more involved in the leading processes and decisions.
Heard about a story where and why the whole dev-department was kicked out of his position because they were crappy developers. And cant just believe the stories they told me about the former Dev-Lead
Now I met the former "Development Lead"
I was brought in because we in the IT wondered why he would like to share his local machine password with colleges. After some questions he came out with the Reason.
He is doing home-office for some days a week now and wants his colleges to be able to start his "software". (already confused by that)
The "better IT-guy" in me offered help for automatic deployment CI/CD stuff so that they can use it as an inhouse service.
BIG OOF incoming:
"The code is not in git because I wanted to clean it up before"
"My IDE is the only place where my PHP crap work is running"
"The 'PHP-software' is to complex for this"
My Lead and I were completely speechless,
I understand the decision to kick this "dev-Lead" from the lead position down to a code monkey/ script kid.
Now I´m thinking about getting my Hands on the Lead position after my exams because if such bastards with no clue about basic stuff, no clue about leading, no clue about ci/cd, no clue about generic software stuff get the job I would easily be the "good IT-guy" with more responsibility/ skill.
Now I sit here, hate people that fake their skills and set back work of colleges for multiple months and never asked for help or advice.
And the little "Bastard Operator from Hell" in my just wants to delete all his files, emails account during a migration to completely demotivate the person who failed to be responsible for a team nor their projects.rant ci/cd php administrator startup script-kid i hate people unskilled skill faker lead developer devops5 -
Working at a startup with a small (~4-6) person engineering team usually means those few people are the most in tune with the software. This then usually leads to an onslaught of people who should know better asking devs stupid questions about the software or relying on the devs to do their jobs for them.
Have you encountered these types of situations before? How were they resolved?2 -
Hopefully get out to the public the two projects I have been working on currently. A local focused startup help website and a local focused fillable forms platform.
And hopefully get my first large scale software project kickstarted - A retail management system on a full Feedback Driven Development approach perhaps with the ability to integrate AI and ML later on. -
This is a rant about the passion of programming and building in the business world (AKA corporate/startup world)
I speak for myself and I believe many programmers out there who set out on their journey into the world of programming by a certain interest kindled some time when they first wrote their first line of code. We innocently eager, and dream of working for large fancy companies and start making money while doing the thing we love doing the most.
And then... reality hits. We find that most companies are basically just the same thing. Our supposedly creative and mind-challenging passion is now turned into mundane boring repetitive tasks and dealing with all kinds of bazaar demands and requirements. You suddenly go from wanting to change the world to "please move this to left by 10 px". And from experience that drives people to the extent of hating their jobs, and hating the very thing they were once so very infatuated with.
One narrative I see being pushed down the throats of developers (especially fresh young eager developers with no experience) mostly by business people/owners is "WORK FOR PASSION!". I personally heard one CEO say things like "It's not just about a salary at the end of the month. IT IS ABOUT A MISSION. IT IS ABOUT A VISION"...bla...bla...bla. Or "We don't work for money we work for passion". Yeah good luck keeping your business afloat on passion.
What irritates me the most about this, is that it is working. People today are convinced that doing shit jobs for these people are all about passion. But no one wants to stop for a second and think that maybe if people are passionate about something, even if that thing is in the field in which they work, they're not passionate about working for someone else doing something they hate? If I am really working for "passion" why don't I just quit and go work on something that I am ACTUALLY passionate about? Something that brings me joy not dread? It's a simple question but it's baffling to me why no one thinks about it. To me personally, jobs are just that; jobs. It's something to make a living and that's it. I don't give a fuck if you think you're building the next "innovative", "disruptive", "shitluptive" thing :D. Unfortunately that is viewed as "negative limited mentality".
I am quite passionate about programming and making things, but I am not so passionate about building your stupid app/website with a glue code everywhere!2 -
I work as android dev for the past year and a half, this week in my startup I started doing some backend (it consists of microservices, codebase is written in python. were using rabbitmq for queuing and for http our framework is falcon).
At first I was very adamant to learn new stuff but now that Im getting deeeper into backend I started to really enjoy it!
Its still lots of new information but at the same time it feels soo refreshing to have two experienced mentors who can guide you, since Ive spent last year and half working on android completely by myself and relying only on myself. Also im very lucky that codebase is clean. -
Currently working a contract for a startup that never finishes the final content editing and organization task so that we can build the last page. They were in such a hurry to start and we 100% delivered everything they asked for on time and at budget. Now that we are centimeters from the finish line, they keep pushing the date back due to the CEO never having time to provide feedback. It’s been months and we cannot get to the final work to earn the final payment.
Not the worst one (which I already shared another week a while back) but definitely not fun.4 -
I am working on a freelance project for a software dev startup. The api service endpoints given to me is so full errors that you can boldly say it's zero percent tested and you'll be correct. The project was meant to last for a week but now it's going to a month due to the errors I have encountered while working with the given API service, so more like a back and forth wait for an update kind of thing. I am close to done building the client but yes they cannot test my last update because someone updated the login endpoint which now returns 500 internal server error. I really want to vent out my frustration to this company without loosing them to the project but honestly i don't know how to do it.
Edit: Just for a side note, about the relationship this client is my former company.3 -
Service based companies and Nepotism
In India, most IT companies hires their own family members. Even they promote their own family members. One of the my friend worked as dev he found that mostly his co workers are relatives of founder or managers. He told me that he understand if they get hired from some kind of references but that's not case here. Even HR is also family member of manager/founder. Most of this guys don't know any language. Even they don't have any kind of professionalism
Imagine that working on companies where your co-workers and HR is family members of managers and founder. Where you find help because everyone will against you because all are family members.
they deduct PF of workers who are not relatives and never pay tax to goverment. In india, most developers are desperate to get job because that's what education system and society taught them.
Hope startup culture will kill all these shitty companies1 -
i have a very casual and boring job. it's a b2b company and you can get an idea of how less work we get (or how fast i am) that it's day 1 of the sprint and i have almost finished all my tickets. my manager always praises me as someone fast whereas i see myself as pretty slow and this company even slower.
i feel like quitting, but the relax environment and stability of the company on paper makes me wonder of that would be a correct decision.
It's a deep tech company (not just meat e commerce or car rentals, a proper b2b analytics giant startup with good profitability) , our sdks are used by major startups and yet i find it boring.
I am an android dev who would love to stay at top of the game. my previous company used latest jetpack libraries, kotlin, modular architectures and stuff. everyday was a hectic chaos of life where there were deadlines, new requests coming in every few days and i was becoming the awesome fast android dev that i am now.
in this company there is no challenge for me.But the amount of free time has helped me grow beyond a single domain. i am currently hustling in 3 areas : my body( i started working out regularly, got my tummy under control), my technical skillset( started taking web dev classes) and my physical skillset (started taking driving and swimming lessons) . the amount of self growth time increases since company has a good leave and PTO policy
it all feels pretty good but the constant feeling of being left out from the android domain makes me think if i should give interviews. am i being stupid or what? my friends are all growing up with better salaries and packages. i am way better than some of them and equally capable as a few of them, so i sometimes feel being behind in finances too :/7 -
I think I am going through burnout.
How do I deal with it?
Joined a startup with crazy work culture in Jan.
Have been working 14 hours a day for months starting march 2020, and even that was only to barely keep up with my colleagues. I have been one of the top performer in my previous jobs.
since the beginning, It always bothered me seeing people working on weekends, and falling behind if I didnt, to not have time for anything else, but I started really hating it a couple of months back.
Work has slowed down a bit now, but I just can't do it. Cant focus and get even basic tasks done. Still getting by with last minute efforts but I hate it!
Dont have the guts to leave the job, but also realise I am not doing enough and will get kicked out eventually anyway.
What can I do, to get over this?16 -
Feeling over stressed, over worked and highly underpaid for all this effort. Worst of all I feel the passion leaving me for this work.
I graduated a boot camp last April and was blessed to contract part time at a startup learning how to work in the unity game engine. The team is two other guys, both super smart snd been working in this field for a long time. Since then I’ve added personal projects, finished a data structures and algorithms course and started the Leet code grind. I told this startup that I’d start looking for full time employee positions soon and they understand. They couldn’t offer me much money, or stock options, just experience they said. I feel like I’ve basically been grinding 24/7 since May. I’m going to run out of money soon and it’s all starting to take a toll on my body and mind. I never really sit on the couch or watch something anymore because I feel I should be doing something productive. This just makes me feel like everything I’m doing is meaningless and without impact. I feel like a wheel turning endlessly in sand and not moving forward. I even feel it zapping my passion for developing.
I just can’t help but feel that I’m burning out here. I have a new experimental feature to do for the startup and the amount of things to learn seems overwhelming. Especially with Leet code and interviews coming up. The two other devs on the team are extremely busy as this is a part time endeavor for everyone. I’m also in a relationship I started to feel detached from which causes it’s own stress. I love VR and AR which is why I chose this startup to learn Unity. Now I just feel like I’m dividing my efforts too much. I’m shitty at unity and also less good at web dev than I would have been if I focused on it purely after boot camp grad. On the plus side I will say I’m doing what I want. I just can’t help but feel like that damn tire in the sand turning without traction. And I feel the patience in me for self learning the basics and iteration over a complex project is waning. Without patience the learning is rushed and I don’t learn shit. I also make dumb mistake and “hope” I don’t run into errors. I feel I’m just trying to bang it out for the startup instead of use it learn cool shit. Anyways it feels good to rant. I can’t wait for a full time job, established work hours, and decent pay so I can live life and have off time.
I assume wherever I go I’ll always be in a spot where I need to figure how to get xyz done with minimal help or oversight. I just would like to be paid for it.8 -
So here's where I'm at:
I was just offered a position as employee #5 at a small startup in my area with stock options. I've never experienced this before and I'm unbelievably anxious. On the one hand I genuinely believe in their solution/product and can see it being successful. On the other hand I know there's a huge risk associated with joining the company at that stage. Heck, they're still only going for their seed round in Q2 of next year! Meanwhile I'm working comfortably in an intermediate full stack dev role with 150+ people where I feel that I can be as much/little seen as I want. In other words I could probably coast for several years (and maybe slowly move up) without any trouble.
Has anyone else gone through this before? The opportunity could be huge but it feels like I'm rolling the dice... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯3 -
So, I am fresh CS grad working at his first dev job at a pretty small startup (less than 20 people).
The Engineering team has 7 people and it's relatively flat.
At times, the senior engineers in my team, have 1:1's with the CEO and (what I feel is) some decisions are taken according to that meeting.
I feel kind of uncomfortable about this secrecy etc. even though I know that at least right now I am not experienced enough to be a "decision-maker".
Is this normal? Idk if this is how politics in the workplace happens.. looking for advice on what I should do regarding this..
Also, it doesn't help that I am literally the only Software Engineer (all other Engineers are Senior Software Engineers or CTO) so there is this generational gap which has limited my ability to "really connect" with anyone on the team.4 -
!rant
Well kinda, more like first world problems.
I started freelancing almost three years ago, it took a lot of hard work, sweat blood and tears to get this whole thing running.
I am currently in a very good place, have a lot of retainer contracts and the awesome freedom that comes with being a freelancer.
Two days ago I got an offer from one of my clients, they really want to have me on board, full time, it's a small, already established startup company, that has big clients, they want me to go into partnership with them, see still haven't talked numbers but they are very "generous".
the idea is to get me ASAP full time on board and start working on a partnership contract specifying all the small details.
I love being a freelancer, the freedom is amazing, client acquisition is Eons away from being a problem, but I miss the team work, and I miss working on products and building teams, freelancers are kind of a lone wolves.
I love working with these clients, there is a lot of mutual respect, they are very transparent and we really are on the same wave.
This could be an amazing opportunity for the next steps in my carrier.
I'm having a hard time making a decision, I'm basically changing my mind about it every two hours...
I mean I guess I'm planning to open my own company at some point anyways... so maybe going into a small but stable company is the way to go..
What would you do?
Would you take the offer? Or would you keep freelancing?11 -
So here is an interesting story.
The company that I work went in collaboration with another company and as my company is a small startup we had only 2 employees. We had to do 2 different projects during the collaboration period.
I was put in-charge of an android application (At that time I had no experience of android development and it was one of their most important project without any guidance)
I was doing work of two companies and getting paid by one and I was getting shit from the company that we were collaborating with.
As a developer I value tasks and deadline but the company issued a new rule that I should stay in the office from 9-6 (strictly) which I didn't oppose. But the senior developers here stay strictly 9-6 but work only for about less 2 hours a day and get valued more.
I used to love working on weekends improving myself in the process but working over time is not valued by the company.
( BTW I completed their project in about 1.5 months ) -
at the co-working space where I work today there was an argument between the CEO of this startup and their developer.
not really sure what it was about but at the end the developer was getting really frustrated and he shouted: "I'm telling you REST means HTTP!!".
I think all the developers around vomited on their keyboard.2 -
So I am working in this startup at Stockholm for 6 months and 1 week ago decided to leave.
I am still under probation period(5 days left until probation period is over), so I should have actually given 1 months notice. However we had many meetings about this and we decided that I will give 2 months notice.
Like we decided, previous week I gave founders a notice of 2 months and they agreed to it. I sent them e-mail and they confirmed it so I have proof.
This week all of a sudden they are saying that their plans have changed and there won't be much work to do for me so they are are forcing me to leave after 3-4 weeks.
I understand their point of view. Since my salary is 41k, they are spending totally 53k sek on me monthly. So their idea is to save extra 53k sek by forcing me to leave 1 month earlier. Also I've heard that they plan to hire another person 2-3 months later after I leave, so essentially they will save 150-200k sek and that's fine, I get it, it's business as usual right?
What I don't understand is how can they be so inhumane?
We agreed that notice is 2 months. I informed all my relatives (since I will be leaving Sweden). I gave notice to my landlord (deposit is 10k sek) and etc. I wanted to have 8 more weeks to plan what I'm going to do when I leave.
When asked wether I can leave by the end of this month I didn't know what to answer. I said that I will need to think about it and now I'm "thinking" about it. First of all I mentioned to them that I am risking to loose my deposit. Instead of offering any compensation, they keep asking me how they can help me to leave as soon as I can?
Situation is really messed up.
Since according to the contract I am still under probation(even though I started working earlier than stated in contract, so technically I shouldn't be under probation) I have no idea what they can do if I don't agree to their terms.
As far as I know they are obligated to give me 1 months notice if they are firing me while I'm under probation, so it doesn't seem that I would have much power in this situation.
If I would try to force them to keep me around for total 8 weeks, they can just officially fire me while I'm under probation and I will have to leave in 4 weeks. However after one week I will become a permanent employee and then they will have to give me 2 months notice if they want to fire me. So it seems that they are trying to save their face by trying to force me to leave earlier on my own will.
My current plan is to agree with them and actually leave at the end of this month. But with conditions.
First I need to get in touch with my landlord, explain the situation and hope that he would give back my deposit even if I'm leaving 1 month earlier than I've told him before.
Also, since these guys decided to mess up my plans by trying to save some money, I think I should demand for some compensation? Like 10-15k? I had plans goddamit and we agreed that notice will be 2 months via e-mail after all.4 -
!rant
TL;DR - not sure if I should take a full-time gig at my current pretty good job, or go do an internship with AWS for the summer.
Needing some wizened development career advice, guys. I am coming to a small crossroads at the moment.
I am in my last year of school getting a BS in Computer Science. I love it. I had a pretty sweet job at a cool startup, until recently, when they were bought by a bigger company. This turned out to still be alright though, since they hired everyone on to the new company to keep our codebase alive and well (it's a pretty good product that they don't want to get rid of). Except they hired me as an Intern instead, which I thought was weird, but they said that's normally what they do with peeps that are still in school. Whatevs. But then I got offered an internship at some company called Amazon Web Services to be a Systems Analyst Intern (basically cloud support engineering from the sounds of it). And then I told the cats at the new company that I was considering this internship and they started saying they'd consider giving me full-time. And they didn't want to lose me.
Well... my thing is that both are tempting. Like the company that'd offer me a full-time gig would be cool because I'd get to keep working on the projects I'm currently on and I'd be immersed in a good development cycle and whatnot. Probably more full-stack programming, which I like a good bit and want to master more of. The Amazon thing seems cool, but I worry that it'd be more of a support gig. And as well as they pay, I may not get as good of development experience. Granted I was told I could definitely get into scripting to automate various things. But I just don't know how much would actually be that. Except having Amazon on my resume would likely be pretty great to have also coming out of graduation.
Down yet another avenue of thought, the AWS internship would only be for a few months in the Summer. So there's a chance I could come back and I could get my old job back. But maybe they would see me as disloyal or something and not want me to come back. I would also likely forfeit my retention bonus (which is an ok amount, but not a deal-breaker and it's spread out over 3 years) for staying on with the company after the acquisition.
I just don't know. Would it be better to stay where I'm at or go on a wild adventure over the summer? Help me, DevRant Kenobi you're my only hope...3 -
Im currently working on a third world Software Dev Agency as Backend Engineer for 250 bucks. My friend, with same experience than me, got a job on an startup and is getting 4k as Frontend Engineer with something of Backend. Yes, i tried to apply at startups too, but no response never.13
-
Should I quit or let them fire me?
I am working on startup since 4 months as mid level ML engineer and my employer called me to say that they might fire me because my performance is not okay. He was true that my performance is far from good because I am busy preparing documents for my MSc. I am thinking about quitting but at the same time, pandemic is hitting hard and lots of jobs are lost and I might be unemployed after this.6 -
Hey guys,
I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.
Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.
Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.
However there are some cons:
My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.
Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.
Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?
They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.
All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"
What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.
On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.
Any thoughts?6 -
After working for a startup for 70 hours a week that taught me everything. The place was fun but lacked all the processes. But the boss eas awesome and taught me a shit a loads.
Things started geeting veryvslow so the start up is on lause right now. Anyhow... I ended up finding a job in a really undynamic city where i live where a prettysucesful and growing company just moved to.
Scrum on point, every one is cool, tasks are well established, git processes are freaking awesome and i could go on and on. 2nd week in i thank my old boss for being so precise and annoying on some very specific things because im rocking my first real it job thanks to him.
It feels good ;) -
Quite confused between choosing one out of two job opportunities
Little background - I am currently working on my own startup/project. I have been thinking of taking a break from it, for now, for various reasons, pick a job, earn some more experience and money, and get back to my gig after couple of months.
18 months ago, I had to choose a framework. I decided to go with Vuejs, and I feel, I made the correct choice. My motive was not to select a framework for job market or prepare for job, but to learn the best framework for project ( Good learning curve, easy, and fast )
Just recently, I got internship opportunity at two good startups (one YC selected and one funded), one using Vuejs and other Reactjs, which will be converted into full-time job.
The advantage with vuejs startup is, I am good with vuejs and looking to use it in future also. But with reactjs startup, I will have to dive deeper in reactJs in coming 2-3 weeks, which I don't think I am going to use in future for personal projects.
Compensation of reactjs startups looks more than vuejs company. Around 20-30% more. Vuejs company had asked for 3 month internship, while reactjs company will decide to convert it to full-time in a month.
Have anything to say ??
*Vuejs is adapted from and bit similar to angular and reactjs*1 -
Guys, this is not a rant. But I need a career advice. I don’t have a BD in CS, but I studied by myself and took some other classes and was working in the field for more than an year now after graduating from university. I do full stack developing with javascript and sometimes java at a startup now.
My goal was to eventually get to grad school in CS. I found some programs what accept students from non CS back grounds too. I can’t do BD again it will take too long. And I’m old ! lol
If any of you had similar experiences, or know some good programs would you let me know? Should I prepare portfolio or should I accomplish something great in order to get accepted? Or should I just try applying first? I’m focusing more on east coast to choose schools from but open to anything for now.
It’s quite scary to really start working on this since I already have a job and there are so much information regarding grad school, I get overwhelmed. Though it’s something i need to overcome. It would be really helpful for me if you could share your two cents.
I love what I do now, and really hope that I get to study further and explore in depth. Also I’m interested in AI or machine learning. Also if you know good source for reading recently published papers on CS let me know!
Thanks for reading! :)10 -
How many of you have managers who grill their employees for coming late?
Maybe it's just me being downright lazy but I've always had this idea that working for a tech company would mean flexible timings and no fixed minimum working hours (as long as you meet your deadlines and get the job done).
I've been working for this small AI/CV startup for about 10 months now and my manager/founder's nephew, who is my age(22) keeps grinding me for not coming on time. I'm not really a morning person (and my productivity decreases significantly whenever I wake up early) but I make sure I meet my deadlines.
Initially, I used to avoid all this BS but now it has started to annoy me. Suggestions?10 -
Went to a hackathon and tried to use ARCore. Most painful experience of my life. There are so many issues and critical bugs that I can't even fit them all into a 5000 character rant, Google has shittier code than a highschool startup.
So instead of typing 5000 characters I'll just save you all some time. If you're forced to use ARCore, don't even try to use the AcquireCameraImageBytes or related apis for actually accessing the camera feed. Just use unity's screen capture API (draw an invisible rectangle on the whole screen, make a texture, readPixel entire rectangle). Turning off all models for 1 frame and taking a screen capture is easier, faster, and somehow more optimal than using Google's code.
Also, they released Augmented Faces on Friday. Their demo plainly doesn't work the way they intended on many devices because the list never gets populated since their engineers are dumb fucks. Just force the face mesh to always remain active and you'll instantly support all devices! You can deactivate it using your own methods but Google's doesn't work on many devices. There's an issue in their repo about this that they are plainly ignoring.
Also if you're interested I have a (working?) engine to use Object Detection for interactions within AR + a create your own adventure game demo made w/ object detection + ar on my git:
https://github.com/pshah123/...
My code is 100% crap so definitely don't use it in production but I was able to get the individual pieces working so hopefully this helps someone! Unless you're from Google, then fuck you please uninstallrant please uninstall google fuck google mv google /dev/null sudo rm google sudo kill -9 google git rm google16 -
I have been coding since 2016, am I overthinking applying for jobs because Im not that "current"? (my React experience is not that deep, I have been working on our startup whos stack doesnt use React or any other front-end framework (only simple handlebars templating))
I have built an actual stable working web platform and mobile app through ionic, is this enough to get a decant non-junior job?
I have never actually worked at a company, its been freelancing and startup (we failed, moving on). Am I overthinking how good I need to be to get a job? I like this one local company but I dont want to screw it up, Im sort of delaying applying there because of it7 -
I was once working at very successful startup as lead android engineer, when another startup contacted me and offered me a better paid and "stable" position. 9 months later I woke up on the 1st of the month (1st June 2018), checking my bank account: No payment. I go to office, boss comes in : hey guys, we're bankrupt and we can't pay your salary.
Today still no salary, we're waiting now for court to officially declare the startup bankrupt and then Government will pay me my last 3 salaries, while my working contract is still valid for 3 months after company gets declared officially as bankrupt. We're being expected to work as nothing would be, with no money on our bank accounts (we've been even told to take a temporary loan) and that sooner or later somebody will buy us off. Oh, it would be also really nice from us if we would not be looking for a new "challenge". What'd you do?3 -
Joined a startup, pretty happy with the company over-all so far truthfully. Secured a large project yesterday with higher billables so job security wise things are good. However... The project I've been working on is a mix of a Spring boot webapp and a game. Two separate applications that interact with each other.
Two teams. A home team, and an away team, plus.... 2 "AI's" to play against... Well.... whoever designed this "AI" designed it so they can only ever play as the away team. Why... every function, every method, every bit of logic is coded around what "Half" of the inning it is.... Now I had the bright idea of picking up the hardest task on the ticket list, of making these AI's be able to play as the home team.
WHAT A TASK, and to make things worse. Instead of using some kind of proper inheritance with actual structure, we have TWO COPY AND PASTED AIs where the other has more hard-coded team sided logic that needs to ALSO be adapted.
17 points my ass.
I do love my job though.4 -
Guys i need your opinion on this issue I've been working in a startup for almost a year now.. the product we are building is pretty awesome.. the only issue is the non technical managers are giving unrealistic deadlines to the clients and we the development team guys are under a lot of stress.. they are not ready to give us a raise as we have not come out beta yet.. should I stay or quit?6
-
Been a while since my last rant, and this is not a rant.
Working at a startup is amazingly exciting and interesting.
Finally rolled out a feature from our company and. Is working on another one and the production bug keep coming from the old one. -
Big party at school coming soon, I'm busy working on my startup, too shy to ask someone out. Fuck, why does it always have to be like that? When I have something important to do, there is ton of other cool stuff elsewhere. I could go, but knowing me I will constantly think about everything I could be doing and how much code I could write. And my fucking annoying shyness. Fuck, even if I like someone so much, I won't tell them because it will destroy our "friendship" and I may loose my dance partner. Flying fuck, why can't one simply change himself.1
-
Who else is frustrated/burnout at building products that never gets into production?
When I work for a company I always tend to do everything with good practices, spend a lot of time thinking on the best ways to build x feature, and then the company falls into the infinite loop of adding stupid features, and then I've been working for 2 years and 0 paid customers. Funny that we've Sentry, GA, Hotjar sitting there doing nothing.
I'm honestly hating the startup environment rn. Good thing is that I've learnt a lot and salary is good. But also I lost all motivation.
Any recommendations for a tired dev?7 -
So it me again and loviing my life at this tech startup..... i feel like I'm actually achieving something thogh at a slow pace
I know i can give out more to this startup.....but there is this 1 manager in our technical department......FUCK the old man thinks he knows everything and so damn arrogant.... at one time he made a fucking simple error which was fucking obvius but the man you cant tell him anything
if anything goes wrong or if anything isnt working the FUCKING old man is quick to throw the blame on people which i feel isnt supposed to be a mind set of some1 in the technical department..... I get it yes sometimes it will be the person making errors but even when you do it right and its not coming out as its supposed to be the damn OLD FUCKING MAN says you are doing it wrong.....then he steps in and bang....it fels and he'll be like "WHAT? HOW WHATS GOING ON...."
and me silently will be like MAKE IT WORK FUCKING OLD GENIUS
I cant even bring in new ideas and systems into the company......hell be like WE ALREADY HAVE SYSTEMS IN PLACE.... guess what..... no fucking system is being used -
In about 1.5 hours i'm getting out of the side project/startup i've been working on with a few friends. Not an easy decision but had do it, as it had a negative impact on my real job.3
-
A bit long, sorry.
I "inherited" an A+ certification book from my older brother over 10 years ago after he saw me meddling with some old computers that still used SIMM's. I still lived in my native country at the time and got my A+ certification through my high school when I moved to the US. I knew before I got the book that my career would revolve around IT.
I learned HTML and CSS right after I finished high school and started working with JS and PHP because of WordPress a year later. To this day I still help family and friends with IT related stuff, but after digging into web development I made it my main focus. I am now working on my CS degree after failing at college years ago because of laziness and procrastination. I also work at an amazing startup as a software engineer for the web. That's it in a nutshell, questions are welcome.
Can I get a stress ball? 😅 -
So... I had to create a VBA macro, ok, it is very simple and it will be necessary during some DOC files reviewing. Ok, not a problem.
I created the functions, added some quick launch buttons and saved it as a .DOTM file. I even included an autoload form with an Install button, so the file copy itself to the Word Startup folder. Nice, everything working just fine.
But... there are two Mac users in the company. I do not have a Mac, but the first thing I thought was I hardcoded the "\" to check if the file already exists and to copy the file. Using the system separator would do the trick. The macro would be copied and everything is done. But...
1. The quick launch buttons do not appear on Mac;
2. The "Application.PathSeparator" returns an ":"
3. The "application.StartupPath" returns an invalid path (something like "Mac's Name:Application:etc")
4. The copy command is not working, the Dir command appears to be not identifying the path etc
5. I need to have it working by Monday morning.2 -
So I just started working on a site for a new client who has been working on getting their startup off the ground. Their CTO has built the site so far but I've never seen so much styling and js online in a RoR app... FML.1
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Fellow ranters, I need some advice.
Work at an early stage startup to build their initial product(let's call it X) or work at slightly established startup with funding(let's call it Y)?
Both have their own benefits.
Working at X:
- I have equity (and a co founder position) thus chances of high rewards if the startup is successful.
- I get to build the whole product from scratch (great learning experience).
Working at Y:
- Don't know much about the company but I get a decent stable income.
- Work with a team (although a small one).
- Job security.
I'm currently in my final year and have given up on campus placements. Moreover, I'm not interested in wasting my time in pointless interview preparations. So I figured that startup is the way to go.7 -
Still as a scholar who has had his intership I decided that I was finally confident enough in my ability to apply for a small part-time programming job. I had an internship at a cool exhausting place with tons of expertise and I've proven myselve over there. So now I wanted a job on the side. Nothing special, just something that would make a little money with programming instead of washing dishes at the restaurant.
So I started at this small internet based startup (2 or 3 progammers) as a backend-oriented programmer. The working hours were amazingly compatible with my school schedule.
The lead dev also sounded like a smart guy. He had worked as a backend guy for years and had code running on verry critical public infrastructure that if it were to fail we'd be evacuated from our homes.
As a first asignment I got an isolated task to make an importer for some kind of file format that needed integration. So I asked for access to the code. I didn't get it since they were going to re-do the entire backend based on the code I wrote. I just needed to parse the file in a usable object structure. So I found out that the file format was horrible and made a quite nice set of objects that were nice. At the end of the first week or so I asked if I could get access to the code again, so I could integrate it. Answer was no. The lead dev would do that. I could however get access to my private repository.
Next week a new intern was taken to build a multiplatform responsive app. Only downside was that all the stuff he had ever done was php based websites. It wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I figured that that was where internships were for. So I ended up helping him a lot and taught him some concepts of OOP and S.O.L.I.D. and the occasional 30 minute rants of IndexOutOfRangeException, ArgumentException and such.
So one day he asked me how to parse a json string and retrieve a specific field out of it.
I gave him something like the following to start with:
"
JObject json;
if(!JObject.TryParse(jsonString, out json))
{
//handle error
}
string value;
if(!json.tryget("foo", out value).../// code continues
"
but then the main dev stepped in and proposed the following since it wouldn't crash on an API change:
"
dynamic json = new JObject(jsonString);
string value = json.myJsonValue;
"
After me trying to explain to him that this was a bad choise for about 15 minutes because of all kinds of reasons I just gave up. I was verry mad that this young boy was forced to use bad programming pracises while he was clearly still learning. I know I shouldn't pick up certain practises. But that boy didn't.
Almost everytime the main dev was at the office I had such a mindboggling experience.
After that I got a new assignment.
I had to write another xml file format parser.
Of course I couldn't have any access to our current code because... it was unnecesary. We were going to use my code as a total replacement for the backend again.
And for some reason classes generated from XSD weren't clear enough so after carefull research I literally wrapped xsd generated code in equivalent classes.
At that moment, I realized I made some code that was totally useless since it wasn't compatible with any form of their API or any of the other backend code. (I haven't seen their API. I didn't have access to the source.) And since I could've just pushed them generated XSD's that would've produced thesame datastructure I felt like I was a cheat. I also didn't like that I wasn't allowed to install even the most basic tooling. (git client or, Ide refactoring plugins, spelling checker etc...)
Now I was also told that I couldn't discuss issues with the new guy anymore since it was a waste of my valuable time, and they were afraid that I taught him wrong concepts.
This was the time that my first paycheck came in so I quitted my job.
I haven't seen any of the features that I've worked on. :) -
I'm joining a startup next month and they are working on a project that requires knowledge of a unique framework and it's architecture. They know I'm mostly free this month and so they have asked me (in a time frame) to learn and perform certain tasks. They have also scheduled reviews to track progress.
tl;dr: Company wants me to learn stuff before joining and schedule reviews.
Is this behavior normal or/and appropriate?6 -
A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.
It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.
Since then I've been working odd jobs.
And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.
First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.
I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.
Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.
Custom column types.
Embedding html in cells.
Reorderable columns
Optional but nice to have:
Changeable column width and row height.
Drag and drop on rows and columns.
Right click menu support out of the box.
After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.
And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.
Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.
Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.
And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.
Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.
Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?
Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?
Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?
As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.
For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.
And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.
How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?
I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!1 -
My Dell PC decided to show "Unrecognized AC adaptor" error on startup.
Spent 4 hours trying to find a solution and almost declared as dead the AC cable even if current was still flowing kind of fine.
Suddenly it starts working again with nothing changed.
Dell, you just lost a possible customer.4 -
Hey guys! I'm a founder and CTO of a Buffalo, NY based startup. I graduated last year and I have been working on the startup ever since. I came to the US on a B1 Visa, which allows me to set up the business here but not earn a salary. So I have been working from India (my home country) as a contractor. I travel occasionally to USA for meetings etc. It gets really annoying because of the massive time zone difference, I'm not able to work as efficiently. We are pretty early stage so I can't get an H1b and since I don't have an entity in India, not eligible for l1 visa either.
Can anyone tell me if i have any other options in US/Canada as Canada is just an hour away from Buffalo. I looked at startup visa in Canada but I don't have any investors in Canada hence not eligible for it.2 -
Hi Guys if you can share your opinion/experience in what I wrote below it would help me a lot, thanks !
Im a full-stack developer with 4 years of experience, worked with different technologies in backend, frontend, mobile etc.. so I have general knowdgele of how systems works and how they should be built.
So I work as CTO in a startup, Im for almost 2 years here I started here with minimum salary (I decided that, because they said to me we are startup and such things so I wanted to help) 2.2k Euros and it has been almost 2 years without pay rise, so last month I asked for pay rise, but they said to me that they dont have money and sent me +300 euros as gift.
One week ago I wrote to them again (co-founders) that I have a lot of pressure and I dont know if I can handle all of that for much time he told me that I got +300 euro pay rise (which it was gift from them in first place, I refused them to sent this to me), but TODAY CEO and Co-Founder wrote to again me asking if I accept +300 euro pay rise because they can afford to pay me 2.5k or if I dont accept this they can sent me 2.2k again (they think that 2.5k is maximum that they can pay me right now and that this is enough for me).
I want to ask you guys what would you do, would you accepting something like this, considering that right now Im only dev here (yes Im only dev) and Im taking care of these(yes all of these) :
1. Company Website (react js)
2. Web Admin Panel (that clients use to manage their data)(react js)
3. Web Application (that visitors use to see client data)(react js)
4. Widgets (some code that is integrated into clients websites it's same as application, but integrated directly to client website)(react js)
5. Backend of all 3 apps mentioned above (asp.net core)
6. AWS Architecture( some of services : Cognito,Lambda,RDS,API Gateway,CloudFront,S3)
7. DevOps Role
Also consider that I didnt take holidays for 1 year now working on weekends too :)3 -
I've got startup ideas.
Not just ideas, but, I'm working on all of them.
Now I wanna leave my engineering...
And everybody is telling me not to.
Can I get a yes here?8 -
## Learning k8s
Okay, seriously, wtf.. Docker container boots up just fine, but k8s startup from the same image -- fails. After deeper investigation (wasted a few hours and a LOT of patience on this) I've found that k8s is right.. I should not be working.
Apparently when you run an app in ide (IDEA) it creates the ./out/ directory where it stores all the compiled classes and resources. The thing is that if you change your resources in ./src/main/resources -- these changes do NOT reflect in ./out/. You can restart, clean your project -- doesn't matter. Only after you nuke the ./out and restart your app from IDE it will pick up your new resources.
WTF!!!
and THAT's why I was always under an impression that my app's module works well. But it doesn't, not by a tiny rat's ass!
Now the head-scratcher is WHY on Earth does Docker shows me what I want to see rather than acting responsibly and shoving that freaking error to my stdout...
Truth be told I was hoping it's k8s that's misbehaving. Oh well..
Time to get rid od legacy modes' support and jump on proper implementation! So much time wasted.. for nothing :(9 -
Work in a startup, with no pressure to work after hours.
Might sound bliss for those of you working 80 hour weeks, but be honest with yourselves, what would you plan on doing after work anyway?3 -
!rant
A question to all the guys and girls that launched a startup: How powerful was your infrastructure at the beginning? How many requests per seconds did you encounter after the first few weeks after the launch? Did you distribute the workload to different systems in the first place or was that something that was done later?
I am currently working hard in my freetime to get my first project done. As it's still a side project, that I am working on in my freetime, I want to make the launch as smooth as possible. I imagine that it's really hard to make serious changes to the whole design, just because the initial approach doesn't scale well enough. So I am currently in the process of stresstesting the whole infrastructure. But during the stresstest I realized that I don't really know what I should aim for.
What I also want to avoid is, that I am wasting my time on creating a large infrastructure of database servers, caching instances and load balancers that isn't really necessary for the initial launch.
Would really love to hear your experiences on that.3 -
I joined a startup a few months back, it has four developers apart from me and after I joined and started interacting with them, I could feel that they weren't happy working there, after a couple of months, they became vocal about their dislike, when we were talking about work. I too started experiencing that. Two of them are going to leave next month.
I feel like its starting to rub off on me, I don't have that enthusiasm I used to have, I dread going to the office and overall everything related to the office started to seem negative to me. I feel like I want to get out of this place ASAP.
yeah, most of the things they say are true and I'm not so sure about the rest. Is this how I truly feel?1 -
follow up from https://devrant.com/rants/2377758/...
As theKarlisK and Root stated "When it works it works beautifully, when it doesn't a bit of Google-fu finds a fix".
some issues I found in this journey:
- stuttering in some games, even using custom proton build(halo mcc)
- some titles are hard to even start(my RE7 D:)
- bluetooth with my dongle isn't good, takes to long to connect my xbox s controller, sometimes with doesn't even work at all. had to do a workaround in the first place to pair (but this is a problem with ubuntu, not linux gaming but had to mention it)
- games outside the proton ecosystem can be a pain in the ass to get working. LoL on lutris crashes 3 times at startup, don't wanna even try to install overwatch on lutris
- rbg software can be "hard" to find or the alternative is not that good. (got an alternative for mystic light but is just command line. did not found a logitech keyboard software :/, hadn't search hard enough )
pros:
- being able to game on linux is like a dream come true
- most of my steam games runs out of the box
- is linux
- is linux
but the issues are starting to bother me...5 -
Working on maintenance suck, but that's why most of the software developers do. Stable job and higher pay. Mundane tasks like fix bugs or modify small part of the software.
Working on an idea is interesting in startup. You don't see shit code and code from the ground up. The work is creative. But the pay is low because the company is not profitable.
Which one is your choice?1 -
THANKS UNITY FOR FUCKING CRASHING ON EVERY STARTUP!!
I have a big problem my Unity Engine Editor crashes on startup with an error never seen in the forum's! GOOD TO HAVE THANKS.... I really needed to work this weekend on my game but noooooo 😑😑😑 if the support can't help me I'm quit Unity and start working with C++ !
"Error: initializing license system"
OH FUCK OFF2 -
Need some job search advice here please!
A startup is has offered me a job, but is going to be paying me half salary for 3 months, and then they're sure to get funding, so will be paying the difference amount after 3 months. But, it all hangs on this supposed funding that will happen in 3 months. The "CEO" is actually working for another company currently. And his rationale for half salary was, we all need to take risks with startups. Is this worth taking up? The alternative is me continuing job search for a more stable job (where I can stay for few years) and a full salary with benefits and all. I'd tried starting up on my own earlier, and now I'm looking for opportunities fulltime (in other words unemployed).8 -
Dude ist sysadmin at server Pool hosting our app for the client.
Client: something minor is not working.
Dude: Let me just restart app, works at my windows laptop everytime or whatever.
*restarts app, hangs on entrypoint*
Dude: Dear client it's brocken.
Clients: *calls us in panic.*
Horus: Dear dude, when it hangs on startup consider to download an update because we fixed some issues with in theis area recently. Also maybe enlarge the docker compose timeout.
Dude: Still does not start up.
Horus: ok just call me on this Zoom link, then we can debug together.
Dude:...
Dude:...
Dude:...
Dude: oh i just saw it did startup mean while, it just took some time.
Fuck you dude, and your impatience!1 -
Since my internship, I've been working for a startup, but my contract's job description is so ambiguous that it doesn't mention what programming language I'll be responsible for (I'm not sure whether other normal large company do), so there's nothing wrong with assuming the company wants me to wash toilets someday. Also, I don't enjoy not having seniors in my field advise me on the best/professional way to do things, so I've been self-taught online and am free to do my work my way (which is probably me coding some very bad/unreadable code that I'm not even aware of).
Until then, my primary job had been to develop Flutter app. Recently, the company has been doing some development, and I was forced to do Swift programming, which I had never done before, and I needed to migrate the coding of an iOS app that my senior had programmed into a MacOS app, but my senior's programming is extremely difficult to read, with no comments, and I was disgusted!
By the way, isn't it true that Swift programmers are usually better paid? So wouldn't I be taken advantage of by the company because I didn't even get a raise for switching to Swift programming?
First time I am posting my rant here, thanks for watching!4 -
Question directed to devs who know a bit about setting up middle sized architecture.
Prestory: Joined into development of a middle sized online game. Figured they created a monolith over the last 6 years up to a point where nothing works properly and nothing can be changed without wrecking the whole system. Figured a monolithic approach isn't such a great idea.
Current Situation: In a different, same scale online game development team, game itself working but team is struggling with architecture.
My job is to come up with an approach on how to set up masterserver/matchmaking/database etc. Reading through various articles about common principles (SOLID etc.), i figured that a microservice+event-/servicebus architecture may work for that kind of project.
The idea would be to have a global interface in which microservices can be hooked. So a client registers to a client handler on startup, then starts to queue for a game, the client handler throws an event on the bus to register the user to matchmaking. The matchmaker happens to listen to those events (Observer Pattern) and adds him to matchmaking, when a match is found it throws an event on the bus to connect the user to the server, etc. One can easily imagine a banhandler throwing in a veto to cancel such an action, metrics and logging is fairly simple to add (just another service listening to all events), additionally Continuous Delivery, FRP and such are also beneficial advantages and it is said to scale well.
The question is, would you do the same, is there maybe something i might be overlooking? Do you have better ideas?
Keep in mind that we are not too experienced and are bound to different languages (python, C++ and java mostly) and are a small (4 Devs) Team with different strengths.
Thank you for your feedback and criticism!1 -
I'll about to join one of MNC in next month(at this moment I work in Startup company). But I'm little bit nervous. Technology for which I got selected, I worked 1 year ago. I selected for senior post and don't know what my responsibilities will be. I'm going through Imposter Syndrome. For overcoming that stress and nervousness I'm working on my weak areas. But as my notice period is going on, my boss is giving me more and more work and I'm not getting enough time on focusing on my weak areas. As date is coming close and that stress is increasing day by day. What can I do and how can I handle myself?3
-
New guy in the block!. Just started with a new position in a new company too!.
Designated as as Devops Engineer (after my 2 years of experience as one) in a well funded Saas Startup!. Lots to learn. I used to work in Openstack Terraform puppet etc whilst here it's fully AWS. I was expecting this right from the start but woah.
Lambda, dynamodb, cloudformation, ssm, codebuild, codepipeline
Serverless framework, Flask and node mixed apps , Vue (including vuex) js Front end, graphQl api, and rest for between microservices.
Lots of ground to cover and I've not consumed this much topics before. Especially graphQl and Vue js are being a pain for now .
Each Devops engineer is working on a tools to improve the productivity and shorten the release time. Lots of automations in the pipeline!.
I'm not sure this qualifies as a rant but here you go!.2 -
Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.
So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.
2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.
So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?
Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)
3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?
4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot9 -
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 -
I'd like to ask you guys for a suggestion: I've been working for about 10 months at a friend's little startup as a front-end developer.
There are only a couple of developers in the team, while the CTO and some other senior devs are either absent or passing by sporadically, as they actually are not part of the team, with all the problems that this entailed, so for various reasons I didn't much enjoy the company in terms of organization, culture and growing opportunities, to say the least.
A couple of weeks ago a rather renowned company interviewed me, and told me they like my attitude and could consider to take me onboard in a few months as a fullstack developer, provided that in the meantime I level up my backend skills.
Now, I'm struggled as on the one hand I would leave my friend's company, but on the other hand, the latter company's working culture seems great, and I expect the compensation to be higher as well.
What would you do if you were in my situation?
Thanks for any suggestion :)2 -
update : we are at hr round baby!!!
part 1 : https://devrant.com/rants/5528056/...
part 2 (in comments) : https://devrant.com/rants/5550145/...
the tech market is crazy mann! it's one of the top indie fintech companies in our country and has a great valuation.
i totally felt that they i am crashing the interviews , and am seriously not trying to be humble. before the dsa round , i was trying to mug up how insertion sort works 🥲
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now my dilemma is should i switch if i get the offer. in a summary:
current company:
- small valuation but profitable (haven't picked funding for last 3 years , so poast valuation is some double digit million $, but can easily be a unicorn company)
- very major b2b player in my country. almost all unicorns (including this fintech company) and some major MNCs are their client and they have recently acquired a few other companies of us and eu too, making them- a decent global player
- meh work : i love being a cutting edge performer in android but here we make sdks that need to support even legacy banking apps. so tech stack is a lot of verbose java and daily routine includes making very minor changes to actual code and more towards adding tests , maintaining wrapper sdks in react/cordova/unity etc, checking client side code etc.
- awesome work life balance : since work is shit and i am fast enough, i am usually working only 2-4 hours a day. i joined gym, got into shape , and have already vsited 5 places in last 6 months, and i am a guy who didn't used to have time even on sundays. here, we get mote paid leaves than what i would usually need.
- learning opportunities: not exactly from the company codebase, but they provide unlimited access to various course learning platforms like linkedin learning, udemy and others, so i joined some web dev baches and i now know decent frontend too. plus those hybrid sdks also give a light context to new things
new company :
- positives : multi billion valuation, one of the top players in fintech , have been mostly profitable ( except a few quarters)
- positive : b2c so its (hopefully) going to put me back into racing shoes with kotlin, jetpack and latest libraries.
- more $$$ for your boy :)
- negetive : they seem to be on hiring spree and am afraid to junp ship after seeing the recent coinbase layoffs. fintech is scary these days
- negetive : if they are hiring people like me, then then they are probably hiring people worse than me 😂. although thats not my concern what my main concer is how they interviewed. they have hired a 3rd party company that takes interviews of people FOR THEM! i find that extremely impolite, like they don't even wanna spare their devs to hire people they are gonna work with. i find this a toxic, robotic culture and if these are the people in there then i would have a terrible time finding some buddy engineer or some helpful senior.
- negetive : most probably a bad wlb : i worked for an year for a fast paced b2c edtech startup. no matter how old these are , b2c are always shipping new stuff and are therefore hectic. i don't like the boredom here but i would miss the free time to workout :(
so ... any thoughts about it?4 -
Plz help me to choose between two offers.
First one is a services provider firm where I would get to work alone on projects for clients. The con is their is no Senior Android Developer's in the firm
Second one is a startup where I will be working with a team on their product.
Points to be noted :
1) I am a fresher
2) both companies are offering me same position (Android Developer ) and salary.4 -
How to write a great resume and Linkedin when im playing 3 roles at my current job?
Iwear many hats right now on my Job (you can check my LinkedIn, the link is on my devRant profile).
Right now im looking forward change job in 3 months or so, mostly due to non flexible working hours and somewhat toxic environment.
The problem im facing right now, id how to put all the stuff im doing right now in my profile without it sounding crazy or something like that.
I also see companies open positions for very specific roles, so i dont know how write a resume to apply to a job without excluding half of my skills from it to looks "specialized".
Other factor is that i really have fun doing diverse things on my Job, it is boring for me do a single thing for months.
How can i include everything i know in my resume? or what job title can resume all my expertise?
Thanks guys!
PD: If you are in an small startup, and trive working with people that wear many hats, contact me on LinkedIn! i can consider your offer1 -
VSCode. I used to be a WebStorm guy, but at one point I found out that I could do like 85% of the stuff in VSCode, and switched over. Things I still kinda miss from the JetBrains ecosystem:
- the elaborate refactoring
- the built-in navigation across the file and the project
- the really clever expand select and go to open/closing bracket (VSCode is kinda getting there, but for expand select it honours camel case words and that can't be turned off, it's weird with HTML files with inlined JS or CSS; for bracket jumping it must rely on an extension)
- the way that everything within the UI is predictable and navigable with keyboard only (tried opening a dropdown in VSCode without having a specific keybinding for that specific dropdown? In WebStorm it was Alt+Up/Alt+Down for any dropdown that has focus IIRC)
- the visual way of changing a colour theme (in VSCode you have to guess what is what before modifying a value; by the way this is an idea for an extension that I might research)
What I like about VSCode:
- the speed (although it can get slow with large files; on the other hand JetBrains IDEs are not that slow except for the startup, given that you're not working on a potato, but here we are)
- its extensibility and very active extension development (and the fact that it's rather easy to write your own extensions, although I haven't benefited from that very much)
- the ease of syncing settings (the Settings Sync extension and now the built-in mechanism introduced I think earlier this month)
- it's free (so I don't have to pay for it myself or nag to my employer to issue me a license)
I've tried Sublime and it's hands down the fastest thing I've seen (it can open a 100 MB text file on the shittiest computer you can find and edit it efficiently), the problem is that it's not so rich in extensions. I've tried vim, nano and whatnot, but I'm far from that, just not my cup of tea. I'm okay for the occasional file edit while SSHd somewhere, but that's all.
In an ideal world we'd have something like Sublime's performance with VSCode's ecosystem and JetBrains', well, brains...1