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The surreal experience of my first developer job

bennuttall.com

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Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#11

Post by benn_88 »

siva7 wrote: post #9
zz865 wrote: post #8

> The short version is that I was told we had to have it finished before anyone could go home. We were there until 9pm. That was my first day as a full-time employee. I'd heard of modern companies trying to get new employees to release new code to production on their first day but this is a new one. Seems like a challenge.

at least you know on your first day that you should start looking for another job ;)

If it's your first experience in work, you're naiave to what's not acceptable...

If I were to start a new job now, I'd know the warning signs :)

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#12

Post by Sharlin »

lordnacho wrote: post #10

I think once you look outside of established brands, there's a lot of this type of thing that happens. Small business led by some random person with no particular competence, who's somehow found himself as the boss. The money comes from some unclear source, though that doesn't necessarily mean illegal, it's just hard to explain why someone thought to invest in this particular venture. I did something like this over a…

I guess it's the same with every new fad. "We'll do something with the Web!" "We'll do something with mobile!" "We'll do something with blockchain!" "We'll do something with AI!" and so on.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#13

Post by rwmj »

There are lots of these half-arsed tiny tech companies in the UK (I've worked for a few). I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK? It could be that we don't have a culture of VCs who would fund a company to the required scale and provide adult supervision. I remember when I ran a company, raising money or even getting a bank loan was impossible. (We just ran it on a shoestring and as a result were never able to scale.)

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#15

Post by k__ »

ah, yes.

The joys of working for small businesses.

I worked for someone who moved from reselling operating systems to selling childrens toys.

I worked for someone who built an on-premise competitor to google analytics and despite having many big customers never made a single dime.

I worked for someome who build a crappy web app and sold liceses for >20k a month to twenty clients and made a good living.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#19

Post by ionwake »

rwmj wrote: post #13

There are lots of these half-arsed tiny tech companies in the UK (I've worked for a few). I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK? It could be that we don't have a culture of VCs who would fund a company to the required scale and provide adult supervision. I remember when I ran a company, raising money or even getting a bank loan was impossible. (We just ran it on a shoestring…

Id love someone from outside of the UK to comment on this
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