On Friday, July 20, 2012 10:32:06 AM UTC-7, zentr
...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> Previously: is a digital marketing company the place for keen developers?<https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/javaposse/TWL8x4Srk7w/discu...>
> **** UPDATE!! A YEAR AND HALF AFTERWARDS ****
> I made it!
> I quit *that* job and landed on one the most successful startup in the
> area (can't name it for reasons you'll soon understand, but just to let you
> know what I mean by 'most successful', we just passed our series a fudging
> and everyone and their uncles is talking about us).
> It's an API Java shop. All I'm gonna say. I was hired to join what the API
> team. I'm one the (two) API guys.
> Hang on... my profile in two lines: 6 years of Java web development.
> Spring fan. ORM. SQL. Some HTML. JS/JQuery.
> Recently tried Ruby/Sinatra and Node.js/Express on two little personal
> projects (and loved them both).
> Learning Scala and recently got over *Don't Make Me Think* and the whole
> fuss about Responsive Web Design.
> That said, these guys told me they're growing and growing, scaling and
> scaling.
> Their playground's on AWS and certain unspecified performance issues on
> mysql made them start thinking to move some 'things' on Dynamo DB.
> How did they buy me?
> Money? Not at all.
> Stock options? Apparently not... yet.
> I guess I was just very frustrated about the situation at my previous
> employer and it just felt cool to jump off and try the startup dope.
> (I dropped other job offers meanwhile. They were my first choice).
> I must admit I might have been easily fooled by the keyword-dropping
> (cloud, nosql, higly-scalable, machine learning...).
> Shame on me. I know.
> Day 1: I discover the following things:
> - mr.API keeps unused imports on his classes. I guess it's some sort of
> fetish.
> - API compiles with ant. Fine... I figured it was just me hating ant in
> 2012. I must've said something like "let me *mavenize* all your
> projects... please let me!". I kinda did it in the end.
> - not just any ant, some shit netbeans does for you, which resulted in
> them telling me I was not able to use Eclipse (my IDE lover). I called it
> racism and laughed (and just used ant command line).
> - no unit testing. No continuous integration.
> - no dependency injection. I knew they were not using Spring... but I
> figured they were using weld or something.
> Code's full of calls to static methods of helper classes. Code has the
> stinky tendency to use ThreadLocal as their food trolley. Never seen it
> before.
> - production deployment (on all 6 instances of glassfish) is done BY HAND.
> Does not look like they want to change this.
> Not bad for your first day, right?
> My first task: set up an oauth authentication provider. oauth 2.0. Cool.
> I was *allowed* (literally) to use spring security oauth which to me
> looked like the quickest way. Fine.
> I got it fully working in like 2 days and if it wasn't for their silly
> customization requests, It would've been faster.
> What now?
> It's been a month now and I want to jump off the window. Here goes a short
> list of things I can't stand or bothered me.
> - CTO can't code. Seriously. And proudly admits it.
> - mr.API screamed at me because I was (successfully) using @Inject and
> things like that… especially on the EntityManager that they keep passing
> over as a parameter from rest resource to resource helper and so on.
> - I said I would've liked the oauth provider pages to follow the mobile
> first sort of rule, only to find out they had no idea what I was talking
> about (and I ended up media-querying my thingie… which was actually kind of
> fun).
> - I was asked to produce (in less than a day) and Facebook Connect kind of
> button… a nice companion to our newly born oauth provider (that nobody uses
> yet)
> Where am I going?
> I hate it here! Sure we're front page news and all… but the amount of
> incompetence and bullshitting I heard so far is unbearable.
> I was told I was late for a deadline I was never informed of!
> There is no project mgmt tool. No agile or anything for that matter.
> They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them (yes, this is a
> quote from a book I don't think anyone in this company has read).
> Is it just bad luck? Should I ask whether they use maven or jenkins at job
> interview?
> What I might get out of this is maybe the flexibility (work-for-home/no
> badged entrance kind of thing) and (maybe) a trip to our offices in Palo
> Alto (if I'm very lucky).
> What I wanted to get out of this was learning a new language (Scala
> maybe), new things (nosql, hadhoop, mahout). In a word: learn and innovate.
> What now?
> I'm giving this one or two more months. If I'm still treated like a newbie
> by these guys, I'm calling it a quit.
> Sorry for the rant again.
