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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

#91

Post by devtosales »

nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #41
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…

UK IT salaries are really low and it's easy to set up a company. If you make economy business-friendly it's probably same as Android app store without a fee.

Low compared to the US - that's true of most places. Low on a global scale? Absolutely not.

You're making it sound like we're living on minimum wage.

The average Java developer in London is within the top 5% of the UK in terms of salary.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#92

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

Anecdotally, after participating in some mentoring programs I believe most junior developer jobs in 2021 are actually quite good. At least among the mentoring cohorts I’ve mentored.

I think developer salaries have risen a lot since many of these negative anecdotes took place. The higher salary expectation for local developers has pushed a lot of the sketchy small shops to look for outsourcing opportunities for their tech work rather than trying to hire in house.

I’ve started noticing the inverse of this situation: Some of the juniors I’ve mentored end up working at ultra-cushy jobs at overfunded and undermanaged startups where they’re paid a lot to do very little. After those experiences, it’s hard for them to go back to a regular job where they’re paid normal comp to do normal amounts of work. Once they’ve had a taste of working 2 hours per day on projects that will never actually get shipped , it’s hard to accept the types of workloads, expectations, and accountability that come from a normal job at a well-managed company.

On the other hand, people who start in bad jobs tend to thrive when they’re hired into a normal, well-run company and realize just how much better it is.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#93

Post by duxup »

As far as a few months experience goes, that really sounds pretty amusing, colorful, and not all that terrible.

You wouldn't want to continue there, but some good life lessons learned about those types of people.

Got paid, cost a few months, have a good story to tell. Not bad.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#95

Post by dboreham »

codegeek wrote: post #71
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.

cute citation but it is a sweeping generalization. There are plenty of small businesses that take care of their employees. Yes they have challenges but so does large businesses and "unicorns". There is no perfect business to work for. You just need to avoid shitty ones and especially shitty bosses/managers.

I agree, I know of one. But I own it.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#96

Post by gorbachev »

SebastianFrelle wrote: post #25

Out of curiosity: is posting internal company communications (referring to the e-mail here) on a public site like this legal? I'm not saying that it isn't; I genuinely don't know.

It's not illegal by itself, but will get you fired.

There are exceptions, of course, e.g. revealing trade secrets or insider information on a publicly traded company.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#97

Post by Koshkin »

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…

I know of a case when the salesman-CEO sold a freaking demo. (Helped the company to stay afloat, but the devs had to work hard to turn it into something of a product as fast as they could.)

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#98

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Says how luck weighs in one's life and how dealing with chaos, randomness and risks is important.

My first gig felt horrible, I left for freelance, drowned and never recovered.

Also the importance of networking and support.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#99

Post by karmicthreat »

My first paid developer job was writing backend code for what I would later learn was the Canadian mafia. I was doing some backend and embedded work to build super shitty gambling kiosks for them. They already had some person "managing" project and the Indian contract house that was building flash games for the kiosk. He was useless, so I was stuck figuring everything out. Including getting things running on a then obsolete HP Itanium Integrity server with an old insecure version of Fedora on it. Plus figuring out how this was all going to work in the Dominican Republic where power was not a given at any particular time nor was connectivity. These kiosks would be scattered across 10's of casinos down there.

Eventually things got weird, and I figured out that it was probably a form of scam against their investors. Since they wanted things very insecure and unlogged. Then they wanted me to come down to the DR and help with setup there. I bounced at that point, I was unwilling to give them that sort of power over me. They were in with the former president down there and I would have been at their mercy.

10 ish years later I would hear from the "manager" again. He wanted me to help with an automated locker system. I helped a bit but once he begged me to go to an ATT store and recharge his prepaid phone I was done with him. (I did recharge his phone because I am a sucker for a sob story)

If someone seems scummy, DO NOT work for them. Your gut is probably telling you something.

That said, a good work ethic and a baptism by fire where you have to do everything can be an effective way to get your start.

Re: The surreal experience of my first developer job

#100

Post by tcbasche »

justinclift wrote: post #54
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…

> I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK? Pretty common in Australia too. ;)

Worked for one of these that moved to Australia from the UK!
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