[HN Gopher] The surreal experience of my first developer job
___________________________________________________________________
The surreal experience of my first developer job
Author : benn_88
Score : 599 points
Date : 2021-08-04 09:04 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bennuttall.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bennuttall.com)
| tester34 wrote:
| wow, where are your startups now, news_hacker? ;)
| gregwiin wrote:
| 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.
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| overkalix wrote:
| Are you really gonna leave us like that?
| Tade0 wrote:
| Took me a while and some details are missing, but here it is:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
| benn_88 wrote:
| UK pants or US pants?
| Tade0 wrote:
| US, fortunately.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
|
| - Zajebiscie (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.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Please write a post about it. Sounds hilarious!
| Tade0 wrote:
| It was much longer back when I the memory of it was fresh,
| but here it is:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
| csilverman wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q7Cy3qSwKI&ab_channel=MattH...
| Tade0 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
| dakial1 wrote:
| 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.
| brycewray wrote:
| "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=...
| csours wrote:
| Shameless plug for a friends' podcast:
| https://www.stitcher.com/show/lie-cheat-steal
| systemBuilder wrote:
| 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 .
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| I don't tend to hold "rock-solid businessmen" in high regard
| either.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Netflix is running a show about deLorean and the chap who ran
| the whole thing. Ended up in jail for drugs smuggling.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| 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.
| clubdorothe wrote:
| When googling about the business owner "Andrew John Camilleri",
| the first result is for his implication with the "Paradise
| paper"[1]
|
| [1] https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/56050262
| Amin699 wrote:
| The first interview I had was a general developer job in a small
| company in Stockport - the job required Microsoft Access
| experience, and for some reason this was still something I
| considered myself to have, and was willing to promise to others I
| had, which baffles me now. I ended up having a really great chat
| with the company boss at the interview. He asked some great
| interview questions about data analysis, and we spent about 90
| minutes in conversation - he was fascinated by what I'd studied
| at uni - particularly data visualisation and dynamical systems &
| chaos. I did get offered the job but he was too late - I'd
| already had my second interview and they asked me to start
| immediately.
| abraae wrote:
| > Do it today tomorrow doesn't exist !
|
| Epic motivational line.
| durnygbur wrote:
| Do it today like there's no tomorrow.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| If there's no tomorrow, I'm getting the hell out of any place
| I don't love to be and having some damn fun.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| petercooper wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| 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.
| benn_88 wrote:
| Agreed!
| mrmuagi wrote:
| 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.
| zz865 wrote:
| > 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.
| siva7 wrote:
| at least you know on your first day that you should start
| looking for another job ;)
| benn_88 wrote:
| 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
| :)
| agent327 wrote:
| 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.
| SolubleSnake wrote:
| 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...'
| mrmuagi wrote:
| > 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.
| jmfldn wrote:
| 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.
| benmarks wrote:
| "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.
| trhoad wrote:
| 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.
| petercooper wrote:
| 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.
| walshemj wrote:
| 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.
| evilduck wrote:
| 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.
| mapgrep wrote:
| Google cache link
| http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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/
| suction wrote:
| 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.
| rambambram wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. I see they are opening an office in
| Nijmegen as well, nice.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| 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.
| testudovictoria wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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.
| holoduke wrote:
| 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.
| csours wrote:
| 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.
| benn_88 wrote:
| 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.
| ionwake wrote:
| 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.
| byteface wrote:
| Man, I got some stories. I don't tend to write them down. Funny
| read.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| 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.
| benn_88 wrote:
| 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...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| kebman wrote:
| I've heard similar with the cleaning industry in Oslo. Ahem,
| regular cleaning, not the other kind.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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?
| dnh44 wrote:
| 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.
| foolproofplan wrote:
| "waste management"
| kebman wrote:
| Import/export.
| sulZ wrote:
| To give you an explicit answer - yes.
| intrasight wrote:
| 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".
| navs wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| elwell wrote:
| Well those aren't really 'fads' (maybe... blockchain)
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| svachalek wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| gkwelding wrote:
| This literally could have been written by any developer in the
| UK. I think most of us start out like this! I think the best one
| was a company I worked for in Leeds, it was building a secure
| learning platform for schools which ultimately fell flat on it's
| arse. The company was run by a self-made millionaire who was
| notorious for scamming people.
|
| He'd randomly lay off huge numbers of the sales team, and the
| first 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...)
| ljm wrote:
| 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.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| 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.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > The company was run by a self-made millionaire who was
| notorious for scamming people.
|
| You knew this before going to work for him, and still went to
| work for him? What does that make you?
| Karsteski wrote:
| Someone who needed a job?
| jack_riminton wrote:
| You commented out of half-knowledge and assumptions on an
| interesting story, trying to shame them. What does that make
| you?
| swhitf wrote:
| He doesn't explicitly say he knew of his notoriety when he
| joined and could very well have only discovered after.
| Alternatively given the economic circumstances he could have
| needed the job enough to take the risk. To be honest, your
| comment seems unnecessarily snide and mean spirited for no
| reason.
| [deleted]
| sen wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| selestify wrote:
| You continued to work for 3 months without getting paid?
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| hhmc wrote:
| It may also have been payment in lieu of notice or holiday.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| gkwelding wrote:
| 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".
| systemBuilder wrote:
| 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 ...
| themolecularman wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| "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."
| jlg23 wrote:
| > 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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| > > we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS)
|
| That's when you ask "What colour is the boat house at
| Hereford?"
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Brown brick with blue and white, according to Google :-)
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| 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.
| jlg23 wrote:
| Hrhr. I actually know a legit one who fits the description.
| But that is exactly one :)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| With all that experience, you need only one.
| dboreham wrote:
| "Never work for a small business unless you own it". Citation:
| me, 35 years ago after my first small business employee
| experience.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Also don't work for one with more than 100 - 150 employees.
|
| Sweet spot seems to be somewhere around 20 to 45 people.
|
| But that's just my experience.
| kwere wrote:
| Agree, expecially if One want a good work enviroment at
| normal Comp, not too shabby or too corporate with good growth
| potential
| codegeek wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| I agree, I know of one. But I own it.
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| I agree. You may get the odd exception, but seem to be rare.
| sigzero wrote:
| Yup! My first experience was really bad. I would never do it
| again.
| Otek wrote:
| 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.
| tholford wrote:
| 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...
| adamrezich wrote:
| archive.org mirror (page is currently hugged to death):
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.)
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| 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.
| ilikeerp wrote:
| Low compared to the US - that's true of most places.
|
| Low on a global scale? Absolutely not.
|
| You're making it sound like we're living on minimum wage.
|
| The average Java developer in London is within the top 5% of
| the UK in terms of salary.
| devtosales wrote:
| Low compared to the US - that's true of most places. Low on a
| global scale? Absolutely not.
|
| You're making it sound like we're living on minimum wage.
|
| The average Java developer in London is within the top 5% of
| the UK in terms of salary.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> 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.
| hogFeast wrote:
| 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 PS20k 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).
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| It's kind of an "be grateful for what you have because so
| many people have it worse" argument.
| mmarq wrote:
| 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 40KPS 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.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| When you say "very very bad healthcare", are you
| referring to the NHS?
| mmarq wrote:
| 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.
| alibarber wrote:
| 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.
| mmarq wrote:
| > 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| mmarq wrote:
| 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.
|
| 80KEUR 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, 5-6KPS in healthcare
| and 2KPS in public transport (just to name the first 3
| thing that come to mind), and will be much poorer than a
| German family making 50KEUR per annum.
| conjectures wrote:
| > 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.
| mmarq wrote:
| A senior dev in a hedge fund may make more than 200KPS
| 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 70KPS.
| [deleted]
| objclxt wrote:
| Healthcare is free in the UK. I don't know where you're
| getting the idea you need to spend "PS5-6k" 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.
| mmarq wrote:
| 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 300PS
| 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 3000PS.
| 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 2-300PS per visit.
|
| A family of 3 can easily spend 5-6KPS per annum in
| healthcare, especially during the first years of the
| child.
| martinald wrote:
| 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.
| justinclift wrote:
| > I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a
| peculiarity of the UK?
|
| Pretty common in Australia too. ;)
| tcbasche wrote:
| Worked for one of these that moved to Australia _from_ the
| UK!
| ionwake wrote:
| Id love someone from outside of the UK to comment on this
| coldtea wrote:
| It's true all over the world.
| wayne wrote:
| 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.
| lfischer wrote:
| I've found a few of these companies in the Netherlands.
| BLanen wrote:
| I know a guy who's Manager/CEO went to prison for fraud
| during his internship.
| mattbee wrote:
| 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.
| Bayart wrote:
| 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.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| 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.
| debarshri wrote:
| I have seen a few of those in netherlands too.
| valdiorn wrote:
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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.
| Kluny wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| benn_88 wrote:
| 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.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| It seems the site is experiencing a hug of death :(
|
| Archive links:
|
| https://archive.is/KJBWF
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...
| danuker wrote:
| > made false representations to creditors in attempt to wipe out
| debts
|
| Funny how that got him a suspended sentence, while the gambling
| did not.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Reading these comments makes me realise how lucky I was in my
| first job. Brilliant people and amazing tech.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| 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.
| make3 wrote:
| recharging a crime phone in front of a camera lol
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| 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.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| 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.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There's a Canadian mafia?
| rbjorklin wrote:
| 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...
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Mafia like groups are everywhere. The names may be different.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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... Today
| [2018], a barrel of maple syrup is worth about $1,200
| -- that's around 18 times the value of U.S. crude
| oil.
| r00fus wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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).
| karmicthreat wrote:
| Hah, whenever I tell this story that is always the first
| thing people say.
| NumberCruncher wrote:
| There is even a series about them:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood_(TV_series)
| mattbee wrote:
| My mind went to the A.F.R. from Infinite Jest, surely the
| most sinister Canadians ever imagined.
| masterof0 wrote:
| They will sorry you to death, if you don't comply.
| dayofthedaleks wrote:
| In Montreal, primarily.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rizzuto_crime_family
| purple_ferret wrote:
| even makes a location appearance in The Sopranos
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| > 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.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| 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.
| SebastianFrelle wrote:
| 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.
| gorbachev wrote:
| 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.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| 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.
| benn_88 wrote:
| Phew!
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| 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).
| dcminter wrote:
| If the company involved has been wound up (rather than bought
| out) I'd _guess_ it would be fairly safe. Who would sue, after
| all? I am not a lawyer. Or since this is UK, "I am not a
| solicitor" :)
| Tarsul wrote:
| also he never signed a contract :)
| avnigo wrote:
| Brilliant read, and oddly anxiety-inducing too.
| jjeaff wrote:
| 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.
| handrous wrote:
| > 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.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Buying MLM energy drinks (and indeed any MLM product) is a very
| bad sign.
| sleibrock wrote:
| 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.
| BigJono wrote:
| 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.
| darkr wrote:
| > 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.
| gjvc wrote:
| 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.
| rpeden wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If there is a co-founder at all that's much better than
| just a single person.
| gjvc wrote:
| That's what I thought. I thought that the character of
| one would balance the other out in this case. (Not that
| there is any guarantee, of course.) I was wrong.
|
| Bad leadership drives out good.
| Tostino wrote:
| It can balance out, but it is not guaranteed to by any
| stretch
| Koshkin wrote:
| I know of a case when the salesman-CEO sold a freaking
| _demo_. (Helped the company to stay afloat, but the devs had
| to work hard to turn it into something of a product as fast
| as they could.)
| abraae wrote:
| I feel as CEO that's what I'm always doing.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| > 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
| fsloth wrote:
| 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.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 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.
| fsloth wrote:
| Yes, very descriptive - the 'good sales CEO' was very
| much per your positive example.
| donatj wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| technofiend wrote:
| 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.
| lategloriousgnu wrote:
| 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 in Essex. 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
| called John 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 PS12,000 a year, which 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 John. 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 John'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.
| ehnto wrote:
| 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.
| b0afc375b5 wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| 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.
| granshaw wrote:
| What did that last web app do if you don't mind sharing?
| k__ wrote:
| It was a "secure" document management system.
| kebman wrote:
| "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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It is quite enjoyable. It's also quite bizarre seeing them on a
| gambling website.
|
| It does give the whole thing a kind of trustworthy vibe though.
| Like, they use cows as their mascots, how bad could it be.
| kebman wrote:
| IDK depends if you drop acid before trusting them with your
| money I guess :D
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