The surreal experience of my first developer job

wow, where are your startups now, news_hacker? ;)

It seems the site is experiencing a hug of death :(

Archive links:

https://archive.is/KJBWF

https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...

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 companies are out there. Be wary of CEOs that don't bring anything other than money to the table. The more useless someone is, the more of a cunt they can be. Obviously this guy was struggling to pay his rent so he was going to take whatever job came up, but if you're entering startups and have the privilege of a bit of money in the bank and time on your side, try and pick the one with founders that are actually doing the work themselves. Look for some proof that they've built, designed or sold something substantial, before you agree to do all the work for them. Because if they haven't even begun to do the hard yards themselves, they're not likely to respect any of your work.

> The short version is that I was told we had to have it finished before anyone could go home. We were there until 9pm. That was my first day as a full-time employee.

I'd heard of modern companies trying to get new employees to release new code to production on their first day but this is a new one. Seems like a challenge.

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 summer once. Showed up in the office, which was run by the older brother of a friend, and he had a handful of staff. Phone salesman, secretary. Somehow they thought we'd just sort of do stuff and make money. We came up with all sorts of random schemes, and settled on one where we'd buy computers for certain people, who could pay for it through a government subsidy.

About a week or two after, the company was sold, somehow. I was able to claim I'd done the placement that I needed, and I wasn't in need of any money, so it was fine for me.

But weird as hell.

These days I've also come across things with people/money and no plan. They're a little more specific (help us with crypto!) but they're just not focused like you might expect, and the people are literally thinking that they'll learn whatever they need.

Even one of my early jobs in the fund industry was like this. "We've got a bunch of money, let's invest it... somehow".

It can sound like a total joke, and sometimes it is. Other times you actually get somewhere with it and you can learn a lot.