[–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

Hi. I’m currently looking for one person to join a small long-term collaboration team. The position requires both strong English communication skills and enough technical knowledge to understand software-related discussions, interviews, meetings, and other professional conversations.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    As unmagical said, we're all slop code verifiers, now, at least some of the time. This isn't actually new due to AI, but the automated junior coder makers certainly make it worse.

    QA staff who know automation are incredibly valuable, and often under-appreciated.

    There's going to be un-meetable demand for software verification skills, as soon as anytime manages to measure (and start trying to recover) how much money the AI slop code wave is flushing down the drain.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Self-hosting is something in my experience that helped that I don't see in your post.

    (Dangerously) running open source software on the public Interet gave me a crash course in DNS and networking. It also made me very motivated to read up on Cybersecurity risks to my servers.

    I find it very effective to read about a common misconfiguration and then go read through the relevant configuration files on my server and try to verify that I have it mitigated.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I just found stapi.co, a star trek api that is not very actively maintained. I had the idea to bring that project up from springboot 3.0.x to springboot 4.x.x (the most recent one). That idea came ti me an hour ago and thusfar I've froked the project,but can't get it to run yet haha

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    All my experience with plc programming was done professionally with systems way outside the common person budget(for example for one of them just the software to connect to it was 5k per year). I know there are cheaper alternatives but don't have experience with them.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Makes sense. Might be hard though.
    Would be a good idea to start by adding what types of programs you are good at, i.e. the projects.

    Also, there is no lack of OSS projects to work on. Take for instance:

    • LibreOffice
    • any of the project you might find on invent.kde.org and bugs.kde.org
    • Blender

    For paid work though, it becomes harder. You need to be good at advertising yourself correctly to the correct client and I (as someone who failed to advertise myself) am not the correct person to give suggestions on that.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Startups are real companies. They are not the comfortable lazy jobs you would have on a big tech company campus or even a post-IPO tech company. They are still trying to "change the world" or else they figured out it's not going to work. The founders typically leave within 5 years of starting them, either because they succeed and get bought out or because the investors stopped financing their continued existence for a particular reason. Maybe the idea was great at the time but the market changed. Maybe they were wrong about the idea from day 1. They are often 1 mediocre executive decision from going out of business.

    Big companies are full of people who aspire only for a comfortable existence in a relatively easy job offering a career path or a lucrative compensation package that will get them the nice 2 story home in the suburbs and pay for the kids private school this year. They work a standard 40-50 hours per week unless they're on the management track and then they may leave the baby at home with the nanny until they make Vice President of something very ordinary and mediocre.

    In a startup, depending on what it is, you could be working for or alongside the next Steve Jobs and not know it yet. You could also be working for and alongside total bozos. Figuring that out is key to knowing whether its worth your time. Steve was kind of an a-hole according to some, so it might not be apparent until you talk about serious things having to do with the vision for the future. You will probably have 5 to 10 jobs that change frequently and will work way more than a standard workweek.

    It's like saying "I'm going to join the military and can either become a supply clerk or join an elite unit whose name is not publicly acknowledged". Most people should probably stick to supply but the others will never be fulfilled there.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 months ago

    I taught (and still am teaching) programming courses at my school while I was doing my bachelor. Also I'm 36 and have other working experience. I've been job hunting for half a year now and this is my third interview, so it's not a winning combo, but I guess those are my selling points.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Honestly, working at a startup means being part of a company that is more interested in selling equity than products.

    In other words, these guys probably don't care as much about the quality of the applications that they're making (or the code that goes into them) as they do about making huge pitches and promises to potential investors in an attempt to score big multi-million dollar investment deals. In my experience, startup culture is a bunch of people pretending to care about a product, but really only interested in selling an idea of a product.

    As a worker without any stake in the company itself, this means that things are probably going to be fast and loose, and more than a bit chaotic. The people you are working for are going to be spending a lot of money quickly (which can be fun to be around) and are eventually either going to score a big investment deal or totally run out of money. You may end up switching gears often and doing different things.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    Generally, I have enjoyed smaller companies because it's easier to meet people and get to know them. When problems arise, you have a direct connection to whoever you need to talk to. The downside is that you need to do a lot of stuff yourself if you are the one pointing out the issue. It can get rewarded, but that depends on the company.

    Startups are usually fast-paced and always hunting for more money and more desperate than large companies.

    They were a good experience to learn from and they taught me what to focus on and when to let things go. There just isn't enough time to do things "the right way". In large companies it's much easier to bullshit your way into writing proper code (triple estimates, start a corporate sounding initiative, pretend to held up by other teams, use bullshit lingo to make thing sound complicated, make small promises deliver more, etc.)

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    It varies.

    I was employee #50 at a startup. Prior to my joining, they had a lot of incredibly poor practices. No release management. Few automated tests. Around when they hired me, that stuff turned around.

    The CEO was kind of a controlling jerk, but was kept in check by the other founder. When that guy left, it got worse. The org also accrued layers of sycophants. The soft skills of knowing how to weasel your way into the CEOs favor paid off.

    It's not really based on merit. It's all based on emotions. Building a cool thing can help, but that's not enough on its own. You could rewrite the code base so it's bug free and easy to expand, but if management doesn't know you or understand that, it won't matter. Meanwhile, the guy who's always at his desk making a lot of code shaped noise to management might get promoted.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago*

    I've worked with startups that were great, and where I had real responsibility and felt useful. I also worked with startups that were hell, where the shitty managers harassed people because they had no purpose in life.

    The moral of the story is:

    • It can happen in ANY company, big (100k employees) or small (3 guys in a closet)
    • You CANNOT know from the outside if it happens, you have to work with them for a few months to detect whether you'll have fun or not
    • Try it because you're young and you can leave early if it goes bad (and stay if it's good)
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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Startups are often the fiefdoms of a single-minded narcissist who believes their gut reactions are the same as skills and experience.

    Sometimes this works out, but most of the time it just leads to a team that was excited to build something together getting their projects smashed and destroyed by someone who has no idea what the results will be, but is certain that the experts are wrong.

    Then as the mission creep sneaks up on them they will usually hire more of their management friends (more layers of management will surely get the product out faster than the scientists and engineers working on it)

    Then the team that managed to build something useful gets let go for a few juniors to 'save runway' as the managerial vultures soak up any running capital and pour it into advertising for a product they don't have working (advertising to investors instead of consumers) right up until the last minute when the C-levels yank the rug out and take whatever they can from their comp package and go destroy another startup.

    This is a big part of the reason startups that 'make it' are such news-worthy stories

    The circle of life.

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