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Hassan Pezeshk
Hassan Pezeshk

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Be careful who you work for!

This is my first post here! And here it goes:

I was working for a company for 4 months last year and there was one big mistake that made those couple of months really hard for me and that was not paying attention to what/who I was working with.

The interviewer

First off, don't trust what you hear in the interview, which can mean two things:
1- The interviewer may not be that honest with you or,
2- He/she may not see the job as you should (In a technical view).

When you should start looking for more

When you get to the stage that you know what you're doing, there are a couple of things beside salary and co-working experience and other obvious things that you should make sure about:
1. What software stack they're using and how suitable it is for you to work with that stack
2. How experienced they are in managing the position they're hiring you for

What it can cause

Not knowing the above may lead to the experience that I had, a bad software stack led to losing my coding passion and therefore not delivering with the quality that I should have. And the second part led to not being able to manage the tasks and not knowing what to expect from the developer; which, in a rather small team, messes up the whole developing team and puts a lot of pressure on the developer.

So all in all, be careful who you work for!

Top comments (6)

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jordan33h profile image
Jordan

I have similar situation currently. I'm working as in house dev in non-software company, I can do whatever stack, framework I like.

Currently i handle two projects:

  • Backend of e-commerce and mobile commerce .

  • Overflow-stack (more than full lol) engineer of e-wallet, involves law, license and competitors research.

It will not losing my coding passionate for sure. But working alone, unsuitable environment, unsuitable company structure and management, "real programmer" colleagues, makes me worried and come up with anxiety, thinking for resign and losing passionate day by day.

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hpez profile image
Hassan Pezeshk

My advice, do it sooner rather than later, because for me the coding passion is my passion for life and losing it made my life kinda "unpassionate".

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tobiassn profile image
Tobias SN

Iโ€™d really like to hear your story.

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hpez profile image
Hassan Pezeshk

The whole story is, I was working at a startup for a couple of month until it failed. After a couple of days I got a call from another company saying "We'd really like to work with you". I went for the interview and what I heard in the interview was "If you wanna apply abroad for studying, this is the right place to work" meaning this is the kind of work that is being done in the better countries. Also they asked me if I knew Redis, Node.js, Elasticsearch and DevOps (Which I said yes to) on top of Php which was the actual job vacancy. Cut to a week after, I turned down another job offer and went to work for them. What I was actually working with there was php and mysql on a really bad "kinda framework" with nothing else on the stack. And this was not the whole thing. There was only one other Back-end developer there and he was full-time (I was part-time cause I'm still a university student) and they were used to that, although they were using sprints and agile with Jira and Bitbucket. The problem here was they were not used to dealing with a part-time developer who's not available all the time. All the unnecessary pressure and bad stack made me lose my passion of coding and reduced my performance significantly which I didn't realize until one they I was developing an API as a kind of add-on to the whole project and I was supposed to do that on Lumen framework. After coding for a couple of days on Lumen I realized this is the kind of stack (bare minimum) I should be working with. I regained my developing passion and performance when I was coding with Lumen and then I realized I'm not where I should be! And the rest is history.

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tobiassn profile image
Tobias SN

Sounds really interesting! Iโ€™m sure this could go as a post of itโ€™s own.

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hpez profile image
Hassan Pezeshk

Yeah, maybe I'll do a post on this too