81–90 of 278 posts
Surreal can't even begin to describe my first dev job. I'd never tell this story IRL, but this is an anonymous account so why not. I was broke, living in a roach infested hostel in Waikiki after buying a one way ticket to Honolulu to surf, bum around, and not a whole lot more. Things had worked out great so far... until the money ran out. I was about a week from being homeless and living on the beach. Fortunately my…
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 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…
Can confirm. I mentor college grads. They’re always coming to us with sketchy job postings they found for random crypto projects. It’s always a small group of people led by a gregarious CEO who think they “just need a few engineers” to launch a crypto scheme that will make them rich.
I have an anecdote which I entitled "The Man Without Pants". It takes around 20 minutes to deliver but the gist is that I spent a month working for a man who had a peculiar dress code - and that wasn't even the weirdest thing about that place.
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?
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…
As a counter example - I was at a startup where all the CEO did was sales. Everything worked really great. I think the key here is is the culture pathological or not - not the specific role of the CEO. CEO can have good enough understanding of tech to do their job well even thought they are not elbows deep in it themselves.
If "sales" means "I spent 3 years talking to every customer in a particular industry, became keenly aware of a vacant niche, and now am looking to do something about it" I reckon it would be a very good thing.
If "sales" means "I saw that the crypto market is booming and want to get in on the easy money," it's not going to go well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there is a co-founder at all that’s much better than just a single person.
That's what I thought. I thought that the character of one would balance the other out in this case. (Not that there is any guarantee, of course.) I was wrong. Bad leadership drives out good.
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…
Their idea was to have 1 or 2 senior developers with a few part-time university students. They'd negotiate contracts with clients for websites or apps. Their rationale was to give students more experience than a summer internship while having some quality control in place with a few experienced developers and engineers. The pay was great too.
I recommended a classmate a year behind me as my replacement when I left.