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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

#251

Post by prepend »

RobRivera wrote: post #220
themolecularman wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think GP thinks it is more polite than saying “I’m so rich, I don’t even know if I get paid.” But I don’t think so and seems pretty cringy.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#252

Post by gjvc »

BigJono wrote: post #238
darkr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

+100

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#253

Post by intrasight »

exikyut wrote: post #244
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".

And this was your first developer job...? I am very curious how you wound up there. The other comments are talking about minimum safe paranoia levels from the perspective of the applicants, but there's also the facility to consider: it would be reasonable/expected/etc to require everyone signing off on significant work to have maybe 10-15 years experience or so. I take it this wasn't happening?

Yup - right out of engineering college. Westinghouse. They hired me because I said that I knew my way around a TCP/IP stack. They had no way of verifying that -but I did in fact have such skill, having written a networked multiplayer game (standard course project for CMU's "Operating Systems" course).

As for "experience", these were different times (1989) where a) people were rational about such things, b)I was more experienced than any of the mid-career engineers on some critical tech, c) Westinghouse was the place one got nuclear experience. Finally, I'll say that it was the best job experience of my career. I worked with an amazing team of dedicated engineers. And unlike today, they were all engineers.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#254

Post by intrasight »

texasbigdata wrote: post #222
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".

Did you fix it????

First - he was being hyperbolic. But I did look around for the nearest exit;)

There was nothing wrong with our software. It was just that they had never had such a fine-granular view into the status of the plant before.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#255

Post by intrasight »

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.

"security" was provided by those guys with machine guns at the entrance. This was effectively before the internet, so there was no cybersecurity threat.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#256

Post by benelvin »

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…

My perspective as a hiring manager at a UK based SAAS company is this:

I will and do pay as much as I can afford to secure developers who are actually good at their job. I can't really comment on why they're so hard to find, but my experience is that they really are.

Maybe it's the side effect of there being very few of the kind of developers who could command those SV level salaries in the UK, or maybe they just aren't in the market for my kind of opportunities. It's a hunch that would require more data because I've not hired developers in the US so I don't actually know if there's a quality difference.

Anyway, I'm hiring at the moment.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benelvin/

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#257

Post by ljm »

prepend wrote: post #251
RobRivera wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the relevance of working in Silicon Valley?

I think GP thinks it is more polite than saying “I’m so rich, I don’t even know if I get paid.” But I don’t think so and seems pretty cringy.

There was a post written a while ago by someone saying what it was like to be poor when they got their first job in SV. One of the exact points was that they had colleagues who didn't really mind if they missed a couple of months of salary... they wouldn't notice as they had no need to look. Just like GP. It was totally incomprehensible for her, as someone who had to live paycheck to paycheck.

My only real response to this kind of humblebrag is... good for you!?

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#258

Post by Joker_vD »

gkwelding wrote: post #139
selestify wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You continued to work for 3 months without getting paid?

We'd been working there for about 2 years at that point, had always got paid, had been the same team since day 0 so we had no reason to doubt the "I'm just waiting for the next investment to clear in the company account then I'll pay you everything you're owed" message. Plus the arrogance and naivety of "it's a tech company, he needs us to do anything so he's got to pay us eventually".

Just can't help myself to mention the eerie similarity with being a factory worker in Russia in the early 90-ies: people would too work for months without getting paid, and for pretty much the same reasons. Plus, when you see with your own eyes that the product is still being made and even shipped, surely at some point the money will clear?

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#259

Post by Andy_G11 »

The flip side of the egomaniacal types in the story and comments is that the world is equally full of skilled people with great ideas and coding skills who write really useful software but have no clue of how to get it off the ground and growing it into a valuable business.

How do some salespeople learn the art of dressing up absolute crap as 'the next big thing' and wielding substantial power with zero capability, whilst many brainiacs are effectively ego-midgets who even if they invented time travel would struggle to find a ready buyer?

I think Jordan Peterson is right for many people when he says you need to act beyond your self-imposed mental limits because otherwise you sell yourself short.

There seems to be a level of self-criticism which causes certain types of people (say type Theta) to work on developing real skills but hurts their sales ability and self belief. People who lack that (say type Zeta) are capable of selling sand in the Sahara but may have very little other technical / professional skills - and this is in no way a criticism of sales ability, which is worth gold.

If you're a Theta, perhaps you need to be more Zeta, and vice versa.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#260

Post by gkwelding »

Joker_vD wrote: post #258
gkwelding wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd been working there for about 2 years at that point, had always got paid, had been the same team since day 0 so we had no reason to doubt the "I'm just waiting for the next investment to clear in the company account then I'll pay you everything you're owed" message. Plus the arrogance and naivety of "it's a tech company, he needs us to do anything so he's got to pay us eventually".

Just can't help myself to mention the eerie similarity with being a factory worker in Russia in the early 90-ies: people would too work for months without getting paid, and for pretty much the same reasons. Plus, when you see with your own eyes that the product is still being made and even shipped , surely at some point the money will clear?

It's almost like a workplace Stockholm Syndrome!
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