qxmat

At the moment I have to deal with code written only last year that uses long depreciated frameworks and awful logic. In shorts it's an unreadable mess so full of programmer sins it makes brainfuck look beautiful.

It was coded by experienced contractors at great cost whose entire body of work I have judged to be far below the reasonable standard of a competant developer. I've actively called for them be sued and have costs returned several times.

Although rare, as professionals we're subject to a professional obligation to weed out the most reckless of our community. Anything less and we risk being knowingly dishonest.

Argh now I need an alternative to 123reg :(

50ms! Wow... take it from me, you should have used Solr.

The last big interview I had was with a four letter company in Canary Wharf. The interview 'day' was me alone in a catered meeting room with a File->New assignment.

Despite end of the day praise and the acknowledgement that I'd be recommended for the next phase, not to mention a genuine rapport with the devs that sporadically popped in, the four letter firm acquired a software house and froze recruitment a week later.

I spent a day revealing tricks and patterns - something I charge a substantial daily rate - for nothing. But this is ridiculously common: the more effort required to interview the less likely I am to get the job.

Nowadays I'm happy to walk out of bullshit interviews where they ask open ended questions where only their answer is correct.

You get to a certain age/experience where it becomes apparent that a good interview is an informal session where you have a meeting of the minds not an adversarial grilling.

I think, in this instance, the 'immeasurable benefits' should probably read as 'measurable benefits so great they break the scale (but measurably better than the mess imperative JS creates)'.

Recently, especially at a startup I've felt the need to use libraries and frameworks more and more just to hit deadlines and meet the desired user experience.

Model binding is a prime example of this: on the web today everything has to be dynamic and reactive. Rather than do something (i.e. animate) and tightly couple the onComplete handler to N other things to do afterwards (via callbacks/promises etc) I prefer to compose my code around n-event subscriptions and react to changes.

Thanks to things like model binding (and their frameworks/libraries that offer this) the 'immeasurable benefits' of decoupled and composable functions trump the spaghetti soup reactive Javascript requires.

(P.S. one designer is a step up from none!)

I feel for you.

I made a similar leap from an OK-paying regional job at an established niche cashcow to a London start-up. The perks: a coffee machine, senior pay cheque.

The reality: a shit coffee machine, low moral, no realistic prospect of a profit and no willingness to pivot. 80% of costs have been sunk on a Facebook clone 'with a spin' while the owners try to sell snake oil to investors. We operate like the bad slides of 'Good vs Bad Startup' are a blueprint for success. The owners, almost weekly, come up with an idea someone has to coach them away from - a long ironically drawn out confrontational meeting of: "we don't have the resources". The bit I expected to pay off (medical monitoring hardware) turn out to be crappy I2C/SPI bridges any e.eng graduate could whip out in a month :(

I've had long look at myself: how could I turn down other offers yet accept this?! I'm still unsure why. For a while I feared that I deserved this - I'm one of them, one of the guys who decided to create their own header based HTTP authentication system key by a timestamp: a crap programmer.

It's been 4 months. Poor tests are still committed despite my best efforts to teach the one doing it that they should test a result not implementation (only 1 test damn it!). We don't use any JS frameworks on the front-end (yet alone my other true love: Typescript) because the last lead dev couldn't understand the immeasurable benefits of model binding. I've done - by no means single handedly - an incremental rewrite of the entire code base (front, middle and back). Although they're paying me on time, they missed my post probation increase :( I could go on but this is probably not the right forum.

In short: it's not worked out for me either. Thankfully I've got an excellent track record so I'm off in 3 days to a proper PLC. I heard large companies, like the BBC have 15 (FIFTEEN) designers in their News division alone... I can't wait to have just one designer unencumbered, available and talented.

The whole saga has left me with the strong suspicion most startups are a joke (no I don't want to be a DBA/CSS/JS and C# guru who maintains the iOS codebase!).

Inept owners who're unwilling to pivot, often trapped by the sunk cost fallacy, or owners expect to create a market with their 'one true solution [to a problem you no-one has]' plague the startup scene. No product should ever be a Facebook clone :(

For what it's worth, if I was hiring now I'd interview you solely on your written language skills (which are better than most native English speakers, myself included).

How do I buy you a beer?