My first job

As for junior, I didn’t understand the joke about “programming is like riding a burning bike in hell,” but they explained it to me very quickly.

At some point in time, every programmer, whether he is self-taught or a knowledge-filled graduate from a specialized university, enters the world of commercial development. This is when a project that really works for people is written for money, and not a hack work on my knees. Serious office, serious adult experienced highly paid programmers, hard on complex and not completely understandable to beginners tasks. So I, full of expectations, crossed the threshold of the first in her life.

Expectations were met one hundred percent. On the very first day, and not during the week, as in our state institutions, I was given a combat-ready computer; they helped me to set it up extremely friendly and to join the process in general. The collective is weird, but who among us has them?

In the smoking room, we talked charmingly with two long-haired employees about women and coding. The boys are somehow very quiet, homely and a bit glamorous, geeks in one word. Closer to dinner, another character appeared. Noisy, charismatic, flagrant and friendly Andryukha. Smart, joyful, self-satisfied and experienced all the time.
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- Understand, Gray, here it is necessary to plow. Here is how I am! - He hit me with a hangover in half with cigarette smoke on a smoke break. Where am I so experienced from? I plow without ceasing, I write the code, I test, I make up. Hence all this knowledge.

I took this advice with me all my career, seriously. Later even such a meme appeared - write the code, bl% @ th. Five minutes later, the guru fell asleep in our common room across from me and snored. They saved the headphones, as they just started to hurt the classics of light heavy rock.

Andrew beautifully set off a mysteriously detached, cold, but very kind somewhere deep inside, haired as an Toddler from Carlson, blonde Anka, whom I was surreptitiously admiring. Anya even “good morning” spoke as if she came to the cell for the Untermen suicide bombers in the form of an Überführer SS for some of her, buttress needs. But in fact was a kind soul man. In general, a classical woman, although a programmer, is mysterious and incomprehensible as the sea.

Later, another colleague left the hospital. Worse, most positive, most experienced of us all Vitek. His “Iiiiiiii! Who did this? ”was accompanied by extremely comedic facial expressions and usually meant finding the next [wtf?]. You do not know what it is? Just remember - this is a measure of the complexity of the project, the surprise of the architecture and contradictory requirements. Well, quite often this exclamation in general sounded. And we sometimes adopted it too.

And in particular, the supervisor of this zoo, our manager and tester in one bottle, Tanechka, took over. The most positive character in this universe, otherwise it was impossible with us. Imagine the quality of project testing, if there was one tester for seven crippled developers - Tanya? And can you imagine how she, for the bugs that have broken through her, directly brainwash foreign customers / bosses? At first I had no idea. In general, we had a very nice tamer, forever everyone, even a newly discovered bug, pleased, smiling even in a thunderstorm Tanya.

- Do you know how we were late for the train we were late for? - cheerfully, defiantly, she said with a smile. - In a snowstorm on ice.
And I imagined how the same positive Tanya with a smile runs towards the flying snow behind the invisible train for three meters and smiles. And by that time Tanya is already finishing:
“Well, we did not catch the train in a taxi, but were stuck for a day, the soldiers pulled us out.” Were sullen. “Well, nobody doubted this. - Oh, almost with you, the talkers, I have not forgotten. Seryozha, there is a bug.
Well, who would doubt. I, as the most inexperienced and inaccurate from her, heard it more often than others.
- Yes, Tanya, I'll write to them now, - I sighed doomfully.
I tried, but I needed mistakes on which to learn. ie6 has become my worst enemy. The subtleties of this javascript and the lack of polymorphism in php statics I remembered forever. The need for indexing the tables in me drove a 38-hour marathon over the base of a feverish site under the growing load of the site. So I learned accuracy and thoughtfulness.

We then all sat on Windows (not to be confused with the screw!), Scolded Zend Studio for moving to Eclipse, using all kinds of panels, PhpMyAdmin, Denwer and FTP (s). Some flawed bug trackers half in Excell. No CVS. Scary SSH occasionally.

But I learned not only that. I learned to anticipate the abolition of the most idiotic customer requirements. I learned to clasp my teeth to make rounded corners on buttons, since this is so important. I learned the price of a pixel and hue from designers, I learned the price of documentation errors and responsibility for other people's bugs in the 3-rd party software and for choosing the limit of hardware used or simply inferior hardware.

I learned to understand, to get into the very essence, to speculate, to recheck them, to get to the bottom of the true cause, to understand.

I finally hated Bill fiercely and justifiably - for the whole line ie. Even WinAPI did not infuriate me in the period of desktop development. I hated and loved php - for its illogicality and for the fact that it was my main tool. How can you not love the language in which you write?

And I also knew all the fear, all the pain and hatred of uncompromising bloody outsourcing with a foreign mediator.

Do you know what outsourcing is? Experts in English will tell you that this translates as "code outside", which may mean including the issuance of the source code of the company's product to the customer. Spit in their face, they know nothing. Outsourcing is when everyone doesn’t care.

The customer company is usually foreign, do not care for them at all and for the performers in the first place, just to squeeze out in time the entire functionality of the terms of reference and a little more from the top, which they entered into the terms of reference.

We had only one customer, we even allegedly were his subsidiary, and therefore allowed to climb on the head. Because ... [drumming] ... the owners of the subsidiary company (our) vaasche all do not care how long the grandmothers pay. In the technical process they were involved a little less than not at all and their whole role was to remove the margin from our sn.

And, as a result, programmers do not care about the quality - to quickly issue a project to the mountain - askew, crooked, just to be alive. Under the pressure of someone else's management, with insufficient testing, in a state of permanent time pressure, and with the full connivance of the native management.

Ball in the office was ruled by sloppiness, incompetence and fraud. Permanently hungover Andryukha was considered the most valuable developer, because he had the most advanced imitator of vigorous activity, and also knew how to push a sugary loyal speech in the face of the authorities in time. This character is not uncommon for non-IT firms, but I met an extremely intelligent and charismatic copy, capable of existing even in a team of programmers busy with real work. And he seemed to love coding too.

The principal flawiness of the system: the inability to write at least some good code. Write something well only happens by chance. Why live like this?

Just come to work from 8 to 17 for a salary? Well, some people worked and so, for example, Anya. She turned out to be an interesting man, an enthusiastic tourist, a cyclist, knew a bunch of interesting people, walked all over the Crimea and half of Altai, and her wheel was so great in Baikal and the White Sea. The southern coast of Crimea knew better than the contents of their kitchen cabinets.
- Anya, tell me pliz what a place in the Crimea - Attic?
- Gray, the dam with work, come later.
- Are you doing?
But she froze, which was very very strange. Since the only way to get Anka to show a little interest and friendliness was to ask her about the places she visited.
“Not anymore, except in the oven.” “She lied a few hours later.” - Thank God.
- Do not like coding? - I asked doubtfully. How can you not love it?
- I love, but only during working hours.
- What about outside working hours?
- Do not code.
But she didn’t even work hard or simply for her salary — no, she was sick of her projects and was acutely worried about mistakes and unsuccessful decisions. But did not want to learn anything new and did not like coding for real. I can’t even imagine how to work in this profession without loving it.

After all, even a stool to collect without love is sad. And you try to love the stool, if it is on crutches and with the wheel of a bicycle. Do you think I exaggerate? Yes, I rather underestimate and keep back, analogies are always false. Oh, would you know how crookedly made sites, programs, sometimes even the equipment that you use every day.

Anya and I worked on a pair of projects for a while, we became friends a little there. Paired? Well, this is when due to seo you have to make mirrors, but different. SEO? Then.
So Anya loves, but I don’t know a little something. Ride and travel - loves. A code can, but no, he does not like.

Vitya's “Kachek” - all according to the classics, the nickname for subtlety - he “who did it”, was the only real programmer among us. Very attentive and attentive to the client, he gave the highest quality code and the best layout to the surface. He wrote some eerie framework on PEAR-classes and best understood Linux. Guru. In addition, in his free time, he made websites of some Canadian office and sometimes we threw up a part-time job. So I learned rapid development after work and abusive English in disputes with the customer - Vitina intermediary office from Canada. It wasn’t much to argue with our official Dutch half-commander.

Glory to the digital gods, the crisis struck. Here our owners started and our sharashka began to sluggishly and ineptly flutter in search of orders. But the local market is destitute, and one must still look for a client over the hill.

Just in case, we began to rattle teambuilding, corporate spirit and other fashionable methodologies. Andryukha already saliva came in loyal sayings, sometimes at feasts. We were now in the mornings in the morning - becoming a circle and sharing with everyone what exactly didn’t do yesterday and why. And that will not do today. Tell me - a sect? Not, agyle, in all its glory.

All these gestures were expectedly led to nothing - it is too late to drink Borjomi when the liver has resolved. The office did not acquire new customers, and the old ones themselves burst. I, thank Torvalds, fell under the reduction. But I was not nervous, because by that time I had already gained experience in this very commercial development, which differs from programming as a city fight from bench shooting. After all, programming itself is like an ongoing test in higher mathematics. But the capricious customer introduces elements of a hopak, striptease, exorcism and a burning bicycle into the process. With mathematics, and so everything was fine with me, but Gopak and exorcism still had to be tightened.