When I left the house to work abroad my mom called me.

Mom: “every time you touch the computer things change!”

Me: “I haven’t touched it in months, what’s the problem?”

Mom: “my google has changed, please put it like before!”

The same phone call, day after day, I couldn’t figure what she meant and she was getting pissed off.

Then I realized, it was just the google doodle...

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

Shit just got legal

There's the lead dev, I'll call him John. John is not from the US, Europe, or any of those developed countries. The rest of management are from developed countries.

John found himself in the US for personal reasons, on a non-work visa, and his visa will expire soon. In the meantime, management found an opportunity to raise capital in the US, and they want John to be there because it'll look better in the presentation.

John: Oh but that's a month after my visa expires. You'll have to provide me a work visa.

Management was uncomfortable, because we're not registered in the US. and coz they don't wanna spend money.

The French: Don't worry, the US allows you to come in for 3 months without a visa.

The other management seemed to agree with the French. John had to explain that, no, only very few privileged countries have that right, and for the rest the US border is very, very hard to cross, and the visa process takes months. Most US embassies abroad have a year-long waitlist, though you can pay a (hefty) extra fee for it to be expedited. Fucking management was seriously surprised by this.

The Canadian: Don't worry, I own have an apartment in the East Coast. I could give you the keys and you could stay there for this month until the presentation.

So management wants John to stay in the US illegally for a month because they don't wanna pay for a work visa and the expedition fee.

One time was in a meeting with clients from abroad (big company with some offices in the US). After the meeting we went to a restaurant with the clients. Then one hour later our CEO shows up and starts tanking beers like crazy and gets super wasted. Then starts asking the client if they have a job for him in the US. He doesnt want to run his company anymore because all his employees are fuckung idiots blahblah. Then he asks me you understand right you have seen my employees they are fucking stupid. Uhm yeah dude I work for you... *awkward sillence, continues chugging beers, changes topic*

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

! Rant

I'm getting married on Friday.
I proposed half a year ago.

What have we done since the proposal?

- Adopted a Cnaani dog with a lot of issues and recovered her from most of them.
- went every Saturday to skydive for the whole day (almost finish the license!)
- moved apartment
- Plan and execute the wedding
- build wedding RSVP and teaser sites
- work full time as developers (me full-stack and she's an automation expert)
- go abroad twice
- I have work on a new startup with a friend (in version two right now)
- I hade my driver license classes
- went to salsa courses twice a week
- built our salsa wedding dance
- I studied Clojure, ruby on rails, Angular 2 and a little bit of React.
And more...

So why does it feel I haven't done enough?

One of those things that put a smile on my face happened today.

I (like many devs) am fond of Linux. So I use Linux on everything.

I'm currently doing an internship abroad in Finland(Linus Torvald's country!) for my college.

So there is this Finnish student who uses Linux. And after a while he asked what I was using so I told him that I'm running linux(arch+i3 like all the cool kids).

So one day he was like; But can you game on Linux?
I was like, yeah sure, might not work as well as Windows but some games run native and some can be emulated through wine. He was like; Hmm maybe I'll try it out.

So he installed Linux mint on his laptop and came to work. I was rather proud (even though he installed the bastard child of Debian and Ubuntu).

So far I've helped him set up streaming games from his pc to Linux and port forwarding.

But then came the big boy. Since I always try to teach him some stuff since they don't teach him a lot at his school.

He asked me if I could help him set up a plex streaming server on Linux.

So we took an old computer and installed Ubuntu Server(Lot's of information for it).

Installed and configured plex server, qtbittorrent-knox and all kind of goodies.

I started showing him how to use ssh, how the rights system works, etc.

It broke my heart a little that he want to be able to teamviewer in it.(since it's running openSSH daemon)

So he installed Ubuntu's desktop ontop of it as well as teamviewer.

It ran slow as hell because the PC has an old crummy core2duo and ddr2 2gb of ram. It chokes when multitasking.

So seeing that as well as telling him everything that can be done with a GUI can be done in CLI.

I saw the lightbulb lighting up. He gets it now. He understand the power of Linux.

That just made me smile all the way home.

So today I realized that Im not happy.

When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.

I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.

After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.

However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.

At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..

Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).

Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.

Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

So, we’ve a small UK based dev team, we follow good practices and get good results. But ‘they’ want to deploy quicker (it was suggested we skip the test phases...) but don’t want to invest in more staff.
So their suggestion is to outsource development to Bangladesh and have us in-house devs work on discovery and innovation.
I’m uncomfortable with this as it feels they are thinking they can get quicker and cheaper dev done abroad (which I hate as it feels disrespectful to my fellow dev brothers n’ sisters).
Also disjointed as in my experience planning and dev’ing work best when you can talk face-to-face.
Thoughts?

I needed a new laptop to work/study and found a suitable one on Lenovo's website...
25th of july :
- "your order has been placed... blablabla.. it will take approximately from 1 to 2 weeks to prepare and 3-5 days shipping.."
- hum... Ok.. seems long to just put RAM and SSD inside my laptop but alright..

31st of july :
- "unfortunately your order has been delayed, the new shipping date is estimated for August, 14"
- Fuck ! Ill be patient then.. hopefully it'll be ready earlier than that..

10th of August :
- "unfortunately your order has been delayed, the new shipping date is estimated for september, 7"
- WHAT THE FU.. ?!? YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKER, HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO PUT 8 FUCKING GIGS OF RAM AND AN SSD PLEASE TELL ME ?!? IS IT A JOKE OR WHAT ?! I FLY ABROAD THE 17TH OF SEPTEMBER YOU BETTER SHIP MY LAPTOP IN TIME !!

I'm really mad now and thinking of cancelling the order.. I might have no time to test the laptop before flying.. FUCK !!

Cousin sis who was brought up abroad is back in the country, looking for further education opportunities.

Says she wants to study graphic design but from the short interaction i had, it seems she has no fucking idea about the basics of what goes into graphic design. Neither does her parents.

Haven't seen or heard any work or hobby from her that would make one think she has interest in graphic design.

Asked whether she tried doing some design and it seems she is not even aware of tools like Photoshop or illustrator.

It doesn't help that she barely talks at all and wants to get back to her phone. Compared to her, i feel like an extrovert lol.

People who barely interacts or expresses are cringey to talk to.

Trying to talk to her, I feel like looking at myself from 10 years ago.

The point is - learn to talk more. It can help you a lot in life.

I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.

The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).

Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).

So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).

Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.

So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.

Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.

The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.

First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"

What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!

So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."

Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!

A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:

E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him

That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"

So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".

Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.

Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"

So I'm at that age of arranged marriage process. It's kinda like dating but even more complicated with more if conditions on religion, caste, region, age and impressions of a third person who may be a mutual relative or acquaintance. And yeah, you have to engage or marry before any kind of intimacy.

Finding a girl of same religion, caste and region is hard enough, ( not a matter for me personally, but it's a factor for families to go along ). I was lucky enough to find this pretty nice girl that seems be the best match I have received in the matrimony site so far.

She's also a programmer which is awesome and together we could also explore the earth as a Digital Nomad if she's also into that.

Here's the deal though, my father is not very keen on next steps in making this partnership ( guys parent calling girls family to know things better ) because apparently she did higher education abroad and works abroad, and I'm not that qualified in terms of education. And on top of that, he worries I'll move abroad leaving everything back at home.

I suppose that's his insecurity showing up.

He doesn't realize working in IT is the most flexible job as proved in 2020 and it's only going to get better in the coming years. We could work from anywhere with the right remote company.

Anyhow, the girl's family found out my number and reached out to me directly. I'm pretty impressed honestly.

I had left little traces on the internet for potential families to find more info about me if they choose to look me up! This was in a way a little filter of my own. Thanks to Google Analytics and Seach Console for helping me to track them XD

I just hope this works out and my father won't mess up my chance for me to get to know this girl better and potentially be with the life partner I dreamed of.

If this won't work out, I'm just gonna live alone rest of my life. The criterias and conditions set by boomers for arranged marriage are very disgusting for my modern mindset.

Sometimes I have to work with physical hardware. There are over 300 machines in our lab, split among two subnets. But for some reason, I can never access my machines by hostnames.

Every other week, there's an IP conflict on this network, requiring me to log into the active directory server and delete old DNS entries. This usually happens because someone decided to deploy 64 VMs on a huge server, all at once, didn't boot them with a delay, let alone with with a warning to IT.

Then when my superior asks how my progress has been and I respond with "I can't even get the machines to ping each other by hostname, there's something wrong with the DNS:, I get the following response: "HOW COME NOBODY ELSE IS HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THIS. YOU'RE FULL OF SHIT", from someone who spends 90% of the year abroad, working remotely.

Hey peeps,
I got a question that is bothering me for a while now. I am from Germany and I quit my CS studies a few months ago in favor of a "Berufsausbildung". I don't know if other countries have a comparable equal to our Berufsausbildung, so I gonna give you a quick overview:

In the Berufsausbildung you stay 30% of your time in school where you have to learn the basics and theory parts of your chosen profession. 70% of your time you are in the company ("Ausbildungsbetrieb") that is training you to learn the practical parts your profession and gain work experience. At the end of the Berufsausbildung, you have to work on a project and present it in front of a committee and write some exams.

So the Berufsausbildung is more about learning by doing instead of learning all the little things in the field of your profession.

Now to my actual question. One of my biggest dreams is to work in Japan as a freelance for a few years or more. Working on projects for companies in my home country while traveling through Japan. I know that it is hard to be allowed into the country for a longer time and even working there without a good education. I always have the feeling that I am inferior to people who have a college degree and I am afraid that my "inferior education" might be a huge disadvantage in the future for me. I already gained 3 years of work experience as a dev and in February 2020 I will have finished my Berufsausbildung. What is your experience with working as a dev without any college degree? Are you treated differently than other people that got a degree? And has anyone experience with working abroad with or without a degree?

Thank you very much!

Every work experience so far.

The first one... Internship abroad, very messy codebase, almost no code review.

At the end I was so tired I started watching movies during worktime.

So finally I just got my first credit card!

Now on, I don't need to worry about carrying cash when traveling abroad, enjoy free lounge access, buy things in installments and what not.

It's almost impossible to get credit card here without a typical 9to5 job. The best thing is I didn't have to work for it at all. It just happened. So that's something.

So I've been hired as a senior software developer with all the tags included (mentoring, innovating, pushing forward changes) for a company that is trying to move away from waterfall development (yup, it's 2019 and this exists) to a more iterative workflow.
I was initially hired and sent out to do some "field work" abroad for 3 months and then worked "remotely" from the local office with our field partners.
During all this time it seemed that my ideas go through smoothly, there was a lot of chatter about how things are moving forward, how new projects, innovations and new methodologies are implemented.
And yet, after my "remote" work has finished and I have to do things locally more, all of the skeletons fell out. It's just talk, nothing seems to be changing at all and yet any attempts to talk with the brass is like hitting a brick wall.
Not only that, I've been handed a 12 year old project with no possibility to refactor, no technical documentation, very few comments and in a terrible style.
The atmosphere in the company is odd as hell. People are either not very initiative, nor they seem to really care about all of the "changes" that "should be happening".
It almost feels that I've arrived in a company that still lives in 2007 more or less.
Should I quit, or perhaps it's a little "too soon" (have spent 7 months in the place already)? What I don't want is to get in the same train again (work for a company for 8 - 12 months, feel burned out because of the divergence between actual things done and "plans" and then change the job).

I'm considering to build a powerful, small/semi-portable mini-ITX PC. Just small box you can easily travel with, kinda like a laptop but a lot cheaper and without a screen, keyboard and battery - I can't really work on laptops anyway (ergonomics!). Stuffed with something like a 4400G when Renoir (mainstream Zen2) comes out, so lots of processing power. Add 32GB+ RAM and one or two SSDs.

I'd say the reason is that I might work from abroad (remotely) next year, but honestly, it just gives me an excuse to break my piggy bank!

What do you think?

So my first computer... My dad got a Laptop somewhere around 96-97 for work as he had to travel a lot abroad. He also used to take work home and work there in the evening or on weekends. I kindof asked if I could play with it and he just opened defragmenting and I loved the animation. At least I think it had some animation. I know another computer I got later had it. However like the second or third time he left me alone with it, I decided to find something else and somehow managed to instead of defragment the hd, format it. Or atleast delete like a few folders on it. However that game was "lame", so I went out to play with a friend, as the computer wouldn't respond after some time. I've never seen him as angry as when I got home.
Long story short, me and my brother soon got our own computer, like a really " old" one the company where my aunt worked sold. It didn't had a cd rom drive, just a 3.5 and a bigger drive. My dad later took the big tape out and replaced it with a cd rom drive. It ran win95 I think. And we later upgraded it to 98

Overall, pretty good actually compared to the alternatives, which is why there's so much competition for dev jobs.

On the nastier end of things you have the outsourcing pools, companies which regularly try to outbid each other to get a contract from an external (usually foreign) company at the lowest price possible. These folks are underpaid and overworked with absolutely terrible work culture, but there are many, many worse things they could be doing in terms of effort vs monetary return (personal experience: equally experienced animator has more work and is paid less). And forget everything about focus on quality and personal development, these companies are here to make quick money by just somehow doing what the client wants, I'm guessing quite a few of you have experienced that :p

Startups are a mixed bag, like they are pretty much everywhere in the world. You have the income tax fronts which have zero work, the slave driver bossman ones, the dumpster fires; but also really good ones with secure funding, nice management, and cool work culture (and cool work, some of my friends work at robotics startups and they do some pretty heavy shit).

Government agencies are also a mixed bag, they're secure with low-ish pay but usually don't have much or very exciting work, and the stuff they turn out is usually sub-par because of bad management and no drive from higher-ups.

Big corporates are pretty cool, they pay very well, have meaningful(?) work, and good work culture, and they're better managed in general than the other categories. A lot of people aim for these because of the pay, stability, networking, and resume building. Some people also use them as stepping stones to apply for courses abroad.

Research work is pretty disappointing overall, the projects here usually lack some combination of funding, facilities, and ambition; but occasionally you come across people doing really cool stuff so eh.

There's a fair amount of competition for all of these categories, so students spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff like competitive programming which a lot of companies use for hiring because of the volume of candidates.

All this is from my experience and my friends', YMMV.

Do you guys take your main laptop with you on vacation / travel abroad?

I can't afford to lose my laptop. Every work is saved in it. Some important files have been backed up to cloud. But that's it.

Can't risk getting it damaged or stolen or taken in custody when abroad.

But, if something in my server fucks up when I'm abroad, i want to be able attend it and get it addressed.

I'm thinking of buying a low cost portable laptop to use incase an emergency situation happens.

How do you guys manage such situation?

I was just back home from a 5-month work trip abroad in another field and I had just found a new recruitment platform; applied to a company that had an ad in it and they contacted me like less than a week later. Arranged an interview, flew out, had the interview and received an offer like three days later. Almost four years later I'm still at that company.

#!/bin/rant

# Is good to be back

Life is funny, I spend years ranting about WordPress and Mac computers, while being a full stack developer, then I got the opportunity to study music abroad, two months into the semester I get offered a scholarship to work with a Mac managing WordPress sites.

Isn't life funny?

Need some advice here.

So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.

I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.

I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.

Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.

In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.

I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.

I fucking can't keep this to myself so I am writing this piece of shit...

People are now working from home as much as they can and some non-remote companies here are now considering allowing their employees to work from home.

"That's great", you would say.
No, it fucking isn't.

I am working from home full-time.
"Great, so you have nothing to be worried about!"
I wish.

My brother still has to go to school. They fucking allowed everyone who just arrived from holiday 10 days ago, mostly in Italy to stay. If you ask someone nicely, almost nobody will listen. And that's exactly what happened.

"Why won't your brother just stay at home?"
Well, because my mom is one of those "Fuck it" people, who will not do a single thing to fight something she is not dying from (and maybe even if she was). She is very strong believer and she says every time I want to talk to her about almost anything serious "What is to happen, will happen". And that's fucking it. With this approach the phrase "What is to happen, will happen" is going to turn into "What is to not happen, will find it's way to you anyway".

Fortunately, my country doesn't have many infected. Yet. But it won't last long. Sick people are already here and we only know they are here, because they are responsible. People who don't care, or weren't tested after coming from abroad, deserves to be burned alive.

I just hope, we won't end like Italy and people coming from foreign countries will take the 14-day home quarantine seriously now when our government is going to fine people who don't give a fuck.

I’m Latin American and unfortunately after 40 it is complicated to get a job in companies in the region, but it also extends to headhunters who work with firms abroad.

I just think I wanna work abroad so I have left my company with a steady position. I don't know that's right or wrong.

Hey guys so I am currently working in a recruitment firm. (Don't ask why.. it's just for money to fund my abroad studies).

My passion is android development.

I dont get time for development as i spend all my time on job and end up being tired.

My question is would it be awkward if i brought my laptop at work and coded during my lunch and break hours. I could totally do that.

Would it seem awkward to fellow colleagues if I brought my laptop and coded.

Can someone plzzz advise me about this😓😓

I’m 20 years old MERN (Mongodb, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) Stack Developer, Working in a start up as a full time employee. They’re paying me 20k (INR) (< $300)/month. I’m in 2nd year of my college for my Bachelor’s Degree in computer Science. My Job is work from home. I’m doing programming for 4 years now. I have 1 year full time experience and extra 6 months internship in the same company and also doing freelance for 1 year. I’ve worked on many technologies like AWS, Azure, GCP, React, Tailwindcss, Flutter, Node.js, Express.js, Docker, Vercel, Linux and keep learning things cause I love doing this. But I think my salary is too low, I work 6 days/ week. They promised me that they’ll increase my salary but I don’t think they will. I think there is a lot I can achieve but nothing I can see right now. I’m not comparing myself to anyone but I think I’m eligible to get good food and good Education cause I’m paying for everything (College, food, etc). Family is not supporting after I started earning. I’ve basic understanding of DSA, Networking, etc. Pls Guide me, Please like what to do.. should I leave my job, if I do then I’ve to serve 45 days of notice period.. They said they’ll raise some amount from this new year. So should I wait to get the offer letter then should I quit.. and even after I quit then where should I apply? Should I apply abroad or Bengaluru? Should I take IELTS Certificate or any other tech certifications? Please Help, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE🙏🙏🙏

Hey devRant community, I’d really like some suggestions/advice for something I’m going through.

I’ve always wanted to go abroad to work/travel and experience new things and I feel that I can do all of that by pursuing masters but I am not fully sure about the specific area in CS which I’d like to study more, I do have an interest in A.I but I’d like to explore other things as well. I like Software engineering and would love to do some internships and probably a job before applying for masters but college ends in 6 months and I’m still not sure about this. I also want to get better at Software Engineering interviews as I’m avg when it comes to data structures and algorithms. Any help here will be appreciated.

OK Guys I need your advice. I got an (I think it's about 8 years old) Aspire from Acer. Windows 10 is installed after upgrading from Windows 7, which was the worst decision because now it runs at speeds below good. I want to clean install a new OS. But which route to take?

Windows or Linux?

What distribution? I have my knowledge in Debian. Or could I go with RemixOS because it's most user-friendly and best for work abroad? But is there an IDE for Android based distributions?

You see what my dilemma is don't you? ^^

May some of you could help me

Specs: 4GB of DDR3, 500GB HDD, a shitty battery and an AMD Dual core with something about 2.5GHz

Hey guys! I was working as a programmer for 3 years now, but I don’t have any diplomas or anything to prove that I can code. However I soon want to relocate from my country, and I was thinking about this: Is it a problem that I don’t have a diploma, or just the acual work experience would be enough for me to get a job abroad?
How is it in your country?

I realised I can't grow much and work on my skills if I stay in my city anymore. Development hype is way too less here.
What are some of the ways I can get internship in a startup in Hyderabad/Bangalore/Mumbai/abroad ? I wanna help a team to develop their product ( Android/Node/ Firebase/Python ).
Thing is I couldn't complete any worthwhile projects to get a great internship.

Hey devRant community, I’d really like some suggestions/advice for something I’m going through.

I’ve always wanted to go abroad to work/travel and experience new things and I feel that I can do all of that by pursuing masters but I am not fully sure about the specific area in CS which I’d like to study more, I do have an interest in A.I but I’d like to explore other things as well. I like Software engineering and would love to do some internships and probably a job before applying for masters but college ends in 6 months and I’m still not sure about this. I also want to get better at Software Engineering interviews as I’m avg when it comes to data structures and algorithms. Any help here will be appreciated.