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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

#61

Post by csours »

brycewray wrote: post #36
dakial1 wrote: post #29

I've noticed that many entrepreneurs have this immense drive and very little ethical/moral sense, and this helps them get by the most dire situations, where common people would simply give up, because they simply go on with a "fake it until you make it" mindset. Entering very dark grey areas and leaving a lot of bodies behind (figuratively speaking). There are the stupid ones of course that don't get far, but the sma…

“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…

Shameless plug for a friends' podcast: https://www.stitcher.com/show/lie-cheat-steal

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#62

Post by Ansil849 »

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…

> The company was run by a self-made millionaire who was notorious for scamming people.

You knew this before going to work for him, and still went to work for him? What does that make you?

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#64

Post by nicoburns »

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…

Same here. I lucked out by getting my first job in a very successful app development company that followed best practices, had an excellent UX design team (before "UX" became meaningless), and actually made some genuinely innovative apps. And my immediate boss was excellent. The pay wasn't great, but I had no experience and it pretty much set me up for the rest of my career.

However, my second job (I did a degree in between which is why I didn't just stay at the first one) was not a dissimilar experience to this article. Not quite as bad, but they clearly didn't really know what they were doing.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#65

Post by ubercow13 »

rwmj wrote: post #13

There are lots of these half-arsed tiny tech companies in the UK (I've worked for a few). I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK? It could be that we don't have a culture of VCs who would fund a company to the required scale and provide adult supervision. I remember when I ran a company, raising money or even getting a bank loan was impossible. (We just ran it on a shoestring…

If it’s hard for the capable people with the good ideas to get funded, then most new companies will be started by the people with money, not the good ideas.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#66

Post by agent327 »

benn_88 wrote: post #11
siva7 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least you know on your first day that you should start looking for another job ;)

If it's your first experience in work, you're naiave to what's not acceptable... If I were to start a new job now, I'd know the warning signs :)

The reason people over 40 aren't employable is not because of any skill, knowledge, or speed deficit, but because they don't put up with BS and abuse anymore.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#67

Post by donatj »

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…

> 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 agreed to do some side work for them until they restaffed, and completed a decent number of sites in a short timeframe.

Then I got sick and ended up having emergency surgery - loaded with prescription drugs and largely out it, I passed a project back to them which I had put maybe 50 hours into and completed short of populating the final verbiage/copy specifying as much.

I offered to take half of the agreement since I wouldn’t be completing it. I got a polite “we’ll talk about it when you’re feeling better” from my former PM, wonderful person.

It was handed to one of their most junior developers, and according to people I knew at the company he told the owner I had done almost nothing on the project, the pages were blank. They literally just needed copy I hadn’t received yet! The entire backend was done!

When I got better and tried to get everything straightened out, they literally ghosted me. Ignored my calls and emails. I’d put a load of time into the project and wanted something for my efforts. I'd worked there for over five years, it felt so disrespectful at the very least.

I started copying more and more people at the company in my emails. In the end however my efforts were fruitless.

About a month after this ordeal, a developer I had managed took a job with my new employer. I received a letter threatening to sue me for stealing their employees. I had nothing to do with it. Our corporate lawyer analyzed our contracts and said they didn’t have a leg to stand on. He sent them an official response and sure enough nothing came of it.

They went into bankruptcy restructuring within the year, they’re still in business but I suspect I lost my right to try to collect with that.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#68

Post by whywhywhywhy »

rwmj wrote: post #13

There are lots of these half-arsed tiny tech companies in the UK (I've worked for a few). I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK? It could be that we don't have a culture of VCs who would fund a company to the required scale and provide adult supervision. I remember when I ran a company, raising money or even getting a bank loan was impossible. (We just ran it on a shoestring…

Definitely worked at similar places in the UK straight after graduating. Thankfully not for long and thankfully nowhere near as bad as this.

Same sort of vibe though, same sort of deal though where the founder had some successful company in something else then we were the smaller side business doing web design and 3D animation at the time but clearly knew nothing about how to make that work and same sort of deal as this where the other businesses subject would start to leak in presumably because that's what the founder understands.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#70

Post by Karsteski »

Ansil849 wrote: post #62
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…

> The company was run by a self-made millionaire who was notorious for scamming people. You knew this before going to work for him, and still went to work for him? What does that make you?

Someone who needed a job?
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