I would suggest sticking it out. These things are normal. Don’t let your output fall or let your boss out-manoeuvre you out of a job. I have survived a similar situation, although not exactly like yours.
Bosses are clever sometimes. Don’t let them run you over by their tactics.
It is different, what you describe. I can’t say I understand the point of being with their wives: perhaps a different culture, that you and I come from.
But please don’t misunderstand my point of not exploiting people. Some of these, what you call ‘exploited people’ are sometimes the root of evil in our society. Having them work for little money is not an issue in my opinion.
But I take your point. Exploitation has existed since the beginning of time. It is all a matter of where one can draw a line..:) again, thanks for this lively and fun discussion!
I say this is important. However, given the fact that the big companies have invested millions into this endeavour, providing access to the public for free seems a bit discriminatory and unfair. I would caution against getting people used to getting stuff for free. This happened with the newspapers, back when I was at the NYT, and we had to put up a pay-wall to protect our investments.
+1. My interview experience at one of the gang companies a long time ago was pretty bad. I got grilled for several hours, and then - after clearing all their rounds, was offered a pretty menial base pay. They seemed full of themselves :(
I’ve heard from plenty of experienced people how some of these companies, especially googlee - milk you for all you’ve got while pretending to be caring and offering you competitive base pay.
I feel the same wayy now that I'm older. The nitty-gritty of some of the memory management stuff just isn't relevant. The work I'm doing now is at a different scale and I let the language designers worry about this. It is still useful to know some details as they apply when I'm programming, but a lot of this stuff just doesn't command my attention!
I think this is a good summary of what makes great teams, and it is true of all great(productive and high performing) teams.
The point about management empowering individual employees is key to this, I believe. I have been on many highly productive teams - and not-so-good ones, also.
The key difference I've noticed in the functioning that was different for high-performing teams was the management being keyed-in and pumped about what they were doing. There was little scope for dirty politics to seep in as everyone was aligned with the mission.
Now every org says these things. But the key difference, I have come to believe - is the management of these teams.
Sometimes, things appear rosy in the interviews. The numbers look good and everybody on the team is nice. Then you end up joining and discover some of these actors have hidden motivations and they are not working for the organization. Misaligned objectives. Anyhow, this is a good read nonetheless.
I would suggest caution and making your own judgement, going with your gut feeling - when joining new teams in tech!!
I think React, combined with one of the backend frameworks are well-suited for your use-case.
Back when I was first starting out, React was new and now they've ironed out a lot of the kinks/bugs we faced. It is a solid framework of choice for any frontend-related work.
On the backend, you can't go wrong with Django. Or any of the Python-backend frameworks like Flask. You'll have to learn the intricacies of the frameworks to implement a decent app.!
Bosses are clever sometimes. Don’t let them run you over by their tactics.