Hi Dev Ranter,

My name is John Smith and I came accross to your resume on Linked In and I was very impressed. Would you be interested in a 5 min call?

Job Details:
Required skills (all expert levels): C#, JAVA, Clojure, C, PHP, Frontend, Backend, Agile, MVP, Baking, Redis, Apache, IIS, RoR, Angular, React, Vue, MySQL, MSSIS, MSSQL, ORACLE, PostgreSQL, Access, Python, Machine Learning, HTML, CSS, Fortran, C++, Game design, Book writing, PCI - Compliance
Salary: $15/Hours no benefits
Duration: 2 Months (possible extension, plus we can fire you at will)
Place: Remote (with work tracking software)
Hours: 5am - 1pm, 6pm - 11pm
Expect to work on weekends

You will be managing people as well as building applications that had to be running as of yesterday. Team culture is very toxic and no one cares about you.

We care about you though (as long as you deliver)

Looking forward to talk to you.

John Smith
Founder, CEO, Director of Staffing, Entrepeneur
Tech Staffers LLC ( link to a PNG posted on facebook)
Est. 2020

Did not expect this from Google. Seems like you're hiring real linguistic pros.

Now this is not the only thing I didn't like, they're very disorganized & the interviewer got sick & two of three interviewers were so cocky.. bad bad vibes

On the other side, a small local company is giving warm & good vibes, seems more accommodating even with lower pay.. their website sucks & the tech director was honest & smiling.

So yeah, Fuck You Google
..|.

Where I work we develop drivers and command-line software for embedded systems. The contracts we have with our customers tend to be in the £100k-£500k range and are usually completed in 6 - 9 months; our team is made up of 20 developers. You would think that it would be worthwhile investing in the department. But no, instead we have to deal with >10 year old build servers on their last legs; limited numbers of development boards with wires soldered on so that we can keep up with new board revisions; no room for R&D into new products; and to top it all off, not one of the executives has a laptop on par with the placement students in the next department. It's like the company is trying to kill the department, we've seen our staffing dwindle with no new graduate (or higher) positions being made available in the last 3 years while we've lost at least 5 people to other places. I just don't get it!

The entire IT department was HATED by the rest of the company at the last place I worked because of the complete ineptitude of the IT director and the executives refusing to do anything about it.

I was hired as a sys-admin and on my first day I knew I was in trouble. The help desk was just two guys and the only other sys-admin was the IT director. Our tiny team was supposed to handle everything for a company with a couple thousand employees spread across the country.

There was a budget for staffing but nobody would stick around for too long because of the IT director.

Here are some highlights:

- Servers were so far out of date that it was scary

- There was no documentation besides an excel spreadsheet with some passwords and IPs

- He just DISAPPEARED for a month ???

Turns out, he's related to one of the executives and was given the position with next to no prior experience. Nepotism is a bitch and I'm so glad I was only there for six months.

Most awkward recruiter interaction was probably when I had to tell a staffing agency that I didn't want to work for them because I had already worked for them and left.

I got into IT by working for a staffing agency and I was contracted out to a large company's IT call center. Doing the usual sort of level-one tech support stuff. After my contract term ran out (and upon reminding my boss that she wouldn't be my boss for much longer if she didn't hire me away from the staffing agency), I was hired on full-time.

Six months later I left the call center and moved on to a cloud server development job in the same company. Not long after that, I got a message on LinkedIn from the staffing agency, offering to hire me on as a contractor working for one of their largest partners in the area.

I responded asking for more details, just for fun. The company I'd be working for, etc. Then I had to inform them that I had in fact previously worked for their firm, and now worked at the company that they were offering to contract me out to, and earning a fair bit more money than they were offering.

They didn't even look at my employment information on LinkedIn before sending the InMail. Just glanced over my skills, saw the magic buzzword "devops," and sent me a message.

When company preaches for a great product, but keeps staffing up the marketing department.

I was working on a team with people with various employment statuses. Contractors, employees of the client, and me as a regular full time employee of the company that “owned” the contract. My HR manager gave us a presentation about our reporting structure. I had at least seven managers for different reasons across various projects.

I got a new position so needed to resign but I had no idea which managers were the ones I should notify. I looked at the org chart that the HR lady showed. I sent my resignation to five managers that would be affected by my leaving. Unknown to me my project manager was actually a contracting manager hired by the client. He let his employer, the client, know that the lead dev quit.
Apparently it destabilized the contract for my employer. If I hadn’t just issued resignation they would have fired me for telling a customer about a significant internal staffing change. They didn’t fire me because the optics would have been worse for them.

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

On my project the customer has re-signed into a contract several times when they have budget to continue work. The first time they got us to build the system was a huge success story because the team was assembled quickly and we did rapid development. Initialize repo to prod in 1.5 months. The customer asked for the same dev team. Strong dev team, a PM that doesn't take shit, and pure agile. Lets call her don't-take-shit PM.

When the customer re-signed the executive decided that she didn't like don't-take-shit PM. So the project manager gets replaced by play-by-the-rules PM who will comply with stupid requests and micromanagement. He isn't a bad PM but he tries to make everyone happy. The amount of management types executive installs on the project is massive, and development team is cut down in major ways. Customer and executive shit rolls down to the development team and we can't get anything done. The customer starts to lose faith because we can't get traction. They start demanding traditional waterfall/SDLC docs. Which causes more delay in the project.

So the executive decides that the PM can take a fall for it to save face for the company. She moves play-by-the-rules PM to another project. He starts handover to a new PM that has a history of being her pushover. The customer hadn't seen him yet so now we have push-over PM.

Play-by-the-rules PM is finally out of the project and instead of moving to a different account the company decides to "lay him off because there is no work". So basically they made him take the fall for the failure while promising reassignment, and instead let him go. This is so unfair..

Meeting with push-over PM yesterday and he shows us his plan. Identical to play-by-the-rules PM's plan that got him axed.We point that out and show him the docs that were made for it. His face clearly communicates "OH SHIT WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR?"

3 time sheets: One for the company I work for, one for the parent company staffing us to clients, one for the client.
All three have to be handed in at different times, have different rules, are on different systems and have to fit hourwise.
A waste of hours per week.
And add an offshore team that checks all 3 to this.
Also once in a while they complain about something in it. (Audits, reviews,etc.) Forward to boss, he has to argue with them.
Waste of so much time.

Well, the project I've been working on is now being terminated.

As the lead dev, I found out by one of the managers sending a public message to the staffing team in one of the channels unrelated to development, which I don't normally check.

Apparently at no point in their "very long discussion" did they think they should let me know of this decision.

Tbh I'm not even suprised, I was barely ever told anything. The others aren't either.

Job rant.

There is something terribly wrong with job search portals. The portals are suppose to point me to jobs from companies. Instead staffing companies flood these portals and make them impure. So, when under job and apply essentially they take me to their own portal and ask me to sign up.

If your portal was good then I would have signed up.

I looked at job description and loved it. Then half way the form I realise this company is asking too many questions.. realised I am not apply for job but creating profile on some another portal.

Damn all of you for playing with a jobless engineer's feelings.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms, 2,564 job cuts in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Fremont, Sunnyvale and Burlingame
Google, 1,608 layoffs in Mountain View, Moffett Field, San Bruno and Palo Alto
Salesforce, 1,151 staff cutbacks in San Francisco
Twitter, 900 layoffs in San Francisco and San Jose
Cisco Systems, 673 job cuts in San Jose, Milpitas and San Francisco
Grocery Delivery E-Services (HelloFresh), 611 layoffs in Richmond
Amazon, 524 staffing cuts in Sunnyvale and San Francisco
Intel, 490 job cuts in Santa Clara and San Jose
Rivian Automotive, 448 layoffs in Palo Alto
Lam Research, 400 staffing cuts in Fremont and Livermore

Looking through a staffing website’s photos of recruiters. They all literally look the same from a distance. Like NPCs generated by the game’s AI. “Which character would you like to pick to ruin the next stage of your professional development?”

Can someone smarter than me make a game that actually hilariously simulates job searches? I’d play that for the mere catharsis and entertainment value.

Phase one of the project we assembled a team for rapid development. The client was enthusiastic about the progress that the team made in a short time. They specifically requested the same team for phase two of the project. Executives replaced everyone on the team except me.

I looked at the new team and basically everyone on it is less technical.

Its amazing how you have to train people so their greed doesn't override their greed.

Imagine this.

2000.00 of waste a day.
2000.00 a DAY, offset by EVERY last customer you get.

To make on average 15.00 to 20.00 a day you have to spend the equivalent of $0.19 of electricity extra for them to run a laptop, to get a certain kinda client.

And some days, for a few days at least, you have to leave them alone for 4 to 5 days without buying anything so they'll buy something every day for 2 to 4 weeks at a time.

Well you're already lighting, heating, cooling and staffing the place, and you're throwing out a fuck ton of perishable product, can you afford to turn that customer away ? nope.

but they want to because they like being assholes and because they're mimicking their asshole parents who's purpose or finer points of detail they never understood because they're just desiring to mimic their piece of shit parents in being assholes, not realizing when they can be assholes without too much self detriment.

and the place is far from the ritz hotel :P