Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

I know a guy, about 50 years old. He is a self-taught programmer since he was young, and he has always used Visual Basic (never anything newer than VB6).

He once needed to interface with a web application I wrote, so I asked him to send me a POST HTTP request. He didn't know what I was talking about. No notion of REST, sockets, HTTP, nothing.

The he showed me his code. Actually, his codes. He had multiple copies of the project, one for each version, and he even kept multiple variations of the software in different separate folders. He probably doesn't know what "version control" even means.
You think this is messy. You didn't see the actual code (it's a huge application!).

Spaghetti all over the place. Meaningful variable names, what are they? Default names for the controls, like button1, button2, etc, with forms with more than 30 buttons and text fields. This was the most incomprensibile code I have ever seen.

You might think that this guy is just a hobbyist.
No.
He sells his applications. To companies. They are obviously full of errors, but they buy them.

Now, if you're still with me, two questions come into my mind:

- why?? I hate this, because it's impossible to prove to a non-technical person that this is *not* software development.
- how do I know that, to someone else, I am not like him? How can I be sure that I know and will know what needs to be known?

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

When you open a non-minified file with tons of difficult calculations only to see, that every variable is around 1 or 2 letters. :'(

Fuck today and fuck every piece of shit manager and non-dev coworker that thinks they contribute anything meaningful besides being a fucking idiot and making things complicated. I hope my team, except for the other devs, jumps off a bridge into a valley of dicks and spikes. I hope my client tells them to personally fuck themselves for being such a useless waste of space. Fuck off and die cunts.

i don't understand what would be termed as "relaxing" for me.
when i was in college , i watched a lot of movies on romance, bromance and friendship. being from a very angry , isolated family with bitter relationships from relatives, we had almost 0 people to interact with.
i personnally was also very different from society and struggled making friends.

as of now i did have somewhat come over this problem and have a good number of "known people" (atleast 500+) that i can categorise into'
- A just people with whom i shared a situation( college, office, tutions)
-B people with whom i have spent my free times in those situations (aka friends, and free time = lunch breaks, seat sharing, projects with them, etc)
-C people with whom i spent some time willingly( aka close friends from college, tutions and home, with whom i played cricket, went on partying/touring places , etc)

-D people whom i liked but never got a love back( aka girls to whom i told i like them. they mostly belonged to category C but eventually went to category A)

previously the category C people were special for me and i would weave my life around them. like all those bromance and friendship movies? these are the guys with whom i would do that. world tours and awesome weird shit? these people will be their in the pic... i would wish them on birthdays, i will call them every few days, go meet with them , have a bite, plan trips, movies , etc...

but today i feel am so done with everyone. i feel like everyone is so fake and forgetful, no one is worth my attention. i can easily forget wishing them birthdays or calling/meeting them every few weeks, because i don't want to or care about it.

friendship , from what i have realised, is just a means of dealing with a task in a group. it just provides a herd immunity and herd advantage . and once you learn how to survive alone, you don't really see a point in it. after coming out of college i was alone in the world, as my friends were from different fields. before college, i thought these were the guys with whom we will be living as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, not just in terms of relation, but rather in a symbiotic way: each one helping each other.
today, i feel criingy just thinking about it.

no friend will remember you for more than a year if you die now. everyone will move on. and in the struggling phase that me and my friends are right now (20-30s), we don't even need to die to forget our friendships.
my so called friends have wished me less on my birthdays than the lifeless apps i have on my phone.

so neither i am expecting someone to do something for me, nor do i think i want to do anything with anyone

------
so back to the problem, i don't know how will i find some relax or meaningful time anymore.
i am always up for trips and one of the first person to say yes to plans.

once upon a time i had this realisation that in a trip, we can enjoy 3 things:
1. the people with whom we are
2. the place we are visiting : the locals, the foods, the nature
3. the mode of travel : car on highways, bikes or flights above the clouds , or some memorable train journeys, etc.

but lately so even that seems to be not working out.
- the people are shit
- places feel like somewhat same everywhere . it's either : rocks/mountains or snow or water or buildings and population. it's just a temporary change of scenary and doesn't really gives a feeling of peace. same for mode of transport.

if i rule the going out part, the things that remains is to enjoying your job, home family and daily life. that i do , but that's the thing that creates an environment of "bored-out"-ism in my mind.

i don't know what i am looking for. the only thing i have not experienced is that class D of people. to have a token of faith/respect/appreciation/love from a non blood related person. to have someone with home i will not feel "bored out" when am planning a journey with them.

mathematically , it seems so far fetched and crazily impossible. like if get bored out and loose trust on people whom i shared most of my life after 50-60 meets, how can i be not bored, and be unhappy with a person to whom i have to see each day?

but since this happens for most of the couples, i will say the mind is the biggest and the most fantasizing mystery of human body ❤️ 💔

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?