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The surreal experience of my first developer job

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Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#141

Post by SolubleSnake »

This rings true for me too (Also UK dev). I once worked for half a year at a company that was this bizarre. For example, we had several people come in - and leave - within a day. As soon as they saw how we were working they just left. I kind of found it funny only because the lead developer (now a very close friend) basically onboarded me with the company ethos after I'd been looking through my desk drawer and noticed a brown bag....

'What's in the bag mate?'

'I don't know...?'

'Have a look'

'....er, it seems to be....some receipts....a cafetiere.......and a what looks like a really really old banana'

'Welcome to [name of that company]!'

If he hadn't have been able to make a joke of it too I'd also have walked.

Our managing director was an utter nutjob...

Highlights include:

He once called us from a major UK motorway and asked us where he was meant to be driving (we'd not seen him in days, and said we assumed he must be on a sales visit).

He would almost weekly lose the keycard to our building...which was required to get to the office...to the point where we suspected he'd 'developed a taste for them' and was secretly snacking on these keycards.

He told us once that 'NASA can put people on the moon! We can do this!' After us telling him that what he wanted to do was completely impossible. Like literally not possible. He was getting hassled by a finance company who we'd built an app for, and ironically they were saying that 'the percentages don't all add up to 100% exactly'.

'They're unlikely to'

'We can make them!'

'We can't...'

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#142

Post by rambambram »

Aeolun wrote: post #55

Contrary to most of the posts I read here, my first developer job was actually amazing. I just learned a bit of webdevelopment during my studies and liked it, then managed to get a part-time job while still at university. The company was started a few years before by 3 friends that studied physics and astronomy, but pivoted to software development for reasons I’m not sure about any more. Literally every employee ther…

Thanks for the tip. I see they are opening an office in Nijmegen as well, nice.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#143

Post by evilduck »

trhoad wrote: post #3

This is hilarious, and sadly not that unusual. You really do meet some utter lunatics working in these sorts of agencies/software houses - it seems worse in the UK too.

The US seems pretty rife with examples too. Everyone wants to be the next tech billionaire here. From my first job as a software dev from like 13 years ago, I believe the CEO that was running that shop is still sitting in prison to this day.

TBF, he was nothing but awesome to me and the rest of his employees but his business ethics left a lot to be desired in terms of what's legally allowed to secure a contract and to make matters worse he implicated his wife in the business who also ended up in legal trouble, which put them in a real bind. I think he ended up taking a much worse plea deal to keep his wife out of prison to care for his daughter.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#144

Post by clipradiowallet »

gjvc wrote: post #24
BigJono wrote: post #6

This is eerily similar to a job I had. I also worked for a young asshole CEO called Andrew, with multiple rubbish businesses, pretending to have more money than he had, having no idea what he was doing, and faced jail time a few years after I left. If you replace "property market" with "education sector" and "UK" with "Australia" we could have almost written the exact same article. I wonder how many of these companie…

I wish I had read this several years ago. This is the kind of thing which everyone instinctively knows but somehow forgets with age, or ignores due to circumstances (like needing a job having just been made redundant). I swear that CEOs like the one mentioned here specifically prefer hiring those who are in need like this, with the predictable awful behaviours. Some people will get lucky, but I expect that they are t…

> I swear that CEOs like the one mentioned here specifically prefer hiring those who are in need like this

This is absolutely a thing - it's the same mentality a pimp uses to identify and groom sex workers or other exploitative labor. The less stable/independent you are, the more control they can exercise over you etc

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#145

Post by mmarq »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #106
nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK IT salaries are really low and it's easy to set up a company. If you make economy business-friendly it's probably same as Android app store without a fee.

>UK IT salaries are really low Maybe compared to the crazy US salaries you see here, but compared to continental Europe, CoL adjusted UK salaries are difficult to beat and also you have a lot more interesting opportunities there vs here where it's mostly small web-shops or big name consultancy sweatshops. Wanna see low (CoL adjusted) tech salaries? Try Spain/Italy/Austria/France where they shaft you with high taxes a…

In the past few years IT salaries in continental Europe have increased significantly and, adjusted for the cost of life, German salaries are significantly higher. French and Spanish are almost on par.

If you make less than 40K£ in London, you are likely to experience a form of poverty that is unseen in the continent (pests in your flat, revenge evictions, very very bad healthcare, etc…). Outside of London, salaries are ridiculously low.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#146

Post by mattbee »

mrweasel wrote: post #121
karmicthreat wrote: post #99

My first paid developer job was writing backend code for what I would later learn was the Canadian mafia. I was doing some backend and embedded work to build super shitty gambling kiosks for them. They already had some person "managing" project and the Indian contract house that was building flash games for the kiosk. He was useless, so I was stuck figuring everything out. Including getting things running on a then o…

There’s a Canadian mafia?

My mind went to the A.F.R. from Infinite Jest, surely the most sinister Canadians ever imagined.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#148

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

mmarq wrote: post #145
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>UK IT salaries are really low Maybe compared to the crazy US salaries you see here, but compared to continental Europe, CoL adjusted UK salaries are difficult to beat and also you have a lot more interesting opportunities there vs here where it's mostly small web-shops or big name consultancy sweatshops. Wanna see low (CoL adjusted) tech salaries? Try Spain/Italy/Austria/France where they shaft you with high taxes a…

In the past few years IT salaries in continental Europe have increased significantly and, adjusted for the cost of life, German salaries are significantly higher. French and Spanish are almost on par. If you make less than 40K£ in London, you are likely to experience a form of poverty that is unseen in the continent (pests in your flat, revenge evictions, very very bad healthcare, etc…). Outside of London, salaries a…

If by Europe you mean only the super expensive cities like Paris, Amsterdam or Munich, then yeah salaries maybe have increased, but to what good when property price increases have far outpaces whatever salary increases the industry may have seen.

And most who stayed at one job haven't gotten any significant salary increases unless they job hopped often which brings it's own problems later in ones career.

Edit: Had a quick look at jobs in Munich and curious where those high salaries are as 80k for senior positions on 40+h/week seem like a joke to me considering how expensive it is to live there and how high taxes are.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#149

Post by svachalek »

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 grew up in a family without a lot of money, in a community where there weren't people with a lot of money (or they hid it well) so I was totally unprepared for this as an adult but it turns out -- there are a surprising number of young adults that are just handed a ridiculous stack of money and just need to figure out something productive to do with it. There are some famous examples of it working out well but I'm sure the average is more like these stories.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#150

Post by handrous »

jjeaff wrote: post #51

This reminds me of an early job I had. Except my boss was closer to retirement age and had basically earned a great deal of money as an industrial sales rep. His whole business was basically providing sales staff for big industrial manufacturers. I actually went in to pitch him to become an investor in my small startup that was in the education sector. He was immediately interested but wanted me to also help him with…

> I would only catch bits and pieces of conversations here and there but I pieced together that the muscle relaxers that he had recently been prescribed for his back pain seemed to trigger a sort of manic state that was fueling all this craziness.

I'd read the whole rest of the post thinking "yep, cocaine is a hell of a drug", but yeah, there we go.

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