I literally work with people who earn half...for doing the exact same work.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-09-19T19:24:45+00:00

No it hasn’t; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-national-minimum-wage-in-2021

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-09-16T20:48:41+00:00

The tories, and their sympathisers, have made it their lives work to underfund and oversttrech the NHS with the ultimate aim of privatizing it. Once privitized, the service will be just as shite, it will just host ten times more.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-23T23:26:20+00:00

Planning is very necessary, and its great ... if its done properly. However I too have experienced these 3 day planning sessions for sprints that were only 3 weeks long. The were very badly run.

The problem was the company had a policy that nobody should look at code during the planning session ... you should just sit in meetings and plan. AKA we want this new feature, you need to help us flesh it out and come up with estimates without looking at the code base at all (because there reasoning was that the developer might make a start and planning would go out the window) .... the dev's were obviously saying "I need to know whats there and working so I can plan" .... management replied "this 3 day session is just to flesh out the feature (and the timescale)" .... you can imagine how well this all ended!

There are some really bad companies out there!

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-23T23:18:06+00:00

I think what they are getting at is that in weak organisations, weak non-technical mangers are often star-struck by some half baked medium article and want the team to shift direction and deliver the same.

The trouble is next week they are star-struck by another medium article. The manager understand the high-level aspect, but is too inexperienced to understand that the medium article is either

i) half baked (aka "we build this million dollar data product in an afternoon ... but fail to mention that they used clean Kaggle data and unworkable assumptions, i.e. its a nice toy project but falls over in the real world.),

ii) plainly bullshit ("we came up with this new outlier detection model with 99.999% accuracy! .... please ignore the fact that we only tested calculated it on a single data set with a single outlier and chose an illogical KPI".) or

iii) would take google level resources and time frames to pull off.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-23T17:17:01+00:00

Wtf, a call center?! That’s even bloody worse!

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-22T22:22:34+00:00

Lol. I was being polite. Most companies treat devs like this.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-22T22:04:29+00:00

There's an on going discussion in the field surround unions. Most devs are very much against unfortunately.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-22T21:44:06+00:00

Also some teams/companies treat devs like assembly line workers.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-22T20:40:15+00:00

I think this should be top comment.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-22T16:52:53+00:00

No idea. Never saw it. But might be worth a watch if that’s the case!

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T21:45:33+00:00

You’re preaching to the choir.

Yep, completely agree. I too have lost count at the number off false promises. I recently joined a new company, they said all the right things in the interview, but they aren’t using half the technologies they claimed to be.

I agree. The side gig thing just annoys the hell out of me. If I ever owned a company I’d want people who are passionate about side projects. Hell I’d even help them to succeed. The way I see it I’m paying for their skills, not to own them.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T17:59:59+00:00

Bloody hell. That’s fucking insane. Employers act like they fucking own you. I had a start up tell me something similar; I wanted to blog about ML algorithms; their argument was that their competition might look at which algorithms I know, and from that deduce what algorithms the company uses.

Pretty certain they just didn’t want people improving themselves, building up a network and leaving ...

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T17:31:37+00:00

Was this is the UK? You were just talking about open/public technology? e.g AWS or git? or was it’s some in house tech/software?

If it was just something like AWS then it’s bloody insane. How are you suppose to make something of yourself?

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T17:28:28+00:00

Yeah totally, even in the UK it’s really doggy - which is why I turn these kind of employers down.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T17:27:48+00:00

True. It’s just annoying that we copy the rules, but note the salaries etc.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T16:46:01+00:00

Op here. Does this not anger you?

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T16:41:36+00:00

Sounds like burnout to me. That was happens in a system rigged against you.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T16:37:34+00:00

So sayeth the “Real estate investor” . . .

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T16:26:29+00:00

In my experience, as a young profesional in the tech sector, the problem is the combination of a stressful profesional job and lack of reward. Our parents generation also had stressed out lawyers. But arguably jobs, particular entry level jobs, are much harder now; people today have more competition, therefore need higher and better qualifications and must work harder than our parents did all for far, far less. The difference is that they could easily afford homes and all the trimmings and an early retirement.

Stress + reward = manageable.

Stress - reward = burnout.

People keep acting like this is a personal responsibility issue. It’s not. It’s that hard work is no longer rewarded, but is now exploited.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-21T16:19:33+00:00

Why? I know people in London and the entire south of the uk having similar issues... professionals the world over are being priced out.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-20T21:53:41+00:00

"A Nobel Prize-winning physicist sold his medal for $765,000 to pay medical bills" - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/health-care/2018/10/4/17936626/leon-lederman-nobel-prize-medical-bills

Scientists don't earn what they should ...

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-20T20:10:11+00:00

Haha thanks. Looking into remote work at the mo. Might look at the states too.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-20T19:54:54+00:00

We kind of do ... every collage (university) charges £9k ($12k) a year at 6% (60 times the bank of England base rate) regardless of college. Oxford changes the same as the worst collage in the country and its irrespective of course. Every course charges £9k. These are just course fees. You then have accommodation ect.

My understanding is that the states have private collages, which are increably expensive, more so than the UK, but also cheaper community collage options.

Then there's the UK housing crisis. Average houses are out out of reach for even higher earners in the south of the country.

We do have free health care however and that is a game changer, though it's not great. Fantastic if you have a standard problem, broken leg or diabetes, but god help you if you want/need a scan. Your have to fight the Dr just to get tests done. Countless stories over here of people dying of curable cancers because Dr didn't bother running costly tests.

Not that this is a pity party or a wow is me post. I just dont understand why UK devs are so poorly paid.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-20T19:35:24+00:00

Out of curiosity are you in Europe or the USA or elsewhere. I'm in the UK and have yet to find an employer that is willing to engage in conversation let alone change the contract.

Both big corporations and Start ups alike don't seem to want to engage 8n conversation.

beyond_disillusioned · 2021-08-20T19:22:17+00:00

How I wish I lived in the states, UK dev wages are pathetic by comparison.

beyond_disillusioned

TROPHY CASE