The surreal experience of my first developer job(bennuttall.com)
bennuttall.com
The surreal experience of my first developer job
https://bennuttall.com/the-surreal-experience-of-my-first-developer-job/
279 comments
My first tech job was similar. ~15 person “IT company”. When I joined I was hired as a webmaster/developer to manage their own corporate website, and their main income was doing Citrix installations and outfitting SMEs with computers and networking hardware.
The CEO and 2 others were old high school mates, funding seemed unlimited, we had “company cars” we could take anytime we wanted for errands or lunch or whatever, all were pretty expensive performance cars. Company lunches every day at local restaurants etc (I generally just ate in the office because they all weirded me out). Any hardware/software/whatever you needed was on your desk the next day.
In the 2 years I worked there, the company pivoted maybe 8 times. I’d come to work and suddenly my role was to develop custom e-commerce sites, a few months later I’d be doing graphic design for hardcore porn (DVDs/etc) distributors, a few months later I’d be helping develop hardware prototypes for shopping mall displays, etc etc.
It paid very well (for a first tech role), but the whole thing constantly felt “wrong”, I kept expecting the feds to kick the doors in one day. Just bad vibes all round. I ended up getting a way better job through a workmate there and when I checked on their website a year later it was squatted and domain for sale.
The CEO and 2 others were old high school mates, funding seemed unlimited, we had “company cars” we could take anytime we wanted for errands or lunch or whatever, all were pretty expensive performance cars. Company lunches every day at local restaurants etc (I generally just ate in the office because they all weirded me out). Any hardware/software/whatever you needed was on your desk the next day.
In the 2 years I worked there, the company pivoted maybe 8 times. I’d come to work and suddenly my role was to develop custom e-commerce sites, a few months later I’d be doing graphic design for hardcore porn (DVDs/etc) distributors, a few months later I’d be helping develop hardware prototypes for shopping mall displays, etc etc.
It paid very well (for a first tech role), but the whole thing constantly felt “wrong”, I kept expecting the feds to kick the doors in one day. Just bad vibes all round. I ended up getting a way better job through a workmate there and when I checked on their website a year later it was squatted and domain for sale.
[deleted]
Wow, that sounds very, very strange... Kind of puts things into perspective for me. Thanks for sharing.
Whoa. Just yesterday I was talking with a friend who years ago was sent to London to deal with a UK custom software vendor. He had a Friday meeting to talk with the CEO and lay down the law: they had to show my friend the software they were building right away or the deal was off.
He showed up for the meeting; the CEO was called away urgently. My friend was taken out for a very boozy lunch and given many excuses and platitudes. He held firm, though. Demo or trouble. They rebooked his meeting for Monday.
Arriving at their office on Monday, he found that the place had been totally cleared out. The only thing left was a photocopier that had been smashed. The CEO had, in the British phrasing, done a runner, leaving the employees suddenly out of work.
The good news is that my friend ended up hiring one of the employees, who turned out great.
He showed up for the meeting; the CEO was called away urgently. My friend was taken out for a very boozy lunch and given many excuses and platitudes. He held firm, though. Demo or trouble. They rebooked his meeting for Monday.
Arriving at their office on Monday, he found that the place had been totally cleared out. The only thing left was a photocopier that had been smashed. The CEO had, in the British phrasing, done a runner, leaving the employees suddenly out of work.
The good news is that my friend ended up hiring one of the employees, who turned out great.
“I feel that the developers are not really getting what is required so today we will start dogfooding! There is a personalised can on everyone’s desk.”
On my first day of my first web-dev job, I went to dinner with the top developers and all they did was tell surreal horror stories about the boss. Women would routinely leave his office crying.
The product we were making was complete BS, and I think the boss was just siphoning off money for himself. All he did was download songs on Napster all day and blare them from his office.
Our top developer was a guy from Australia working under the table because he couldn't get a visa. He missed two days while deathly sick. The boss docked him $800.
There are so many other horror stories. I always compared the guy to a cross between Captain Bligh and Mr. Smith from Lost in Space.
The product we were making was complete BS, and I think the boss was just siphoning off money for himself. All he did was download songs on Napster all day and blare them from his office.
Our top developer was a guy from Australia working under the table because he couldn't get a visa. He missed two days while deathly sick. The boss docked him $800.
There are so many other horror stories. I always compared the guy to a cross between Captain Bligh and Mr. Smith from Lost in Space.
> we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS)
I'm not sure what's the fetish with the SAS, but I apparently know more people who where in the or with strong ties to the SAS than regular British folks... OTOH, after knowing some actual members of various special forces for 2 decades: If they saw action, they don't brag. They are usually shy to admit anything even if it is not classified. Or the other way around: Those advertised as "ex-SAS" (or navy seals or french foreign legion, your choice) usually ain't.
I'm not sure what's the fetish with the SAS, but I apparently know more people who where in the or with strong ties to the SAS than regular British folks... OTOH, after knowing some actual members of various special forces for 2 decades: If they saw action, they don't brag. They are usually shy to admit anything even if it is not classified. Or the other way around: Those advertised as "ex-SAS" (or navy seals or french foreign legion, your choice) usually ain't.
A drunk ex-pat walks into a bar. He is a navyseal, with three tours of combat and also the CEO of a public traded company.
Hrhr. I actually know a legit one who fits the description. But that is exactly one :)
With all that experience, you need only one.
> > we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS)
That's when you ask "What colour is the boat house at Hereford?"
That's when you ask "What colour is the boat house at Hereford?"
You continued to work for 3 months without getting paid?
This is a really good thing to highlight for new employees - you may think there is a lot of oversight in companies doing the right thing but be defensive about your labour. If benefits or pay are being withheld assume they will never materialize.
This property should also be applied to "salary increase freezes" or promised bonuses in lieu of raises. Unless the money is in your pocket (or the company has a literally terrible HR person who actually put things solidly in writing i.e. a promisory note) then any intangible compensation is likely to never be realized. And if there is a salary increase freeze the thing that won't happen next year (I guarantee it) is that they'll double up everyone's expected salary increase - you may still be in a freeze, or that freeze may be lifted so you all get normal CoL increases.
When you're an employee be incredibly defensive about what you offer - your employer is being even more defensive, I can guarantee it.
This property should also be applied to "salary increase freezes" or promised bonuses in lieu of raises. Unless the money is in your pocket (or the company has a literally terrible HR person who actually put things solidly in writing i.e. a promisory note) then any intangible compensation is likely to never be realized. And if there is a salary increase freeze the thing that won't happen next year (I guarantee it) is that they'll double up everyone's expected salary increase - you may still be in a freeze, or that freeze may be lifted so you all get normal CoL increases.
When you're an employee be incredibly defensive about what you offer - your employer is being even more defensive, I can guarantee it.
We'd been working there for about 2 years at that point, had always got paid, had been the same team since day 0 so we had no reason to doubt the "I'm just waiting for the next investment to clear in the company account then I'll pay you everything you're owed" message. Plus the arrogance and naivety of "it's a tech company, he needs us to do anything so he's got to pay us eventually".
Just can't help myself to mention the eerie similarity with being a factory worker in Russia in the early 90-ies: people would too work for months without getting paid, and for pretty much the same reasons. Plus, when you see with your own eyes that the product is still being made and even shipped, surely at some point the money will clear?
It's almost like a workplace Stockholm Syndrome!
It happened to my wife, who was paid for 18mo and given lots of "options". People were steadily laid off around her until she was asked of she would work without pay? Because if you say no you're laid off and nobody wants that. I helped to convince her to quit. Company folded when she left ...
It may also have been payment in lieu of notice or holiday.
Given the context that seems unlikely - and it's genuinely hard to rack up a three month severance liability at most companies these days unless you're C-level. Most employers will either evaporate or pay out unused annual vacation so you're looking at a year's accrual at most (we can be over generous and say they may have had five weeks owed) - plus any in lieu time which usually caps out at three weeks.
> and it's genuinely hard to rack up a three month severance liability at most companies these days unless you're C-level.
This isn't true in the UK
This isn't true in the UK
To be honest I don't pay attention to my paychecks. I work in Silicon Valley and have things direct deposited into my bank account, which I never check.
Theoretically, my current (and past) employers could have left out a dozen paychecks and I may not have noticed.
I don't think it's that unusual. If he doesn't have any money in his bank account it may be more noticeable.
Theoretically, my current (and past) employers could have left out a dozen paychecks and I may not have noticed.
I don't think it's that unusual. If he doesn't have any money in his bank account it may be more noticeable.
Don't you have any notifications for transfers? People could steal your identity or card details and you wouldn't even notice?
what is the relevance of working in Silicon Valley?
I think GP thinks it is more polite than saying “I’m so rich, I don’t even know if I get paid.” But I don’t think so and seems pretty cringy.
There was a post written a while ago by someone saying what it was like to be poor when they got their first job in SV. One of the exact points was that they had colleagues who didn't really mind if they missed a couple of months of salary... they wouldn't notice as they had no need to look. Just like GP. It was totally incomprehensible for her, as someone who had to live paycheck to paycheck.
My only real response to this kind of humblebrag is... good for you!?
My only real response to this kind of humblebrag is... good for you!?
> My only real response to this kind of humblebrag
"Humble"?
"Humble"?
Yeah, I’m not offended or anything. Good for GGP and whatnot, just trying to explain.
It was funny working with some people who didn’t really need the money. It was/is always an alien concept for me. We had a cool startup we were working with and they were in “stealth mode” for two years without any revenue or funding, just working without any income. Must be nice.
It was funny working with some people who didn’t really need the money. It was/is always an alien concept for me. We had a cool startup we were working with and they were in “stealth mode” for two years without any revenue or funding, just working without any income. Must be nice.
(Semi-)Obliquely bragging about how much one is paid, AFAICS.
Same here. Only it was a PHP shop and they expected literally everything to be built in Drupal. I got hired 10 minutes after the interview, which should have been a red flag. We also had to clock in with a fingerprint reading device that hardly ever worked.
They were also scamming customers at some point after I got laid off. I didn't really dig into it though.
They were also scamming customers at some point after I got laid off. I didn't really dig into it though.
Ansil849(4)
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.
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.
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 the exceptions, not the rule.
Avoid startups where the CEO does / has done nothing but sales. Avoid them like the absolute plague that they are. If you are in such a place already, and you think things will get better, then I have a bridge to sell you. It is vanishingly likely that they won't, if only for the simple fact that the CEO has found a formula which works, and has no motivation to change it, and your best bet is to leave ASAP for the wider world which has infinitely more opportunity. (BTW, you won't succeed in changing such a "culture" for the better, so don't even think about it. I know you have.)
I could ramble on for several paragraphs, but BigJono has summed it up pretty concisely so I will proffer just this advice when sizing up CEOs and opportunities:
Remember, if there is any doubt, then there is no doubt.
Avoid startups where the CEO does / has done nothing but sales. Avoid them like the absolute plague that they are. If you are in such a place already, and you think things will get better, then I have a bridge to sell you. It is vanishingly likely that they won't, if only for the simple fact that the CEO has found a formula which works, and has no motivation to change it, and your best bet is to leave ASAP for the wider world which has infinitely more opportunity. (BTW, you won't succeed in changing such a "culture" for the better, so don't even think about it. I know you have.)
I could ramble on for several paragraphs, but BigJono has summed it up pretty concisely so I will proffer just this advice when sizing up CEOs and opportunities:
Remember, if there is any doubt, then there is no doubt.
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.
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.
Culture is important, but I think direction might be even more key.
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.
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.
Yes, very descriptive - the 'good sales CEO' was very much per your positive example.
> 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.
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.
I wonder what became of the junior dev, when the next projects he did took a lot ? longer. Maybe he just said that those were more complicated
I know the guy personally to this day. He's a super nice guy, he was just very green at the time. If I recall they threw out everything I'd built and started over.
Ok, feels good to hear :-)
how unexpected (to me at least) that they did that
how unexpected (to me at least) that they did that
Perhaps give them some flexibility if there's a technical co-founder as CTO.
It depends on what the startup is working on. If it's trying to sell into the enterprise I'd be a lot more confident in its future if the CEO is heavily sales-focused provided there's also a technical co-founder keeping things sane on the tech side.
It depends on what the startup is working on. If it's trying to sell into the enterprise I'd be a lot more confident in its future if the CEO is heavily sales-focused provided there's also a technical co-founder keeping things sane on the tech side.
If there is a co-founder at all that’s much better than just a single person.
> I swear that CEOs like the one mentioned here specifically prefer hiring those who are in need like this
This is absolutely a thing - it's the same mentality a pimp uses to identify and groom sex workers or other exploitative labor. The less stable/independent you are, the more control they can exercise over you etc
This is absolutely a thing - it's the same mentality a pimp uses to identify and groom sex workers or other exploitative labor. The less stable/independent you are, the more control they can exercise over you etc
Never again. Best of luck to all reading this who have been on the receiving end of this, and those who are now wise enough to avoid it in the future.
[deleted]
> Look for some proof that they've built, designed or sold something substantial, before you agree to do all the work for them
I disagree. 4 months working for a semi-criminal part mad-man is an amazing opportunity to learn about life and humanity.
Every time I meet someone who went from straight A’s at school, to university/college and then straight into a graduate scheme at some multinational, then onwards and upwards into some successful, but otherwise shallow career I feel so sad for that person that they missed out on the beautiful weirdness of life.
I disagree. 4 months working for a semi-criminal part mad-man is an amazing opportunity to learn about life and humanity.
Every time I meet someone who went from straight A’s at school, to university/college and then straight into a graduate scheme at some multinational, then onwards and upwards into some successful, but otherwise shallow career I feel so sad for that person that they missed out on the beautiful weirdness of life.
That's like saying an abusive relationship is a great way to learn about life and humanity.
You can get a ton of valuable experience working for a startup without a CEO that's an absolute knob. You don't have to jump straight from worst company ever to boring enterprise grad position where you don't learn anything.
You can get a ton of valuable experience working for a startup without a CEO that's an absolute knob. You don't have to jump straight from worst company ever to boring enterprise grad position where you don't learn anything.
+100
I got a few stories from Australia I'd rather not tell online, but suffice to say there are at least a few more out there. From unpaid super, to quitting their own business, and that one guy who posted us a frozen chicken meal interstate through the regular post during an Australian summer, so we could try it out. We did not try it.
What is it with dodgy entrepreneurs and criminality? One of my first jobs was for a guy who after a week of mundane tasks revealed he really hired me to go through the source code of some program and change everything so it looked like he wrote it because he planned to resell it as his own. I politely declined. Turns out literally everyone there except me was an ex-con. I found a job with a different company across the hall and never looked back.
Interesting that you mention the "education sector". That sector seems to have a huge number of dodgy "training companies" covering all sorts of industries.
My first ever job, straight out of college in the UK, at 18 years old, was a Web Developer at an apprenticeship training business. The structure of the business was that it was a "training provider" for web development, design and a few other things.
Rather than go to college or university, kids (usually around 16 years old) would go to this company to get "on the job" training. The company was accredited by a university, such that on completion of the "course", students would receive some sort of BTEC certificate, which is similar to a TAFE course in Australia.
A requirement of "training providers" is that they provide the tutoring to the students in order to obtain the BTEC, but must also place the students into businesses for around 50% of the course time to receive their "on the job" experience. The student must have received a certain number of hours of experience at a real web development company to obtain the proper certificate from the uni.
This training provider took on about 200 students a year into their web development course. Now it's impossible to place that many students with real web development companies. But for each bum on a seat, the company received a sizable chunk of cash from the government apprenticeship scheme, so it was important to get as many through the door as possible.
To solve the issue, the director of the training company (a guy I'll call Fred) who very much matches the description of other middle-aged "pretending to be rich" guys), spun up a series of fake companies for each course, such that he would place the students in his own companies to get their "on the job" hours. Each of the companies had it's own office, but usually attached to the same main building, and some in some random industrial estates without signage.
The web development company was the one I was hired in. The salary was just about enough for me to fill my car up and drive there from my parents house every day. Our "clients" at the web development company were all other businesses owned by Fred. Each of those businesses didn't seem to have any clients of their own, the whole web of businesses was driven purely from the training grants being generated by the main training company.
I worked there for a year and it was a very strange experience. Half of the time I was tasked with coding up websites for the web of businesses and doing odd jobs for Fred's friends (I remember spending a month building a website for a youth football team). The other half of my time was spent "tutoring" the apprentices who were in my office for 50% of their course. That mostly involved giving them "briefs" for clients which didn't exist, getting them all to code up their own version and add it to their portfolio.
I didn't have a boss at the web development company. On paper, I was the only full-time employee.
About a year after I left in 2012, I saw on the news that the training company had folded, because the university had caught on to what was happening, and stopped their funding. The entire network of businesses now seems to have been wiped from existence.
My first ever job, straight out of college in the UK, at 18 years old, was a Web Developer at an apprenticeship training business. The structure of the business was that it was a "training provider" for web development, design and a few other things.
Rather than go to college or university, kids (usually around 16 years old) would go to this company to get "on the job" training. The company was accredited by a university, such that on completion of the "course", students would receive some sort of BTEC certificate, which is similar to a TAFE course in Australia.
A requirement of "training providers" is that they provide the tutoring to the students in order to obtain the BTEC, but must also place the students into businesses for around 50% of the course time to receive their "on the job" experience. The student must have received a certain number of hours of experience at a real web development company to obtain the proper certificate from the uni.
This training provider took on about 200 students a year into their web development course. Now it's impossible to place that many students with real web development companies. But for each bum on a seat, the company received a sizable chunk of cash from the government apprenticeship scheme, so it was important to get as many through the door as possible.
To solve the issue, the director of the training company (a guy I'll call Fred) who very much matches the description of other middle-aged "pretending to be rich" guys), spun up a series of fake companies for each course, such that he would place the students in his own companies to get their "on the job" hours. Each of the companies had it's own office, but usually attached to the same main building, and some in some random industrial estates without signage.
The web development company was the one I was hired in. The salary was just about enough for me to fill my car up and drive there from my parents house every day. Our "clients" at the web development company were all other businesses owned by Fred. Each of those businesses didn't seem to have any clients of their own, the whole web of businesses was driven purely from the training grants being generated by the main training company.
I worked there for a year and it was a very strange experience. Half of the time I was tasked with coding up websites for the web of businesses and doing odd jobs for Fred's friends (I remember spending a month building a website for a youth football team). The other half of my time was spent "tutoring" the apprentices who were in my office for 50% of their course. That mostly involved giving them "briefs" for clients which didn't exist, getting them all to code up their own version and add it to their portfolio.
I didn't have a boss at the web development company. On paper, I was the only full-time employee.
About a year after I left in 2012, I saw on the news that the training company had folded, because the university had caught on to what was happening, and stopped their funding. The entire network of businesses now seems to have been wiped from existence.
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.
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.
Working for the mob can be a good deal.
Basically no oversight into what you are doing because they don't have the technical knowledge to judge your work. Overpay (if sometimes irregular), and easy hours.
As long as you don't "know" they are doing anything illegal with your work, and no one can prove that you know what they are doing. It can work out.
The worst part about it is they try to make up for their lack of technical knowledge as a manager by becoming close with you in a personal way.
Source: I worked for someone convicted of multiple crimes (racketeering, assault, intimidation of a juror), but on his legitimate business.
Basically no oversight into what you are doing because they don't have the technical knowledge to judge your work. Overpay (if sometimes irregular), and easy hours.
As long as you don't "know" they are doing anything illegal with your work, and no one can prove that you know what they are doing. It can work out.
The worst part about it is they try to make up for their lack of technical knowledge as a manager by becoming close with you in a personal way.
Source: I worked for someone convicted of multiple crimes (racketeering, assault, intimidation of a juror), but on his legitimate business.
When did the lack of technical knowledge ever stopped managers from oversighting the work? I for some reason don't think that "the mob" has any more lenience than the military, for example — and its pretty much the universal rule that the military believes in "tenacity prevails over everything, it prevails even over the reason" like no one else.
> As long as you don't "know" they are doing anything illegal with your work, and no one can prove that you know what they are doing. It can work out.
...and no personal ethical dilemmas with said arrangement.
> The worst part about it is they try to make up for their lack of technical knowledge as a manager by becoming close with you in a personal way.
FWIW, this happens outside the mob too.
...and no personal ethical dilemmas with said arrangement.
> The worst part about it is they try to make up for their lack of technical knowledge as a manager by becoming close with you in a personal way.
FWIW, this happens outside the mob too.
Working for the mob is a tenuous deal. Because you probably don't know unless you are involved in illegal things. BUT like many business owners they are kind of desperate because they can't hire good talent easily.
So it could be an option (for some people, and maybe not even good), but really unless you can deal with stress and people well it won't go well. I was able to learn to deal with both pretty quickly. And I credit some of that early experience to being able to just dive into projects I know nothing about.
But it can all go sideways pretty quick. I have a feeling that is more common. Plus you don't want to be involved in an investigation.
So it could be an option (for some people, and maybe not even good), but really unless you can deal with stress and people well it won't go well. I was able to learn to deal with both pretty quickly. And I credit some of that early experience to being able to just dive into projects I know nothing about.
But it can all go sideways pretty quick. I have a feeling that is more common. Plus you don't want to be involved in an investigation.
I've heard surprisingly good things in general about working for shady organizations. Usually they treat you splendidly and go out of their way to make sure you're happy with your work. However, the techy dude who actually built the system that lets a bunch of folks rip off ATMs quite often ends up being the fall guy and losing all of their accumulated wealth. It is a gamble that can and usually does pay off but one where the expected gain is still much lower than just working in a legitimate field.
There’s a Canadian mafia?
In Montreal, primarily.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rizzuto_crime_family
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rizzuto_crime_family
even makes a location appearance in The Sopranos
Mafia like groups are everywhere. The names may be different.
If you think the idea of a Canadian mafia is funny...
You may be positively tickled by the fact that the maple syrup industry is controlled by a cartel like group that may be mafia-adjacent and there have been high-stakes maple syrup heists.
https://www.google.com/search?&q=mafia+maple+syrup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Hei...
It's no joke, of course. That's precious stuff. And where there's money there's crime...
You may be positively tickled by the fact that the maple syrup industry is controlled by a cartel like group that may be mafia-adjacent and there have been high-stakes maple syrup heists.
https://www.google.com/search?&q=mafia+maple+syrup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Hei...
It's no joke, of course. That's precious stuff. And where there's money there's crime...
Today [2018], a barrel of maple syrup is worth
about $1,200 — that's around 18 times the value
of U.S. crude oil.The low price of crude oil is amazing given its utility. I remember hearing about how oil (given its non-sustainable nature) should actually be valued a LOT more.
Black-market maple syrup made it into an episode of Elementary (5x13, "Over a Barrel" - while investigating a murder they find a street gang had switched from smuggling cocaine to smuggling syrup because it was more profitable)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_(TV_series)
If you think the syrup cartel is impressive - you should see the Dairy Farmers of Canada (also mostly based out of Quebec - most suffocating organizations up here in Canada end up being QC based).
Hah, whenever I tell this story that is always the first thing people say.
My mind went to the A.F.R. from Infinite Jest, surely the most sinister Canadians ever imagined.
They will sorry you to death, if you don't comply.
There is even a series about them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood_(TV_series)
Looking at the responses you’ve already received there seems to be plenty. I recently learned of the Tow Truck mafia: https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/w5/this-toronto-area-lawyer-ha...
recharging a crime phone in front of a camera lol
> Your gut is probably telling you something.
There are many times I have regretted not listening to my gut, something feeling "off". OP's story had obvious red flags but in all situations, paying attention to how your body (or "gut") feels is always a good idea.
There are many times I have regretted not listening to my gut, something feeling "off". OP's story had obvious red flags but in all situations, paying attention to how your body (or "gut") feels is always a good idea.
I was kind of dumb and desperate at the time, I got better. These days I would just quote an amazingly unreasonable amount of money. If they said ok, well I could buy a whole lot of therapy and a house in Austin afterward.
Gotta make sure you tell them you want it upfront too before you do any work.
Tho still a good idea to stay away from potentially organized crime, they have a tendency to hang around and show up again when you think you’re all done.
Tho still a good idea to stay away from potentially organized crime, they have a tendency to hang around and show up again when you think you’re all done.
Is it bad that the strangest thing about this story to me is that the Canadian mafia procured an Itanium server and then just used it for random webdev?
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.
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.
> These days I've also come across things with people/money and no plan. They're a little more specific (help us with crypto!)
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.
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 guess it's the same with every new fad. "We'll do something with the Web!" "We'll do something with mobile!" "We'll do something with blockchain!" "We'll do something with AI!" and so on.
Well those aren't really 'fads' (maybe... blockchain)
Web was absolutely a fad the first time around, and that bubble famously burst in a most spectacular manner. AI has been a fad several times, so much so that the term "AI winter" was already coined decades ago. Mobile is a very successful tech, I give you that, but it too had its false starts, and people who thought they’d be the next Twitter in no time if they "just have an app" were dime a dozen a decade or so ago.
I grew up in a family without a lot of money, in a community where there weren't people with a lot of money (or they hid it well) so I was totally unprepared for this as an adult but it turns out -- there are a surprising number of young adults that are just handed a ridiculous stack of money and just need to figure out something productive to do with it. There are some famous examples of it working out well but I'm sure the average is more like these stories.
The question is how to engineer those kinds of emergent situations where you just wind up with a bunch of $$$ - in a way that you'll be fine with looking back on later.
It's weird. On the one hand it feels like "lateral creativity + honesty = unicorn", like "never the twain shall meet", but on the other hand I can't come up with a good rigorous explanation for why that's the case.
It's weird. On the one hand it feels like "lateral creativity + honesty = unicorn", like "never the twain shall meet", but on the other hand I can't come up with a good rigorous explanation for why that's the case.
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 smart ones are the ones who really shine, I have a acquaintance who owns a unicorn and he is exactly like that. I'd never work for him.
I think it must pretty similar to the corporate psychopath profile who many times gets into the CEO position in big companies.
There are the stupid ones of course that don't get far, but the smart ones are the ones who really shine, I have a acquaintance who owns a unicorn and he is exactly like that. I'd never work for him.
I think it must pretty similar to the corporate psychopath profile who many times gets into the CEO position in big companies.
“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 Kenneth Rind[1]
[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=MQvGc8Ee1SsC&pg=PA137&lpg=...
[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=MQvGc8Ee1SsC&pg=PA137&lpg=...
Netflix is running a show about deLorean and the chap who ran the whole thing. Ended up in jail for drugs smuggling.
Yeah, you should probably watch the rest of that documentary.
He successfully defended himself as the people trying to sell him the drugs were the police - and never had any drugs.
Entrapping a desperate man trying to save his company - which honestly could have been the biggest car company in the world if they'd manage to hold on a few more years (and BTTF still happened) - is really not that hard.
He successfully defended himself as the people trying to sell him the drugs were the police - and never had any drugs.
Entrapping a desperate man trying to save his company - which honestly could have been the biggest car company in the world if they'd manage to hold on a few more years (and BTTF still happened) - is really not that hard.
You're misunderstanding the concept of entrapment.
Yeah it's on my list to watch, thanks.
Sun used to ship bricks when they couldn't get enough Spark processors working. Every customer return was repackaged as a new computer and sent to the next customer as a stalling tactic .
I don't tend to hold "rock-solid businessmen" in high regard either.
Shameless plug for a friends' podcast: https://www.stitcher.com/show/lie-cheat-steal
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 there (about 11 at the time I joined) was amazing. I still have to credit most of my current skills and almost all of the important lessons I learned to everyone there.
I tried a different company after I finished my studies, which was also fine, but not quite the same. Tried running my own, but ultimately went back to the one I was at in Uni. Surprise surprise, they were doing even better.
I really only left because I got an offer I couldn’t refuse for a job in Japan. The salary was horrid but I really wanted to work overseas, and the work seemed fun.
Ironically, that ended up being a company much more like the one described in the article (better though, they had an actual business for starters).
Now of course I’m doing fine, but I’ve never since found a company as great as that first one. I check from time to time, and they’re still hiring.
If you live in the Netherlands check them out (no guarantees on current awesomeness) https://werkenbij.infi.nl/
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 there (about 11 at the time I joined) was amazing. I still have to credit most of my current skills and almost all of the important lessons I learned to everyone there.
I tried a different company after I finished my studies, which was also fine, but not quite the same. Tried running my own, but ultimately went back to the one I was at in Uni. Surprise surprise, they were doing even better.
I really only left because I got an offer I couldn’t refuse for a job in Japan. The salary was horrid but I really wanted to work overseas, and the work seemed fun.
Ironically, that ended up being a company much more like the one described in the article (better though, they had an actual business for starters).
Now of course I’m doing fine, but I’ve never since found a company as great as that first one. I check from time to time, and they’re still hiring.
If you live in the Netherlands check them out (no guarantees on current awesomeness) https://werkenbij.infi.nl/
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.
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.
> 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.
The "normal comp" is now bellow their market rate.
The "normal comp" is now bellow their market rate.
> 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.
There is something to be said for the amount of skills you get by running 12 hours a day.
There is something to be said for the amount of skills you get by running 12 hours a day.
I also lucked out with my first job. It was a part time gig at a small company of about 8. Had I saw a job listing for it, I would have been sure that it was a scam to exploit university students looking for experience. The saving grace was a classmate who worked there as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My first gig felt horrible, I left for freelance, drowned and never recovered.
Also the importance of networking and support.
Thanks for the tip. I see they are opening an office in Nijmegen as well, nice.
In Japan, the chance of working for a Yakuza front company are extremely high, unless it's really a multi-billion big corporation, organised crime is involved everywhere.
This one was a US company. Since I knew everyone involved, I’m fairly certain we weren’t a front for the Yakuza. It was fun though, had lots of freedom and could do anything I thought necessary.
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 and as a result were never able to scale.)
Probably all over the world. I started out working a summer for a slighlt sketchy company in Iceland, ran by a friend of my dad's. They made websites for small businesses. They did have a decent core business but looking back, the senior people I looked up to at the time had no idea what they were doing. They also bid on a bunch of big government projects, knowing they had no chance of fulfilling the job and their plan was simply to "hire some people"... wages were paid out at rand intervals since they had no reserve cash and seemed to be on the wedge of bankruptcy the entire time I was there, although I did get my pay in the end.
It was, however, an incredibly educational experience.
It was, however, an incredibly educational experience.
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.
>UK IT salaries are really low
Maybe compared to the crazy US salaries you see here, but compared to continental Europe, CoL adjusted UK salaries are difficult to beat and also you have a lot more interesting opportunities there vs here where it's mostly small web-shops or big name consultancy sweatshops.
Wanna see low (CoL adjusted) tech salaries? Try Spain/Italy/Austria/France where they shaft you with high taxes and there are no top tech opportunities.
Maybe compared to the crazy US salaries you see here, but compared to continental Europe, CoL adjusted UK salaries are difficult to beat and also you have a lot more interesting opportunities there vs here where it's mostly small web-shops or big name consultancy sweatshops.
Wanna see low (CoL adjusted) tech salaries? Try Spain/Italy/Austria/France where they shaft you with high taxes and there are no top tech opportunities.
CoL adjusted UK salaries for anyone from junior to mid-level are terrible, and saving even 1/3 of your income on that kind of salary is hard. Not to mention, the lower CoL areas (and correspondingly low salaries) generally just aren't nice places to be. The idea that you can pay someone 24k/year to write C and Python filling a "junior" role that requires two years of expirence is crazy.
Even if you adjust for healthcare, even if you adjust for cost of living, UK tech salaries are simply bad. I don't know why, and my only hypothesis is that there just isn't much respect for tech workers in the UK in general, or companies don't make much money.
I'm not asking for a Bay Area 150k, I'm asking for 35k outside London for a junior role and 45k for a mid role. It's unlikely I'd get it. The number of people who brush this huge discrepancy off with "healthcare costs" (which, in the US, is a matter of company-paid insurance), or "safety" (as if that's something which should cost half my salary in the developed world) or "social safety net" (something I'm happy to pay for, but that comes out of tax which I already pay, not the take-home) is ridicuous.
There's no way around the fact that UK tech salaries are low, even accounting for the high tax in Western Europe, and I'm tired of being told that they are in any way equivalent to US (non-Bay) adjusted for CoL and healthcare. I'm paid poorly, and if I could access the US employment market, I'd be paid at least 1.5x before converted to USD no matter where I am.
The fact that things may be worse in France or Italy doesn't mean anything to me. In fact, it just makes me surprised that the UK has done well in comparison.
Even if you adjust for healthcare, even if you adjust for cost of living, UK tech salaries are simply bad. I don't know why, and my only hypothesis is that there just isn't much respect for tech workers in the UK in general, or companies don't make much money.
I'm not asking for a Bay Area 150k, I'm asking for 35k outside London for a junior role and 45k for a mid role. It's unlikely I'd get it. The number of people who brush this huge discrepancy off with "healthcare costs" (which, in the US, is a matter of company-paid insurance), or "safety" (as if that's something which should cost half my salary in the developed world) or "social safety net" (something I'm happy to pay for, but that comes out of tax which I already pay, not the take-home) is ridicuous.
There's no way around the fact that UK tech salaries are low, even accounting for the high tax in Western Europe, and I'm tired of being told that they are in any way equivalent to US (non-Bay) adjusted for CoL and healthcare. I'm paid poorly, and if I could access the US employment market, I'd be paid at least 1.5x before converted to USD no matter where I am.
The fact that things may be worse in France or Italy doesn't mean anything to me. In fact, it just makes me surprised that the UK has done well in comparison.
My perspective as a hiring manager at a UK based SAAS company is this:
I will and do pay as much as I can afford to secure developers who are actually good at their job. I can't really comment on why they're so hard to find, but my experience is that they really are.
Maybe it's the side effect of there being very few of the kind of developers who could command those SV level salaries in the UK, or maybe they just aren't in the market for my kind of opportunities. It's a hunch that would require more data because I've not hired developers in the US so I don't actually know if there's a quality difference.
Anyway, I'm hiring at the moment.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benelvin/
I will and do pay as much as I can afford to secure developers who are actually good at their job. I can't really comment on why they're so hard to find, but my experience is that they really are.
Maybe it's the side effect of there being very few of the kind of developers who could command those SV level salaries in the UK, or maybe they just aren't in the market for my kind of opportunities. It's a hunch that would require more data because I've not hired developers in the US so I don't actually know if there's a quality difference.
Anyway, I'm hiring at the moment.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benelvin/
Probably just the location? London has a huge gravitational pull in the UK. If you’re outside London you’re basically limited to people who can’t or won’t move to London, which excludes most (though obviously not all) of the most ambitious and talented candidates.
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This isn't the case. People read about salaries in the UK, and they are usually referring to one of the big tech cities.
In reality, most tech jobs are the small web-shops or big-name consultancy sweatshops (one particular example is Edinburgh, huge market for tech jobs, there are quite a few startups now but the tech industry ten years ago, the period when the OP occurred, it was mostly sweatshops...and still is to a large extent, large companies who open up an office but labour is cheap, and will head off to Eastern Europe if wages rise). Starting salaries under £20k are not unusual in the UK, and startups are still definitely the exception outside London. In particular, the market for grads in the UK is very difficult...it is very, very hard to get your first job because there are lots of scammy companies offering slavery wages, lots of consultancies looking to churn staff, and a relatively small number of decent companies that often aren't particularly good at hiring (or willing to train, or willing to take risks...the UK job market is flexible relative to Europe but not flexible enough that employers don't view hiring someone as a big risk...because it is).
To say this another way, the UK does have some startups where you can make decent money...but the core of the industry that employs most people is just like Europe (because the UK still isn't very well-developed outside London).
In reality, most tech jobs are the small web-shops or big-name consultancy sweatshops (one particular example is Edinburgh, huge market for tech jobs, there are quite a few startups now but the tech industry ten years ago, the period when the OP occurred, it was mostly sweatshops...and still is to a large extent, large companies who open up an office but labour is cheap, and will head off to Eastern Europe if wages rise). Starting salaries under £20k are not unusual in the UK, and startups are still definitely the exception outside London. In particular, the market for grads in the UK is very difficult...it is very, very hard to get your first job because there are lots of scammy companies offering slavery wages, lots of consultancies looking to churn staff, and a relatively small number of decent companies that often aren't particularly good at hiring (or willing to train, or willing to take risks...the UK job market is flexible relative to Europe but not flexible enough that employers don't view hiring someone as a big risk...because it is).
To say this another way, the UK does have some startups where you can make decent money...but the core of the industry that employs most people is just like Europe (because the UK still isn't very well-developed outside London).
It's kind of an "be grateful for what you have because so many people have it worse" argument.
In the past few years IT salaries in continental Europe have increased significantly and, adjusted for the cost of life, German salaries are significantly higher. French and Spanish are almost on par.
If you make less than 40K£ in London, you are likely to experience a form of poverty that is unseen in the continent (pests in your flat, revenge evictions, very very bad healthcare, etc…). Outside of London, salaries are ridiculously low.
If you make less than 40K£ in London, you are likely to experience a form of poverty that is unseen in the continent (pests in your flat, revenge evictions, very very bad healthcare, etc…). Outside of London, salaries are ridiculously low.
If by Europe you mean only the super expensive cities like Paris, Amsterdam or Munich, then yeah salaries maybe have increased, but to what good when property price increases have far outpaces whatever salary increases the industry may have seen.
And most who stayed at one job haven't gotten any significant salary increases unless they job hopped often which brings it's own problems later in ones career.
Edit: Had a quick look at jobs in Munich and curious where those high salaries are as 80k for senior positions on 40+h/week seem like a joke to me considering how expensive it is to live there and how high taxes are.
And most who stayed at one job haven't gotten any significant salary increases unless they job hopped often which brings it's own problems later in ones career.
Edit: Had a quick look at jobs in Munich and curious where those high salaries are as 80k for senior positions on 40+h/week seem like a joke to me considering how expensive it is to live there and how high taxes are.
A senior dev in London makes 60-80K, so it’s almost the same without cost of life adjustments. Outside of London, economy-wise, you are likely to find places more similar to eastern Europe than to Bavaria.
80K€ in Munich is a good salary, considering that you don’t have to pay for private healthcare (in the UK you have to), education is free (in the UK it costs a fortune, either in private school fees or in housing premia) and rents are much much lower than in London (for equivalent properties).
Taxes are higher in Germany, but not extremely so if you account for child deductions and family support. A family of 2 in London making 80K per annum, will spend ~20K to send a child to a random nursery, 5-6K£ in healthcare and 2K£ in public transport (just to name the first 3 thing that come to mind), and will be much poorer than a German family making 50K€ per annum.
80K€ in Munich is a good salary, considering that you don’t have to pay for private healthcare (in the UK you have to), education is free (in the UK it costs a fortune, either in private school fees or in housing premia) and rents are much much lower than in London (for equivalent properties).
Taxes are higher in Germany, but not extremely so if you account for child deductions and family support. A family of 2 in London making 80K per annum, will spend ~20K to send a child to a random nursery, 5-6K£ in healthcare and 2K£ in public transport (just to name the first 3 thing that come to mind), and will be much poorer than a German family making 50K€ per annum.
Healthcare is free in the UK. I don’t know where you’re getting the idea you need to spend “£5-6k” on it.
A lot of employers in the UK offer additional health insurance as a benefit, but that’s on top of - not instead of - what the NHS offers you.
A lot of employers in the UK offer additional health insurance as a benefit, but that’s on top of - not instead of - what the NHS offers you.
The quality of service of the NHS is extremely low compared to its European counterparts. It’s not my problem, because I have a very comprehensive healthcare insurance from my employer, which costs more than 300£ per month per person.
Just to give a practical example, you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist (I know because it’s my experience), and if you go to private doctors, which you should, 3 visits plus some ultrasound scans and tests may cost in excess of 3000£. Also GPs have a tendency to prescribe (random) medicines without referring patients to specialists, which is simply not civilised, and so you end up going to a private doctor and paying 2-300£ per visit.
A family of 3 can easily spend 5-6K£ per annum in healthcare, especially during the first years of the child.
Just to give a practical example, you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist (I know because it’s my experience), and if you go to private doctors, which you should, 3 visits plus some ultrasound scans and tests may cost in excess of 3000£. Also GPs have a tendency to prescribe (random) medicines without referring patients to specialists, which is simply not civilised, and so you end up going to a private doctor and paying 2-300£ per visit.
A family of 3 can easily spend 5-6K£ per annum in healthcare, especially during the first years of the child.
With the NHS you need to "play" the system a bit unfortunately. The key is finding a great GP and asking for him/her by name when getting an appointment. There are a lot of terrible GPs out there and if you just listen to them you may get screwed. If you have a good GP (I would recommend looking up the practice and figuring the head GP there and then asking for him/her by name) the healthcare system is pretty good. Yes specialist referrals can take a while, but again if you have a good relationship with your GP they will be able to expedite it for you.
It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you. FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you. FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
> With the NHS you need to "play" the system a bit unfortunately. The key is finding a great GP and asking for him/her by name when getting an appointment. There are a lot of terrible GPs out there and if you just listen to them you may get screwed. If you have a good GP (I would recommend looking up the practice and figuring the head GP there and then asking for him/her by name) the healthcare system is pretty good. Yes specialist referrals can take a while, but again if you have a good relationship with your GP they will be able to expedite it for you.
Which means that the quality of service is worse than other countries, where you don't have to "play" the system or become friend with a GP to get referrals. Again, not my problem, I can use private healthcare, but this is not civilized.
> It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you.
As I said, it's not the same as the German or the Italian system, it is evidently inferior. I don't feel I need to spend thousands of pounds in appointments (I don't, my insurance pays), I feel I need to get a western European healthcare service (which, again, I get through my insurance), and I'm forced to go private because the NHS is not good enough. The point is that a German (or a French or an Italian) gets that for free and a Briton has to pay thousands of pounds for the same level of service.
> FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
I wrote "you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist", not that you don't get scans. By the way, you do get 2 scans from the NHS, not loads. You get to see lots of midwives, which are not doctors, and lot of doulas, whatever they are, but unless somebody who is not a doctor thinks you need to see a gynaecologist, you don't get to see one, which is not civilized.
Which means that the quality of service is worse than other countries, where you don't have to "play" the system or become friend with a GP to get referrals. Again, not my problem, I can use private healthcare, but this is not civilized.
> It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you.
As I said, it's not the same as the German or the Italian system, it is evidently inferior. I don't feel I need to spend thousands of pounds in appointments (I don't, my insurance pays), I feel I need to get a western European healthcare service (which, again, I get through my insurance), and I'm forced to go private because the NHS is not good enough. The point is that a German (or a French or an Italian) gets that for free and a Briton has to pay thousands of pounds for the same level of service.
> FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
I wrote "you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist", not that you don't get scans. By the way, you do get 2 scans from the NHS, not loads. You get to see lots of midwives, which are not doctors, and lot of doulas, whatever they are, but unless somebody who is not a doctor thinks you need to see a gynaecologist, you don't get to see one, which is not civilized.
> A senior dev in London makes 60-80K
This is just not true. Senior dev at non FAANG could well add 50% to those numbers.
This is just not true. Senior dev at non FAANG could well add 50% to those numbers.
A senior dev in a hedge fund may make more than 200K£ and I was well into 6 digits before becoming a manager, but a senior dev at non-FAANG wouldn’t usually make more than 80K and I know several good senior devs who make less than 70K£.
[deleted]
I 'earned' about 24K (equivalent before tax - as a stipend) as a doctoral student in London. Yes, once we had a mouse in the flatshare, but this is ridiculously exaggerating things.
> Yes, once we had a mouse in the flatshare
While everybody I know who rented in London had to deal with mice or bed-bugs (and I don’t fully understand what these are, because before coming to London I never heard of them), at least those on low income, I don’t know of any other place where this is even remotely true.
While everybody I know who rented in London had to deal with mice or bed-bugs (and I don’t fully understand what these are, because before coming to London I never heard of them), at least those on low income, I don’t know of any other place where this is even remotely true.
Jesus! I haven’t seen stuff like that even in Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, bogota or Mexico City.
Truly medieval stuff!
Unfortunately rent regulations in the UK are designed to protect landlords from tenants, contracts are renewed yearly and you are always at risk of eviction. So maintenance is almost non-existent and if you protest, you will likely end up evicted. After god knows how many years or decades of this state of affairs, the housing stock in London is of a ridiculously low quality, and a local would consider normal to have a mouse in a flat and to have to deal with it (rather than the landlord paying for pest control).
To get what in the continent would be a normal flat, you need to aim at what the locals may call “luxury apartments”. And still, if it wasn’t built after 2010, you’d still have to deal with rotten sash windows, no escalator and other crazy stuff I’ve never seen before.
To get what in the continent would be a normal flat, you need to aim at what the locals may call “luxury apartments”. And still, if it wasn’t built after 2010, you’d still have to deal with rotten sash windows, no escalator and other crazy stuff I’ve never seen before.
Mmarq is exaggerating quite a bit. It may be that they are accurately reporting their own experiences, but as a description of typical life in London, take it with a huge pinch of salt.
When you say ”very very bad healthcare”, are you referring to the NHS?
Yes, the NHS is weirdly worshipped in the UK, but is much worse than the Italian or the German healthcare systems (to name the 2 I experienced personally). The emergency service is good, but prevention is borderline non-existent and getting referrals to see specialists may be challenging.
NHS is a British religion. They think they invented it and take any criticism of it as a direct Tory speak for it’s privatisation.
Can confirm, I co-founded and ran one.
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying not to be That Boss, and I'm sure 50+ ex employees could pick plenty of failures on that front.
Still, our nearest competitor was run by a sketchy Napoleon who's now awaiting trial for rape and sexual assault. The bar for being a good tech boss in the UK is really quite low.
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying not to be That Boss, and I'm sure 50+ ex employees could pick plenty of failures on that front.
Still, our nearest competitor was run by a sketchy Napoleon who's now awaiting trial for rape and sexual assault. The bar for being a good tech boss in the UK is really quite low.
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.
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.
They're even in Silicon Valley. Not every company can raise money. And even if they do, being able to raise money doesn't necessarily mean having the competence to run a software company well.
Yeah, I had one in Canada too. I think we were making forms for insurance companies to onboard new clients more quickly? But the forms were fillable pdfs, which I then had to scrape the data out of in order to feed it to the app. Why not use normal web forms? I don't know, I was fired before I found out. They owe me $200 or so in back pay to this day.
Same thing in France, probably to an even worse degree. Most tech companies fall either in that category or in the overgrown defense contractor one. Little in-between and no funding.
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.
> I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK?
Pretty common in Australia too. ;)
Pretty common in Australia too. ;)
Worked for one of these that moved to Australia from the UK!
I have seen a few of those in netherlands too.
It seems the site is experiencing a hug of death :(
Archive links:
https://archive.is/KJBWF
https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...
Archive links:
https://archive.is/KJBWF
https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...
My first developer job was at some company making shit iphone apps like this, two years before this guy... but they were almost worse considering how stupid they were. People in those days would literally pay like a dollar for an app that just made a google maps search for 'ice cream' or 'liquor' because they didn't know how to use google maps. I realized pretty fast these guys were never going to make anything of actual value. One morning I woke up and decided I was sick of this enough, so instead of sending them a bunch of compiled crap apps like this, along with some data I had generated for them for some reason, (It was unreasonably large in the gigabytes) I had some fun. I wrote them some letter in the morning making it sound like I had gone crazy and born again christian at the same time, and instead of coming in to the office I sent them the stupid shit they asked me to do over skype (REALLY SLOW TRANSFER RATE like below 10kb/s) until like maybe a week later, shit still transferring, me already doing some other job... the fucking greasy guy from the marketing department showed up at my door early in the morning trying to get me to give it to him on a USB. It was pretty satisfying telling him to fuck off and to get off my property, and also never putting that on my resume.
This reminds me of a part I didn't mention in the article - they initially actually set up a second company called "Shady Apps" with a separate Developer account from which they upload the "people will buy anything for 99p" apps, on the basis that they would keep the "App Start" one clean for just the better quality ones.
One day Alex showed me a bunch of such apps they'd made - the "orgasm button" was one I can recall...
One day Alex showed me a bunch of such apps they'd made - the "orgasm button" was one I can recall...
haha yeah see if it made it past the review board (which didn't give a huge damn back then), then people WOULD pay 99p for it. Insane
I know many will disagree, but working a few jobs like this seems to be a rite of passage in some industries. I had some similar jobs back when I had the spare energy and lack of responsibilities to tolerate it and I look back on the time more fondly than I should. I made some friends, learnt how (not) to treat and tolerate certain types of people, and seat-of-the-pants developing has its educational moments.
If you are young and have a rough idea about what’s happening I can even see it as an experience you should allow yourself.
It’s probably more fun in hinsight.
It’s probably more fun in hinsight.
Agreed!
I would agree. My first programming job was terrible. But I learned what type of people and companies to avoid and that made picking a new job much easier down the road.
It's also something valuable to learn that naivety is something you can possess and be abused. Some of my friends in high school shared the awful jobs they had, and I realized very early on (thanks to runescape), there is a predatory force that could leave someone worse of than they started. Luckily there were no real established MLM or such, the worst was an eldery lady recruiting teenagers to "bulk buy" merchandise and sell it themselves in some god forsaken way to cut out the middle man and strike gold. Our friend group tried to dissuade him to the obvious scam, but he took his uncle's advice to heart rather than ours, the same uncle who professed the largest provincial university in our province was a scam. The company you keep is important for sure.
"Never work for a small business unless you own it". Citation: me, 35 years ago after my first small business employee experience.
I disagree with your advice. I work for a small business for over 5 years. Yeah, it has different vibes, sometimes we are cutting corners, or I have to touch frontend, backend and devops in the same day, but people in this company are amazing (almost everyone was hired because they knew someone already working for the company), my boss can appreciate good work and it's never expected to work overtime (excluding when our servers are down, but we almost never have such crisis). And, the best part - I was never hired to be a programmer, but to do some mundane excel work. I wanted to help, they gave me a chance and 5 years later I'm responsible for entire backend of this company. So my advice - never say never, always try to evaluate individually.
> I wanted to help, they gave me a chance and 5 years later I'm responsible for entire backend of this company.
With a commensurate increase in salary?
With a commensurate increase in salary?
When I said that my boss can appreciate good work I wasn’t talking about a “thank you” note ;)
I feel exactly the opposite: "never work for corporations unless they're paying really crazy money". With small companies there's everything, some are bad, some are great, there's a variety to choose from. Corporations are all the same: office politics, "company culture", pointless meetings, even more pointless HR people trying to artificially validate their existence, shifting of focus on passing the evaluations rather than getting work done, etc.
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.
"The common idea that unless you are building your own dream, you are building someone else's ignores the fact you can do both." - me now
I agree. You may get the odd exception, but seem to be rare.
Yup! My first experience was really bad. I would never do it again.
This is hilarious, and sadly not that unusual. You really do meet some utter lunatics working in these sorts of agencies/software houses - it seems worse in the UK too.
My first job was in a "new media" agency in London in the late 90s and you're absolutely right. It was basically Nathan Barley but for real. There were employees who slept under their desks, job applicants who ran screaming from the building mid interview, egomaniacal bosses - the works. I lasted a month but it was hilarious in retrospect.
Wow :-) I did watch Nathan Barley through as we had one of the people parodied working with us.
We referred to his end of the office as the rich end as opposed to the ordinary millionaire end where the VC CTO sat along with the rest of us (just $ millionaire's at one point)
First Tuesday back in 1998-2000 had a few chancers. I saw the original boo crew presenting and thought I could pick 3 managers at random where I worked and boo would have done better.
We referred to his end of the office as the rich end as opposed to the ordinary millionaire end where the VC CTO sat along with the rest of us (just $ millionaire's at one point)
First Tuesday back in 1998-2000 had a few chancers. I saw the original boo crew presenting and thought I could pick 3 managers at random where I worked and boo would have done better.
The US seems pretty rife with examples too. Everyone wants to be the next tech billionaire here. From my first job as a software dev from like 13 years ago, I believe the CEO that was running that shop is still sitting in prison to this day.
TBF, he was nothing but awesome to me and the rest of his employees but his business ethics left a lot to be desired in terms of what's legally allowed to secure a contract and to make matters worse he implicated his wife in the business who also ended up in legal trouble, which put them in a real bind. I think he ended up taking a much worse plea deal to keep his wife out of prison to care for his daughter.
TBF, he was nothing but awesome to me and the rest of his employees but his business ethics left a lot to be desired in terms of what's legally allowed to secure a contract and to make matters worse he implicated his wife in the business who also ended up in legal trouble, which put them in a real bind. I think he ended up taking a much worse plea deal to keep his wife out of prison to care for his daughter.
Aside from the abuse, what a great first dev job. You get to start and finish so many projects! No scrum! No user support! No defect triage!
Obviously a little tongue in cheek, but it sounds like they learned a lot, which is better than most first dev jobs.
Obviously a little tongue in cheek, but it sounds like they learned a lot, which is better than most first dev jobs.
In many ways it was a really good first job for me - the people and dodgy business ongoings aside - what I needed at the time was to build stuff in my own way on my own terms, but with purpose. The next job was a bit of a shock, but it was another new experience.
This rings true for me too (Also UK dev). I once worked for half a year at a company that was this bizarre. For example, we had several people come in - and leave - within a day. As soon as they saw how we were working they just left. I kind of found it funny only because the lead developer (now a very close friend) basically onboarded me with the company ethos after I'd been looking through my desk drawer and noticed a brown bag....
'What's in the bag mate?'
'I don't know...?'
'Have a look'
'....er, it seems to be....some receipts....a cafetiere.......and a what looks like a really really old banana'
'Welcome to [name of that company]!'
If he hadn't have been able to make a joke of it too I'd also have walked.
Our managing director was an utter nutjob...
Highlights include:
He once called us from a major UK motorway and asked us where he was meant to be driving (we'd not seen him in days, and said we assumed he must be on a sales visit).
He would almost weekly lose the keycard to our building...which was required to get to the office...to the point where we suspected he'd 'developed a taste for them' and was secretly snacking on these keycards.
He told us once that 'NASA can put people on the moon! We can do this!' After us telling him that what he wanted to do was completely impossible. Like literally not possible. He was getting hassled by a finance company who we'd built an app for, and ironically they were saying that 'the percentages don't all add up to 100% exactly'.
'They're unlikely to'
'We can make them!'
'We can't...'
'What's in the bag mate?'
'I don't know...?'
'Have a look'
'....er, it seems to be....some receipts....a cafetiere.......and a what looks like a really really old banana'
'Welcome to [name of that company]!'
If he hadn't have been able to make a joke of it too I'd also have walked.
Our managing director was an utter nutjob...
Highlights include:
He once called us from a major UK motorway and asked us where he was meant to be driving (we'd not seen him in days, and said we assumed he must be on a sales visit).
He would almost weekly lose the keycard to our building...which was required to get to the office...to the point where we suspected he'd 'developed a taste for them' and was secretly snacking on these keycards.
He told us once that 'NASA can put people on the moon! We can do this!' After us telling him that what he wanted to do was completely impossible. Like literally not possible. He was getting hassled by a finance company who we'd built an app for, and ironically they were saying that 'the percentages don't all add up to 100% exactly'.
'They're unlikely to'
'We can make them!'
'We can't...'
> to the point where we suspected he'd 'developed a taste for them' and was secretly snacking on these keycards.
Perhaps the UK Office show was a documentary after all.
Perhaps the UK Office show was a documentary after all.
> 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'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.
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 :)
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.
I've had a somewhat similar experience with my first tech job. I'm glad someone took a chance on me even when I had no professional experience.
Looking back now, however, getting screamed at in your face if you did something wrong is quite an awful experience. I hated it six months in, but luckily found another job after a few weeks.
Thankfully, I now have a decent amount of experience to allow me to not tolerate that kind of behavior.
Looking back now, however, getting screamed at in your face if you did something wrong is quite an awful experience. I hated it six months in, but luckily found another job after a few weeks.
Thankfully, I now have a decent amount of experience to allow me to not tolerate that kind of behavior.
Mine was pretty surreal also. I wrote software for the control room of nuclear power plants. Went with the crew that installed the hardware and software in the first plant. Turned it on, and the first words out of the plant managers mouth was "that can't be right".
There is a talk by german software engineer (fefe) who mentioned this scenario (kind of).
It goes something like this: I never wanted to write software for nuclear power plants or the likes where many lives depended the correctness of my work. Then a few years later I met a guy who was quite lax when it came to software security etc. When we talked he mentionend he worked writing code for nuclear powerplants.
It goes something like this: I never wanted to write software for nuclear power plants or the likes where many lives depended the correctness of my work. Then a few years later I met a guy who was quite lax when it came to software security etc. When we talked he mentionend he worked writing code for nuclear powerplants.
And then of course there's the old stereotype (I'm remembering from Idiocracy) of it being the smart people that don't want to have kids, while the dumb people, uh... end up with kids, and that the human race thus became dumber and dumber.
"security" was provided by those guys with machine guns at the entrance. This was effectively before the internet, so there was no cybersecurity threat.
And this was your first developer job...?
I am very curious how you wound up there.
The other comments are talking about minimum safe paranoia levels from the perspective of the applicants, but there's also the facility to consider: it would be reasonable/expected/etc to require everyone signing off on significant work to have maybe 10-15 years experience or so. I take it this wasn't happening?
I am very curious how you wound up there.
The other comments are talking about minimum safe paranoia levels from the perspective of the applicants, but there's also the facility to consider: it would be reasonable/expected/etc to require everyone signing off on significant work to have maybe 10-15 years experience or so. I take it this wasn't happening?
Yup - right out of engineering college. Westinghouse. They hired me because I said that I knew my way around a TCP/IP stack. They had no way of verifying that -but I did in fact have such skill, having written a networked multiplayer game (standard course project for CMU's "Operating Systems" course).
As for "experience", these were different times (1989) where a) people were rational about such things, b)I was more experienced than any of the mid-career engineers on some critical tech, c) Westinghouse was the place one got nuclear experience. Finally, I'll say that it was the best job experience of my career. I worked with an amazing team of dedicated engineers. And unlike today, they were all engineers.
As for "experience", these were different times (1989) where a) people were rational about such things, b)I was more experienced than any of the mid-career engineers on some critical tech, c) Westinghouse was the place one got nuclear experience. Finally, I'll say that it was the best job experience of my career. I worked with an amazing team of dedicated engineers. And unlike today, they were all engineers.
[deleted]
Did you fix it????
First - he was being hyperbolic. But I did look around for the nearest exit;)
There was nothing wrong with our software. It was just that they had never had such a fine-granular view into the status of the plant before.
There was nothing wrong with our software. It was just that they had never had such a fine-granular view into the status of the plant before.
That was a fun read.
On a side note, here, in NY, running any kind of "carting" business requires dealing with ... interesting ... people.
Trying to open an independent refuse business can be ... bad ... for your health.
On a side note, here, in NY, running any kind of "carting" business requires dealing with ... interesting ... people.
Trying to open an independent refuse business can be ... bad ... for your health.
I've heard similar with the cleaning industry in Oslo. Ahem, regular cleaning, not the other kind.
Sorry, I don't get what you or parent are referring to. Are these supposed to be some references to mob run businesses or something?
The garbage collection business in NY is notorious for being run by the mafia. "Cleaning" is a euphemism for the hitman business, at least in movies or pop culture.
To give you an explicit answer - yes.
My first job as a developer was a gift from heaven. I started as a non educated pho developer. I hardly knew the concept of OOP. A very talented smart colleague took care of me for about 4 years. He reached me everything. From PHP to C to high and low level programming. Without him I would be in a very different situation. After that first job I got a decent job at another company. Few years later I was able to start my own company. Now in my second company for a few years.
I believe coaching is the most important skill to have in a company. I was young inexperienced, but I was super motivated. Worked even during the evening's just because I liked it so much.
This was an excellent read thank you very much. I also worked in the area in a dodgy as heck company and everything rings true. So if anyone finds this story hard to believes its basically the norm for small IT businesses in the UK.
ah, yes.
The joys of working for small businesses.
I worked for someone who moved from reselling operating systems to selling childrens toys.
I worked for someone who built an on-premise competitor to google analytics and despite having many big customers never made a single dime.
I worked for someome who build a crappy web app and sold liceses for >20k a month to twenty clients and made a good living.
The joys of working for small businesses.
I worked for someone who moved from reselling operating systems to selling childrens toys.
I worked for someone who built an on-premise competitor to google analytics and despite having many big customers never made a single dime.
I worked for someome who build a crappy web app and sold liceses for >20k a month to twenty clients and made a good living.
Brilliant read, and oddly anxiety-inducing too.
My first tech job was working for a karaoke company in London. I was hired as a music production manager but was studying computer science in my spare time and convinced my boss to let me revamp all of their tech. They were a tiny company and they appreciated the help I think. The boss was a lovely guy too who really encouraged me to run with it. The company was kind of lawless, no contracts etc. All very 'fly by the seat of your pants' . Also located in a pretty bleak industrial estate interestingly.
They went from running their business off of an excel spreadsheet and rendering 4bit graphics for their videos to having an AWS-hosted HD video renderer, a streaming on-demand karaoke service, a brand new website /store and the ability to create ringtones on an industrial scale and upload them to iTunes. I didn't do the development of the actual software, I hired a few companies and individuals to do it and acted more like a product manager I guess. The thing about hacked Magento definitely rang some bells, what we managed to achieve through abusing that thing was a thing of wonder / horror. We did so much with the wrong tools and with very little investment. I did write some in-house tools and scripts too. A few were in Scala which is hilarious looking back as it's not really the sort of language your average non-software engineer coder is going to know. After I left, they basically left all of my tools unmaintained in the hope they would keep on working forever as none of the Magento types they had on their books knew about this.
All in all it was an amazing experience to have this freedom. I could do what I wanted, I genuinely transformed the company by rewriting their internal tool chain, built new tech products for them and got to solve some quite interesting problems. These days I work on 'big tech', big corp stuff and I love it but I do miss the freedom.
They went from running their business off of an excel spreadsheet and rendering 4bit graphics for their videos to having an AWS-hosted HD video renderer, a streaming on-demand karaoke service, a brand new website /store and the ability to create ringtones on an industrial scale and upload them to iTunes. I didn't do the development of the actual software, I hired a few companies and individuals to do it and acted more like a product manager I guess. The thing about hacked Magento definitely rang some bells, what we managed to achieve through abusing that thing was a thing of wonder / horror. We did so much with the wrong tools and with very little investment. I did write some in-house tools and scripts too. A few were in Scala which is hilarious looking back as it's not really the sort of language your average non-software engineer coder is going to know. After I left, they basically left all of my tools unmaintained in the hope they would keep on working forever as none of the Magento types they had on their books knew about this.
All in all it was an amazing experience to have this freedom. I could do what I wanted, I genuinely transformed the company by rewriting their internal tool chain, built new tech products for them and got to solve some quite interesting problems. These days I work on 'big tech', big corp stuff and I love it but I do miss the freedom.
“One thing that might strike you as odd is the bizarre graphics.”
No, no! It's quite enjoyable, actually! The cute sheep. The purple cow. They gave me a good and hearty laugh once I saw them.
No, no! It's quite enjoyable, actually! The cute sheep. The purple cow. They gave me a good and hearty laugh once I saw them.
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.
Please write a post about it. Sounds hilarious!
It was much longer back when I the memory of it was fresh, but here it is:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
Are you really gonna leave us like that?
Took me a while and some details are missing, but here it is:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
Amazing, thanks. I swear, these sleazy guys are always into A) Cars and/or B) Bodybuilding.
It all happened in August 2011. I was still in college and was searching for a summer job in IT.
I responded to a job listing and was invited to an interview with a small company located at the other side of the city. I suited up and took the bus there.
The company was indeed small - their office was the size of an apartment. That couldn't be said about the owner though(named D. in this story), who happened to be at the door when I arrived - I would later learn that he used to be a bodybuilder (important detail).
Our exchange went as follows:
- Is this Company X?
- Yeah. You for the interview?
- Yes.
- Zajebiście (translates to "awesome", but is also an expletive).
The interview went well, because there were really no technical questions. Actually, it went so well that he told me I could start right away, so I did.
Thus began my work experience in that place. Every morning when I arrived D. would call me to his office and talk to me for at least an hour. Our little chit-chat was usually broken up by his CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady, who would rush me back to work and scold D. for wasting my time. I would then return and ask my supervisor - M. what's the plan for that day. M. spent an average 11h every day in the office and was de facto running the place. I wanted to make a good impression, so I started spending 10h there.
My duties included writing web scrapers and so-called "ant sites" (loose translation) - small pages with links to the site our customer was paying us to have higher in Google's search results.
During those morning meetings D. would pitch me his ideas or show something that he thought was cool. Examples:
- An episode of Metal Motivation with the music from Chariots of Fire and some other song played simultaneously to a CGI clip of a meteor hitting Earth. D. trailed off before explaining the reason for showing me this.
- A "3D" gif of the hourglass nebula - he said that this is going to be a hit and that he talked about this with Brian May (the musician/astrophysicist).
- "know your date of death" - a premium SMS campaign in the form of a quiz that he coordinated. I remembered that one from a year before - disregarded it as spa.. Turns out that he sold the aggregated results from those quizzes to insurance companies, who could then plan their pricing strategy based on that. The questions were pretty personal, but that was before GDPR, so yeah.
- This one got him really exited: he sat me down on a leather-clad chair, gave me a pair of stereoscopic paper glasses and showed... 3D porn.
At that moment I started asking myself what kind of mental institution I landed in, but the CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady interrupted us, ordered me to go back to work and asked D. "does this sculpture need to be here?" - she meant the tower PC chassis next to the door that looked as if someone gave it a few healthy whacks with a baseball bat.
I would later learn that D. slept an average of 4h a day and at times was aggressive.
But the weirdest was yet to come: you see while D. spent most of the day in his office, in the afternoons he liked to have a stroll around the place and stand look over peoples' shoulders.
One such time I was minding my own business when I registered his presence, bit something was off. I turned in my chair towards D. and noted that he is not wearing pants - just a shirt and briefs. More importantly my face at an unfortunate height.
He noticed my confusion and explained that since he used to be a bodybuilder, his legs are fairly thick, so he's uncomfortable in pants. I chose to accept this new reality.
Later on it proved to be more of a thing than I originally thought. We tried to hire a secretary. I've seen four of them and the the one who lasted the longest (a week) reportedly had this conversation during the interview:
- By the way, are you fine with me walking around the office without pants?
- Oh, it's no problem - I have four brothers so I'm used to this.
The CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady did not enjoy this development and made sure that girl quit ASAP.
Our relationship started to sour when, after returning from a few days off which I took, I learned that I would be paid minimum wage. I wanted to reach D. about this but he was busy smoking weed and drinking vodka with his clients/friends/businesses partners. I quit on the spot and that was the end of it.
I responded to a job listing and was invited to an interview with a small company located at the other side of the city. I suited up and took the bus there.
The company was indeed small - their office was the size of an apartment. That couldn't be said about the owner though(named D. in this story), who happened to be at the door when I arrived - I would later learn that he used to be a bodybuilder (important detail).
Our exchange went as follows:
- Is this Company X?
- Yeah. You for the interview?
- Yes.
- Zajebiście (translates to "awesome", but is also an expletive).
The interview went well, because there were really no technical questions. Actually, it went so well that he told me I could start right away, so I did.
Thus began my work experience in that place. Every morning when I arrived D. would call me to his office and talk to me for at least an hour. Our little chit-chat was usually broken up by his CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady, who would rush me back to work and scold D. for wasting my time. I would then return and ask my supervisor - M. what's the plan for that day. M. spent an average 11h every day in the office and was de facto running the place. I wanted to make a good impression, so I started spending 10h there.
My duties included writing web scrapers and so-called "ant sites" (loose translation) - small pages with links to the site our customer was paying us to have higher in Google's search results.
During those morning meetings D. would pitch me his ideas or show something that he thought was cool. Examples:
- An episode of Metal Motivation with the music from Chariots of Fire and some other song played simultaneously to a CGI clip of a meteor hitting Earth. D. trailed off before explaining the reason for showing me this.
- A "3D" gif of the hourglass nebula - he said that this is going to be a hit and that he talked about this with Brian May (the musician/astrophysicist).
- "know your date of death" - a premium SMS campaign in the form of a quiz that he coordinated. I remembered that one from a year before - disregarded it as spa.. Turns out that he sold the aggregated results from those quizzes to insurance companies, who could then plan their pricing strategy based on that. The questions were pretty personal, but that was before GDPR, so yeah.
- This one got him really exited: he sat me down on a leather-clad chair, gave me a pair of stereoscopic paper glasses and showed... 3D porn.
At that moment I started asking myself what kind of mental institution I landed in, but the CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady interrupted us, ordered me to go back to work and asked D. "does this sculpture need to be here?" - she meant the tower PC chassis next to the door that looked as if someone gave it a few healthy whacks with a baseball bat.
I would later learn that D. slept an average of 4h a day and at times was aggressive.
But the weirdest was yet to come: you see while D. spent most of the day in his office, in the afternoons he liked to have a stroll around the place and stand look over peoples' shoulders.
One such time I was minding my own business when I registered his presence, bit something was off. I turned in my chair towards D. and noted that he is not wearing pants - just a shirt and briefs. More importantly my face at an unfortunate height.
He noticed my confusion and explained that since he used to be a bodybuilder, his legs are fairly thick, so he's uncomfortable in pants. I chose to accept this new reality.
Later on it proved to be more of a thing than I originally thought. We tried to hire a secretary. I've seen four of them and the the one who lasted the longest (a week) reportedly had this conversation during the interview:
- By the way, are you fine with me walking around the office without pants?
- Oh, it's no problem - I have four brothers so I'm used to this.
The CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady did not enjoy this development and made sure that girl quit ASAP.
Our relationship started to sour when, after returning from a few days off which I took, I learned that I would be paid minimum wage. I wanted to reach D. about this but he was busy smoking weed and drinking vodka with his clients/friends/businesses partners. I quit on the spot and that was the end of it.
I know I’m stating the obvious here and please believe me when I say I mean no disrespect to the stories shared.
If you’re working for a small/unknown/“shady” etc business demand frequent payment for work done.
Ask to receive payment every week or every fortnight.
Default to “no” for any promises of future payments or “options/equity” etc. If it’s not cash in your bank account you are trading an immediate tangible good (your service) for an intangible promise.
Be aware of short (3-6 months) contracts with an acceptance criteria and payment at the end. Stipulate fortnightly milestones that accommodate some variability in what you deliver and that are met with payment.
No payment then no more work until payment resumes.
If you’re working for a small/unknown/“shady” etc business demand frequent payment for work done.
Ask to receive payment every week or every fortnight.
Default to “no” for any promises of future payments or “options/equity” etc. If it’s not cash in your bank account you are trading an immediate tangible good (your service) for an intangible promise.
Be aware of short (3-6 months) contracts with an acceptance criteria and payment at the end. Stipulate fortnightly milestones that accommodate some variability in what you deliver and that are met with payment.
No payment then no more work until payment resumes.
This reminds me of an early job I had. Except my boss was closer to retirement age and had basically earned a great deal of money as an industrial sales rep. His whole business was basically providing sales staff for big industrial manufacturers.
I actually went in to pitch him to become an investor in my small startup that was in the education sector. He was immediately interested but wanted me to also help him with several projects he was working on. He needed "a tech guy". He was the first wealthy business guy (but not the last) to tell me he was going to make me rich.
We pretty immediately started meeting with other people, he had me hiring a few employees, buying computers, having custom office furniture commissioned and checking out office space.
It was a whirlwind of different, seemingly unrelated ventures. There was my business, which I was trying to get off the ground, though after a few months, still hadn't received any investment. But I was bootstrapping it with money that I was earning working for this guy. Then there was some energy drink MLM that I think one of his rich friend's wife had signed him up for and he was buying cases and cases of it to meet quotas with plans to sell it. We had also hired a friend of mine as a sales person for some sort of mineral that I think is used in cattle feed and there were several other things going on.
We were flying around in his private plane, all over the state and region meeting with people. We would start around 5am and might fly to one part of the state, then by lunch, be one state over, then back to a local business by dinner and many times finishing up by around 9pm or even later sometimes. Lucky for me, I was just acting as a "consultant" since I was supposed to be trying to build my business. So I was just sending invoices to his secretary for my time. But I had almost no time for my own business. Though I was too busy living in this strange daze of so many projects and ideas being bounced around all fueled with seemingly unlimited money and a private jet zipping us around on a whim.
I realized things were probably coming to a head when he asked one day how "we" were doing with my education startup and if there was any free cash flow yet that we could start using for some of these other ventures (this was probably 3 months after I had pitched it to him). Of course, he had not actually given me any money for my business. But I think he sort of thought the consulting money he was paying me and his presence was just naturally building equity for him in my business.
I just told him no, we don't have any free cash flow yet and he jumped on to the next topic. His adult son, who by then was running the family business started showing up more and it seemed he was trying to rein in his father's spending. Apparently, he had spent down most of his retirement savings in those few months and he had attracted quite the cadre of grifters and hangers on (the room full of energy drinks was now starting to spill over into the vacant office next door). Perhaps to some outsiders, I seemed like one of those hangers on, but I was just a college student on summer break, excited about the constant action and interest that a prominent, wealthy businessman had in me and my business.
I would only catch bits and pieces of conversations here and there but I pieced together that the muscle relaxers that he had recently been prescribed for his back pain seemed to trigger a sort of manic state that was fueling all this craziness. We had to start laying people off and cutting any ongoing expenses and since university was starting back up, I sort of saw myself to the door and started responding to text messages and emails a little slower and slower and excusing myself from his business outings more and more frequently until he eventually moved on to fresher faces.
Definitely a weird but fun college summer break.
I actually went in to pitch him to become an investor in my small startup that was in the education sector. He was immediately interested but wanted me to also help him with several projects he was working on. He needed "a tech guy". He was the first wealthy business guy (but not the last) to tell me he was going to make me rich.
We pretty immediately started meeting with other people, he had me hiring a few employees, buying computers, having custom office furniture commissioned and checking out office space.
It was a whirlwind of different, seemingly unrelated ventures. There was my business, which I was trying to get off the ground, though after a few months, still hadn't received any investment. But I was bootstrapping it with money that I was earning working for this guy. Then there was some energy drink MLM that I think one of his rich friend's wife had signed him up for and he was buying cases and cases of it to meet quotas with plans to sell it. We had also hired a friend of mine as a sales person for some sort of mineral that I think is used in cattle feed and there were several other things going on.
We were flying around in his private plane, all over the state and region meeting with people. We would start around 5am and might fly to one part of the state, then by lunch, be one state over, then back to a local business by dinner and many times finishing up by around 9pm or even later sometimes. Lucky for me, I was just acting as a "consultant" since I was supposed to be trying to build my business. So I was just sending invoices to his secretary for my time. But I had almost no time for my own business. Though I was too busy living in this strange daze of so many projects and ideas being bounced around all fueled with seemingly unlimited money and a private jet zipping us around on a whim.
I realized things were probably coming to a head when he asked one day how "we" were doing with my education startup and if there was any free cash flow yet that we could start using for some of these other ventures (this was probably 3 months after I had pitched it to him). Of course, he had not actually given me any money for my business. But I think he sort of thought the consulting money he was paying me and his presence was just naturally building equity for him in my business.
I just told him no, we don't have any free cash flow yet and he jumped on to the next topic. His adult son, who by then was running the family business started showing up more and it seemed he was trying to rein in his father's spending. Apparently, he had spent down most of his retirement savings in those few months and he had attracted quite the cadre of grifters and hangers on (the room full of energy drinks was now starting to spill over into the vacant office next door). Perhaps to some outsiders, I seemed like one of those hangers on, but I was just a college student on summer break, excited about the constant action and interest that a prominent, wealthy businessman had in me and my business.
I would only catch bits and pieces of conversations here and there but I pieced together that the muscle relaxers that he had recently been prescribed for his back pain seemed to trigger a sort of manic state that was fueling all this craziness. We had to start laying people off and cutting any ongoing expenses and since university was starting back up, I sort of saw myself to the door and started responding to text messages and emails a little slower and slower and excusing myself from his business outings more and more frequently until he eventually moved on to fresher faces.
Definitely a weird but fun college summer break.
> I would only catch bits and pieces of conversations here and there but I pieced together that the muscle relaxers that he had recently been prescribed for his back pain seemed to trigger a sort of manic state that was fueling all this craziness.
I'd read the whole rest of the post thinking "yep, cocaine is a hell of a drug", but yeah, there we go.
I'd read the whole rest of the post thinking "yep, cocaine is a hell of a drug", but yeah, there we go.
Ya, the ongoing joke was that it was like he was on cocaine, but we all knew that wasn't the case. It was basically the rich guy equivalent of "meth lady shopping": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo6KMeKHSx0
But later having witnessed a few manic episodes from people with bi-polar disorder, it was definitely like that, but without the depressive moments. And he would occasionally have moments of clarity where he would make a bunch of rational decisions. So it was hard to spot that something was up.
But later having witnessed a few manic episodes from people with bi-polar disorder, it was definitely like that, but without the depressive moments. And he would occasionally have moments of clarity where he would make a bunch of rational decisions. So it was hard to spot that something was up.
Buying MLM energy drinks (and indeed any MLM product) is a very bad sign.
[deleted]
"I grew fed up of being stuck in this e-commerce framework – having to work with its hyper-normalised MySQL database (the EAV model)"
2011? Had to be Magento. Not a great fit with what they were trying to accomplish. Not that they seemed to have a clear understanding of how to accomplish what they wanted, which was to throw spaghetti at a wall and hope something made them rich.
2011? Had to be Magento. Not a great fit with what they were trying to accomplish. Not that they seemed to have a clear understanding of how to accomplish what they wanted, which was to throw spaghetti at a wall and hope something made them rich.
Yes, it was Magento. And you're right about the rest too :)
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 brother was with me, and he had ended up landing a job as a tour guide for one of the big tour companies on the island. It so happened that the company was also looking for a web developer at the time, and my brother knew I had done a few small freelance projects in the past, so he recommended me to them for the position.
When I showed up for the interview, there was no white boarding, no engineers to talk to. At a small office in downtown Honolulu that also served as their tour bus depot, I met Diego, the Cuban-Hawaiian owner of the company, who was in board shorts and a t-shirt watering his banana plants. He took one look at me and hired me on the spot. Why? I had no idea at the time. But I'd find out soon enough.
Diego was obscenely wealthy. But Diego also turned out to be a swinger, and he and his Latin pop star wife had taken a real liking to me. What followed was a whirlwind of insanity. In between learning to write Javascript and PHP while working on our websites during the day, I was having wild threesomes, flying to Miami to stay in 5 star hotels, private flights to Maui and Kauai, staying in mountainside mansions overlooking the island, and generally living an absurd lifestyle. We ran practically every tour you could do on the island, and it was all free for me, so that meant beach houses to stay in, SCUBA diving (I ended up getting certified during that time), island excursions, every activity you could imagine. I even logged about 20 hours of flight training in the company plane.
We embarked on a complete rebuild of their reservation and online booking system. I knew nothing but a bit of HTML and CSS, but figured I could fake it and learn. The team consisted of myself and a couple of senior developers who had been contracted from the mainland. Our "office" was a converted attic above the bus garage. I didn't realize it at the time, but we were actually doing serious multimillion dollar e-commerce revenue. And I was able to save him a ton of money by switching out our payment provider on the fly during an outage of the existing one.
It all ended up going down in flames as he was, of course, an insane person. I was living in a high-rise apartment in downtown Honolulu that they had rented for me, and Diego flipped out after finding out I'd had other women up there. After he chucked my brand new fully loaded i7 MBP out of the 20th story window in a fit of rage, I knew I had to get the hell out of that situation. I bought a plane ticket to San Francisco, landed my first "real real" dev job, and the rest is history. Diego ended up getting taken down by a class action sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a raft of other employees, and forced out of his business. But I never held any ill will toward the guy, he was just a total nut.
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 brother was with me, and he had ended up landing a job as a tour guide for one of the big tour companies on the island. It so happened that the company was also looking for a web developer at the time, and my brother knew I had done a few small freelance projects in the past, so he recommended me to them for the position.
When I showed up for the interview, there was no white boarding, no engineers to talk to. At a small office in downtown Honolulu that also served as their tour bus depot, I met Diego, the Cuban-Hawaiian owner of the company, who was in board shorts and a t-shirt watering his banana plants. He took one look at me and hired me on the spot. Why? I had no idea at the time. But I'd find out soon enough.
Diego was obscenely wealthy. But Diego also turned out to be a swinger, and he and his Latin pop star wife had taken a real liking to me. What followed was a whirlwind of insanity. In between learning to write Javascript and PHP while working on our websites during the day, I was having wild threesomes, flying to Miami to stay in 5 star hotels, private flights to Maui and Kauai, staying in mountainside mansions overlooking the island, and generally living an absurd lifestyle. We ran practically every tour you could do on the island, and it was all free for me, so that meant beach houses to stay in, SCUBA diving (I ended up getting certified during that time), island excursions, every activity you could imagine. I even logged about 20 hours of flight training in the company plane.
We embarked on a complete rebuild of their reservation and online booking system. I knew nothing but a bit of HTML and CSS, but figured I could fake it and learn. The team consisted of myself and a couple of senior developers who had been contracted from the mainland. Our "office" was a converted attic above the bus garage. I didn't realize it at the time, but we were actually doing serious multimillion dollar e-commerce revenue. And I was able to save him a ton of money by switching out our payment provider on the fly during an outage of the existing one.
It all ended up going down in flames as he was, of course, an insane person. I was living in a high-rise apartment in downtown Honolulu that they had rented for me, and Diego flipped out after finding out I'd had other women up there. After he chucked my brand new fully loaded i7 MBP out of the 20th story window in a fit of rage, I knew I had to get the hell out of that situation. I bought a plane ticket to San Francisco, landed my first "real real" dev job, and the rest is history. Diego ended up getting taken down by a class action sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a raft of other employees, and forced out of his business. But I never held any ill will toward the guy, he was just a total nut.
archive.org mirror (page is currently hugged to death): https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...
> made false representations to creditors in attempt to wipe out debts
Funny how that got him a suspended sentence, while the gambling did not.
Funny how that got him a suspended sentence, while the gambling did not.
Google cache link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
Just read a good non-fiction book about con men, one of them pulls this exact ruse:
https://www.amazon.com/Cleantech-Artists-True-Vegas-Caper-eb...
https://www.amazon.com/Cleantech-Artists-True-Vegas-Caper-eb...
The flip side of the egomaniacal types in the story and comments is that the world is equally full of skilled people with great ideas and coding skills who write really useful software but have no clue of how to get it off the ground and growing it into a valuable business.
How do some salespeople learn the art of dressing up absolute crap as 'the next big thing' and wielding substantial power with zero capability, whilst many brainiacs are effectively ego-midgets who even if they invented time travel would struggle to find a ready buyer?
I think Jordan Peterson is right for many people when he says you need to act beyond your self-imposed mental limits because otherwise you sell yourself short.
There seems to be a level of self-criticism which causes certain types of people (say type Theta) to work on developing real skills but hurts their sales ability and self belief. People who lack that (say type Zeta) are capable of selling sand in the Sahara but may have very little other technical / professional skills - and this is in no way a criticism of sales ability, which is worth gold.
If you're a Theta, perhaps you need to be more Zeta, and vice versa.
How do some salespeople learn the art of dressing up absolute crap as 'the next big thing' and wielding substantial power with zero capability, whilst many brainiacs are effectively ego-midgets who even if they invented time travel would struggle to find a ready buyer?
I think Jordan Peterson is right for many people when he says you need to act beyond your self-imposed mental limits because otherwise you sell yourself short.
There seems to be a level of self-criticism which causes certain types of people (say type Theta) to work on developing real skills but hurts their sales ability and self belief. People who lack that (say type Zeta) are capable of selling sand in the Sahara but may have very little other technical / professional skills - and this is in no way a criticism of sales ability, which is worth gold.
If you're a Theta, perhaps you need to be more Zeta, and vice versa.
In the United States we're basically not allowed to create lottos. It sounds like maybe half the dev shops in the UK are just creating online lottos? Or at least that's the impression this story is giving me.
This is a wild story. A lot of people get their start in dev work at crazy shops like this. I don't know if there are more or less companies like this in 2021 but they certainly still exist.
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 only illegal if someone prosecutes. (See American Government)
It's unlikely a defunct company, run by a convicted guy, employing a person that didn't sign an employment contract (and by extension, a Non Disclosure Agreement) would pay attention to this, much less go after him.
It's unlikely a defunct company, run by a convicted guy, employing a person that didn't sign an employment contract (and by extension, a Non Disclosure Agreement) would pay attention to this, much less go after him.
Phew!
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.
There are exceptions, of course, e.g. revealing trade secrets or insider information on a publicly traded company.
In Finland it's legal to publish private correspondence, as long as at least one party gives permission (e.g. the party who receives email).
Had to laugh at the giving away of Fosters beer ... it's an Australian beer but nobody in their right mind here drinks it. Only place I've even seen people drink it is in the UK.
We drank it in Scandinavia in the... Eighties, I think; maybe early nineties. I was young then, so I blame the foolishness of youth.
I can totally relate to this, especially the hacked Magento build part and "you won't leave until it's done".
Good lord, that was my life for so long.
I've had the opportunity to meet a lot of junior devs and I'm envious of their jobs. It was a lot wilder and messier when I started but I now see juniors in more developed, mature roles than me. I can't help but be envious.
The real trick is to not get burn out and lose your love for the industry.
I've had the opportunity to meet a lot of junior devs and I'm envious of their jobs. It was a lot wilder and messier when I started but I now see juniors in more developed, mature roles than me. I can't help but be envious.
The real trick is to not get burn out and lose your love for the industry.
Reminds me of my small time spent at a startup that focused on OCR scanning Medicaid documents (not going to name anything).
My friend and I worked for some random local millionaire in our area who wanted to create an automated system for processing Medicaid-related documents. We bootstrapped a bunch of Python/C# code to create an illusion of a website that did something. In reality all it did was take document uploads, run a Tesseract OCR program, and regex through text. That worked for about one document out of a hundred on average.
Initially we started as contract workers, but then the millionaire decided to create a "real" company/startup with an office. I started commuting to work, and the millionaire brought in his newly-grad MBA son not much older than us to lead the company. The son also brought his best friend on-board who was another Stanford grad. So we did a bunch of back-breaking coding while these guys ran a skeleton business hiring new people and letting us slowly hire our college friends to do "work". Our friends were barely fresh out of college comp sci students and didn't know much about developing in a professional setting at all, so we hardly meshed and collaborated on anything.
We didn't use teamwork tools like Git properly, didn't set up issue tracking, and we hardly ever communicated in a group. My friend who I worked with was focused more on infrastructure, and I was stuck trying to figure out how to read PDFs and documents in a secure fashion that wouldn't leak data for fear of HIPAA violations (we even had a HIPAA training class at some point in office, which I don't think most of us took seriously).
Our software wasn't improving and we had a ton of issues hitting benchmarks and passing on test documents we had. After our HIPAA training, my friend and I had a dilemma where we wanted our systems to be secure. He said we shouldn't want to write things at all to disk, because if servers were compromised, all of those Medicaid docs would be exposed. He was kind of right, but we had users log into accounts to view what they submitted, so this was highly baffling. Instead he wanted to store things to memory temporarily, but I really didn't know how to do this part at all. Our OCR and document uploads went to disk, so parts of our systems had to be modified. He tasked me with securing this all by myself while he set up deployment and general infrastructure.
I didn't know anything about solving these issues. I was hardly a security expert. I wrote Django and some Linux shell scripts, but my experience in security was none. At the time I didn't know how to create memory-file mappings in Linux, so I was stuck trying to modify an OCR program to read and write from and to memory. Tesseract OCR was written in C++ and I am by no means an expert in C++ at all. None of our classes had taught that, so really I only had my Java experience to fall back on.
Eventually I started feeling pressure at work and not being up to the job. In meetings I had to say that I wasn't going to meet a deadline for a task and that I would need assistance. I would get told to "Google it" and figure it out and have it done by next time. I would actively look for tasks from my coworkers to avoid doing my own work and tried to look busy and active and helpful. Impostor syndrome started creeping up, and I started having breakdowns after work. I knew I had to do something.
I left on my own volition and I haven't spoken to my friend ever since. I felt better because I wasn't confident in my skill-set. I started going to therapy, and was happy writing my own little software hobby projects while pursuing much less intense jobs.
This was almost 8 years ago and I haven't written software professionally ever since. I figured the company would flop because it had bare-bones leadership and the millionaire investor was sketchy as hell and had too many demands. The company is still going strong it seems and re-branded themselves to a new name. I think they still do document processing. They have a fancy office now in New York City. My friend who I no longer speak to anymore left that place a while ago and works in DevOps at a new company. He was a really good friend for trying to get me into the tech world like this.
I learned a lot since then about comp-sci and software development, but I still feel impostor syndrome when I try to apply to jobs now.
My friend and I worked for some random local millionaire in our area who wanted to create an automated system for processing Medicaid-related documents. We bootstrapped a bunch of Python/C# code to create an illusion of a website that did something. In reality all it did was take document uploads, run a Tesseract OCR program, and regex through text. That worked for about one document out of a hundred on average.
Initially we started as contract workers, but then the millionaire decided to create a "real" company/startup with an office. I started commuting to work, and the millionaire brought in his newly-grad MBA son not much older than us to lead the company. The son also brought his best friend on-board who was another Stanford grad. So we did a bunch of back-breaking coding while these guys ran a skeleton business hiring new people and letting us slowly hire our college friends to do "work". Our friends were barely fresh out of college comp sci students and didn't know much about developing in a professional setting at all, so we hardly meshed and collaborated on anything.
We didn't use teamwork tools like Git properly, didn't set up issue tracking, and we hardly ever communicated in a group. My friend who I worked with was focused more on infrastructure, and I was stuck trying to figure out how to read PDFs and documents in a secure fashion that wouldn't leak data for fear of HIPAA violations (we even had a HIPAA training class at some point in office, which I don't think most of us took seriously).
Our software wasn't improving and we had a ton of issues hitting benchmarks and passing on test documents we had. After our HIPAA training, my friend and I had a dilemma where we wanted our systems to be secure. He said we shouldn't want to write things at all to disk, because if servers were compromised, all of those Medicaid docs would be exposed. He was kind of right, but we had users log into accounts to view what they submitted, so this was highly baffling. Instead he wanted to store things to memory temporarily, but I really didn't know how to do this part at all. Our OCR and document uploads went to disk, so parts of our systems had to be modified. He tasked me with securing this all by myself while he set up deployment and general infrastructure.
I didn't know anything about solving these issues. I was hardly a security expert. I wrote Django and some Linux shell scripts, but my experience in security was none. At the time I didn't know how to create memory-file mappings in Linux, so I was stuck trying to modify an OCR program to read and write from and to memory. Tesseract OCR was written in C++ and I am by no means an expert in C++ at all. None of our classes had taught that, so really I only had my Java experience to fall back on.
Eventually I started feeling pressure at work and not being up to the job. In meetings I had to say that I wasn't going to meet a deadline for a task and that I would need assistance. I would get told to "Google it" and figure it out and have it done by next time. I would actively look for tasks from my coworkers to avoid doing my own work and tried to look busy and active and helpful. Impostor syndrome started creeping up, and I started having breakdowns after work. I knew I had to do something.
I left on my own volition and I haven't spoken to my friend ever since. I felt better because I wasn't confident in my skill-set. I started going to therapy, and was happy writing my own little software hobby projects while pursuing much less intense jobs.
This was almost 8 years ago and I haven't written software professionally ever since. I figured the company would flop because it had bare-bones leadership and the millionaire investor was sketchy as hell and had too many demands. The company is still going strong it seems and re-branded themselves to a new name. I think they still do document processing. They have a fancy office now in New York City. My friend who I no longer speak to anymore left that place a while ago and works in DevOps at a new company. He was a really good friend for trying to get me into the tech world like this.
I learned a lot since then about comp-sci and software development, but I still feel impostor syndrome when I try to apply to jobs now.
Reading these comments makes me realise how lucky I was in my first job. Brilliant people and amazing tech.
Same here, we must have been lucky. My early experience in agencies were fantastic.
It was only when I began contracting that I started to encounter scrappy companies, which made it a lot easier to deal with the dysfunction. We often had the perm benefits, a decent day rate, could clock out on the hour, and didn't have to take part in internal politics. Blissful in comparison to the perm roles.
It was only when I began contracting that I started to encounter scrappy companies, which made it a lot easier to deal with the dysfunction. We often had the perm benefits, a decent day rate, could clock out on the hour, and didn't have to take part in internal politics. Blissful in comparison to the perm roles.
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.
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.
Absolutely! It's what I needed at the time. An experience to learn from, plus getting paid to build something cool and prove myself a little.
Man, I got some stories. I don't tend to write them down. Funny read.
I have learned a lot as a self-taught developer. At first, the experience is quite something new. I am always looking forward to contributing changes to the projects assigned to me.
This story has an Irvine Welsh flavor
Half-a-job Bob, hahaha!!
He'd randomly lay off huge numbers of the sales team, and the first anyone would know about it is when the door code would be changed and we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS) for the new code.
His grand idea to save the failing online learning platform was "pivoting" to selling personalised dog food online........... (and I mean personalised in the sense of just slapping the dogs name and their face on some generic crap dog food, not actually nutritionally personalised to the dog)
Left that place being owed 3 months wages (which I never got).
Last I heard he was being investigated for fraud. (this was the scum bag in question: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/04/barclays-sm...)