Some people have no idea regardless of their experience or certificates.

I had to re-educate the tech lead when I first started working for a client. He had to run some queries to generate some simple reports from the database and his approach was to create a whole new cluster with duplicated data that he could run the queries against. So "not to take the whole production database down". I told him you have to fucking be kidding me, there's a couple of hundre thousand records in there and you think the database engine can't handle that? For fuck's sake, move aside and let me do this shit for you. The query finished in a few seconds, generated the god damn report he needed and needless to say I am tech lead now.

@Demolishun Currently listening to "Blood, sweat and pixels" by Jason Schreier. I've never touched game development except for some basic graphics development back in uni, but it has always fascinated me.

Your comment reminded be of how Stardew Valley came about, covered in one of the chapters of that book.

Money rules above anything else.

If there was profit to be made, they would make linux versions. Trust me, someone would have considered this several times and the outcome has clearly been "not worth it". Not idealistic, not to be difficult, not because of incompetence.. money.

@Demolishun Just a remaster of HL2 as far as I know. Same game, updated graphics. Looks pretty smooth!

Monkey Island, Doom I & II, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, even those old Test Drive games (yeah, I'm that old).

@kiki Half Life 2 is getting remastered this year, will definitely revisit it then!

Two barracudi?

Most spoilt comment I've seen in a while. Are your parents "lazy" for not becoming billionaires?

Remember that if you have kids of your own and you don't become a billionaire.

Jeezes.

@TheBeardedOne Not sure.. I did some of this crap while still being an employee in preparation to going solo. I ended up contracting for that very same company for a while (make sure you make yourself hard to replace ;) but once I had enough of them I knew who to talk to.

Actually, I made one massive mistake. I hadn't done my calculations and had a figure in mind for my hourly rate that was based on what consultants usually charged. I didn't work out how much that really was without all the overhead companies usually have, so I missed out on a pretty good opportunity because I required way more than necessary. This was really early on, so you might be lucky right away. Check your market value, see how much you actually make and compare that to what you are getting paid. Should be a whole lot more as an independent consultant, since you've got none of the benefits of a full time employee and carry all the risk.

@TheBeardedOne Just a bit of searching your local area. You've got the big ones (Accenture etc), then you have the medium sized ones (25 - 50 employees) and then the small ones (5-20 employees).

The point is to talk to as many as possible, let them put your resume in their oh-so-magical-database and then be prepared not to hear from them ever again. But every now and then you talk to someone that actually calls you back, tells you they have a client looking for a certain skillset and ask if this would be interesting. Weed out all the bullshitters, find the important few. Out of all those who have my resume in their database, I will only hear from two or three. And those are the same two or three that I will contact as well when I am fed up with the crap and politics of my current client and looking for something new.

These types of contacts are gold.

Oh, and knowing people. Try to build a network of other freelancers / contractors plus regular full time employees in the software industry. They can pitch you in as a consultant if their company is looking for external help.

Lots of coffee dates with different consultant firms - big and small.

In my case sub-contracting is the way to go. They got clients that need consultants, but they have no available in-house employees with a matching resume. They then present you as "one of their own", taking a small cut of the rate while you are left with the majority (90%). It's better for them to get a small cut and someone on the inside than to miss out on a client alltogether.

Aim for agile development. You can't document shit before you've gone through some iterations, and documentation is usually outdated the second you save it.

Let your code speak for itself, aided by some overview documentation that shows concepts and a birdseye view of what you're building.

I'd use only a fraction of it and send a 25 year old version of myself a text file with some investments tips like bitcoin, Tesla and Apple plus some pointers to when I should cash them in.

Yeah, I'm in it all for myself. Not sorry.

Clickbait

Sometimes I seriously doubt that.

@electrineer Sure, but at least in the regions I operate there is no real difference between a consultant and a full-time employee from a day-to-day perspective (you are treated and feel like part of the team regardless).

You make three times the amount of money, and have organize your own super-annuation / pension, insurances and supply your own hardware.

Be a freelancer, but get full-time contracts with a single client. You work normal hours, but charge a premium hourly rate.

What's not to like?

@TeachMeCode NO!

@AlmondSauce Yeah, well in this case any half decent senior would be ashamed of taking this long to complete such a simple task.

It really was THAT simple.

@MammaNeedHummus Yep, and I got all the wrong answers:

- it's industry practice ("netflix does it")

- it's test driven development (seriously, do we need integration tests and/or unit tests for basic DB operations?

- we have to make a decision to either do it this way or not this way. For every project, everywhere. If it's the right thing to do in a complicated scenario it also needs to be done for the simple scenarios.

- it's good for teaching the juniors (yeah, teach them to not think rationally or pragmatically or that common sense is an important part of software engineering)

And when I politely had an answer for all those arguments we were left with two insulted (!) developers that took feedback as personal attacks and criticism and a useless project manager that doesn't even step in and tries to support either side.

@NoToJavaScript In this case there is no future proofing needed. We're talking the absolute basic CRUD as dumb as it comes.

@Demolishun In this particular case: building a repository pattern on top of EF for simple CRUD operations on a basic simple table with hardly any records in it and pulling in an external dependency we don't need to enable more sophisticated return object - and most of all taking well over a week to complete a half day task.

Didn't read every comment here, but first: God damn it, what a shit hole!

Second, not sure how this is in India but if the next employer wants a reference from previous workplace you might want to try to leave on good terms.

Third: if pay is shit and culture allows it, stop putting pressure on yourself. Just do what you have to until the time is up, leave and call it an experience.

My bad experience from my early years pales into nothing compared to this bullshit, but I had those years of unpaid overtime, long hours, stupid pressure and micro-management. You know what? I look back at it as experience I have later used to boost me further than I might have if I had a cruisy job. My learning curve was steep as hell, so just put your headphones on and humm along to Kelly Clarksson. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

What a fucking shit hole! Sorry, had to say that again.

@IntrusionCM I just have PTSD from the god awful syntax of Java, which totally clouds my judgement and I am aware of it.

It's a fanboi thing, thought I'd get some keyboard warriors going about which one is better. 🍿

How about a proper upgrade - to .NET?

My hair loss stopped, I gained more friends, lower pulse and generally more sunshine when I left Java behind 15 years ago. 😉

Yes, I encourage questioning regardless of experience (see a previous rant about a cockhead that used his 20+ years as reasoning for why he should be listened to).

The issue with this one is how and when she questions something, and the way she reacted to being told the reasons why. Don't sound like a spoilt little shit that doesn't get her way.

Communication is about a lot more than the words you use.

Have you ever tried cancelling something from Amazon? They have the same strategy, tiring you out until you just say fuck you, I'll just keep paying the $10 per month because it's less painful.

@Oktokolo https://letmegooglethat.com//...

They are what they are because they can't be what they want.

Just consistently reply with a LMGTFU (https://letmegooglethat.com/) and after a few days they might learn.