My first dev job was the worst! The woman in charge of the building was always on my ass! She didn't really understand what programming was and didn't like that I smoked in my office... Then I moved out of my mom's house and got my own place

My first job was a statistical program that i wrote during a trainee at a local IT department.
My boss liked it and told me I could keep the sources and the copyright.
Then he made some phone calls and helped me to find my first clients.

Since that time I am working on the same program.
I founded a software company and have a good life now.

My old boss retired some years ago, but some of the team are still there.
From time to time I visit the department having a coffee with old friends.

That trainee was nearly 30 years ago.

Fell asleep on my first day in my very first project. When I woke up, I saw an email from our manager with the subject "No sleeping please.". No email body. 😂

Can't tell you about my first job as I've never had one. 😕

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

I came to Spain escaping my home country and started looking for a job in ANYTHING. Had done some coding as a hobby but nothing serious, still I sent a CV to some starting positions online (also sent the same CV to pet shops, Starbucks, cloth stores...) And I got chosen to participate in a one week training course / trial at a big company.

At the same time I managed to get a spot on a free and amazing course for music production, my dream profession​. Yet I had to go for the one that actually had some work opportunities!

Got the job after the trial was done and immediately got sent to work with a 3 person team that was in charge of setting up a giant SharePoint site for the local mail office. It was kind of insane! For months I had no idea what I was doing and thought I was going to get fired any day.

5 years later, I still have no idea.

First day on the job. Here is your machine. Here is the code. It's crashing. It's in production. We tried to fix it and can't. You fix it. No pressure... took two days too fix it. Felt like a legend. Addicted ever since.

I was an intern - as a high school student. They had no idea what to do with an intern, let alone a high school student that was only there around three hours a day.

They tried to saddle me with a massive "how to use Perforce" manual, but I flat refused and told them to give me some real work.

In the end I wound up writing a text parser in Python to get some specific info from some files. They decided it wasn't actually needed after I finished it (I don't think they expected me to), on my last week there. I just played solitaire the rest of the time. I learned a few things:

1. I never want to work at Adtran.
2. Perforce should die in a fire.
3. Experience != Expertise.
4. Don't be afraid to put yourself on the line if it means potentially accomplishing something.

I was hired to build a small PHP site. The client was arrested and sentenced to jail time right before the third of four milestones was complete, so I didn't get paid any more after that. Didn't hear from him for over a year, then out of nowhere he wanted to pick up where we left off.

They had a copy of the repository inside a development folder, on the repository.

I left on week 2.

My first job was an internship making $12 an hour. Before I was making ~30k selling cars. Completely uprooted and restarted my life. Came in, pointed out a bunch of things they were doing wrong (fearless intern saves the day), and became king of reporting. Within 3 weeks they offered me a full time job at $50k. I couldn't belive my gamble paid off. 5 years later I'm at a new place making way more and couldn't be happier!

Well there I (the 15 year old me) sat sat the table having breakfast with my girlfriend and her parents when they asked me: "hey aren't you good with PC's? Our company needs a new website" - 4 month later I started an one month internship at their company and built their website which is still in use (which is bad)

My first job was at a web agency. Non tech background, trying to transition into tech through frontend. Month 1: graphic designer, month 2: CSS guy, month 3: UI guy, month 4: in the frontend team doing react, month 7: leading the team, also doing some rails backend, month 9: full stack, month 11: leading web team.

How? Everyone else in the dev team left at month 7 lol. Literally thrown into the middle of the rainforest, fighting bugs by myself. But became so good at debugging and learning on the spot. Left at month 12 for a better job.

Sorry. That's classified

I had an intern in for VBA programming on day one they realized that they were in need of an android dev, so the boss came to me and asked if I had any experience with android. I replied with yes a little, I had begun multiple projects but never finished only one of them. After 4 weeks of developing I presented my progress a pretty ugly but working app, after the meeting the boss told me that a other team of devs were building the same app but didn't made any progress in 1.5 years.
Ps: sry 4 my English.

My first dev job was to code a minecraft plugin that was so simple but I made it sound super hard. The guy who bought it from me thought I was some professinal plugin maker so he paid me 100 swedish kronor for a plugin he could get for free ☺️

My first dev job was a paid internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But I wasn't in the computing division with the supercomputer and the 30-foot 18-screen wall display. In a way, I was doing something more exciting. I was in the Hollifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility.

That meant that I was working next to a radioactive ray gun that they fired at different targets to try and make new kinds of particles. To refine the beam components, there was a tower with the world's highest voltage Van de Graf generator at 25,000 kilovolts. I got training on how to put on a radiation suit, and was told that if I got locked in the wrong room and red lights began to flash, I had about five seconds to run to the far wall and push the E-stop, before I got irradiated and died slowly over the next five weeks.

But, I was reassured, that never happened. Radiation leaks are rare too (that's why we wore dosimeters). More likely, there would be a leak in the generator tower. To explain why that's bad, that tower wasn't filled with normal air. 25,000 kilovolts would punch through that like nothing, arc against the walls, and we'd lose the electric charge. No, instead, the tower was filled to a few atmospheres of pressure with sulfur hexafluoride gas. You know how helium makes your voice go up? This stuff makes your voice go down. It's heavier than air, and it kills you by displacing and starving your lungs of oxygen.

So, while I was happily coding away on PHP, CSS and the Bash shell, making a log book for all the ion gun settings and targets the scientists used in their experiments, I was keeping an ear out for the oxygen alarm. I had a blast!

404 first devjob not found.. :-(

My first Dev job involved password resets. Quickly created a GUI for that shit and passed it off to IT support.

I am a student but I make Android apps and have them up on Play Store (only 2 different apps), and they bring in little money. 😅

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

A few weeks into my first dev job, the owner of the company sent out an email directing that we were no longer allowed to use open source software in our web projects.

I didn't stay there very long.

My first job stared when i was 16 when i make my first power generator with some hardware stuff and c++.

I remember when it explodes one week later.

actually I still work in my first dev job :)
(its been 8 years now)

Got hired as an SSRS engineer. Walked into work day 1 thinking I was a bad ass with my SQL joes2pros knowledge and quickly (and i mean quickly) got smacked down with what real SQL procs look like........should've renamed my title to SSRS reverse-engineer. Good times.

My first work was a paid internship.
My first couple weeks on the job I was supposed to be working on the same machine with another dev to get the gist of the process and everything. Kind of pair programming mixed with mentorship. Sounds cool?
Yeah... Problem is my fellow dev was more interested in spending around 80% of her time chatting around with her boyfriend and friends on Microsoft Chat.
Anyway, I soon got bored of having to look to the other side all the time, and went to our boss and asked for some other stuff to do "because I'm better learning by doing than by example".
Almost 20 years later, I'm still in touch with this dev... But she soon left the job and pursued a career as a translator and interpreter. She was always more interested in talking than programming 😃

My first dev job didn't start out as a job. I started out writing a database querying program just to see if I could do it, and the software ended up being purchased, and me along with it! Seems like such a long time ago now...

First dev job: port Unix on Transputer, a (now defunct) bizarre processor with no stack, no registers and no compiler. That was fun! And that was in 1991 😎

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 made my first website at the age of 12 with my dad for building company! It's alive to this day 😀

I'm still at my first job, got the job by word of mouth from a friend.

This company wants me to develop both their iOS and Android apps, and being the solo developer it's a long process. I forgot to mention I had to learn objective-c on the job, and being from a java background Android was easy to pick up but it wasn't exactly 100% easy either.

8 months down the line I finished the iOS app and working on the Android app, which is more so copying the features I did with the Android prototype I worked on at the start.

I get paid minimum wage with from the looks of it no sight of a pay raise.

This company doesn't seem to know about how difficult it is to be the only developer for two apps in two different languages.

Anyway aside from this I was wondering if I could get some advice, I want to apply for jobs while I finish up the Android app, but is it a good idea to put the company I work for on my CV? I don't want to risk getting found out for looking for a job, without my boss knowing.

Would it be ideal to just have some sort of more information on request type thing if the jobs I apply for respond?

I guess I could stay until I'm here for one year (student advisor said this) but in saying that I don't think he understands that software development is done in projects rather than time, and after these apps I'll have to start on a new app from scratch, which I'm not looking forward to.

Anyways for any advice you guys give me thanks in advance I really appreciate any input, just wanna get out of this job, the 10 hours of commute I spend a week is killing me :/ along with it being expensive.

I left uni in 2005 clutching my shiny new .NET based degree, and was instantly hired by a local software firm... to maintain their legacy Turbo Pascal systems.

My first dev job my boss, understood me so well. i think he must of been like me as a kid. Much like when people go to uni people say they change so much. He knew i was just in my shell, shy, but capable.

I turned 18 and he straight away wanted to get me to nightclubs! i don't remember much from the night, except, i got into a bit of a fight (we won) stole a huge pitcher of some kind of drink (to drunk to taste it) and danced on the tallest part of the stage most of the night, kind of like the spotlight of the entire place. It was epic, and it certainly made me come out of me shell.

Worked for the US federal government. Stuff couldn't be used unless it had been approved. Had to us Python 2.6. Python 3 was out by then. Basically anything brand new or even new within the last 5 years wasn't allowed, but was expected to make apps that represented modern web apps.

I was making a prank app which turned to my first virus.

One day my mother told me that the programers in her work were offering to her to show them the virus and if their program dont catch it they will give me a reward. It was not catched by the program and i got the reward it was not so big but the feel was awesome

Awesome, first paying gig and I get to build a site for a local school system!

Superintendent and 3 network admins at the stakeholder meeting to approve the design?

Wait, you don't want the school colors, but ones from your favorite football team?

Seriously? Blinking police light line art bookending the alert block?

You.... Want my design as a Dreamweaver template?

I'm just going to go sit in a corner and cry now...

My first job was not exactly a job but a freelance project. The guy that I delivered the website to thought that I'd charge money each time I pressed a key on my laptop when we met.
Had to explain to the guy that that's not how it works. That's not how any of it works.

It was my internship and I've end up working on a law company specializing on Australian construction laws they're working on a website that will take care of all the paperworks for the contractors. They have a dev team who's working on it but they don't have a web designer. I was accepted for the job as an intern/web designer/tester. I was so happy that I've got a really cool internship as a designer but that's only for a second.

The hell starts on day one. They've told me that they're using agile workflow and that they need to make the website responsive. It was based on bootstrap and gosh their code was so broken. HTML tags overlay on each other, some are unclosed. I've tried to fix the problems and did a great job at that. Made the front page responsive and all laid out. When I went to the next php file it has a different header.php and footer.php and same problems apply and we're not even touching the worst.

They didn't use any version management and they're cowboying everything. Now that the website is on the staging server they use Cpanel text editor to edit the code! My headache started to pileup.

The Australian client asked me to provide icons and fix the colors of the website. Also the typography looks great already. I've fixed almost all the problems and I'm satisfied with the design when suddenly a new co-worker from a famous and expensive college was absorbed by the company. He worked as the marketing specialist who has no experience at web design at all. He told me to do this and that and the whole website changed. He bullied me for my skills in design (I'm an intern) and just took over the whole design. Everyone even the boss listen to him as if everything he say is right. He's skilled at design but not web design. He made the website look like a freakin movie poster.

All my works are for nothing, I got headache for nothing and I've got hated for nothing.

It was the day when I finished my internship. It was a long 3 months. After a month I've heard from my co-interns that the whole dev team was fired including the marketing specialist. Also the whole website is scrapped and has been rebuilt by a single guy who used WordPress which he did in only a month.

Was fired after 3 months. My boss said "how did you even pass engineering school?!"

I'm not a skilled programmer... and never will be!

We (as new hires) had to add a fallback logic for input validation on every input element using only JSP and Spring controllers just because the client still uses IE6 and fucking disables Javascript!!

Error 404

Well. I was fresh software engineer. Was so excited to start working on real life codes.
They put me in charge of writing user manual. In 2 different languages 🤐

My first dev was a small pascal application that my dad used in his job to calculate profitability of their rental machines.

Adding up interests, workshop costs and salaries an finally splitting all shared costs according to each items turnover.

Before this my dad did this by hand using an calculator with a paper printout and it usually took around 3 days with interruptions.

With my application he entered the numbers in a grid like interface and all fixed costs in a settings view and hit calculate. Took around 30 minutes.

And if he got updated figures he just loaded the monthly figures from file, changed as needed and got the new numbers in less than 1-2 minutes instead of starting all over.

This was 1987 and personal computers was just finding its way into business.

My first job. Hired as a designer. It was me and a backend dev (PHP). Company wanted us to build their e-commerce website, but the backend dev had no eye for design or front end chops, fell onto me, so I learned it on the spot.

I also did the mistake of trying to prove myself too hard and ended up doing IT, network and user support, user training, phone sales and helping the print team on designs, on top of my already taxing responsibilities, for 18k/year.

In the end, the company moved offices and I was tasked with finding and installing a new server, IP phone system, and organising the desks following a carefully crafted and approved plan. Spent the weekend doing that (had some friends that didn't even work for the company join as they knew of my struggle) only for the bosses to arrive on Monday, decide they didn't like it, and just said "change it", ignoring the plan entirely. I then left without having another job lined up and never looked back.

Just finished my third year of my comp sci degree when a friend found me a position at a very small startup. I was asked to build a web crawler to take job postings off kijiji and craigslist and place them in our database for our clients to find. It didn't take long to build (even with limited experience). It was pretty shady. I didn't think i'd have to deal with the ethics of a task so soon in my new dev-life! Luckily it never made it to the live site. After that they got me to work on their android app (not so shady)

4 years later i still work for that company building apps. It's still a small team, and i love 'em 🤙

My first job was when I started my apprenticeship in 2012 - I was really shy, 15 years old and couldn't talk to strangers. So couldn't the guy who started the apprenticeship with me. We've got a simple contact form to program, he did the php part, I did the html part. We were supposed to talk together but we both didn't so it was pretty enerving for our boss lol. After three years we finally started to talk and we are still working together for the same boss, even after the apprenticeship - I think he's happy that we are finally talking lol

#firstdevjob
printed "hello world!" when I was 14
and the journey began...

Worked as a student in a big company. Just doing data entry and checking product data. It was a nice part time job at the same time with computer science study. After a year I asked for something else and switched to the Android Team. I said I could do a little bit of Java and wrote for another half year Unit Tests. That was the point where I really learned coding and got experienced. Would never learned so much in my study because I was lazy. Now I can call me a Android Developer. Still love the company for giving me this opportunity.

It's rant time!

So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).

I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.

One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.

Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.

6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.

Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.

I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.

Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.

Worked for a party supply chain on their e-commerce solution for less than minimum wage and was overworked.

The only reason i did it was so i could visit my girlfriend 3 hours away each weekend.

We are still together 7 years later and have 2 kids.

My first Dev job only lasted 2 weeks. That's about it.

First job was coding voice alarm s Systems (1998) primarily using Delphi and programming act microcontrollers using avrco pascal and act assembler.

They were happy days

I was working as an intern at small company, and after a month we signed contract
But each month they had some excuse for not paying me, or any of the employees
So I quit after 3 months without any payment
But I would not have been where I am, if I was not in that difficult condition, it made me work harder, and thought me to always keep my options open :-)

My first dev job is my current job, but I'm leaving it tomorrow to go on on an internship overseas, then return my focus to completing my Computer Science bachelor's degree and getting into a Master's program.

Before this job, I was an office assistant at a small company that sold cosmetics products and fragrances. I had just returned to college after a 1.5 year hiatus and was tired of that job. I wanted to get into the field, even though my experience was limited to freelance web design and a few personal programming projects of which I no longer had any proof, and I still didn't have a degree, but I wasn't confident that someone would contact me. Yet I decided to update my resume and upload it to Indeed.com. I was already getting interviewed at a call center when this local tech startup called, and 2 weeks later, I had the job. We were 3 employees and I was, not only the first woman in the team, but also the first person to ever get hired by the directors without a college degree. Today​, I still hold those two titles and the team is 3 times bigger.

It was a very bumpy ride, and tomorrow I move on to other adventures, but I'll always be grateful for the opportunity, all the lessons, and the best team mates I could ever have. Without their wisdom and guidance, I wouldn't have half the blessings I have today. I will miss them dearly, but I know we'll stay friends.

Here's to better things and to a college degree! <3

My first dev job is like attending college. I just study php and Codeigniter for 6 months. Low pay but I learned a lot.

Was hired as a mobile dev / mobile web dev, was told my main project would be integrating a tool with phonegap.

... 13 months later I was never asked to download phonegap and was now writing server side java. Surprisingly I left that job

I was hired to make a little app, alone, for iOS, Android and I had to code the server and the database. At first it was only à little app on Android and I had to do it in one month and go back school after.
Finally, the client was upset that the app was buggy and asked me to stop school because it was my duty because he paid me

I've been seeing a lot of rant about bad cs teachers for the week's rant so I'm gonna share about a teacher that I like. Maybe wk45? Anyway, I think I mentioned him before. Its the same teacher who taught our class OOP. He's a pretty cool guy. Gives out difficult tasks for us each week (Something that we don't like, actually..but thats just a student thing. But everyone agrees that it does help us understand the whole thing better) He grades our assignments and tests, and if he feels that we're a bit left behind, doesn't mind offering us one-to-one classes when he's free and makes sure that everyone understands what he's talking about in class. Some of us had still had some trouble getting the basics down so this was really helpful. Plus he likes giving fun examples and stuff in class so its never boring (usually food related examples).So yeah, learnt a lot during the class :D
He's not the only teacher that I like though, we've got a few other cool teachers as well. I guess maybe I have a bit of luck with this?

Was offered a really good price to set up a webshop, and he would pay me the same amount for two literal duplicates of the site.
"Oh btw I need it so no one can see who logged in to the website, there must be no traces of activity"

IOW - he makes shitloads on illegal horse trade while I take the blame for the website.

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.

Google Maps put me on the other side of the freeway, so rushing to get there I was stopped by a security guard who told me to slow down and directed me to a spot. I hit the car next to me, I then interviewed and exchanged insurance information with the other car's owner. I went to school to defend my capstone and got the offer. A year later I sat next to the guy whose car I hit.

Hired by large prestigious company to do web development. Understanding at the outset, I was not a web developer, just wanted my foot in the door with the company. 2 days after orientation, I am placed on a $20 million contract expansion with 3 other developers. All new to this contract. So: new language, new technologies, new team, no leadership, no mentorship. 2 months later after a month of asking for help, I'm asked why I'm not delivering solid code by the project exec and moved to the testing team. Testing team lead introduces me to people on the contract and answers questions or tells me vaguely where to loom. Spend last 4 months building a professional fuck you by making myself a yes man to everyone and their mother. Left the contract and have been getting regular hours with them since (including developing for them). New contract loves me and despite the project execs attempt to torpedo me, I have an excellent reputation and am positioned for career advancement already.

I couldn't give him the finger, but I made him regret lettimg me go. Original team lead has since been released for unrelated HR complaint.

Maintaining a Blackberry App. Actually it wasn't as bad as it sounds like...

Ask me in a few months after my bootcamp! I hope to have my first dev job! Scary and exciting at the same time 😳

First job. Started 2 weeks ago, I'm doing an internship in a Web development company and even though my studies were mainly for Java and Android, it's going fine.
Past week I learnt to use .less and HTML5 and will start with Javascript now.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

My first job was 3 years ago.
I was tasked to create feature updates for a referral system.
There were two programmers in that project , both had left the company before I started.
There left no documentation whatsoever. They gave me a copy of user manual as my guide. HAHA!
Half of the code was in code igniter framework(wasn't even familiar with it then), the other half was hard coded.
It was a total nightmare. Wish I had the guts to call it quits then and there. XD

My first dev job was making and maintaining a shop on a Windows XP and xampp. We tried it like a week and i secretly changed everything to go to 000webhost. It was great there and no one had problems with the website. So... Hope the next guy after me thinks of a smartar way because they didn't want to give money for hosting....

!rant
My first real software job is my current one. Nothing to rant about: great colleagues, lot of challenging work. Plus I get to work remotely.

I had just finished programmer school (Air Force Tech School), and was all set to wade into the world of C++ programming. Got to my first job, and they set my down at a VT220 terminal on a VAX 11/780 and said, "You are the new sys admin." Talk about disappointment. My first actual coding? I got to apply a software patch to a Gould SEL 67 that only had a Mod 40 TTY as an interface ... yes, pretty much a typewriter ... no terminal screen. I am so happy technology has advanced as much as it has.

It was an internship. They wanted me to spoof the government's digital signature on some online tax-filing documents by reverse engineering the government's application, just because the whole process of recieving authentic signatures would have taken time, and they wanted it _now_

Does downloading on all the scripts to a 3D webgl game to a free server so my friends could play it count?

The IT at my current work designed infra as such :
One repo for ALL the configs for every project and one config file per project that defines the version of the language (ex node 6) for all environment of a project. I don't even want to talk about deploying previous version or what happen when you update the version and AWS spawns new instances.
Jump into chatops hype approach and use one single script to deploy every app. Talk about a single point of failure but hey we use slack now it's great no?

Since I always think we are one character away from bad deployment and I'm into one click deployment then I've made a web app just to generate command and copy it or send it to slack.

I guess this is what happens when IT work for themselves only..

I was an intern at a large company in Madrid throguh a program named ERASMUS+. Apparently we (my friend and I) was the first interns they ever had. So, we didn't get to work alot. Few html and css tasks.

Never got to touch the backend nor a real project. Good that they had lots of coffee machines.

And a great cafeteria with lots of pudding.

Got started by making farmville cheats. Found many exploits. Best was when I found 3 ways to do the same exploit. Zynga kept patching and I kept releasing a new way.
Lasted for just over a year or so.
Played for like 3years and then got bored. Those were the golden days, really miss them.

My first job was writing a cloud based malware analysis system from scratch for UTSA's Institute for Cyber Security.

My direct supervisor was a womanizing, lazy, prick with a PHD. I wonder where he is now.

My first job was in a team of 20 ppl. They are super friendly and skillful. I still work there.

Lost my first job because I told my boss he can't have all 3 of CAP theorem fml

I started at a what is now called a brogrammer shop. While the three owners were probably 50 and older, there was little design outside of the owner's dreams. We busted out programs in the new language C# in three tier architecture with an Access backend. It was fun but when the economy went south I got laid off after about a year.

During the first week of my internship colleagues were bringing me coffee. Then they started nagging and taught me how to do it for them too.

I want to be able to NOT go on youtube every 5 minutes when I'm trying to develop.

I wasn't hired to do a dev's job (handled sales) but they asked me to help the non-HQ end with sorting transaction records (a country's worth) for an audit.

Asked HQ if they could send the data they took so I wouldn't need to request the data. We get told sure, you can have it. Waits for a month. Nothing. Apparently, they've forgotten.

Asks for data again. They churn it out in 24 hours. Badly Parsed. Apparently they just put a mask of a UI and stored all fields as one entire string (with no separators). The horror!

Ended up wasting most of a week simply fixing the parsing by brute force since we had no time.

Good news(?): We ended up training the front desk people to ending their fields with semi-colons to force backend into a possibly parsed state.

First job was as a student, but paid, which was great! Started with some training which taught me more about programming in 7 weeks than I'd learned in 4 years at school/college. Started with some proprietary systems, then moved on to proper web dev/browser based apps using tech you're all far too young to remember. I was instantly at home. So became my career (with lots of full stack experience picked up along the way).

About 3 months in, my team lead said to me (the n00b student) "I'd ask and trust you to do things now that I wouldn't ask people who've worked here for years to do." Meant the world to me... (thanks DH!)

At the end of my time as a student I was invited straight back full time.

The first dev job was on probation for two weeks..

My first job was adding features to a django app and deploying to Heroku. Learnt a lot from that startup in my home town Kakinada.

"What you mean I have to get a log on for a sequel server? What's a sequel to a server?"

#IDontDoICT #CodeIsntMyThing #ServersAndSQL #GISConsultantInICTServices #ArcGIS

My first task as a developer was to make a 20-year-old migrated-to-winforms application with over 1500 forms dpi compatible because apparently someone used it at 125% (acceptable by some law) and it was simply unusable and looked horrendous😩

I guess my story is not really cool, but okay, I lost my job as a Digital designer (Yeah, I actually have a bachelor's degree in graphic design, I'm an impostor)

I lost it because I saved enough money to travel to Japan and I wanted to stay at least a month so the company didn't like it. after coming back I got a job as a content editor, I just copied old content from an old website to a new one, basic html and css, not even responsive design, then I got really into it, and bootstrap came along, the company opened a new department "Front End" so I got in, I learnt responsive design and Jquery, really loved it, I went back to Japan for a month and a half, keeping my job, I liked it, but I quit.

I now work as a remote front end and I feel stuck, I'm very comfortable as remote, don't wanna go back to an office, but it seems I'll have to, can't find any opportunities to improve remotely, and I feel like I'm missing what the "cool kids" are doing.

My first job as a '"dev"' (I really need some kind of super quotation mark for this).
I was young and too stupid too know how stupid I really was, I jobbed at a small recruiting firm and one day my boss complained about her database system and that she needed to hire a student to remake it. Suffering from the problem to be too incompetent to even recognise I'm incompetent I obviously offered my services as a python wizard I mean I could write a program that saves fibonacci numbers to a csv file, how much more could there possibly be? Fast forward two months and I proudly presented a GUI written in VB (it had an wysiwyg GUI editor) that was loosely frankensteined onto a bunch of together copy pasted python scripts running on a Windows Server. No web interface just accessible via vnc. It was slow, sluggish and soo ugly but it worked and did exactly what she wanted it to do. Sure the database was a bunch of csv files but non the less, to say it in pm, it resolved the user story. I quit shortly after because of her tendency to not pay the last bill after something was done (and tbh i deserved it) but she never removed my account from the server. So I copied my "magnus opus" from there... Let's just say whenever I look back at it I feel ashamed and yet it serves as a reminder to never be content with how good you are.

My first job wasn't as good as i hoped to be.
I had to do a content update to a overly plugined worpress site.
But non of my collegues could give me the code for the site to actually do something. I only could use the wordpress admin page.

My colleagues had to use a shitty php framework which was developed by an other company. They were so stressed..
After i talked to them they told me that everyone wants to leave the company.
And the boss was an arrogant asshole.

I left after a weak.

I started as intern at the place. Worked unpaid for 4 months. Then they started paying. That's when shitload started. 5 web developers and 10 projects. 1 months later they fire one of us. Next month they fire another one. 3 developer and 8 projects. No documentation for they projects that were already started before I went there. Provide support for 3 year old project and nothing for reference. Salary was paid 10/15 days after the month war over. I couldn't take it anymore so I have a two months notice before leaving job. A month later all of the 3 android developers gave their notice. After we left, they haven't still paid us our final month's salary. Reason was it was not formal east of leaving and they projects we worked on haven't rolled out to market yet.
Talked and then mailed them the resignation two months in advance is not formal then I don't know what is.
Also how can the project be rolled out when there is specification change every 6 hour to 1 day on the project. Also we completed what was given to us and then the project hasn't rolled out because of new changes in the specification.

I started out as a data entry guy. I learned VBA because dealing with thousands of products in excel by hand was a pain in the ass. Among other things, I wrote a macro to combine multiple products into an importable Magento custom product. From there I learned HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP and never looked back.

Error 404

My first dev job :

Do a front-end in Joomla!. As an internship. Without being paid.
(In France, if you are here for >2 months, they can pay you, or not.)

At least, now I know why Joomla is a no-no when you want to do custom things. Heard that the team working on back-end had problems of PHP, like the PHP appearing and the one Joomla uses "is not the same" or something like this.

And now you know if you didn't. No problem.

The mission was to develop an Android application for configure some devices(who goes 4000m under the water) before and after their deployment by Bluetooth.
It was pretty cool!

Saw an ad on a news/media website looking for front end developers.

Fresh out of Practical Engineering college, which is basically a rapid 2 years teaching academy, I knew the manager previously and applied for the job.
In my standards I failed the "interview" miserably, but nevertheless they still took me under their wings and taught me everything.

1 year later, I'm the lead web and android dev and currently learning AWS and iOS.

it's a fun experience and the unexpected responsibilities have taught me alot.

My first job as a student was at the institute. I was working realy hard. Doing my best. Closing issues lika a boss. All my code was reviewed by senior.
Two other student has this simple program to make (gui for some functions and some graphs). They have no idea how to make it. Their code was worst than spageti and in four mounths then didn't even come close to the end. Noone even looked at theri code.

We were paid the same money!

My first dev gig was an internship in a young startup company. It taught me clients are assholes. That should sum it up.

Don't have one yet ):

Im on it, all my rants refere to it:
780 columns table, pushing unfinished changes to master and recently the new hire pushed a 700mb database bkp to production... I had to learn how to clean that shit on git and rebuild the repository...

How can someone not realize they are pushing 700mb to gitlab?
That shit must have taken ages... I realized because git pull was taking too long...

My first job was being a sales clerk. I exel macroed my way to my coworkers hearts. Today im just a simple developer, and I love my job!

I was a bit intimidated going into my first full time job since I was the youngest on the team. They put me on a small project to start with and it wasn't difficult at all.

After working with my colleague for a while, he came in one morning and asked what I'm doing here.

"I'm at work? I work here?", I replied in confusion.

Then he went on about that I shouldn't be working at this company. He thought I was smart enough to work overseas at an investment bank.

Thanks for the complement :)

3rd year college. Create a basketball timer+score board in java. The price was around 70$

My first dev job was in visual basic.. As an unpaid intern and also no bonuses anything.

First dev job was unified communication and call center software. Over 4 years later, still there today.

I was hired as an Android Developer. Now, being a Windows Phone/Mobile User but coming from Android this wasn't a problem.
Working with Android really convinced me what a piece of garbage that OS is. 50% of the code are fixes for stuff that SHOULD work and DO work on other OSes just not on Android. Often times I got in trouble for Apps crashing due to the Android Phone itself failing it's job which I of course can't fix. Sadly, I'm only trained in Android and Windows Development and no one wants a Windows App, so I'm still stuck with this underpayed job which makes me sad!

It was the end of my first week. Friday evening and everything was going well. I'd just made a career change and loved it. My new job, boss, and coworkers were fantastic.

So I decided to play a little with a portion of the website before leaving for the weekend. I needed to learn a module that was responsible for displaying our company hours online. I was told prior to being hired that this particular part of the site was important and the only recent cause of the previous developer working long hours.

It didn't work like I thought it did, and with changing one line of code, I brought the entire thing to it's knees. Not just the part displaying hours, but the entire page, which was our home page.

I didn't panic. I called some other devs I had met. I knew they could fix it. No one answered. 4.30pm on a Friday is not the best time to reach people. Four or five unanswered calls later, I started to panic. I tried changing the line of code back, but couldn't get it right. I tired removing the hours module, but that didn't work either. 10 minutes felt like an eternity.

I finally found the history feature of our CMS. It saves versions of pages and saved me that night. I rolled back to a version of the page last modified before I started working there, and it worked like a charm.

I didn't touch that module again until I had something to replace it with.

I took my first job as a web designer, not knowing that i would never create a single design. Instead, i was suddenly expected to be a actionscript developer. So suddenly i was a developer.

My first dev job after vocational high school is being an android dev, still on 2.1.

Small amount of tutorials for doing basic stuffs, no libraries that makes life easier, my english sucks and no idea how to java.

Oh and i did the backend too.

But at least i got paid 150$ a month which is nice than being an unemployed

NULL

(still looking for one, please send help. I graduate in 2 months and I've been scavenging for a job.)

Building Jasper reports in XML with an early buggy beta of iReport for visuals. So painful.

My first job is my second favorite dream job...

Technically the first things I received money for were some android apps I published in the Google Play Store. They were icon packs that I created the icons for and mimicked someone's android project. After that created some of my own android apps. First paid career job, hired 2 years ago for java web developer at a health insurance company. I still like it, very appreciated here.

I was construction management for ~9 years, then I quit with really no back up plan, and decided to pursue a career in development. After a little self education I started checking Craigslist every day for internships/entry positions, and applied for all of them. Within a couple weeks I found a company willing to give me a shot, 2 years and a few agency jumps later in Still kicking.

I am still "at it"! *pa dum tsssh*

I landed at the company's office and the boss was off to meetings so I sat with the dev team ( which was 2 people back then ) and started to ask what they're doing trying to get one of the tasks off them. The boss came late and told me to come next day, the first thing he said to me in the morning was "you're hired!, Now go back to what you did yesterday".
I was 17 and happy lol

My first job was through a technology "Graduate Training Program" at a large bank. We were sold on the job being told that there would be a month of corporate training before getting to work. You know, stuff like presentation skills and Myers Briggs and actual useful stuff. And yeah, they did have that for like two days of the month.

The rest was the most bullshit work to basically kiss-ass to upper management. Having to analyze their commercials and explain how amazing they were and why (they sucked). Explaining a portion of the business to upper management.. you know- the business they knew because they are executives in it- but it had to be "fun". We were stuck making board games and rap songs to these things to make an ass of ourselves in front of executives.

Then after that I was stuck working on VB6 programming with a Cobol mainframe backend. So fucking awful.

One good thing about being at a remote offline office with virtually no supervision or coworkers is long lunches. I left ~10mins ago, and if anyone calls (and no one will), I left just few minutes before they called.

When I was 11, my uncle called me genius and I should study computers after I went online to HP's official website (using a 56k modem connection) to download the drivers for the printer we had at hone, since somebody lost the cd with the installation that came with the printer. Today, I am 25 yo software developer earning 25k+ a year :) #thanksuncle

Iam a newbie in Linux kernel programming can anyone mentor me ???

VALAR MORGHULIS

Had an intern job at a established company, that mostly did equity reports. They made create HTML email templates out of tables for 2 weeks. Fun times.

They told me I needed to know VBA, so went off and learnt it in a week (I only knew Turbo Pascal) 1st day in the job they put me on ASP. So it was great, by the time I left I knew TP, VBA, ASP and JavaScript. All before 1st year University!

I was hired to work on an Android application written in java. Spent three months working on a project written in C++ instead. Needless to say I had no prior experience with C++ at that time.

My first job was partially support oriented. Had to work in shifts and just close issue tickets. Learnt Python, automated shit, only to quit it later for a better job :)

On my first job I was assigned to an Angular 1 project that nobody was working on anymore. After two weeks of pestering the people that worked on it I finally figured out that mess of a code and started fixing bugs. It sucked working alone but I escaped eventually...

I had ".NET Developer" position. In reality, I was doing php, Android, unity, c on arduino, some desktop .NET and web too. Oh, I had to work with nodejs too. I was getting paid 6 times less than now...

When I was 14, I "registered" to Google Play Dev Console. I make apps since then. Most of them are only available in Hungary, but I have some international ideas.

Setting up dev environment.
Had enough doubts, got to know everyone in my team. :)

First job out of school was for a company that did Cold Storage as its main gig and custom dev as a minor form of additional income. I worked with one of the owners and another guy as a three man agile team.

Except, the owner didn't trust source control, so we didn't use it. There was no organization, instead the owner would come in every morning, and assign something new. Randomly, the owner would come in and pitch a fit that something he had assigned 3 weeks before, immediately pulled us off of the next day, and ordered us to DELETE the code for, wasn't done. He treated the other guy on our team as his personal whipping boy. He would sometimes go 2 or 3 days without saying a word to me. No project to work, nothing. I would sit there all day with nothing to do. I stayed there a year.

First dev job: embedded SWE at a robotics company. Honestly can't complain.

So I currently work at my first job and have for 2 years now. First project I had was to redesign a user info set up page. Didn't know any of the languages so kinda had to just wing it. Anyway finally committed my code and tested on dev server. Then code pushed to production and tested there. Then I saw a message from one of the top devs saying nobody could login. I replied saying that I was able to. Well, I actually ended up making it to where no one could log in except me. I learned real quick to never fuck up like that again. Surprised I wasn't fired on the spot.

- "Two months" training upon hire, with all the other hires too.
- Entire thing takes place in a hotel's larger room meant for small conventions or whatever.
- Brought on as Java developers, told there was Java work for all of us
- By the end of it, there wasn't
- Sit at our company's office for a month doing nothing, waiting for work
- It's summer time, 90F+ heat, and the A/C not only wasn't on most of the time, when it was on it was actually heating the building instead of cooling
- Get on a project, join the client site, takes at least a week to get a laptop, takes a month to get most of the needed accesses
- Was brought on because they needed a SQL Developer, I do not know more than basic syntax which I told them
- Project is 3 months behind already
- Really no development since Offshore handles it (poorly)
- For the first year+ of my time here I am doing nothing but manual quality assurance testing, and no development

It's hard to leave when you aren't learning

Today was my first day on my first job ever. It was give me the task to create a website's template to present to a client. Task, to fulfill on a computer where on the first 2 hours occurred 2 BSOD. At least they didnt gave me (yet) a deadline.

In my first Dev job, it was a startup and my employer(owner), didn't even had the passion and vision I had for the company

My first dev job started by doing a change across a bash, perl and python script, where I got hired for C++. Now I'm full time python and I love it.

First dev job was not really a job but rather an internship... I was completely new to Spring and Jersey Java and i was given a 5 points story "which turned out to be 8 later on" to consume a RESTfrl webservice... Manipulate the response and create an Excel sheet at the end... But the Excel columns n rows had some complicated logic to determine colour, font, borders, alignment and a lot of other props..
Got it done "code was a bit ugly" and dev lead was satisfied and told me I actually knocked out an 8 points story on my own... Team velocity was 5 points story per Dev.
Now im a full time Developer therr

As a junior in a print communication agency, my boss wanted me to make their portfolio.
Their requirements were: a full animated flash website (in 2010...). Understand, they had been bought the Adobe license...
After several months of works and ton of alerts about flash death, the website has been deployed.
My boss did not understand why he could not visit the website with its iPhone...
The website had lived 2 months and will was replaced by a static "wix" alternative... So much work for nothing because the boss did not trust a junior dev.

Biggest lesson: Always begin with fast proof of concept to validate your hypotheses for you and for your boss ;)

Turboc++

My colleague checked in the compiled java class files on every commit, until i could convince him that this makes no sense. 😂

Called in for an interview for graphic design, didn't get it. Same company contacts me a few months later for a web design opening. I get the job. They were behind on graphic design work, so my first few months were helping them to catch up. One day they asked how the web site was going. I was like, uh, you've been scheduling me graphic design since I started. It took a few more months to get my plate cleared completely but I was able to finally build out their site and a photo appointment scheduler that we could all love.

My first dev job was as an intern. Hired for my skills in Java and C++, had to maintain a big legacy software in VB.NET. I felt kinda lost and disappointed ...

!rant
Preface: As it was unpaid labor I won't count my school-internship in a games resell shop in which I was ordered to "program" a BDSM-Shop with MS Frontpage.

My first paid gig was back in 2006. I got booked to write the website of a new company by friends of the family. The problem was that the gig had to happen ~600km away from my home town. Back in 2006 it was far from common to own a laptop for young folks, which is why I packed my Pentium 4 HT "powerhouse" tower, my 15" TFT monitor, keyboard and mouse into a suitcase and took a bus. I not only had to write the website, but had to do all the Frontend and Design as well and was paid 400€. Hahaha what a deal. They are still using my logo btw.
Anyhow... I was like 17yo and the work experience was more valuable then the money anyways. Plus at the time 400€ weren't a bad payment either. After that it took 2 more years and half a dozen of boring jobs until I started earning money with programming again. I can't understand why I haven't started programming earlier. Especially considering the wage gap between the jobs I did and potential programming jobs. Guess you're always smarter afterwards.

I was supposed to write test cases for existing code using gtest. No one wrote any test cases in our team but the framework setup was there. Cmakelist
I did everything I could but just could solve a linking error.
Asked all the senior people about my issue. No one could solve it in 10 minutes and it was also not a functional requirement so no one really bothered. I tried and tried and tried. After 2 weeks 3 days. On Thursday morning at 11 oclock I could solve it. I was under a lot of stress. Seriously those days were bad 😔
My manager used to think I'm technically weak. Now things have changed. And Cmakelist is awesome.

Build a website for a private business: Cool.

Do it without being aware that frameworks are a thing and you shouldn't swear every day for a month to fix percentage layouts: Cooler.

Hear the customer complain about how much he liked a competitor website built on flash technology: Coolest.

Now I'm an iOS developer.