I don’t have a real way to find a good company.
As a rule of thumb I avoid startups.

This doesn’t mean all new young tech companies are bad. I avoid the startup rethorics. Those are 🚩 for both new and old companies.

And I avoid crypto, nft and other scam businesses. There’s an high chance that the owners will run away with the money and leave you without a job.

Just before my graduation a big consultancy firm reached me to offer me a job.

They told the salary was double compared to other jobs but they needed me to

go to a city 4 hours away from mine,

have an interview there,

if that went well I would have had to attend an intensive course in the same city (paying all expenses by myself)

and after that have another interview to see if I was good for the job

“Sounds nice 😊 can you call me next week after my graduation? Now I need to focus on that but then I would like to hear more…”

How did it go? Who knows, after my graduation I turned my phone off for a month and 👻 ghosted them…

Hide Easter Eggs in your code

In my first program we had a secure file deletion feature

I was tasked of the Mac OS version

While windows version had an icon for drag and drop with a document in a trash bin, in my version when you selected different safety options, it changed icons

Basic deletion had the bin

Intermediate deletion had a document grinder

Advanced deletion had a burning file icon

I was very proud of myself

Got back at work after 2 weeks off

Useless to say I did not remember what to do or where to start…

Today I was working on a feature and while thinking about code organization I found an empty function ready to be filled with the exact name I was about to type.

My 2 weeks ago self prepared it for me… it was so kind of him

Longest I worked without rest: about 13 hours

Why: first job + young and stupid

Blender (hobby)
Godot (hobby and job!)

Took a couple of days off last week and was at home for 4 days straight.

I picked 2.7kg of mulberries and made jam.

I don’t want to sit in front of a screen now 😭

When I work from home, I probably spend less time working, but I do it seriously

When I work in the office I spend most of the time I would not actually work, pretending to work and probably time spent in actual work is much less

But I guess that better performances in work from home, do not feed automotive industry…

Testing

And when I have improved Testing, the next one will be…

Testing

At the beginning of the last year of university a new flatmate arrived. His father dropped him at the apartment and then called me asking for the Wi-Fi password.

I told him I could not remember it on the spot and I would tell it to his son later.

I actually remembered it very well and I could say I didn’t tell him because of security reasons …

Actually I was embarrassed to say on phone: “PubesRule!”

The password was actually decided by a previous flatmate…😅

And then one day you wake up and discover that your first boss,

the one who hired you when you had no experience

who believed in you when nobody else did

and also paid you a full decent payment when the rest of the world tried to pay you less than half the amount

who taught you a lot about the business and even when you disagreed, it was impossible to get angry because he was calm and gentle always

and treated you so many lunches and dinners

…was beaten and killed by a former colleague…

I have no words…

Sayonara 👋 boss
I will miss you so much on this Earth 😢

My last job application letter was literally: “I saw your add and since you don’t do web stuff I decided to apply”

Hired

After a year working in an office where everyone worked part time (manager 3h, other programmers 5/6h per day) and I was the only full time employee …

… one day the manager told me: “since today is pre-holiday you can go home one hour early as we usually do”

…usually…

… after a year…

… of many pre-holiday days …

you finally felt that it was the time to inform me that I could have spent less hours in that 💩 office?

Well thanks…

[… finally I don’t feel so guilty for going home just 5 minutes after the others left the office because there was nothing to do …]

My previous manager always complained about the programmer that used to be there before me was utterly incompetent and unable to work.

One day checking a legacy app that needed a minor update I was looking at the code and said: “It is true the previous programmer didn’t even know how to put together 2 lines of code, this is literally the shittiest thing I have ever seen, thank God he is not around anymore!”

…

Manager: “Actually I wrote this myself”

…
…

Just graduated in CS.
All jobs required experience in stuff I never seen/heard before (back then I didn’t know most job listings were copy pasted by people who knew less than me).
I felt so inadequate that I replied to a job offer as a seller as they asked only fluency in 2 foreign languages.

The company owner during the interview looked at me and told me I needed to look elsewhere, that mine was a good resume and then he dropped this:
“I can see you are a good guy, but for this job I need an asshole”

Back then it was very hard for me but now I understand

1997 Olivetti, 122 MHz Intel processor, 8MB RAM and 1GB HDD and Win 95. I mostly used software for children learning and games.

But my first “computer” was a shoebox with a keyboard drawn by hand on the cover and a screen on the bottom where I could change the “software” by swapping different drawings inside a transparent envelope.

All hardware and software made by me 😁

“You know what is not fungible, scarce and valuable to me? My time! So if you wish to persuade me NFT are a good thing, you should pay me a fair amount of real money to make me listen your bullshit”

From now on this will be my standard reply to NFT harassment.

Feel free to use, edit and share with others.

Every time a read a rant about a company environment here I think: “It sounds exactly like my previous company!”

But I know we are in different countries…

I guess that when companies suck over a given threshold, they distort space and time like a black hole and become a unique super dimensional joint venture.

From the window of my new office I see a lot of chicks.

Literally, there’s an henhouse out there!

“One day you will find a real job”

It looks like if you don’t lift weights, move hands, sweat… and sit all day doing click click on keyboard, it cannot be a real job…

Reading documentation started feeling like reading a novel…

…but there are thousands of characters and they all have 3 letters names!

Real life job interview…
Manager: what about this problem? Could you solve it? (Showing me a problem about scanning a 2d array to find a value written on a piece of paper)

Me: sure! Just give me a piece of paper and I will write a solution.

Manager: no need for that. I don’t have the knowledge to check that anyway… if I wanted you to solve it I would have called one of my programmers.

…
Manager: do you have any question about the company?

Me: What do you exactly do in the company? I wonder what is the purpose of a person that makes questions about things he doesn’t know.

Managers hiring process in my mind.

Do you know how to:
Code? No
Pick up the phone? No
Repair stuff? No
Doing photocopies? No
Swipe the floor? No

You are hired!

Lately I stopped being angry at work, maybe because I am already in a “notice mindset”. Tomorrow after my job I have a meeting in another company and I should get an offer for another job. Leaving web development to do some C hardware development.

Otherwise tomorrow I will write the biggest rant ever or I will cry or maybe both.

Back when I was at university, during the first lesson of web development class, our teacher said: “If you have any doubt or problem, please ask me. The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask!”

A fellow student raised is hand and asked how to do printf in Java (it was totally legit as most of us only used C at that point and it was our only reference in programming).

Our teacher: “What kind of fucking stupid question is this?!?”

😳

2 weeks ago my boss: “This are the requirements, make fronted and backend”
Yesterday we finally delivered the project and today he changed all the requirements. I have to remake everything, the only thing that will not change is the database because he made it. And it is the single source of garbage.

“We are on a hurry, let’s fix in production, then you can write the fix in the repo.” (Multiple times)

Guess why we are always on a hurry…

I hate web development, I didn’t study CS to make web sites, I like learning new things but when web development is involved and especially certain libraries and frameworks, it seems that I always have to learn again the same thing with a different flavor and I feel stuck in the same place… and at the end of the day it is always form this, validate that, download those AARGH!!

Maybe it is just a bad day

Last week I asked my manager a piggy bank where other employees could put money every time they open a ticket or make a call for something that is unnecessary, not concerning us or poorly described.

I am still waiting…

One day I will make my very own js framework and I will make a built in function to automatically make to-do lists. I will provide a 1 line tutorial and claim it is the best.