I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

- Recruiters are as bad as car sellers
- They are not your friends
- They're not on your side
- The less you ask for a job the more they're gonna get
- Keep your cards on your side
- Don't tell them how much you make (they love to know that)
- Set a salary expectation for yourself and push it
- Expect a few-months long job hunting
- If you know you deserve the salary you are asking for keep pushing.
- Be patient.
- Don't give your 2 weeks notice until you signed already for the other company
- Medical insurance makes a big dent on salary
- Keep applying for jobs even if you are advanced in a hiring process.

So far this is what I've been learning through my current job seeking experience.

I hate job recruiters, if you can, avoid them at all costs

"Your XML is malformed by these strange tags CDATA. I've cleaned it up ;)"

Fuckity Fuck my boy, now the whole website is down. All hail the magic push to prod button.

(there were snippets of user provided HTML that was passed over XML by a microservice)

Things I'm half decent at: Writing code
Things I am absolutely the worst at: Managing projects

Things I got employed for: Writing code
Things I do: Managing projects

I had the nerve to ask “Do you have any reservations about hiring me?” during an interview today. No regrets. Recommend.

I hate, HATE MYSELF!! I am an awful developer. I am an awful person.
I am trying so hard. To be a better person. To be a better developer. But, as a person I am again finding it difficult to empathize. At work, I really want to explore MERN stack but that I have to do it out of working hours. And damn! work is too much, I don't get time.
I need to work on a new project, for 2 months the discussions with MILLION TEAMS ARE GOING ON!!! NOTHING!! NOBODY HAS ANY IDEA!! THEY MIGHT FIRE ME!! I AM STRESSED!!
IT'S 1AM HERE AND I AM WRITING UNIT TESTS!! I want to cry. I want a partner maybe who can support me or maybe it's my mood swings.

Internships on Internshala, a popular Internship recruitment platform in India, be like...

😂😂😂

And the pay: 10,000 INR ~ 136 USD/month

Yep
You read that right
PER MONTH

How do you do it fellow developers? How can you stay productive for the whole day? I've tried and best I can do is 6 hours without feeling my brain mushing. Why do management insist I need to sit in front of the computer for the whole 8 hours...

I was hired in a company for the title of Front-end Developer. I am qualified as because I have skills and experience with regards to doing front-end stuff. But it turns out that the work will be Full Stack. The employer was reasoning out that after your done with front-end task, I must do backend stuff as well so I would not be idle on may day's shift.

Is it my fault if I already done with my respective task and just mingle with random task of backend stuff that is not my real skills or forte?

I can understand and know PHP & MySQL, but I am not guaranteed to finish the task quickly compared to my backend counterpart in doing their task.

To cut the story short, they terminated my contract and claim that I am not performing well with my duties and responsibility, though most of the Front-end stuff I was assigned were already done and deployed.

There's no justice in this typical world of start-ups and noobie HR people that always one sided and they always say that it's their policy and they cannot do anything with regards to the incident happened to me.

The hardest part of being a programmer wasn't the education, the self-teaching, the sleepless nights or the hours of agony trying to fix a bug that would break a program I'd spend weeks working on.

It's the realization that my family, friends, coworkers...nobody understands at all what I do. They don't know of my failures or my triumphs. I can't talk about it with them and it's becoming more apparent to them that it's taking up more of my life. And in a way it feels like a part of myself has just become, well, alien.

Best way I can describe it is, it's like the "Tears in the Rain" scene from Blade Runner.

I'm stuck, I think. I know I've been shutting out people from my life more and more as I don't want to "deal" with people's issues, but I don't think it's been good. I'm can verify that I'm depressed beyond my normal levels.

It's time for me to make an appointment with a therapist.

Remember that you are loved here, and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Stay strong.