Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

The dilemma of having a job that I love but a salary that just breaks even with living expenses and student loans.

The worst part of being a dev

My social dilemma

In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.

Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.

And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.

Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.

Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.

An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.

Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place

But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.

In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.

And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.

So I got approached by a recruiter... not from a recruitment consultant company, but from the company offering the position - which is a refreshing change. Now I have a dilemma....

On the other hand I’m really interested in their offer since the way they approached me by basically saying ”noticed you can do F# and we need F# devs” - so I have a chance at getting a job programming with the language I really like. And these opportunities don’t come around often, since F# isn’t really widely used anywhere it seems.

The caveat is, I really really enjoy working where I’m at now, even tho I mostly work with PHP (with the occasional Vue, C# and F# thrown in), but the atmosphere is unparalelled, my colleagues and my manager are the best, and the benefits are better than most companies can offer - so I’m a bit reluctant to change employer, especially since I have personally interesting projects coming up soon on the roadmap.

What should I do if the details for the offer I get are worth considering?

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺

Worst day of my life.

Got a job at an awesome company in another country but joining is in November.

Bunch of us got screwed over by the current company because of "downsizing" (out of the blue, they wanna start over with 4-5 devs like 2 years back) and they don't want to keep front-end developer as anybody can do it... (yeah I remember how the site was before I came... using ! important everywhere is not the solution).

Started looking for jobs (because I need to pay rent) so that I can spend 3 months there and then quit. Facing moral dilemma, as I don't want to do that to the company who hires me now.

Guys I am facing a dilemma and i want to hear your opinions.

The background story:
I am completely self taught, currently i am learning something totally unrelated to programming at the uni. Maybe one day when i've finished that shit I will apply somwhere for a job as a developer. Until that the self education continues.

I've recently finished a big sideproject. I've rewritten my father's old shitty joomla company website from scratch with complete cms and integrated stockkeeping and billing features. After some minor fixes it is working perfectly and honestly I am kind of proud of myself. Now that I have some free time available i need something to work on again.

TL;DR - Here comes the question:
Should I broaden my knowledge in webdev even more (there is much room for improvement and i am starting to get the grasp of it) or start digging into game developement (which is my dream for ages although i didn't have the courage to dive into it until now)?

I have project ideas for both but simply can't decide. :/

I am appreciate your time for reading && telling your opinion on this.

Hi guys! I need your help.

I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.

The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.

If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.

What do you guys think?

[Blue pill]
stay in my current workplace [approaching the 10yrs mark], with an agreed salary and seniority raise, with a high probability of losing my current project [which is really fun!] in Feb next year and having to switch to another one, but keep all the benefits

[Red pill]
switch full-time to contracting with a potential to reap big bucks [x2-x4] and be free to juggle as many clients as I like, dictate my terms, become a shareholder, but lose all that warm and cozy certainty guaranteed by my current employer

Want to find new job, but there's no good companies in city i live... don't want to move...life is dilemma

Ok guys n gals, I really need help with this one. I have been offered a position at a company with a nice salary but I really don't feel the company's product, furthermore I think that the industry cut they are working in is one of the most boring ones. Thus taking this job will mean that I will be turning on almost everything I believe. Another thing is that I will have to relocate to a town that I really don't like.

On the plus side the team looks great. Everyone seems really friendly and I am certain that I will gain a lot of experience. Also I'm a recent grad and I've been looking for a position for a couple of months. I know that this looks like a dumb dilemma but for me it's not. I'd really appreciate your advice..

I'm in a dilemma.

I started this job about 9 months ago and it's really not what I expected. I'm the sole developer in my department that handles applications built around our customer database.

Well it's pretty boring and there is a lot of technical debt with the source code since usually 1-2 people are taking care of it so they never had proper conventions. And we have super old applications running on legacy solutions like cold fusion 🤢

I also receive a lot of problem tickets that never contain enough information to actually do anything and the people don't realize I have no idea what they do or what their business processes are.

The upside is I'm paid very very well for this job > 100 in a place where cost of living is cheap. And when there's no work to do I can work on side projects.

It's really not fulfilling work and idk if I should stick it out. I also don't know where I would head next. There's not very many companies working on cool stuff. Maybe remote work?

Anyone else have a similar story?

[Background]
Back in September I joined a startup after my first job in MNC for about 1.8 yrs as a fresher. I always wanted to learn, but the experience in that MNC was not at all fruitful. So ai decided to join a small/mid size company or a startup. To my luck, I got in this small startup in a week after my resignation as a front-end dev (always wanted to be).
It's an automation company, so you can find software, electronics, even mechanical engineer.
The team was almost a year younger than me. It was a team of around 12 people, in which 5 of them were from Business development.

The tech team was too driven and knowledgeable. Always trying new stuffs and motivating to do the same. I was highly motivated by them in my initial days, watching them working on new stuffs.

So I started with revamping their website completely in Angular 4, and did it in around a month or so, being new to Angular. Outcome was pretty satisfactory. I wanted to work on new projects, but just to get the cashflow in they started getting in WordPress projects. It was frustrating, I wanted to work more on new technologies like Angular, React, etc...but just for the survival of the company I had to work on WordPress, so to respect their urge to get going I kept working on 3-4 projects in parallel, and mind you the clients were from hell !!

Fast-forward 4 months, I am still working on few WordPress websites, and one internal GPS based project in React. And I haven't received my salary for past 3.5 months, since the company is still struggling with the issue of funding and getting money from clients. I kinda liked working there because there was lot to learn even though they are so young, but I had bills to pay too.

And I am in dilemma to leave the company or not, because I already stretched 3 months out of good will and guilt of leaving the company in high time. So i finally let the CEO know that I cannot stick for any longer. And i was done with the false promises of getting the salary "next month" everytime. All the money getting inside of company was invested heavily on the product we were building and no one was getting the salaries. Others were fine since they were founding members too.

Long story short : I finally left immediately and now working in a good company as a React dev. I hope they do well and I would love to see them grow, but please *STOP* making false promises and hold on to employees on a lie.

People always say thet you should not quit your job before you have the next job lined up, but what if you plan to do freelance? This is my dilemma.

A bit of context (rant).

My current job is my first official job. Small company, VERY HIGH staff turnover rate. I have been here for 2 and a half years. My commute on a good day is < 20 mins, and money is relatively good.

During the last 6 months, all devs above me resigned, which lead to the system maintenance being passed on to the few devs left. Our biggest system is a legacy system (Windows CE), and new clients are actively signed up and new features requested. The codebase is not even worthy of being called spaghetti, changes break every client, I need to wash my hands every couple of minutes. Seriously, I would rather maintain obfuscated code. It is like a bunch of highschoolers wrote the system, though I think they would have done a better job.

Management is nice and understanding, but the state of the codebase is killing the spirits.

I fill my nights and weekends moonlighting to keep my mind off of the 'daymares' at work. I have never been a team player, and thrive on my own. I have been thinking quiting and going full freelance/contract the last couple of months. Should things not work out, I can always go job hunting (see issue in par. 1)

Was hoping someone with experience can provide insight or advice on this. It's a long one, so thanks in advance to everyone who took time.

Received a great job offer a few weeks ago and was told I'd get a contract in January. They seemed pretty switched on about the kind of problems I might be facing and even raised my asking price, so I'm definitely not interested in looking elsewhere.

However, I started getting interview requests Thursday last week, one of which is for next Thursday.

Received and signed contract on Friday. Haven't received copy with employer's signature yet, but it's still early so np yet. However, I still haven't replied to the interview requests.

Should I turn down the requests or accept them and hope I get the contract back in time to cancel? I mentioned to the recruiter that I was receiving interest from other companies and I wanted to seal the deal with this company, but didn't receive response yet advising me whether it's cool to keep my options open.

I don't wanna look dodgy to the dudes I signed with in the unlikely event they find out I accepted interviews. I also don't wanna come across as combative or a pain to work with by pressuring them to sign soon.

However, I also don't wanna have a panic attack in the middle of revision season if I don't hear from these guys for a week (they get pretty busy at times). I feel like I could be sentencing myself to short-term anxiety (and I'm already anxious af in final year) if I start turning down offers before I have a signed contract.

Thoughts?

[Career Advice]

Hi folks! I'm in a bit of a career dilemma for which I sincerely need your help.

TL;DR
How do I go from being a React Native Developer to an Android developer, considering I have 2x more experience with React Native than Android, with React Native being the more recent one ?

More details -

I started as an Android developer in 2015, using Java as my primary language. Up until the end of 2017 I kept working as an Android developer, adding different native mobile tech skills to my skillset.
At the end of 2017, my employer asked me if I could also learn React Native as he had many big projects that required a more hybrid stack. I had always been eager to learn new things (perks of being a programmer I guess), so I said yes and started working on React Native in 15-20 days.
From that point onwards, I kept doing more and more projects using React Native (in my day job) and over the years, I became more of a React Native Developer than an Android one. At this point in my career, I have about 4.5 years of React Native experience and 2.5 years of Android.

However, now I am at a point where I want to make a switch (for better pay and more exciting projects) but when I looked at the job postings for React Native this morning, they were all for startups with great pay but kinda average products, whereas the Android job listings were for companies like Uber, Reddit, etc. (basically great companies with good projects and great pay).

I really want to go back from being a React Native Developer to an Android developer full time but I don't know how. I've personally seen so many people switch jobs from one field (say React Native) to another (Backend development) - and when I asked them about how they did it, they said it didn't really matter to their companies what specific tech stack they'd worked with, which is kinda hard to believe because every job listing I've seen companies list every single technology very very specifically.

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

I've been working for over a year now in this remote job as a sysadmin for a local client. I personally find this job quite intimidating at first with all of the infrastructure and all of its many microservices running in high availability set up. I enjoyed learning everything about them and why it's been set up this way, which gives me ideas if I were to build my own app (not competing with my current employer, of course).

But now I don't feel comfortable managing this beast in its many environments.

From time to time, I would hear from my old colleagues at my old sucky company for help in their work and that they know I'm an expert in. I help and it makes me feel good.

Now I'm at a career dilemma. I don't want to lose my current job because I feel "uncomfortable" with managing and administrating the tech holding the whole infrastructure. And I don't wanna go back to my old job with the sucky pay and the feel of being unchallenged. And if I try to find another job, I might be as lucky as I do now, especially good difficult it is for me to find a remote job to begin with.

Objectively, I just need to clear off my debts (at this rate, in 4 years), and have a side income to support my family. But I don't think I can follow through on that plan. Should I look for a new job or do better with the current job that I have now?

Luxary dilemma. I'm just finishing up my studies and got 2 job openings going on. They are about the same salary but very different companies. What should i think about for my future like CV and other stuff? What would benefit me the most knowledge wise. Or any other recomendations starting as a developer?

Opening 1:
Smaller company "10-15 people" that develops apps and plugins for CRM systems. C# fullstack.

Opening 2:
Big player in the car industry with 1000+ employees. Java backend.