The surreal experience of my first developer job • Hacker News Board

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#231

Post by ghosty141 » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 6:03 AM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #197

Mine was pretty surreal also. I wrote software for the control room of nuclear power plants. Went with the crew that installed the hardware and software in the first plant. Turned it on, and the first words out of the plant managers mouth was "that can't be right".

There is a talk by german software engineer (fefe) who mentioned this scenario (kind of).

It goes something like this: I never wanted to write software for nuclear power plants or the likes where many lives depended the correctness of my work. Then a few years later I met a guy who was quite lax when it came to software security etc. When we talked he mentionend he worked writing code for nuclear powerplants.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#232

Post by comprev » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 6:27 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #159

jlg23 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS) I'm not sure what's the fetish with the SAS, but I apparently know more people who where in the or with strong ties to the SAS than regular British folks... OTOH, after knowing some actual members of various special forces for 2 decades: If they saw action, they don't brag. They are usually shy to admit anything even if it is not classified. Or the other way around: T…

> > we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS) That's when you ask "What colour is the boat house at Hereford?"

Great film!

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#233

Post by JetAlone » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 7:08 AM UTC

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…

Wow, that sounds very, very strange... Kind of puts things into perspective for me. Thanks for sharing.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#234

Post by suction » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #225

suction wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Japan, the chance of working for a Yakuza front company are extremely high, unless it's really a multi-billion big corporation, organised crime is involved everywhere.

This one was a US company. Since I knew everyone involved, I’m fairly certain we weren’t a front for the Yakuza. It was fun though, had lots of freedom and could do anything I thought necessary.

Ah, I see. Was it truly a subsidy of an US company, or one of those "name and brand" licensing things they do in Japan and China?

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#235

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 7:49 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #159

jlg23 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS) I'm not sure what's the fetish with the SAS, but I apparently know more people who where in the or with strong ties to the SAS than regular British folks... OTOH, after knowing some actual members of various special forces for 2 decades: If they saw action, they don't brag. They are usually shy to admit anything even if it is not classified. Or the other way around: T…

> > we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS) That's when you ask "What colour is the boat house at Hereford?"

[deleted]

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#236

Post by jjeaff » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 7:56 AM UTC

handrous wrote: post #150

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.

Ya, the ongoing joke was that it was like he was on cocaine, but we all knew that wasn't the case. It was basically the rich guy equivalent of "meth lady shopping": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo6KMeKHSx0

But later having witnessed a few manic episodes from people with bi-polar disorder, it was definitely like that, but without the depressive moments. And he would occasionally have moments of clarity where he would make a bunch of rational decisions. So it was hard to spot that something was up.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#237

Post by bloqs » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 7:57 AM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #33

"Never work for a small business unless you own it". Citation: me, 35 years ago after my first small business employee experience.

"The common idea that unless you are building your own dream, you are building someone else's ignores the fact you can do both." - me now

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#238

Post by BigJono » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 7:59 AM UTC

darkr wrote: post #169

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…

> Look for some proof that they've built, designed or sold something substantial, before you agree to do all the work for them I disagree. 4 months working for a semi-criminal part mad-man is an amazing opportunity to learn about life and humanity. Every time I meet someone who went from straight A’s at school, to university/college and then straight into a graduate scheme at some multinational, then onwards and upwa…

That's like saying an abusive relationship is a great way to learn about life and humanity.

You can get a ton of valuable experience working for a startup without a CEO that's an absolute knob. You don't have to jump straight from worst company ever to boring enterprise grad position where you don't learn anything.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#239

Post by mmarq » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 8:24 AM UTC

elzbardico wrote: post #218

mmarq wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Unfortunately rent regulations in the UK are designed to protect landlords from tenants, contracts are renewed yearly and you are always at risk of eviction. So maintenance is almost non-existent and if you protest, you will likely end up evicted. After god knows how many years or decades of this state of affairs, the housing stock in London is of a ridiculously low quality, and a local would consider normal to have a mouse in a flat and to have to deal with it (rather than the landlord paying for pest control).

To get what in the continent would be a normal flat, you need to aim at what the locals may call “luxury apartments”. And still, if it wasn’t built after 2010, you’d still have to deal with rotten sash windows, no escalator and other crazy stuff I’ve never seen before.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#240

Post by tummybug » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 8:44 AM UTC

claudiawerner wrote: post #217

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…

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 healthc…

Funny in Ireland I find tech salaries quite generous with 80k+ easily achievable for someone with 5+ years experience and 6 figures being the norm for a senior worth his salt.