28 ms·

The surreal experience of my first developer job

743 points by benn_88 5y ago

tester34 5y ago
wow, where are your startups now, news_hacker? ;)
trhoad 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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.
Sebb767 5y ago
It seems the site is experiencing a hug of death :( Archive links: https://archive.is/KJBWF https://archive.is/KJBWF https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttall.com/the-surreal-experience-of-my-first-developer-job/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...
avnigo 5y ago
Brilliant read, and oddly anxiety-inducing too.
BigJono 5y ago
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.
- gjvc 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
b0afc375b5 5y ago
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.
zz865 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  at least you know on your first day that you should start looking for another job ;)
  - benn_88 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
lordnacho 5y ago
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.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Well those aren't really 'fads' (maybe... blockchain)
    - Sharlin 5y ago
      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.
rwmj 5y ago
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.)
- ionwake 5y ago
  Id love someone from outside of the UK to comment on this
  - coldtea 5y ago
    It's true all over the world.
- lfischer 5y ago
  I've found a few of these companies in the Netherlands.
  - BLanen 5y ago
    I know a guy who's Manager/CEO went to prison for fraud during his internship.
- debarshri 5y ago
  I have seen a few of those in netherlands too.
- valdiorn 5y ago
  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.
danuker 5y ago
> made false representations to creditors in attempt to wipe out debts Funny how that got him a suspended sentence, while the gambling did not.
k__ 5y ago
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 5y ago
  What did that last web app do if you don't mind sharing?
  - k__ 5y ago
    It was a "secure" document management system.
kebman 5y ago
“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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    IDK depends if you drop acid before trusting them with your money I guess :D
abraae 5y ago
> Do it today tomorrow doesn’t exist ! Epic motivational line.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  Do it today like there's no tomorrow.
  - slfnflctd 5y ago
    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.
ionwake 5y ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I've heard similar with the cleaning industry in Oslo. Ahem, regular cleaning, not the other kind.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    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?
    - foolproofplan 5y ago
      "waste management"
      - kebman 5y ago
        Import/export.
    - sulZ 5y ago
      To give you an explicit answer - yes.
    - dnh44 5y ago
      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.
SebastianFrelle 5y ago
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.
- dcminter 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    also he never signed a contract :)
- Damogran6 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Phew!
- gorbachev 5y ago
  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.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  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).
dakial1 5y ago
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 5y ago
  “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=PA137#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=MQvGc8Ee1SsC&pg=PA137&lpg=...
  - mrlonglong 5y ago
    Netflix is running a show about deLorean and the chap who ran the whole thing. Ended up in jail for drugs smuggling.
    - QuantumG 5y ago
      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.
gkwelding 5y ago
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-small-business-lending-scheme-jeffrey-morris https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/04/barclays-sm...)
- sen 5y ago
  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.
dboreham 5y ago
"Never work for a small business unless you own it". Citation: me, 35 years ago after my first small business employee experience.
- sigzero 5y ago
  Yup! My first experience was really bad. I would never do it again.
- Otek 5y ago
  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.
  - sombremesa 5y ago
    > 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?
    - Otek 5y ago
      When I said that my boss can appreciate good work I wasn’t talking about a “thank you” note ;)
- codegeek 5y ago
  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.
clubdorothe 5y ago
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 https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/56050262
ramesh31 5y ago
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.
jjeaff 5y ago
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.
Tade0 5y ago
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.
- dna_polymerase 5y ago
  Please write a post about it. Sounds hilarious!
  - Tade0 5y ago
    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
- overkalix 5y ago
  Are you really gonna leave us like that?
  - Tade0 5y ago
    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
    - overkalix 5y ago
      Amazing, thanks. I swear, these sleazy guys are always into A) Cars and/or B) Bodybuilding.
- benn_88 5y ago
  UK pants or US pants?
  - Tade0 5y ago
    US, fortunately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511
Aeolun 5y ago
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/ https://werkenbij.infi.nl/
- nicoburns 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
csours 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
gregwiin 5y ago
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.
Amin699 5y ago
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.
petercooper 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
- benn_88 5y ago
  Agreed!
- txsoftwaredev 5y ago
  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.
- mrmuagi 5y ago
  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.
mapgrep 5y ago
Google cache link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://bennuttall.com/the-surreal-experience-of-my-first-developer-job/&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
adamrezich 5y ago
archive.org mirror (page is currently hugged to death): https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttall.com/the-surreal-experience-of-my-first-developer-job/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...
Taylor_OD 5y ago
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.
duxup 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
karmicthreat 5y ago
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.
- ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
sleibrock 5y ago
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.
benmarks 5y ago
"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.
- benn_88 5y ago
  Yes, it was Magento. And you're right about the rest too :)
tholford 5y ago
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-ebook/dp/B07V6L5M8T https://www.amazon.com/Cleantech-Artists-True-Vegas-Caper-eb...
jamal-kumar 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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...
  - jamal-kumar 5y ago
    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
holoduke 5y ago
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.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  A pho developer? Hope they have you company hoisin.
iamflimflam1 5y ago
Reading these comments makes me realise how lucky I was in my first job. Brilliant people and amazing tech.
- JulesRosser 5y ago
  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.
byteface 5y ago
Man, I got some stories. I don't tend to write them down. Funny read.
SolubleSnake 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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.
deleted 5y ago
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navs 5y ago
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.
intrasight 5y ago
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".
- texasbigdata 5y ago
  Did you fix it????
  - intrasight 5y ago
    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.
- ghosty141 5y ago
  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.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    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.
  - intrasight 5y ago
    "security" was provided by those guys with machine guns at the entrance. This was effectively before the internet, so there was no cybersecurity threat.
- 5y ago
jmfldn 5y ago
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.
Izmaki 5y ago
Half-a-job Bob, hahaha!!
coding123 5y ago
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.
holografix 5y ago
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.
tintt 5y ago
This story has an Irvine Welsh flavor
nineteen999 5y ago
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.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  We drank it in Scandinavia in the... Eighties, I think; maybe early nineties. I was young then, so I blame the foolishness of youth.
Andy_G11 5y ago
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.

743 points by benn_88 5y ago

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

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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.

Sebb767 5y ago

It seems the site is experiencing a hug of death :( Archive links: https://archive.is/KJBWF https://archive.is/KJBWF https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttall.com/the-surreal-experience-of-my-first-developer-job/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...

avnigo 5y ago

Brilliant read, and oddly anxiety-inducing too.

BigJono 5y ago

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.

gjvc 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

b0afc375b5 5y ago

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.

zz865 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
at least you know on your first day that you should start looking for another job ;)
- benn_88 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.

lordnacho 5y ago

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.

Sharlin 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Well those aren't really 'fads' (maybe... blockchain)
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    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.

rwmj 5y ago

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.)

ionwake 5y ago
Id love someone from outside of the UK to comment on this
- coldtea 5y ago
  It's true all over the world.
lfischer 5y ago
I've found a few of these companies in the Netherlands.
- BLanen 5y ago
  I know a guy who's Manager/CEO went to prison for fraud during his internship.
debarshri 5y ago
I have seen a few of those in netherlands too.
valdiorn 5y ago
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.

danuker 5y ago

> made false representations to creditors in attempt to wipe out debts Funny how that got him a suspended sentence, while the gambling did not.

k__ 5y ago

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 5y ago
What did that last web app do if you don't mind sharing?
- k__ 5y ago
  It was a "secure" document management system.

kebman 5y ago

“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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  IDK depends if you drop acid before trusting them with your money I guess :D

abraae 5y ago

> Do it today tomorrow doesn’t exist ! Epic motivational line.

durnygbur 5y ago
Do it today like there's no tomorrow.
- slfnflctd 5y ago
  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.

ionwake 5y ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

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 5y ago
I've heard similar with the cleaning industry in Oslo. Ahem, regular cleaning, not the other kind.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  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?
  - foolproofplan 5y ago
    "waste management"
    - kebman 5y ago
      Import/export.
  - sulZ 5y ago
    To give you an explicit answer - yes.
  - dnh44 5y ago
    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.

SebastianFrelle 5y ago

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.

dcminter 5y ago
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 5y ago
  also he never signed a contract :)
Damogran6 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Phew!
gorbachev 5y ago
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.
baobabKoodaa 5y ago
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).

dakial1 5y ago

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 5y ago
“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=PA137#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=MQvGc8Ee1SsC&pg=PA137&lpg=...
- mrlonglong 5y ago
  Netflix is running a show about deLorean and the chap who ran the whole thing. Ended up in jail for drugs smuggling.
  - QuantumG 5y ago
    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.

gkwelding 5y ago

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-small-business-lending-scheme-jeffrey-morris https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/04/barclays-sm...)

sen 5y ago
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.

dboreham 5y ago

"Never work for a small business unless you own it". Citation: me, 35 years ago after my first small business employee experience.

sigzero 5y ago
Yup! My first experience was really bad. I would never do it again.
Otek 5y ago
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.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  > 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?
  - Otek 5y ago
    When I said that my boss can appreciate good work I wasn’t talking about a “thank you” note ;)
codegeek 5y ago
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.

clubdorothe 5y ago

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 https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/56050262

ramesh31 5y ago

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.

jjeaff 5y ago

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.

Tade0 5y ago

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.

dna_polymerase 5y ago
Please write a post about it. Sounds hilarious!
- Tade0 5y ago
  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
overkalix 5y ago
Are you really gonna leave us like that?
- Tade0 5y ago
  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
  - overkalix 5y ago
    Amazing, thanks. I swear, these sleazy guys are always into A) Cars and/or B) Bodybuilding.
benn_88 5y ago
UK pants or US pants?
- Tade0 5y ago
  US, fortunately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066511

Aeolun 5y ago

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/ https://werkenbij.infi.nl/

nicoburns 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.

csours 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

gregwiin 5y ago

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.

Amin699 5y ago

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.

petercooper 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
benn_88 5y ago
Agreed!
txsoftwaredev 5y ago
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.
mrmuagi 5y ago
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.

mapgrep 5y ago

Google cache link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://bennuttall.com/the-surreal-experience-of-my-first-developer-job/&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

adamrezich 5y ago

archive.org mirror (page is currently hugged to death): https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttall.com/the-surreal-experience-of-my-first-developer-job/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...

Taylor_OD 5y ago

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.

duxup 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

karmicthreat 5y ago

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.

ghostbrainalpha 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

sleibrock 5y ago

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.

benmarks 5y ago

"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.

benn_88 5y ago
Yes, it was Magento. And you're right about the rest too :)

tholford 5y ago

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-ebook/dp/B07V6L5M8T https://www.amazon.com/Cleantech-Artists-True-Vegas-Caper-eb...

jamal-kumar 5y ago

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 5y ago
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...
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  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

holoduke 5y ago

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.

sombremesa 5y ago
A pho developer? Hope they have you company hoisin.

iamflimflam1 5y ago

Reading these comments makes me realise how lucky I was in my first job. Brilliant people and amazing tech.

JulesRosser 5y ago
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.

byteface 5y ago

Man, I got some stories. I don't tend to write them down. Funny read.

SolubleSnake 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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.

deleted 5y ago

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navs 5y ago

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.

intrasight 5y ago

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".

texasbigdata 5y ago
Did you fix it????
- intrasight 5y ago
  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.
ghosty141 5y ago
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.
- exikyut 5y ago
  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.
- intrasight 5y ago
  "security" was provided by those guys with machine guns at the entrance. This was effectively before the internet, so there was no cybersecurity threat.
5y ago

jmfldn 5y ago

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.

Izmaki 5y ago

Half-a-job Bob, hahaha!!

coding123 5y ago

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.

holografix 5y ago

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.

tintt 5y ago

This story has an Irvine Welsh flavor

nineteen999 5y ago

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.

CRConrad 5y ago
We drank it in Scandinavia in the... Eighties, I think; maybe early nineties. I was young then, so I blame the foolishness of youth.

Andy_G11 5y ago

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.