The surreal experience of my first developer job(bennuttall.com) |
The surreal experience of my first developer job(bennuttall.com) |
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.
Epic motivational line.
I actually went in to pitch him to become an investor in my small startup that was in the education sector. He was immediately interested but wanted me to also help him with several projects he was working on. He needed "a tech guy". He was the first wealthy business guy (but not the last) to tell me he was going to make me rich.
We pretty immediately started meeting with other people, he had me hiring a few employees, buying computers, having custom office furniture commissioned and checking out office space.
It was a whirlwind of different, seemingly unrelated ventures. There was my business, which I was trying to get off the ground, though after a few months, still hadn't received any investment. But I was bootstrapping it with money that I was earning working for this guy. Then there was some energy drink MLM that I think one of his rich friend's wife had signed him up for and he was buying cases and cases of it to meet quotas with plans to sell it. We had also hired a friend of mine as a sales person for some sort of mineral that I think is used in cattle feed and there were several other things going on.
We were flying around in his private plane, all over the state and region meeting with people. We would start around 5am and might fly to one part of the state, then by lunch, be one state over, then back to a local business by dinner and many times finishing up by around 9pm or even later sometimes. Lucky for me, I was just acting as a "consultant" since I was supposed to be trying to build my business. So I was just sending invoices to his secretary for my time. But I had almost no time for my own business. Though I was too busy living in this strange daze of so many projects and ideas being bounced around all fueled with seemingly unlimited money and a private jet zipping us around on a whim.
I realized things were probably coming to a head when he asked one day how "we" were doing with my education startup and if there was any free cash flow yet that we could start using for some of these other ventures (this was probably 3 months after I had pitched it to him). Of course, he had not actually given me any money for my business. But I think he sort of thought the consulting money he was paying me and his presence was just naturally building equity for him in my business.
I just told him no, we don't have any free cash flow yet and he jumped on to the next topic. His adult son, who by then was running the family business started showing up more and it seemed he was trying to rein in his father's spending. Apparently, he had spent down most of his retirement savings in those few months and he had attracted quite the cadre of grifters and hangers on (the room full of energy drinks was now starting to spill over into the vacant office next door). Perhaps to some outsiders, I seemed like one of those hangers on, but I was just a college student on summer break, excited about the constant action and interest that a prominent, wealthy businessman had in me and my business.
I would only catch bits and pieces of conversations here and there but I pieced together that the muscle relaxers that he had recently been prescribed for his back pain seemed to trigger a sort of manic state that was fueling all this craziness. We had to start laying people off and cutting any ongoing expenses and since university was starting back up, I sort of saw myself to the door and started responding to text messages and emails a little slower and slower and excusing myself from his business outings more and more frequently until he eventually moved on to fresher faces.
Definitely a weird but fun college summer break.
I'd read the whole rest of the post thinking "yep, cocaine is a hell of a drug", but yeah, there we go.
But later having witnessed a few manic episodes from people with bi-polar disorder, it was definitely like that, but without the depressive moments. And he would occasionally have moments of clarity where he would make a bunch of rational decisions. So it was hard to spot that something was up.
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.
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.
Funny how that got him a suspended sentence, while the gambling did not.
https://www.amazon.com/Cleantech-Artists-True-Vegas-Caper-eb...
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.
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.
There are exceptions, of course, e.g. revealing trade secrets or insider information on a publicly traded company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He'd randomly lay off huge numbers of the sales team, and the first anyone would know about it is when the door code would be changed and we'd have to ring the "office manager" (ex-SAS) for the new code.
His grand idea to save the failing online learning platform was "pivoting" to selling personalised dog food online........... (and I mean personalised in the sense of just slapping the dogs name and their face on some generic crap dog food, not actually nutritionally personalised to the dog)
Left that place being owed 3 months wages (which I never got).
Last I heard he was being investigated for fraud. (this was the scum bag in question: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/04/barclays-sm...)
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.
He showed up for the meeting; the CEO was called away urgently. My friend was taken out for a very boozy lunch and given many excuses and platitudes. He held firm, though. Demo or trouble. They rebooked his meeting for Monday.
Arriving at their office on Monday, he found that the place had been totally cleared out. The only thing left was a photocopier that had been smashed. The CEO had, in the British phrasing, done a runner, leaving the employees suddenly out of work.
The good news is that my friend ended up hiring one of the employees, who turned out great.
The product we were making was complete BS, and I think the boss was just siphoning off money for himself. All he did was download songs on Napster all day and blare them from his office.
Our top developer was a guy from Australia working under the table because he couldn't get a visa. He missed two days while deathly sick. The boss docked him $800.
There are so many other horror stories. I always compared the guy to a cross between Captain Bligh and Mr. Smith from Lost in Space.
I'm not sure what's the fetish with the SAS, but I apparently know more people who where in the or with strong ties to the SAS than regular British folks... OTOH, after knowing some actual members of various special forces for 2 decades: If they saw action, they don't brag. They are usually shy to admit anything even if it is not classified. Or the other way around: Those advertised as "ex-SAS" (or navy seals or french foreign legion, your choice) usually ain't.
That's when you ask "What colour is the boat house at Hereford?"
This property should also be applied to "salary increase freezes" or promised bonuses in lieu of raises. Unless the money is in your pocket (or the company has a literally terrible HR person who actually put things solidly in writing i.e. a promisory note) then any intangible compensation is likely to never be realized. And if there is a salary increase freeze the thing that won't happen next year (I guarantee it) is that they'll double up everyone's expected salary increase - you may still be in a freeze, or that freeze may be lifted so you all get normal CoL increases.
When you're an employee be incredibly defensive about what you offer - your employer is being even more defensive, I can guarantee it.
Theoretically, my current (and past) employers could have left out a dozen paychecks and I may not have noticed.
I don't think it's that unusual. If he doesn't have any money in his bank account it may be more noticeable.
They were also scamming customers at some point after I got laid off. I didn't really dig into it though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=MQvGc8Ee1SsC&pg=PA137&lpg=...
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/
Archive links:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210804102448/https://bennuttal...
One day Alex showed me a bunch of such apps they'd made - the "orgasm button" was one I can recall...
It’s probably more fun in hinsight.
Sweet spot seems to be somewhere around 20 to 45 people.
But that’s just my experience.
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.
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.
Obviously a little tongue in cheek, but it sounds like they learned a lot, which is better than most first dev jobs.
'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...'
Perhaps the UK Office show was a documentary after all.
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.
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.
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.
I am very curious how you wound up there.
The other comments are talking about minimum safe paranoia levels from the perspective of the applicants, but there's also the facility to consider: it would be reasonable/expected/etc to require everyone signing off on significant work to have maybe 10-15 years experience or so. I take it this wasn't happening?
As for "experience", these were different times (1989) where a) people were rational about such things, b)I was more experienced than any of the mid-career engineers on some critical tech, c) Westinghouse was the place one got nuclear experience. Finally, I'll say that it was the best job experience of my career. I worked with an amazing team of dedicated engineers. And unlike today, they were all engineers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does give the whole thing a kind of trustworthy vibe though. Like, they use cows as their mascots, how bad could it be.
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.
I think the key here is is the culture pathological or not - not the specific role of the CEO. CEO can have good enough understanding of tech to do their job well even thought they are not elbows deep in it themselves.
I worked for a small company where this was the case. The owner had been a sales person for a large online industrial web registry and decided he could be a middleman selling the companies websites that integrated with said registry. The job was fine, my paycheck bounced a couple times, but that’s the worst of it until after.
In my exit interview I had agreed to do some side work for them until they restaffed, and completed a decent number of sites in a short timeframe.
Then I got sick and ended up having emergency surgery - loaded with prescription drugs and largely out it, I passed a project back to them which I had put maybe 50 hours into and completed short of populating the final verbiage/copy specifying as much.
I offered to take half of the agreement since I wouldn’t be completing it. I got a polite “we’ll talk about it when you’re feeling better” from my former PM, wonderful person.
It was handed to one of their most junior developers, and according to people I knew at the company he told the owner I had done almost nothing on the project, the pages were blank. They literally just needed copy I hadn’t received yet! The entire backend was done!
When I got better and tried to get everything straightened out, they literally ghosted me. Ignored my calls and emails. I’d put a load of time into the project and wanted something for my efforts. I'd worked there for over five years, it felt so disrespectful at the very least.
I started copying more and more people at the company in my emails. In the end however my efforts were fruitless.
About a month after this ordeal, a developer I had managed took a job with my new employer. I received a letter threatening to sue me for stealing their employees. I had nothing to do with it. Our corporate lawyer analyzed our contracts and said they didn’t have a leg to stand on. He sent them an official response and sure enough nothing came of it.
They went into bankruptcy restructuring within the year, they’re still in business but I suspect I lost my right to try to collect with that.
It depends on what the startup is working on. If it's trying to sell into the enterprise I'd be a lot more confident in its future if the CEO is heavily sales-focused provided there's also a technical co-founder keeping things sane on the tech side.
This is absolutely a thing - it's the same mentality a pimp uses to identify and groom sex workers or other exploitative labor. The less stable/independent you are, the more control they can exercise over you etc
I disagree. 4 months working for a semi-criminal part mad-man is an amazing opportunity to learn about life and humanity.
Every time I meet someone who went from straight A’s at school, to university/college and then straight into a graduate scheme at some multinational, then onwards and upwards into some successful, but otherwise shallow career I feel so sad for that person that they missed out on the beautiful weirdness of life.
You can get a ton of valuable experience working for a startup without a CEO that's an absolute knob. You don't have to jump straight from worst company ever to boring enterprise grad position where you don't learn anything.
My first ever job, straight out of college in the UK, at 18 years old, was a Web Developer at an apprenticeship training business. The structure of the business was that it was a "training provider" for web development, design and a few other things.
Rather than go to college or university, kids (usually around 16 years old) would go to this company to get "on the job" training. The company was accredited by a university, such that on completion of the "course", students would receive some sort of BTEC certificate, which is similar to a TAFE course in Australia.
A requirement of "training providers" is that they provide the tutoring to the students in order to obtain the BTEC, but must also place the students into businesses for around 50% of the course time to receive their "on the job" experience. The student must have received a certain number of hours of experience at a real web development company to obtain the proper certificate from the uni.
This training provider took on about 200 students a year into their web development course. Now it's impossible to place that many students with real web development companies. But for each bum on a seat, the company received a sizable chunk of cash from the government apprenticeship scheme, so it was important to get as many through the door as possible.
To solve the issue, the director of the training company (a guy I'll call Fred) who very much matches the description of other middle-aged "pretending to be rich" guys), spun up a series of fake companies for each course, such that he would place the students in his own companies to get their "on the job" hours. Each of the companies had it's own office, but usually attached to the same main building, and some in some random industrial estates without signage.
The web development company was the one I was hired in. The salary was just about enough for me to fill my car up and drive there from my parents house every day. Our "clients" at the web development company were all other businesses owned by Fred. Each of those businesses didn't seem to have any clients of their own, the whole web of businesses was driven purely from the training grants being generated by the main training company.
I worked there for a year and it was a very strange experience. Half of the time I was tasked with coding up websites for the web of businesses and doing odd jobs for Fred's friends (I remember spending a month building a website for a youth football team). The other half of my time was spent "tutoring" the apprentices who were in my office for 50% of their course. That mostly involved giving them "briefs" for clients which didn't exist, getting them all to code up their own version and add it to their portfolio.
I didn't have a boss at the web development company. On paper, I was the only full-time employee.
About a year after I left in 2012, I saw on the news that the training company had folded, because the university had caught on to what was happening, and stopped their funding. The entire network of businesses now seems to have been wiped from existence.
There are many times I have regretted not listening to my gut, something feeling "off". OP's story had obvious red flags but in all situations, paying attention to how your body (or "gut") feels is always a good idea.
You may be positively tickled by the fact that the maple syrup industry is controlled by a cartel like group that may be mafia-adjacent and there have been high-stakes maple syrup heists.
https://www.google.com/search?&q=mafia+maple+syrup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Hei...
It's no joke, of course. That's precious stuff. And where there's money there's crime...
Today [2018], a barrel of maple syrup is worth
about $1,200 — that's around 18 times the value
of U.S. crude oil.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.
...and no personal ethical dilemmas with said arrangement.
> The worst part about it is they try to make up for their lack of technical knowledge as a manager by becoming close with you in a personal way.
FWIW, this happens outside the mob too.
So it could be an option (for some people, and maybe not even good), but really unless you can deal with stress and people well it won't go well. I was able to learn to deal with both pretty quickly. And I credit some of that early experience to being able to just dive into projects I know nothing about.
But it can all go sideways pretty quick. I have a feeling that is more common. Plus you don't want to be involved in an investigation.
Can confirm. I mentor college grads. They’re always coming to us with sketchy job postings they found for random crypto projects. It’s always a small group of people led by a gregarious CEO who think they “just need a few engineers” to launch a crypto scheme that will make them rich.
It's weird. On the one hand it feels like "lateral creativity + honesty = unicorn", like "never the twain shall meet", but on the other hand I can't come up with a good rigorous explanation for why that's the case.
I think developer salaries have risen a lot since many of these negative anecdotes took place. The higher salary expectation for local developers has pushed a lot of the sketchy small shops to look for outsourcing opportunities for their tech work rather than trying to hire in house.
I’ve started noticing the inverse of this situation: Some of the juniors I’ve mentored end up working at ultra-cushy jobs at overfunded and undermanaged startups where they’re paid a lot to do very little. After those experiences, it’s hard for them to go back to a regular job where they’re paid normal comp to do normal amounts of work. Once they’ve had a taste of working 2 hours per day on projects that will never actually get shipped , it’s hard to accept the types of workloads, expectations, and accountability that come from a normal job at a well-managed company.
On the other hand, people who start in bad jobs tend to thrive when they’re hired into a normal, well-run company and realize just how much better it is.
The "normal comp" is now bellow their market rate.
There is something to be said for the amount of skills you get by running 12 hours a day.
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.
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.
My first gig felt horrible, I left for freelance, drowned and never recovered.
Also the importance of networking and support.
It was, however, an incredibly educational experience.
Maybe compared to the crazy US salaries you see here, but compared to continental Europe, CoL adjusted UK salaries are difficult to beat and also you have a lot more interesting opportunities there vs here where it's mostly small web-shops or big name consultancy sweatshops.
Wanna see low (CoL adjusted) tech salaries? Try Spain/Italy/Austria/France where they shaft you with high taxes and there are no top tech opportunities.
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying not to be That Boss, and I'm sure 50+ ex employees could pick plenty of failures on that front.
Still, our nearest competitor was run by a sketchy Napoleon who's now awaiting trial for rape and sexual assault. The bar for being a good tech boss in the UK is really quite low.
Same sort of vibe though, same sort of deal though where the founder had some successful company in something else then we were the smaller side business doing web design and 3D animation at the time but clearly knew nothing about how to make that work and same sort of deal as this where the other businesses subject would start to leak in presumably because that's what the founder understands.
Pretty common in Australia too. ;)
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.
I responded to a job listing and was invited to an interview with a small company located at the other side of the city. I suited up and took the bus there.
The company was indeed small - their office was the size of an apartment. That couldn't be said about the owner though(named D. in this story), who happened to be at the door when I arrived - I would later learn that he used to be a bodybuilder (important detail).
Our exchange went as follows:
- Is this Company X?
- Yeah. You for the interview?
- Yes.
- Zajebiście (translates to "awesome", but is also an expletive).
The interview went well, because there were really no technical questions. Actually, it went so well that he told me I could start right away, so I did.
Thus began my work experience in that place. Every morning when I arrived D. would call me to his office and talk to me for at least an hour. Our little chit-chat was usually broken up by his CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady, who would rush me back to work and scold D. for wasting my time. I would then return and ask my supervisor - M. what's the plan for that day. M. spent an average 11h every day in the office and was de facto running the place. I wanted to make a good impression, so I started spending 10h there.
My duties included writing web scrapers and so-called "ant sites" (loose translation) - small pages with links to the site our customer was paying us to have higher in Google's search results.
During those morning meetings D. would pitch me his ideas or show something that he thought was cool. Examples:
- An episode of Metal Motivation with the music from Chariots of Fire and some other song played simultaneously to a CGI clip of a meteor hitting Earth. D. trailed off before explaining the reason for showing me this.
- A "3D" gif of the hourglass nebula - he said that this is going to be a hit and that he talked about this with Brian May (the musician/astrophysicist).
- "know your date of death" - a premium SMS campaign in the form of a quiz that he coordinated. I remembered that one from a year before - disregarded it as spa.. Turns out that he sold the aggregated results from those quizzes to insurance companies, who could then plan their pricing strategy based on that. The questions were pretty personal, but that was before GDPR, so yeah.
- This one got him really exited: he sat me down on a leather-clad chair, gave me a pair of stereoscopic paper glasses and showed... 3D porn.
At that moment I started asking myself what kind of mental institution I landed in, but the CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady interrupted us, ordered me to go back to work and asked D. "does this sculpture need to be here?" - she meant the tower PC chassis next to the door that looked as if someone gave it a few healthy whacks with a baseball bat.
I would later learn that D. slept an average of 4h a day and at times was aggressive.
But the weirdest was yet to come: you see while D. spent most of the day in his office, in the afternoons he liked to have a stroll around the place and stand look over peoples' shoulders.
One such time I was minding my own business when I registered his presence, bit something was off. I turned in my chair towards D. and noted that he is not wearing pants - just a shirt and briefs. More importantly my face at an unfortunate height.
He noticed my confusion and explained that since he used to be a bodybuilder, his legs are fairly thick, so he's uncomfortable in pants. I chose to accept this new reality.
Later on it proved to be more of a thing than I originally thought. We tried to hire a secretary. I've seen four of them and the the one who lasted the longest (a week) reportedly had this conversation during the interview:
- By the way, are you fine with me walking around the office without pants?
- Oh, it's no problem - I have four brothers so I'm used to this.
The CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady did not enjoy this development and made sure that girl quit ASAP.
Our relationship started to sour when, after returning from a few days off which I took, I learned that I would be paid minimum wage. I wanted to reach D. about this but he was busy smoking weed and drinking vodka with his clients/friends/businesses partners. I quit on the spot and that was the end of it.
This isn't true in the UK
Tho still a good idea to stay away from potentially organized crime, they have a tendency to hang around and show up again when you think you’re all done.
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.
My only real response to this kind of humblebrag is... good for you!?
If "sales" means "I spent 3 years talking to every customer in a particular industry, became keenly aware of a vacant niche, and now am looking to do something about it" I reckon it would be a very good thing.
If "sales" means "I saw that the crypto market is booming and want to get in on the easy money," it's not going to go well.
how unexpected (to me at least) that they did that
Bad leadership drives out good.
It was funny working with some people who didn’t really need the money. It was/is always an alien concept for me. We had a cool startup we were working with and they were in “stealth mode” for two years without any revenue or funding, just working without any income. Must be nice.
"Humble"?
Even if you adjust for healthcare, even if you adjust for cost of living, UK tech salaries are simply bad. I don't know why, and my only hypothesis is that there just isn't much respect for tech workers in the UK in general, or companies don't make much money.
I'm not asking for a Bay Area 150k, I'm asking for 35k outside London for a junior role and 45k for a mid role. It's unlikely I'd get it. The number of people who brush this huge discrepancy off with "healthcare costs" (which, in the US, is a matter of company-paid insurance), or "safety" (as if that's something which should cost half my salary in the developed world) or "social safety net" (something I'm happy to pay for, but that comes out of tax which I already pay, not the take-home) is ridicuous.
There's no way around the fact that UK tech salaries are low, even accounting for the high tax in Western Europe, and I'm tired of being told that they are in any way equivalent to US (non-Bay) adjusted for CoL and healthcare. I'm paid poorly, and if I could access the US employment market, I'd be paid at least 1.5x before converted to USD no matter where I am.
The fact that things may be worse in France or Italy doesn't mean anything to me. In fact, it just makes me surprised that the UK has done well in comparison.
I will and do pay as much as I can afford to secure developers who are actually good at their job. I can't really comment on why they're so hard to find, but my experience is that they really are.
Maybe it's the side effect of there being very few of the kind of developers who could command those SV level salaries in the UK, or maybe they just aren't in the market for my kind of opportunities. It's a hunch that would require more data because I've not hired developers in the US so I don't actually know if there's a quality difference.
Anyway, I'm hiring at the moment.
If you make less than 40K£ in London, you are likely to experience a form of poverty that is unseen in the continent (pests in your flat, revenge evictions, very very bad healthcare, etc…). Outside of London, salaries are ridiculously low.
In reality, most tech jobs are the small web-shops or big-name consultancy sweatshops (one particular example is Edinburgh, huge market for tech jobs, there are quite a few startups now but the tech industry ten years ago, the period when the OP occurred, it was mostly sweatshops...and still is to a large extent, large companies who open up an office but labour is cheap, and will head off to Eastern Europe if wages rise). Starting salaries under £20k are not unusual in the UK, and startups are still definitely the exception outside London. In particular, the market for grads in the UK is very difficult...it is very, very hard to get your first job because there are lots of scammy companies offering slavery wages, lots of consultancies looking to churn staff, and a relatively small number of decent companies that often aren't particularly good at hiring (or willing to train, or willing to take risks...the UK job market is flexible relative to Europe but not flexible enough that employers don't view hiring someone as a big risk...because it is).
To say this another way, the UK does have some startups where you can make decent money...but the core of the industry that employs most people is just like Europe (because the UK still isn't very well-developed outside London).
And most who stayed at one job haven't gotten any significant salary increases unless they job hopped often which brings it's own problems later in ones career.
Edit: Had a quick look at jobs in Munich and curious where those high salaries are as 80k for senior positions on 40+h/week seem like a joke to me considering how expensive it is to live there and how high taxes are.
80K€ in Munich is a good salary, considering that you don’t have to pay for private healthcare (in the UK you have to), education is free (in the UK it costs a fortune, either in private school fees or in housing premia) and rents are much much lower than in London (for equivalent properties).
Taxes are higher in Germany, but not extremely so if you account for child deductions and family support. A family of 2 in London making 80K per annum, will spend ~20K to send a child to a random nursery, 5-6K£ in healthcare and 2K£ in public transport (just to name the first 3 thing that come to mind), and will be much poorer than a German family making 50K€ per annum.
While everybody I know who rented in London had to deal with mice or bed-bugs (and I don’t fully understand what these are, because before coming to London I never heard of them), at least those on low income, I don’t know of any other place where this is even remotely true.
To get what in the continent would be a normal flat, you need to aim at what the locals may call “luxury apartments”. And still, if it wasn’t built after 2010, you’d still have to deal with rotten sash windows, no escalator and other crazy stuff I’ve never seen before.
A lot of employers in the UK offer additional health insurance as a benefit, but that’s on top of - not instead of - what the NHS offers you.
Just to give a practical example, you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist (I know because it’s my experience), and if you go to private doctors, which you should, 3 visits plus some ultrasound scans and tests may cost in excess of 3000£. Also GPs have a tendency to prescribe (random) medicines without referring patients to specialists, which is simply not civilised, and so you end up going to a private doctor and paying 2-300£ per visit.
A family of 3 can easily spend 5-6K£ per annum in healthcare, especially during the first years of the child.
It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you. FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
This is just not true. Senior dev at non FAANG could well add 50% to those numbers.
Which means that the quality of service is worse than other countries, where you don't have to "play" the system or become friend with a GP to get referrals. Again, not my problem, I can use private healthcare, but this is not civilized.
> It's definitely not the same as the German system for example where every minor issue gets a million tests and multiple specialists, but usually that isn't needed. If you feel you need that and want to spend thousands on private appointments with specialists it is not going to be a good system for you.
As I said, it's not the same as the German or the Italian system, it is evidently inferior. I don't feel I need to spend thousands of pounds in appointments (I don't, my insurance pays), I feel I need to get a western European healthcare service (which, again, I get through my insurance), and I'm forced to go private because the NHS is not good enough. The point is that a German (or a French or an Italian) gets that for free and a Briton has to pay thousands of pounds for the same level of service.
> FWIW I've never ever heard of anyone that hasn't had loads of ultrascans in pregnancy. That is not normal at all.
I wrote "you can go through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an NHS gynaecologist", not that you don't get scans. By the way, you do get 2 scans from the NHS, not loads. You get to see lots of midwives, which are not doctors, and lot of doulas, whatever they are, but unless somebody who is not a doctor thinks you need to see a gynaecologist, you don't get to see one, which is not civilized.