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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

#211

Post by JulesRosser »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #136

Reading these comments makes me realise how lucky I was in my first job. Brilliant people and amazing tech.

Same here, we must have been lucky. My early experience in agencies were fantastic.

It was only when I began contracting that I started to encounter scrappy companies, which made it a lot easier to deal with the dysfunction. We often had the perm benefits, a decent day rate, could clock out on the hour, and didn't have to take part in internal politics. Blissful in comparison to the perm roles.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#213

Post by mmarq »

martinald wrote: post #202
mmarq wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of service of the NHS is extremely low compared to its European counterparts. It’s not my problem, because I have a very comprehensive healthcare insurance from my employer, which costs more than 300£ per month per person. Just to give a practical example, you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist (I know because it’s my experience), and if you go to private doctors,…

With the NHS you need to "play" the system a bit unfortunately. The key is finding a great GP and asking for him/her by name when getting an appointment. There are a lot of terrible GPs out there and if you just listen to them you may get screwed. If you have a good GP (I would recommend looking up the practice and figuring the head GP there and then asking for him/her by name) the healthcare system is pretty good. Y…

> With the NHS you need to "play" the system a bit unfortunately. The key is finding a great GP and asking for him/her by name when getting an appointment. There are a lot of terrible GPs out there and if you just listen to them you may get screwed. If you have a good GP (I would recommend looking up the practice and figuring the head GP there and then asking for him/her by name) the healthcare system is pretty good. Yes specialist referrals can take a while, but again if you have a good relationship with your GP they will be able to expedite it for you.

Which means that the quality of service is worse than other countries, where you don't have to "play" the system or become friend with a GP to get referrals. Again, not my problem, I can use private healthcare, but this is not civilized.

> It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you.

As I said, it's not the same as the German or the Italian system, it is evidently inferior. I don't feel I need to spend thousands of pounds in appointments (I don't, my insurance pays), I feel I need to get a western European healthcare service (which, again, I get through my insurance), and I'm forced to go private because the NHS is not good enough. The point is that a German (or a French or an Italian) gets that for free and a Briton has to pay thousands of pounds for the same level of service.

> FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.

I wrote "you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist", not that you don't get scans. By the way, you do get 2 scans from the NHS, not loads. You get to see lots of midwives, which are not doctors, and lot of doulas, whatever they are, but unless somebody who is not a doctor thinks you need to see a gynaecologist, you don't get to see one, which is not civilized.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#214

Post by voidfunc »

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…

Is the Canadian mob polite at least?

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#215

Post by voidfunc »

karmicthreat wrote: post #204
hallway_monitor wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your gut is probably telling you something. There are many times I have regretted not listening to my gut, something feeling "off". OP's story had obvious red flags but in all situations, paying attention to how your body (or "gut") feels is always a good idea.

I was kind of dumb and desperate at the time, I got better. These days I would just quote an amazingly unreasonable amount of money. If they said ok, well I could buy a whole lot of therapy and a house in Austin afterward.

Gotta make sure you tell them you want it upfront too before you do any work.

Tho still a good idea to stay away from potentially organized crime, they have a tendency to hang around and show up again when you think you’re all done.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#216

Post by QuantumG »

mrlonglong wrote: post #49
brycewray wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Entrepreneurs are not at all like ordinary businessmen. An entrepreneur who is not in trouble closes no avenues, keeps a lot of balls in the air, and will never tell you the whole truth when a half-truth will do. An entrepreneur who is in trouble will lie, cheat, and steal. He will smuggle cocaine or ship bricks. We should never measure an entrepreneur by the standards of a rock-solid businessman.” — attributed to K…

Netflix is running a show about deLorean and the chap who ran the whole thing. Ended up in jail for drugs smuggling.

Yeah, you should probably watch the rest of that documentary.

He successfully defended himself as the people trying to sell him the drugs were the police - and never had any drugs.

Entrapping a desperate man trying to save his company - which honestly could have been the biggest car company in the world if they'd manage to hold on a few more years (and BTTF still happened) - is really not that hard.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#217

Post by claudiawerner »

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…

CoL adjusted UK salaries for anyone from junior to mid-level are terrible, and saving even 1/3 of your income on that kind of salary is hard. Not to mention, the lower CoL areas (and correspondingly low salaries) generally just aren't nice places to be. The idea that you can pay someone 24k/year to write C and Python filling a "junior" role that requires two years of expirence is crazy.

Even if you adjust for healthcare, even if you adjust for cost of living, UK tech salaries are simply bad. I don't know why, and my only hypothesis is that there just isn't much respect for tech workers in the UK in general, or companies don't make much money.

I'm not asking for a Bay Area 150k, I'm asking for 35k outside London for a junior role and 45k for a mid role. It's unlikely I'd get it. The number of people who brush this huge discrepancy off with "healthcare costs" (which, in the US, is a matter of company-paid insurance), or "safety" (as if that's something which should cost half my salary in the developed world) or "social safety net" (something I'm happy to pay for, but that comes out of tax which I already pay, not the take-home) is ridicuous.

There's no way around the fact that UK tech salaries are low, even accounting for the high tax in Western Europe, and I'm tired of being told that they are in any way equivalent to US (non-Bay) adjusted for CoL and healthcare. I'm paid poorly, and if I could access the US employment market, I'd be paid at least 1.5x before converted to USD no matter where I am.

The fact that things may be worse in France or Italy doesn't mean anything to me. In fact, it just makes me surprised that the UK has done well in comparison.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#218

Post by elzbardico »

mmarq wrote: post #168
alibarber wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 'earned' about 24K (equivalent before tax - as a stipend) as a doctoral student in London. Yes, once we had a mouse in the flatshare, but this is ridiculously exaggerating things.

> Yes, once we had a mouse in the flatshare While everybody I know who rented in London had to deal with mice or bed-bugs (and I don’t fully understand what these are, because before coming to London I never heard of them), at least those on low income, I don’t know of any other place where this is even remotely true.

Jesus! I haven’t seen stuff like that even in Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, bogota or Mexico City. Truly medieval stuff!

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#219

Post by [deleted] »

sen wrote: post #38
gkwelding wrote: post #32

This literally could have been written by any developer in the UK. I think most of us start out like this! I think the best one was a company I worked for in Leeds, it was building a secure learning platform for schools which ultimately fell flat on it's arse. The company was run by a self-made millionaire who was notorious for scamming people. He'd randomly lay off huge numbers of the sales team, and the first anyon…

My first tech job was similar. ~15 person “IT company”. When I joined I was hired as a webmaster/developer to manage their own corporate website, and their main income was doing Citrix installations and outfitting SMEs with computers and networking hardware. The CEO and 2 others were old high school mates, funding seemed unlimited, we had “company cars” we could take anytime we wanted for errands or lunch or whatever…

[deleted]

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#220

Post by RobRivera »

themolecularman wrote: post #207
selestify wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You continued to work for 3 months without getting paid?

To be honest I don't pay attention to my paychecks. I work in Silicon Valley and have things direct deposited into my bank account, which I never check. Theoretically, my current (and past) employers could have left out a dozen paychecks and I may not have noticed. I don't think it's that unusual. If he doesn't have any money in his bank account it may be more noticeable.

what is the relevance of working in Silicon Valley?
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