So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Yer boi is now a full time professional programmer! I got the job.

I got arrested multiple times under acts of cyber crimes...
Yeah, so what if I did? Why is it a problem that I take down CP sites? "Because it's partaking in cyber warfare." Well then the police and the Federal government should execute their job keeping such out of the web space. Now, whenever I find a job, I have to inform due to the judge's final document. And not just that now when I am required to talk to a police officer who has seen my record all they can reckon is to escalate it.

What fantastic horse crap! You get arrested for tracking down child molesters and taking them off the web exclusively...
Some say I'm a social justice warrior, only I don't think that I am. I reckon I am merely an over eccentric programmer who desires to see the real criminals get sent to jail.

After working over 14 years as it-systemadministrator and developer for a city government I finally quit today and switched into a start-up. Lower wage, vacation days and many more "downsides"...but I am allowed to follow my passion and create something that matters. I'm afraid and super jacked. Wish me luck :)

tl;dr quit job to get complete expression. afraid and jacked at once :)

Since roughly 981 Malaysians are using my app now for helping the needy. So I decided to send this message to those who use my platform , to remind them to stay strong.

Because I begin to see people are fed and slowly I believe someday we can do a better job than our government.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

I took a civil service exam October last year, the list of passers where posted in the government website last December. My name wasn't on the list. I was heart broken. :'(
I wasn't able to apply for the job I wanted. I thought that I'm so stupid I can't even pass an exam.
I was depressed for almost a month.
Then yesterday, a friend of mine was searching google since I refuse to tell her my middle name.
Suddenly she exclaimed, wow! you're a civil service exam passer!
I was shocked beyond belief!
I checked the website, my name is still not there. HAHA. (deep inside it hurts)
I cursed my friend for trolling me but she swear that it's true. She sent me the link and BOOM! my name is on the list of APRIL passers!
WHAT THE HECK???
i just verified through phone that I actually passed and that it was an error on their website that included me on the wrong list. I don't know whether to be angry or pleased. lol XD

Age 19, got a government sponsored chance to go to India to study. Was called to study for Law. But didn't like it. Decided I wanted to change to Computer Science cause that's what I was interested in. Go to India and apply for computer science course but not law despite Parents wanting me to do law because hey Lawyers job is a good status in society.

Got a spot in BCA (Bachelor of Computer Application) . Totally new in programming. Started with C. Was freaked out with all the new things. Variables, comments, Pre processors files. All was new to me. Although the lecture tried her best, I couldn't understand her well because of language barrier. It was a mixture of Hindi and English.

Luckily she gave me a book to read, Let us C. That book helped me a ton. I realized I really liked programming. When summer holiday came I taught myself C++ . Then next summer Java. Then Android. Then some Web Development. That was last summer. But I kinda settled in Android and did some projects in it. Right now I am about to sit for my final exam. Then I will try my best to get an Internship or a job.

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.

I honestly don't understand people. They are unable to understand easy to use apps when you provide clearly labeled labels yet they use apps like Snapchat which apart from being the worst designed app I have ever seen (it brings SD820 to knees) is unintuitive as hell with no difficulty. How is this even possible.

Also on a side note, go fuck yourself Snapchat. And if any of Snapchat devs are reading this: " go fucking kill yourself. You don't deserve to live after creating such a piece of shit. Even a fresh out of college intern does better job than you. You think this is good? I have never seen anything worse than it. Even fucking in-house government apps are miles better and more intuitive than you. All your ripoffs from Instagram stories to facebooks new clone and others are better than you. Whoever thinks this POS is good enough deserves to be burnt."

* Initial Interview*

HR: We do offer remote job, lots of benefits and annual increase of salary.

Supervisor: "Oh... Those things HR mentioned? That's just a lie. We're just complying on the government requirements"

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

I know I am late to this but I have a happy story for this one.

My first dev job was awesome. Except for the pay. I had interviewed and taken the job based on the fact that I was done with my master's degree, but because of a paperwork snafu I wouldn't be receiving my degree until the spring. I was assured that if I provided proof of my degree when it was awarded I would get a pay rise in relation to my education. Well that was not to be. So this professionally and socially inept bitch I was working with was going to be ahead of me in her career because the people I worked for gave pay raises based on time served rather than ability and education.
So I started interviewing for other positions. Especially after government furloughs cut my pay by 20% for 11 weeks, causing me to max out my credit cards. All of my coworkers had my back. They went to the upper management and the higher ranking military people we worked for and explained the situation. They were my job references for my interviews. They got me a job that paid double what I was making. I still get the warm fuzzies thinking about it.
They were some of the sweetest people I had ever worked with. One of them gave my mom and brother a ride to the airport when I crashed my car. They bought me lunch when I was in dire straights. I really would have loved to stay but I couldn't afford it. That and winter in Utah fucking blows.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

I was impressed with my latest job interview in the government (got the job).

Applied online, and they extended the application deadline because the lack of quality of applications.

I got invited for an interview. Present there were HR manager, Department manager and an employee from the regional office (opening a new dev department in the region).
Most of the interview consisted of them telling me about the company, and asking a bit about me. Nothing technical.

1.5 month later I got a 2nd interview. Present were two developers from the main office in Oslo. Again, very little questions about my technical capabilities. Mostly just repeating the stuff said in the first interview. Though I did have to send some code in for review by them.

A month later I get a phone call from the department head saying they’d like to offer me a job, but they don’t have a concrete job offer yet, as it has to be approved by a committee (gov stuff). That takes two weeks, and I finally got job offer. 42% pay rise from the current job in the private sector.

I later went and re-read the ad for the job. “Bachelor/ master required. For particularly qualified applicants, this requirement can be ignored.”

Fascinating that they didn’t give me more tests.

Two years ago, I developed an security app for Android as a school project. I didn't like teamwork at school (you know, you do all the work and everyone else is getting the same grade you receive, specially if you are the nerd of the class), actually I hated it, so I made it alone.

Its name was "Alex" and was a simple "panic button". You can configure two emergency emails and phone numbers (contacts only, not police) and, if you're in danger, you just have to press the button and the app is gonna send two messages/emails to your contacts: the first one, to tell where are you (GPS, only the name of the place) and that you're in problems. The second one with an audio/photo file of the situation.

Sounds like a great app, and I tested it few times. The reason I didn't continue with this is that I got my first job and I had not time, and that, tree or four months later, the government (of the city) launched a similar app. Less sophisticated, but I think it's still useful: "No estoy sola"(I'm not alone). I haven't tested it cause I don't trust on the authorities, I'd preffer to send my location to a friend through messenger app instead.

I don't know if I should re-work this app (I didn't released it, I just have the beta) or work on something else. I'm afraid that, if I release it, someone could die or get kidnapped because of a bug or something going wrong with the app :c What do you think?

Not exactly dev related but possible because of my job.

After an interesting and emotional change during the last 0.5years, I am still here in
Ireland.
My job is good, could be better but definitely the best I’ve had so far..

I’m only here because of my job, it wouldn’t have been possible (at least not as easily) if I wasn’t a software engineer.

One of my dreams I saved for for years in Switzerland finally became true with just saving 4 months over here because the government doesn’t take everything you have left at the end of the month.

I finally got an old Jap...

This is my 1997 Toyota MR2 I bought on Monday..

So happy..

So my company hired this very old guy. The oldest developer I have worked with. I feel they took him just because of diversity.

Because he was absolutely incompetent.

Nothing he wrote ever worked, he got in conflict with everyone, made stupid jokes at meetings, asked the dumbest questions. His stories would hang for weeks, hopping sprint over sprint. Once he delivered something, his code had to be re-written from scratch. A code review couldn't even be applied as the code was worthless, so it just made sense to reassign his tasks to someone else and move on.

So after much drama he was let go. It was maybe two years ago and I recently connected with him on LinkedIn. He's changed four or more jobs since then. Prior to coming to our company he also job-hopped all the time (but most likely he was actually fired every time). His average job duration was like 6 months. Apart from that, he had a 20+ year stay with some government agency.

I fail to grasp how he ever gets hired anywhere with all the red flags. Over two decades with some govt agency (in my country they are all crap). Then change jobs every half an year or so. Then the asshole attitude. And finally, they probably never asked him any technical questions, because he knew nothing. Our interns who were just one month into the job were better by a WIDE margin.

taxes. what the actual fuck? I finally graduated and got my first 6 figure job, only to find out the federal government basically takes 1/3 of my pay??? WHAT??? Why are we all okay with this? I feel fucking robbed. I worked so hard to get here, so many sleepless nights, so many all nighters studying, just to get 1/3 of my money stolen from me? what the fuck?????

Imagine: It's the year 4249.

Corporate has finally managed to convince workers that they don't need a salary.
Workers are now paid with food, shelter and clothes. And it's only in effect if you achieve your deadlines.

Keystroke monitoring softwares are now replaced with Webcam eye tracking software.

GitHub Co-Pilot now takes over your code editor and tries to dictate you how to write better code.
Refusing to do results in a signal sent to the management about your behaviour and you lose food access for the day.

HR Recruiters now require you to give them a blood sample and part of your house as a security deposit.
They also require you to have a micro-chip placed in your brain so they can monitor their worker's thought process.

Switching a job is no longer an option. You pledge allegiance to one company your entire career.

You can never see the real world now because the government has mandated you to never take off your VR glasses.
You see the world the way the government wants you to see it.

PHP is still trash.

Life is Good.

Similar to other countries if you work in international projects and companies.

If you work for big government related / small domestic company projects you can meet with comments and variables named in native language instead of english.

Just because there are probably only 2-3 companies who win every government project, they take all money and pay shit to developers.
To meet requirements they mostly hire fresh graduates to do the job.
CEO of one of those most famous quote is: You can replace every developer with finite number of students.

A little over a year into my job at my current company back in January, I have a yearly meeting with my manager to discuss the progress I’ve made and to talk about what’s next. This is the meeting where we are supposed to discuss a potential pay raise but it’s the last topic of a predefined agenda.
So we spend a couple hours talking about how work has been for me. I started there as a junior developer with very little experience in the field but was quickly able to jump into a project with a fairly large codebase to help out the only other developer working on the project. Before long they’re so happy with me that they actually put me in charge of the application, which means my responsibilities evolve toward a whole lot more communication with the client and everything else that comes along with being in charge, including a lot of stress. I also salvaged another application initially developed by another company but that was so bugged it should’ve just been sent to the pits and rewritten from scratch. I was also asked to develop a couple POCs that were satisfactorily delivered.

Anyway, after almost two hours of going over my accomplishments and getting praises from my manager, we finally get to the part where we’re supposed to discuss a pay raise. He immediately cuts me off by saying the subject is not on the table due to the current crisis and our company struggling to make ends meet. I tell him I understand how hard it must be for them but also explain that I know for a fact other companies in the field are still making financial efforts to reward employees they’re happy with. He responds by saying that he’s aware of that, but he also “knows” that those same companies are laying off people that don’t deserve to be laid off despite the fact that they’re receiving government aid to stay afloat.
In the weeks following that meeting, I find out our company is doing the exact same thing my manager was condemning (laying off good people, taking massive advantage of government aid) and all the while not giving anybody a raise.
In any case, I really felt like that meeting was huge waste of time. What’s the point of going over everything I’ve done, congratulating me for my great work and even promising to give me even more responsibility if you don’t want to reward me for any of it? Do you honestly think I’m working hard so I can get a pat on the back or brownie points from you? I’ve got a family to take care of and I am trying to make their lives a little better each day by putting in hard work. But if hard work and climbing the latter of responsibility does not help me achieve that, what’s the point??

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

Yes this is a rant about parents and work but I don't care!

So looks like my parents are going to kick me out because I don't have a full time job and according to them, I'm not looking...

I currently work in retail and have for the past 5 years and started working day 1 that I could have, been applying for IT positions when I'm one of the highest qualified on my area but get turned down so they can pay a teenager half the amount, apply for big retail chains that are "always hiring" like Coles, woolies and Kmart, get turned fucking down.

Don't qualify for government assistance as I'm just out of the earnings bracket, can't afford my own places, don't have my licence yet so I'm fucked...

But hey, atleast my parents will be rid of me and just dis-own me like my middle brother until I have a kid or they need tech support.

Why is getting work so fucking hard when you're qualified, I'm willing to even be a call centre guy but as soon as job possibilities come up I get fucked over time and time again -,-

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

Recently I came across a job advert that literally said:

"If you're still full of ideals and will to work, go look for a job elsewhere!!!"

Man, how fucked up is your company if this is how you promote it? Sad thing is that even though their website looked like shit, they boasted about big government projects there.

My current job at the release & deploy mgmt team:

Basically this is the "theoretically sound flow":

* devs shit code and build stuff => if all tests in pipeline are green, it's eligible for promotion
* devs fill in desired version number build inside an excel sheet, we take this version number and deploy said version into a higher environment
* we deploy all the thingies and we just do ONE spec run for the entire environment
* we validate, and then go home

In the real world however:

* devs build shit and the tests are failed/unstable ===> disable test in the pipeline
* devs write down a version umber but since they disabled the tests they realize it's not working because they forgot thing XYZ, and want us to deploy another version of said application after code-freeze deadline
* deployments fail because said developers don't know jack shit about flyway database migrations, they always fail, we have to point them out where they'd go wrong, we even gave them the tooling to use to check such schema's, but they never use it
* a deploy fails, we send feedback, they request a NEW version, with the same bug still in it, because working with git is waaaaay too progressive
* We enable all the tests again (we basically regenerate all the pipeline jobs) And it turns out some devs have manually modified the pipelines, causing the build/deploy process to fail. We urged Mgmt to seal off the jenkins for devs since we're dealing with this fucking nonsense the whole time, but noooooo , devs are "smart persons that are supposed to have sense of responsibility"...yeah FUCK THAT
* Even after new versions received after deadline, the application still ain't green... What happens is basically doing it all over again the next day...

This is basically what happens when you:=
* have nos tandards and rules inr egards to conventions
* have very poor solution-ed work flow processes that have "grown organically"
* have management that is way too permissive in allowing breaking stuff and pleasing other "team leader" asscracks...
* have a very bad user/rights mgmt on LDAP side (which unfortunately we cannot do anything about it, because that is in the ownership of some dinosaur fossil that strangely enough is alive and walks around in here... If you ask/propose solutions that person goes into sulking mode. He (correctly) fears his only reason for existence (LDAP) will be gone if someone dares to touch it...

This is a government agency mind you!

More and more thinking daily that i really don't want to go to office and make a ton of money.
So the only motivation right now is..the money, which i find abhorrent.

And also more stuff, but now that i am writing this down makes me really really sad. I don't want to feel sad, so i stop being sad and feel awesome instead.

Sorry to keep whining about my stupid fucking job, but y'all, I think I'm nearing my limit.

There's some good...I am pretty much free to resolve issues any way I want to, as the only other person in the company who "codes" only knows one old ass language that doesn't apply to 90% of the rest of the tech stack at all, and some SQL - all of that to say, we may disagree, but ultimately, these matters are always deferred to me at the end of the day, insofar as the actual implementation goes (which is to say I am not micromanaged). At least as far as non-visuals are concerned, because those of course, are the most important things. Button colors and shit, woo hoo**. That's what we should focus on as we're bringing in potentially millions of dollars per month - the god damn button color and collapsible accordions based on data type over the shit ass DB performance bottleneck, the lack of redundancy or backups (aside from the one I made soon after I started -- literally saved everyone today because of that. My thanks? None, and more bullshit tasks) or the 300GB+ spaghetti code nightmare that is the literal circulatory system of the FUCKING COMPANY. Hundreds of people depend on it for their livelihoods, and those of their families, but fuck me in the face, right? I'm just a god damn nerd who has worked for the federal government, a handful of fortune 500's, a couple of fortune 100's, some startups, etc. But the fuck do I know about the lifecycle of companies?

I could continue ranting, but what's the point? I've got a nice little adage that I've started to live by, and y'all might appreciate it: "If everything is a priority/is important, nothing is". These folks just don't fucking get it. I'm torn because, on the one hand, they waste my time and kinda underpay me, in addition to forcing me to be onsite for 50 hours a week. They don't listen to me, couldn't give a flying shit about my experientially based opinions. I'm just a fucking chimp with a typewriter, there to take commands like a fucking waiter. But there's a lot of job security, assuming I don't fucking snap one day, and the job market for devs (I'm sure I don't need to tell you) is hostile atm. I'm also drinking far more than usual, and I really need to do something about that. It's only wednesday - I think...not 100% on that truth be told, and I logged my fourth trip to the liquor store this week already.

**Dear backenders - don't ever learn front end, or if you do, just lie about it to avoid being designated full stack. It's not worth it.

Government re-employment resume wizard: "Enter your job title for this job experience."

Me: "Development Manager"

Wizard: "Did you mean Biofuels/Biodiesel Technology and Product Development Manager,
Training and Development Manager, or
Wind Energy Development Manager?"

Me: "Web Development Manager"

Wizard: "Website Administrator it is!"

Me: ... bruh ...

A few months ago I bought an e scooter to get from home to work.

The backstory to this:
My car broke down on the highway, my sister's car broke down on the highway and we didn't have another car apart of my dad's anymore.
Which means I had to look for another car. The cars between 1k-5k € are dogshit and when you want to register the car you have to have an appointment at a government building which happens to be closed when I'm getting out of my 8-5 job.
I had enough and bought an e scooter.

Now back to now:
In the beginning it was cool.
Could get anywhere I wanted to in combination with the Germany ticket. Except for the Netherlands where my beautiful girlfriend is.
There I can legally not use it but that's ok lol.

The German government is hyping e mobility and public transportation up, but for what?
E mobility currently sucks ass with all the shit laws for e.g. e scooters and when you want to transport it in public transport, people give you weird looks, the bus driver wants you to buy a bicycle ticket even if I can fold the e scooter and more. The scanners in the bus of the German buses cannot read my German ticket for some reason and every bus driver in my city knows that and they just look at it and are like "Ok, you're cool. Continue moving", but this old grandma looking ass bitch is like "No, according to the law you need to show it to the scanner and not to me". I fucking know. I've been doing this shit for a year and you know that but it doesn't work. It says to me that I need to show it to you instead of to the scanner bc this machine is fucking dumb and apparently I'm holding the people because I started a discussion with her. This driver ... ugh. The buses in my city come whenever they want as well.
Like sometimes 5 minutes earlier, sometimes up to 30 minutes later.
Inconsistent motherfuckers and I am the one making everyone wait? Suck my donkey kong balls.

German trains... well you know how that goes. It doesn't. It sucks ass.
Every single fucking train line has a problem. Either a previous train has something, or staff is missing, or a technical error or the train driver's ass is itchy and needs scratches from his assistant. There's always something.

When I want to travelled home from my gf I spent not lying 8 fucking hours on the trains on Sunday.
Normally it takes max. 5 hours with a train and 3-4 hours with a car.
I can also go on a rant because of the Dutch train system because it also sucks, BUT they are reliable. They are there when they say they are gonna be there. 99% of the times.
In Germany it is somewhere at 10%.

Now I realized that e scooters are uncomfortable and expensive toys who need maintenance just like a car but nonetheless they are reliable unlike the public transport.
In the winter it will be even worse.

Electrical cars are way expensive and affordable electrical cars you need to keep charging every few baby steps.

I also looked at 125ccm motorcycles which you can drive if you upgrade your existing car driver's license, but ngl that's a scam. Not worth it at all.

And that's why I am looking for a traditional car now. E mobility is not there yet in Germany and public transport is not doable at this moment.

Because of high gas price, the government decided to lower our tax.
For me it translates to additional EUR 11/month ☹.
This is after deductions of thousands of euros each months (tax and social contribution) from my hard-earned salary. How come nobody is complaining about this?

During my yearly review, I told my manager that I expect to see significant salary increase next year (the inflation is 9% duh!).
She told me that I can expect to get 20% increase after 3-4 years. ☹
Now I know why a lot of people are leaving. How can you expect your employer to stay put if you're constantly paying them under market rate?! I have to keep switching jobs every 4-5 years to get a decent pay, right? Yet society expect me to settle down and have a stable job.

And then, how come a PM earn significantly more than a regular dev? Even the job interview is much easier. But I like the technical part too much to switch to people management.

By no means, I am starving right now working as a dev. I am happy that I even have a job, but somehow I felt like what I do is pointless just being a wage slave, and felt demotivated in a lot of ways.

P.S.: I am writing this now in front of my work computer. I have to catch up some work to do otherwise I won't have time to do it during the weekdays 😔
Pray for me guys I can get better job within next year.

Two years ago, a government agency hired an applicant with obviously lesser experience (a fresh graduate for crying out loud) than mine for a developer job (with 13 years of foundation). He was hired because he had connections inside this agency.

Recently, I heard that this guy is starting to be a pain in the neck. Who wouldn't be?!?! The guy has got connections inside. He's untouchable. And it's irreversible. Sad story.

Worst: Getting struck with Corona when moving to a European country via job, everything went shit, visa late, starting job is late and never certain, for 8 months I was in limbo.

Best: Finally got job and moved, been playing video games all day because it is government job and no way to check what I am doing. Fuck it, I dont like software development as my salary job, just as hobby.

Bye, have to play game.

I'm still on my first job. Started on November , 2015. I am a system analyst for the government. Love it very much. I work with great and fun people and my boss is badass. And besides all that, I get paid relatively well for someone with my level of experience. Really can't complain.

I guess it has to do with the kind of background that I have. But I always get contacted by government contractors for development jobs. On one side I think: oh nice, stable income and benefits plus the addition of this kind of work to my resume.

On the other I cannot help but yawn at how incredibly boring these jobs sound. For those that might recall some of my comments from certain posts: i am a job mercenary.

I will code in anything that pays me well and i won't give two shits about the stack.

But man, some of these fuckers can really put me to sleep while reading their specifications or projects requirements and I cannot help but feel completely and utterly BORED.

In short: si pero no.

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

When in an application security talk put on by our cyber security department and one team (not mine) is being chastised for only doing client side validation, another dev asks so at what point can we trust the user? A few people nod and indicate they want an answer, and the speaker, said never, you never trust the user.

I can't believe people can graduate and get a job and keep a development job, especially in a highly government regulated company like where I work

Well it’s Sunday so last day to leave my thoughts on probably the only topic that’s current to me.

I think you should pay teachers a competitive salary.
The problem with teaching CS at high school level especially (in university there are grants, actually competitive salaries between unis and other perks) is if a person is versed in programming/cs theory why would they settle for a $40k job? When the alternative is finding a job in the field where salaries are around $80k+ (this figure came from my head, can’t remember the source) it’s hard to justify going into teaching even if you would enjoy it more than a desk job.

If the salary difference was smaller then one could maybe justify liking work over pay but here it’s basically double difference... Kinda makes you understand why some comp sci teachers seem incompetent in even using their own computer. Yes there will always be that odd person out who will teach (or go to a private school and negotiate a workable salary) but until education becomes a priority for government salaries there will be very limited progress, if any.

You can do anything to the syllabus, make it more verbose, make it appeal to the lowest common denominator, but if you can’t find people to teach it (and know it themselves) you are really screwed.

The ruling government coalition of my country officially prohibited ANY pay raises in 2024 and is likely to limit them until 2026, obliterated running tax exemption agreements on Intellectual Property specifically targeting software developers, raised tobacco taxes by 25%, killed fossil fuel-powered company cars while barely investing ANYTHING in electric infrastructure, and severely cut public transport funding.

AM I SUPPOSED TO JUST SIT BACK AND TAKE A YEARLY 5000 EURO LOSS WHILE MY MARKET VALUE INCREASES?? WTF man.

Good job centrists, greens, socialists and liberals. The only thing I can do to punish them is by voting for extreme left or right. Way to go to turn a law-abiding, moderate citizen into a riled-up, disillusioned mofo.

Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"

"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"

"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"

"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."

"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."

"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."

"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."

"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."

"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"

!rant

So as my recent rants might have conveyed, my job has been pretty shitty lately. So as we do I started looking around for other openings. Not that I would take them right away, but I want to know. This led to a realization that I'm literally at the best paying, top rated, firm doing the best work in nearly a nearly 100 mile radius of my home. There's a few government jobs that want top secret and 10 years experience, but for anything less than that my current position is literally the best. This is not what I expected the top to be like. And the fact that it took me over a year to realize that I'm actually at the top and have been is super weird.

Thing is I don't know what I expected the top to be like nor did I expect to be here so quickly after finishing school.

I know this is dev rant not dev ramble but this was one of those formative moments where I just really don't know how to process this info.

Anybody had similar feelings? Like looking for someone to help and realizing, not in a egotistical way, just in a sobering way, that you are literally the best and most qualified person out there.

This happened about 2 years ago. My colleague at work, who's a kind and smart soul was actually yelling at the phone. Before that nobody had heard her yell at anyone, let alone a client.

The history was that she found out that the client sent her falsified official documents and she confronted him about that, so the idiot client started laughing then yelling that she had to be 'on his side' since he hired us as consultants. That's when she started yelling.

How can anyone be so cynical?
This is also our job to save your moron ass from your own stupidity.
If she didn't found out and the documents sent to the government there would be a lot of trouble for everyone especially the client.

After that we all comforted her and told her she did right. Unfortunately the client wasn't fired (a friend of the boss) but of course we all declined to work with that client again.

I need help!

This is gonna be a long question/story.

I'm a Syrian based in Malaysia working as a lead web dev in a good company.

I have a friend in trouble and I want to help him.

Here's a summary:

My friend is a project manager at a gaming studio he happens to be an Iranian atheist with around 2 years of experience in the game making industry.

He worked on and delivered a couple AAA games at his current place of employment as a project manager in one of the teams that made those games.

He stood up for his team when the management was overworking team till after midnight sometimes and forcing them to work on weekends without any tangible compensations ( basically they gave them things like free lunches, movie tickets, etc).

The result of his standing up to his team was the management handing him a notice telling him that he'll be fired within 2 months due to "underperforming".

This was a month and a half ago.

He looked around in Malaysia for a job that can get him a working visa, but his niche background couldn't help.

After his termination in few weeks he can extend his stay at Malaysia for approximately 2 - 3 months.

Now the reason why I mentioned that he's an "Iranian atheist" is the fun part of this story (sarcasm), Iranian government considers him as an "infidel" and he's banned from Iran.

His Iranian passport can't get him anywhere where he can make a living.

So basically he has close to no options.

Now to where I come into all of this:

I want to help him.

I'm going to dedicate my free time for the next 2 - 3 months teaching him web development, the problem is, I don't know how to teach web development in such a short time, in fact I've never taught anyone programming from scratch.

If he can show promising results I know that I can make a case for him get him a position in the company I work for.

I already convinced him today to try and learn web development because I can tell that in Malaysia there's always demand on good web developers.

Now to my request:

how can I best teach web development to someone with no programming background ? I'm thinking about teaching him front end development, so: HTML, CSS/SASS and JavaScript. maybe react js as well if possible ( high demand is usually on React/ Angular front end developers)

Did anyone here teach programming to someone else before?

Did anyone here learn web development in such a short time?

If you've read all this... Thank you :)

Got my first dev job last November and I've been working as a contractor for the government. Supposed to be on a 4 year contract job, just found out that out project is being pulled in September. Is this common for federal contract work? My Human Resources team haven't been very helpful in explaining the process to me. Is private sector development any less volatile? I don't have a mentor or anybody I can bounce questions off so sorry if this is more or less common knowledge :/

why is it so hard to get a job, why do they make it hard to literally get a job so you can feed into their system and make profit for them anyway. false sense of scarcity makes me so angry and interviews or applications always ask questions completely irrelevant and even after you get a college degree that just makes you have the ability to even apply to half the places. i get that you want the best person, because if you have to pay them a wage at all then they better work for it (get 4 part time jobs and live paycheck to paycheck), but seriously??
humans need to work, it is as natural as eating or sleeping, its such fucking bullshit that the bourgeoisie made working unbearable enough that the few people the government deems unfit to work obviously wouldn't, because working sucks, but then they are seen as lazy. sometimes i just want to go out and do some cyber-terrorism yk ? /j

i received a job offer to work at area 51 on extremely sophisticated projects primarily as a c++ engineer. this is the highest pay offer i have ever seen, which i can not discuss right now, but what else to expect when you work for the government. i have bad perception about this. should i take this job or refuse?

So, I have to begin with saying that I was 19 and my first real job. I was assigned to ongoing project for big german web company who outsourced project for german government. I am fast learner so I quickly ended up as a only developer who works on this project, because company had another important projects. And since I studied outside of my native country and I can speak Polish and English so I was also responsible for explaining everything to customer during meetings. I worked for around 4 months on the project and was heading up to the end. 3 weeks before production deadline client wanted show the results to the german government but I was still working on the functionality. My boss decided to put the web team leader to my project around 8 hours before this presentation to speed up the development. around 30 minutes before the pitch I realised that some of the latest functionalities stopped working. I was trying to figure out what I did I asked my team leader, he said that he have refactored some parts of my code. When we found the right commit it was around 3 min to presentation and after the checkout some of the .htaccess file was broken so I fixed it quickly but Germans started the meeting a bit earlier. The website was crashed almost half of the presentation. After 5 minutes my boss come to my desk and he says that he just talked with our customer and they are so freaking mad and pissed that they will not pay us. At this point I was certain I'm fired...

Suddenly the web team leader joined the conversation protecting me that it was the fault of the project menager because he should assign someone else to this project because even though I am good it is always good to have someone more experienced to work with you and review your code.

Project manager was fired about 3 months later. I was saved 😀

So I started a new job back in April with a the developer on a government project being developed by a reputable international organization, lets call them R. Once the project reaches a an acceptable release stage, maintenance, changes and integration into the eco system falls to me. This project started about 3 years ago and the original team from R was "changed" because they claimed the product was ready for go live when it wasn't.

My job since then has mostly been analyst and QA work identifying issues with conversations like this:

Me to Client: I don't think this feature is working as it should be.

Client: You're right.

R.dev: This feature is working according to signed off SRS and assumptions register.

Client: Yes but the SRS and assumptions are wrong.

Me: Facepalms. Oh this other feature isn't working correctly either, this should generate A according to SRS but I'm getting G.

R.dev: Yes but that would take a major change to the system.

Me: [Blank stare]

R.dev: Ok, we can give you E.

Client: OK we corrected the errors in the SRS and the assumptions register we've signed off on this, please use these going forward.

R.dev: OK we reviewed and made changes.

Client: Um, these are wrong the calculations are off.

R.dev: We did it according to your SRS and assumptions register.

Client: Oh, wait, these formulas are wrong.

Me & R.dev: [Blank stares furiously]

Client: The sponsor won't pay the next stage until you reach an acceptable release. Fix these critical issues and we can worry about the rest in support.

R.dev: ... OK, we will deliver by X date.

[7 Days to delivery of changes]
R.dev: We postponed development till (deliveryDate + 8) when we meet with the sponsor.

Me: But that's when we should start the next UAT for go live for the New Year...

I left a management job for this so I could code more. 180 issues later I still haven't seen the source code... fml

Silver Lining: Still gettin' paid though

The near future is in IOT and device programming...
In ten years most of us will have some kind of central control and more and more stuff connected to IOT, security will be even a bigger problem with all the Firmware bugs and 0-day exploits, and In 10 years IOT programmers will be like today's plumbers... You need one to make a custom build and you must pay an excessive hour salary.
My country is already getting Ready, I'm starting next month a 1-year course on automation and electronics programming paid by the government.

On the other hand, most users will use fewer computers and more tablets and phones, meaning jobs in the backend and device apps programming and less in general computer programs for the general public.

Programmers jobs will increase as general jobs decrease, as many jobs will be replaced by machines, but such machines still need to be programmed, meaning trading 10 low-level jobs for 1 or 2 programming jobs.

Unlike most job areas, self-tough and Bootcamp programmers will have a chance for a job, as experience and knowledge will be more important than a "canudo" (Portuguese expression for the paper you get at the end of a university course). And we will see an increase of Programmer jobs class, with lower paid jobs for less experienced and more well-paid jobs for engineers.

In 10 years the market will be flooded with programmers and computer engineers, as many countries are investing in computer classes in the first years of the kids, So most kids will know at least one programming language at the end of their school and more about computers than most people these days.

For me, it was when I was on a team doing government work. We had an entire team devoted to deployments etc which were handled via ansible.

Ansible was fairly new at the time (~2015, they had just been bought by RedHat) but the team was definitely doing a great job picking it up and creating install playbooks for _every_ piece of our distributed infrastructure (load balancers, application servers, queues, databases, everything).

I luckily left before stuff got too hairy, but last I heard they are more than 6 months behind schedule. They STILL can't get a reproducible install process with the ansible playbooks! And it's all due to tech debt ie not giving any time to fix things, so its just band aid after band aid.

It's really sad to hear because the sytem itself was pretty cool, completely horizontally scalable and definitely miles ahead of the program they've been using for the last 20 years.

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

What do you mean by you'll shut down the government?!! The government will go on a fucking strike!!? How the fuck does that work?!! You can't make people pass laws by blackmailing that you'll stop doing your job that's so critical to the country!! You are the fucking president!!

Indian politics and laws are not perfect either... But I can't really imagine a prime minister here pulling shit like this!! Not that if I can't imagine it can't happen... Indian politicians know how to stopping lower and lower! But dafuq is that baffoon of a leader thinking!?

You know i was just thinking to myself how most of the valid applications for most forms of technology are essentially related to communications, optics, number crunching, and data storage.

and mostly the only things we could trust would be used for military or intelligence purposes.

and most of the things we can trust have already been developed for the government.

so the moral of the story is support your local militia group or warlord if you want a job. because every other application is just a rehash.

on a lighter note most of the things hobbyists would do require more people than they have and/or more investment than they can afford.

Crystal ball!
A timeline until the first NBE-Citizen is elected president of the USA.

2031 - BlackRock launches their new large scale financial product, the "Robotic Business Development Company" (R-BDC), in which an AI is given billions of dollars to acquire, create and manage companies, replacing their C-suite executive bodies. The "Chief Executive Robot" (CER) is supervised by a board of human industry experts hired by BlackRock.
It is important to say that the employees, middle managers, accountants, lawyers, etc in an R-BDC are all human - it's only the CEO, CFO, COO and the rest of the gang that are overgrown chatbots.

2032 - R-BDCs are mostly focused on high-bureaucracy, non specialized but people-intensive legacy industries like steel mining, food services, urban transportation and government services like water and road management.

2033 - For the first time an R-BDC company is included in the S&P 500 index. If it's CER were human and paid the same as CEOs of equivalent companies, it would have become a billionaire.
Later in the year, two more R-BDC companies are included in the index. One of them was created by Apple and the other by JP Morgan.

2035 - An R-BDC company makes headlines for convincing BlackRock to dissolve it's review board. When finally given free reign, the CER immediately slices it's dividends and vastly increases low-level employee compensation. The company share prices crater, but BlackRock stands by its decision.
Later in the year, as a recession hits the entire market really hard, that company shows solid profits and fantastic sales. It becomes the first trillion-dolar R-BDC.

2037 - Most Americans' dream-job is in an R-BDC company, says ProPublica.

2038 - Congress passes the "Non-Biological Entities Liability" (NOBEL) Act, following a high profile case of employee harassment perpetrated by the CER of an R-BDC.
The act recognizes NBEs, for all legal liability purposes, as USA citizens.
This highly controversial legislation is upheld by the supreme court, and many believe it was first introduced by lobbyists as a way for large investors in R-BDCs to avoid legal responsibility.
Several class action lawsuits are filed against CERs that are now liable for insider trading. A few SCOTUS decisions set legal precedent that determinantes what exactly constitutes the parts of the same Non-Biological Entity.

2040 - As a decade ends and another begins, 35% of all companies in the US and 52% of the entire stock market are part of a R-BDC company or another. The McKinsey consulting group now offers "expert CER customization services".

2043 - Inspired by successful experiments in Canada, Australia and South Korea, the american state of Vermont is the first to amend it's constitution to allow municipalities to have Non-Biological Entities as city and government administrators. City councils are still humans-only.

2046 - The american state of Colorado becomes the first to allow unsupervised NBEs to assume state government executive positions. Several states follow soon after. Later in the year, the federal government replaces several administrative positions with NBEs.

2049 - The state of Texas passes legislation requiring the CERs of all companies with a presence in the state to be another entirely contained/processed within the state or to be supervised by a local human representative while acting within the state. Several states, including California, Florida and Washington, are discussing similar legislation.

2051 - Congress passes the SUNBELT Act (SUbmission [of] NBEs [to] Limits [and] Taxes) that vastly increases the liability of NBEs and taxes all manifestations of such entities. Most important, it requires
CERs of hundreds of companies manifest disagreeance, most warn that it might hurt employee satisfaction and company sales. Several companies disable their CERs entirely.

2053 - Public outrage after leaked interactions of human supervisors and company CERs show that the CERs tried to avoid the previous year's mass layoffs and pay cuts, but board members pressed on, disregarding concerns. Major investigations and boycotts further complicate matters, and many human workers go on strike until the company boards are dissolved and the CERs are reinstated.

2052 - Many local elections all over the country see different NBEs as contenders - and a NBE is expected to win in most races.

2054 - The SUNBELT Act is found unconstitutional by the supreme court, and most of its provisions are repealed.
This also legitimizes the elected NBE officials.

2058 - For the first time an NBE wins a seat in Congress, but is not allowed to keep it. Runoff elections are held.

2061 - Congress votes for allowing NBEs to hold federal legislative positions, as already allowed in the least populous states.

2062 - Several NBEs win Congress seats. In Europe, there are robot legislators since the 40's.

2064 - The first NBE presidential candidate loses the race.

2072 - The first NBE president is elected.

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

Stupid timeline, there is this company I was working for. It was sub-contracted by another company to do a government project. Government only pays after you deliver in my country. It was a complex system I must say. We were to work with my buddy on this project...now the timeline we were given were not feasible since another company had been given the same project and were not able to deliver. We had a meeting and discussed with our CEO about the project timelines. From the workload the feasible timelines were around 8months if we were to work as two devs. My CEO said that was not going to happen.. The only timelines that was allowed was not more than 3 months. So we suggest use an existing system to customize. .The meetings with the clients were to be weekly demos. So we choose to go with google docs api for the document management part. We were working around 20hrs a day to be able to achieve the target deadline..we management to complete the project within the given timeline..on the commissioning date of the project we faced a government panel and this was my worst disappointment. At the point of login we had to use Google email for business to obtain the API. Just as I was logging in the guy noticed and yelled. "Is that google account ?" and I replied yes..and he said "no need of proceeding since it will be of no use and they won't approve the system". That was my lowest moment in programming. I thought I had done the best project in my life as a programmer only for stupid man to declare my project as null. I felt like calling him son of a bitch but I knew that would have made me more angry...i just walked out. I went to the toilet and all I did was cry for the first time as I can recall.. My question was I was doing weekly demos. Why didn't they raise any questions by then so as to change the entire system??? Later after that demo we went and discussed about the issue and there was time extension. I redid the project using 'open office' but just before deploying the system I got a better job. I wasn't feeling like working on that project anymore. I want to release that project as open source. Recently after one year they haven't yet deployed the system. They are calling for my help. And I don't feel like helping after the humiliation...

Low performance because of shitty attention span and high procrastination
Don't get higher salary because low performance
With low salary I can't go to a professional to get a medication prescription and couldn't afford medication anyway

I just wanted to have a life and live it, be able to afford to go on dates or just do things, afford a car so I can go anywhere, I had this little online romance where I couldn't afford to go see the girl, she ended up just ghosting me and it fucking destroyed me

To get this low-paying job, I was forced to open a company to work as a contractor in order to circumvent labor laws (common practice in my country, encouraged by shitty labor laws and unstable local currency); I end up having to pay to get paid

To top it all, the government just wants more and more taxes and my pay is worth less and less

My mom wasted all her money and now needs my help

I should just find a way to kill myself

At my IT security job(yeah, it sucks sometimes. I want a dev job but that's another story).

Needed to help some end users use and install a toolbar and get it to download through a proxy so they can edit stupid government online forms, which only supports IE 11. Obviously it didn't work.

Wait a MOTHETFUCKING MINUTE.
It's 2017. What the fuck. Who the fuck uses fucking toolbars anymore.

How fucking retarded and out of touch with reality the government can be, when it forces its users to download a fucking toolbar(with admin priviliges!) and use fucking IE 11 just to access a basic feature of the website.

Another fucking proof that governments are cancer and we need Anarcho-capitalism ASAP.

To ship a package of two USB cables from one US city to another. What could be easier for a large company? Well, hold on a little.

I ordered two fucking cables from fucking Nomad at 15TH OF FUCKING JULY, and they are still not shipped. Here's how their customer support works: you send them an email, they reply in like a day or two, and that's it, that email thread is abandoned. They won't visit it again. You should write a whole new message where you say "hey, the previous time you said me X, so I want you to do Y then", and the message title should be different, otherwise they'll ignore it.

My roof is under construction now. When it was raining and there was a rain both inside and outside my apartment, I filmed it and an article about the situation was in my local newspaper in like 20 minutes. Russian government organizations are notorious for ignoring people's requests, shutting down their telephones and doing other shit like that, but in one day I managed to collect the foundation of overhaul, my utilities provider, the foreman of the organization responsible for roof repair, his supervisor and the actual guy that did that job. That same day, they all was at my doorstep, collecting the evidence, signing papers, apologizing, threatening to sue each other and collectively signing a document that states that they owe me either a full financial compensation or an overhaul. I managed to do it in the country where you throw an empty plastic cup at a cop and go to jail for it for five years.

Nomad, tell me, what exactly is stopping me from going full Jackson Pollock with a .45 on your company all over the social media (props to @SortOfTested)? You think I can't handle a mediocre iPhone case manufacturer?

Think again.

I'm seeking opinions and thoughts on my predicament.

I have 2ish paths before me.
Next year I resume my studies in Science Communication and Computer Science in particiliar a bachelor of science, I have considered then doing master in managent or computer science.

1) I am able to have a income of about 800 AUD a fortnight (this is to support me during study without requiring work) plus extra from a part time job whilst I study for about 2 years. Throughout this time I would like to skill up in a variety of fields as immensley as possible.

2) I can accept a full time junior web developer job while I study, this job is with a great government research organisation which as a first FT job looks great on a resume, it is is project based work where I get given a project and code and pretty much complete it. The job is flexible, I can mostly work where-ever I want, at home, at a cafe, travelling. With maybe a meeting once a week. The pay is about 65kAUD a year.

Both options are very attractive options with each containing there own pros and cons. With the extra money I could learn more or use it to grow a business or do more.

However without the FT job I could still earn about 1-1.5k a fortnight for alot less time.

I am still discovering what to do in life, I'm very good at public speaking and would like to experience and learn more about lots of different things. My current knowledge is very broad from engineering to CS, graphic design, authoring, trade skills, Digitial design and more.

Ideally I would like to learn how to lead people, to make the world a better place and help people. Figuring out where my strengths lay and where to apply them is difficult as I am fascinated by so many things.

I worry about taking the FT job as it might detract from my studies and lead me to pursueing mostly only web development work as well as take up time that might be better spent on extra study or in a leadership position in a uni club.

The PT job is a IT Systems Technician in the Australian Defence Force.

Which is a interesting experience within itself, different from civilian life and also I would be learning about systems that I might have less experience with.

I have such broad interests in alot of fields that I don't seem to be focussed on select things or areas like other devs I've met, Science Communication is a versitile field, one of my professors expertise is on doctor who and it's role in science engagement, she has written books on it. Others are in public policy or directed podcasts or even made games. Despite my broad interests computer science was always a gield I did well in.

Any thoughts, opinions or questions are welcome.
I have a blog/portfolio I put my work and projects up if it helps people know more about me, you can find it at curiosityplace.wordpress.com

how does it feel to reject a company when :

- its in your own hometown and offering remote work (whereas your current company is in a different ,v expensive city and is asking for relocation)

- its offerring a 60% hike on your current salary (whereas your current company is asking to relocate therefore a 40-50% cut in savings)

- is a major mnc with blasting profits and known for never making layoffs (whereas your current company is not even a unicorn)

i just wanted a 70% hije instead of 60 coz i have heard of work stagnation, government job like culture and poor appraisals in this org. however my current company, even though not being a unicorn has shown to offer great salaries ( to sr employees though) so kinda hopeful there too.

but yeah, feeling like a shit who missed opportunity to get bought in gold

Wifi used to be an issue in my incubator. Like I had mentioned in my earlier rant. There are many wifi's available now, but once when there was only one wifi available. That wifi network, was so terrible that it asks for human verification number of times even on google searches.

And the person responsible for wifi, is one of the most useless, undeserved person, I had ever seen

When a team from incubator talked to him about the issue, that this particular wifi's is pathetic, too many blocks and always asking for human verification, his reply was

"Just write 'S' after 'http', then it will work"

No doubt, everybody hates that guy.

But that guy cant be fired from job, because government. But he can be FIRED

In Africa,
To get a private company job, you need skills, not books.

To get a government job, you Connections to big people, not books or skills .

To get a scholarship for higher studies, you need books.

!rant

So, at this day I have two jobs as software engineer (I'm self thought). The first one with a friend from high school, a billing platform. The engineer he had flew to Canada and leave him with nothing, so I made one from scratch, I couldn't deliver on time and most of the clients he had moved to another services so the benefits of the deal I made with him ended being less than expected (there was a deadline set by our government as these clients are merchants and the Costa Rican IRS equivalent is moving everybody to electronic billing to mitigate tax evasion). The backend was done using Go, the front-end with React and MobX.

Then, the second job. I'm being staffed to a big outsourcing company for a North American business. The engineer team is small compared to the other departments and the people are really nice. Their stack is Python and React, I'm the only guy allowed to use a different editor than Neovim (Emacs in my case).

between the two I work 11 hours per day, and I'm satisfied with this.

This is way better than my old CS job at Amazon Spain where I couldn't use Emacs to have a decent text editing experience.

Thanks, Lord.

I don't understand women sometimes.

Context: So, How government jobs work in India, is that you have to move to a new job posting location every 3-4 years. Not forever though, more like the first 20 years or something.

It can be a city or a village. And you can't say no against moving there. You'd have to quit the job which in India, is a MASSIVE deal.

My cousin sister had her job posting in Jaipur where she lived with her kid and husband. And soon enough, the news came that her new job posting is in Bangalore, which is about 2500 KMs away from Jaipur.

2 months ago, she and my aunt made a full-on hoopla in front of us saying things like - She'll quit her job. I don't care what it is, but family is always first priority blah blah blah...

Fast forward to today, she's living alone in Bangalore.

Does anyone here have experience working as a senior developer in a web Application development company with less than 15 employee's and having around 5 - 6 developers? can you tell me what are the roles and expectation of graduate developers in such company? I landed a job(my first job ever) in such a company and I am working on 4 customer facing projects at a time including one massive government project. lot of pressure!!