The surreal experience of my first developer job

Post by exikyut » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #149

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…

Post by exikyut » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 9:19 AM UTC

ghosty141 wrote: post #231

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.

Post by hhmc » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 9:30 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #166

hhmc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may also have been payment in lieu of notice or holiday.

Given the context that seems unlikely - and it's genuinely hard to rack up a three month severance liability at most companies these days unless you're C-level. Most employers will either evaporate or pay out unused annual vacation so you're looking at a year's accrual at most (we can be over generous and say they may have had five weeks owed) - plus any in lieu time which usually caps out at three weeks.

Post by cutemonster » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 10:38 AM UTC

donatj wrote: post #67

gjvc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Avoid startups where the CEO does / has done nothing but sales. I worked for a small company where this was the case. The owner had been a sales person for a large online industrial web registry and decided he could be a middleman selling the companies websites that integrated with said registry. The job was fine, my paycheck bounced a couple times, but that’s the worst of it until after. In my exit interview I had…

Post by benn_88 » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 10:51 AM UTC

benmarks wrote: post #110

"I grew fed up of being stuck in this e-commerce framework – having to work with its hyper-normalised MySQL database (the EAV model)" 2011? Had to be Magento. Not a great fit with what they were trying to accomplish. Not that they seemed to have a clear understanding of how to accomplish what they wanted, which was to throw spaghetti at a wall and hope something made them rich.