Comment by citizenpaul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by citizenpaul | Hacker News Reader

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What I find interesting is even looking back he still has no awareness of the situation going on. I find this to be a huge issue with developers in general, they don't seem to ever pick up on social skills even when it is right in their face.

He got in because no one cared about anything other than someone willing to push through boring contract design work for low AF pay. He seems to still believe his lying(skill?) is what got him the job. It sort of was in the sense they wanted someone young dumb delusional and enthusiastic to work for next to nothing on what was essentially boring boilerplate work. In a system that even at the time he could see was a disaster to work in. Then used him as a negotiating tool to lay off other decently paid workers after he "proved" that what they did to him could be done. He calls them "expert manipulators" but there is nothing expert here, this is ham-fisted pointed haired boss 101.

TL;DR the company wanted a useful idiot with enthusiasm to push through a broken system to do a mind numbing job for next to no pay. The author still doesn't seem to get this.

They don't teach "pointed haired boss 101" in school. It's great that you are smart, and know this stuff now. But most people have to go through the hard lessons of having their good will and faith be abused by bad-faith actors.

They do, actually, but you have to seek those courses out yourself. Problem is that most engineers don't realize that Psychology and Organizational Behavior are important to learn until it's too late.

And yeah, I'm one of those who had to play catch up later and learn all that stuff the hard(er) way.

They should, though.. I had one profess with real world experience who tried to explain this stuff, and the other dozen or so were lifelong academics who didn’t know anything about reality. Really wish I’d listened to the one more..

Places like HN and Reddit (or /. back in the day) are fantastic resources for learning "pointed haired boss 101".

Yep, bad faith actors and useful idiots are 80% of the commenters.

I've been a "bad faith actor" and I will again if I have the chance. As a development manager I have taken credit for the work of others and exploited multiple companies for my own gain. I personally believe it's foolish to not play the game for ones own benefit.

I appreciate your cynicism/realism, and I don't think you should be voted-down for telling it like it is.

I don't like the idea of taking credit for the work of your staff; but if your team (run by you) gets credit for a job of work, some of that should absolutely be rubbing off on you.

I've always had better things to do than scheming and game-playing. "Life" is about playing games for one's own benefit; I managed fine, without knocking too many other people down. But some people treat Life as zero-sum. That's fine too - but watch as other people steer clear of you.

At 18 and a few weeks old, I did NOT have the awareness. At 33 and a few months, though, I feel I'm better aware of being taken advantage of, and have raised my hourly requirements to better suit contract work. I had no negotiation skills, and even if I did, they wouldn't have upped the pay, and then I would have been back to working at a call center for $8/hr.

The job was a crap job, but that job taught me a LOT about being a software developer.

Any crap software job is better than a crap retail, crap food service or crap call center job. You made the right move, and I am sure even a crap $30k a year software dev job paid dividends in experience. Coming right out of high school you did the right thing

Agreed, because a crap software job is like a crap apprentice job to a tradesman. The work might suck, but there's knowledge being imparted or, at least there to be sought out or absorbed.

It's the same reason a few years apprenticed to a plumber or carpenter is better than a few years in retail. At least you'll have come out the other end with something more applicable to a career, if you decide to pursue it.

My first programming job was at minimum wage.

They were using me for cheap labour, I was using them to get a CV that allowed me to get a real salary somewhere else later.

I literally said this to the director who hired me (a few months in, in his office with nobody else around) and was rewarded with a huge grin because I'd guessed correctly that he'd prefer cheap labour who -understood- that was the deal and wasn't afraid to own their half of it.

Worked out fine for me, and I did duly leave to take a much better paid job after about a year.

Not sure where you were, but a lot of the UK is actually pretty livable on minimum wage, so then you decide are you going to do 20 hours at McDonalds and have time for friends, or 40 hours at minimum wage and build your career.

As much as I hate to admit it: I'm all for abandoning friends at 18-20 for the career focus. Then bring back the handful of them that stuck by you.

I was in Lancaster, and it was livable, yes.

Plus being cheap meant my management were pretty open to "I don't know how to do that -yet-, but I think I have an idea what I'd need, can I have a few days to research it and get back to you?" which was -very- helpful to my learning process.

Looking back, I don't regret the choice at all.

I had been planning recently on taking a multi-year hiatus and moving to the midlands and attending university (for the visa and NHS), because after researching it, 3 years of university and living expenses are roughly what 3 European vacations cost anyway. And this would make vacationing to Europe a lot cheaper than from the states.

If it hadn't been for the NHS, I don't think I'd ever have risked going freelance.

Though you might also want to consider Germany - a lot of bits are liveable primarily speaking english and they're not currently suffering from the "fun" of brexit.

I had been hoping the "fun" of Brexit would have made my dollar stretch further, but each time I see it drop toward dollar parity, my hopes are dashed. Sorry if it is a bit morbid of me to wish the pound would lose value so that I as an American can go there for cheap.

Eh, maybe it is morbid but $partner gets paid in USD so it would be to our household's advantage as well ;)

I've learned not to regret my early failures in life. They're usually low-cost ways to prevent more significant failures later.

You're as smart as you are today BECAUSE you made those mistakes. You've gotten the painful part out of the way.

I agree. And like I concluded the post. I would probably do it all exactly the same.

You took the best option presented to you. A fresh-faced 18 year old isn't presented with much in the way of good career opportunities.

Our stories are pretty similar. My first dev job paid $9/hr! Sure, in some ways you could consider that to be "taken advantage of" but only because we were successful. Had either of us been flunkies, we would be the ones taking advantage!

When you hire an 18 year old for an important job, you know the risks and the potential payoffs.

Yup and he was smart enough to get out sooner rather than later, and got a lot of hardcore experience along the way. Landing that first tech job is the hardest, after that, it's pretty gravy.

What’s your hourly now?

It is hard to quantify across all of my income streams, but I bill for butt in chair and hands on keyboard: $150/hr since 2018. I haven't raised my rate since the world shut down and its high enough for me and keeps a lot of crap recruiters from hounding me constantly. The first thing I tell them is my rate.

I kind of guessed a different situation, where a small development team has asked repeatedly for more staff, since they were not making acceptable progress. Owner balks for months because maybe money is tight, but finally relents. Says 'you can add someone, but we can only pay 30K.' Devs probably thought they could at least unload some gruntwork onto the new person and free up time to accelerate development.

This was a small business with a late product. Probably circling the drain, and not much cash flow to play with.

The only way an owner would approve a rewrite suggested by his most junior dev with only a few weeks on the job, is out of pure desperation.

Completely agree. That was my takeaway as well.

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