My first job

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

At some point in time, every programmer, whether he is self-taught or a graduate of a specialized university, overwhelmed with knowledge, enters the world of commercial development. This is when you write a project that really works for people for money, and not a handicraft for yourself. Serious office, adult serious serious experienced highly paid programmers, piling over complex and not completely clear tasks for beginners. So I, full of expectations, crossed the threshold of the first in the life of it contra.

Expectations were justified one hundred percent. On the very first day, and not during the week, as we have in state institutions, a combat ready computer was allocated, extremely friendly helped to set it up and generally join the processes. A team with oddities, but which of us does not have them?

In the smoking room, we had a nice conversation with two long-haired employees about women and coding. The boys are somehow very quiet, homely and a little glamorous, geeks in a word. Closer to dinner, another character appeared. Noisy, charismatic, showing rude and friendly Andryukha. Smart, always joyful, smug and experienced.

- You see, Gray, you have to plow here. That's how I am! - He doused me with a hangover in half with cigarette smoke on a smoke break. Where am I from so experienced? I’m plowing without ceasing, I write code, test, and typeset. Hence all this knowledge.

I dragged this advice with me all my career, seriously. Later, even such a meme appeared - write the code, bl% @ t. Five minutes later, the guru fell asleep in our common room opposite me and snored. They saved the headphones, as they had just started to get sick with the classic light heavy rock.

Andrei magnificently set off the mysteriously detached, cold, but very kind somewhere deep inside, the blonde Anka, whom I slyly admired, cut under the Kid from Carlson. Anya even said “good morning” as if she went to the cell to the death row non-management women in the form of an Uber-Fuhrer SS for some of her butchery needs. But in fact she was a good soul. In general, a classical woman, although a programmer, is mysterious and incomprehensible like the sea.

Another colleague later left the hospital. Skinny, most positive, most experienced of all of us, 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 unit of measure of the complexity of the project, the surprise of the architecture and the contradictory nature of the requirements. Well, often this very exclamation sounded in general. And we, too, sometimes adopted it.

And in particular, the supervisor of this zoo took over, our manager and tester in one bottle, Tanya. The most positive character in this universe, otherwise it was impossible for us. Can you imagine the quality of testing projects if there was one tester for seven crippled developers - Tanya? And can you imagine how the foreign customers / bosses directly rinse their brains for the bugs that broke through it? At first I had no idea. In general, the tamer was very sweet, always with everything, even a newly discovered bug, happy, smiling even in the thunderstorm Tanya.

“Do you know how we chased a train that we were late for?” - she said cheerfully, fervently, with a smile. - In a blizzard on ice.
And I imagined how the same positive Tanya with a smile runs towards the flying snow behind a train that is invisible for three meters and is smiling. And Tanya was already finishing by that moment:
- Well, we didn’t catch the train by taxi, but got stuck for a day, the soldiers pulled us out. Ranged up. “Well, no one doubted that.” “Oh, I almost forgot with you, talkers.” Serezha, there is a bug.
Well, who would doubt it. I, as the most inexperienced and sloppy from her, heard this more often than others.
“Yes, Tanya, I’ll write to them now,” I sighed fatefully.
I tried, but I needed mistakes to learn from. ie6 has become my worst enemy. The subtleties of this javascript and the lack of polymorphism in php statics I remembered forever. The need to index the tables drove me into the 38-hour marathon over the base of the site, which was febrile under the growing load. So I studied accuracy and thoughtfulness.

We then all sat on Windows (not to be confused with a screw!), Scolded Zend Studio for moving to Eclipse, used 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 predict the abolition of the most idiotic customer requirements. I learned with my teeth clasped to make rounded corners on the buttons, since it is so important. I found out the price of a pixel and a shade from designers, I knew the price of documentation errors and responsibility for other people's bugs in 3-rd party software and for selections used to the limit of capabilities or just poor hardware.

I learned to understand, get into the essence, build guesses, double-check them, get to the bottom of the true reason, understand.

I finally hated Bill fiercely and justifiably - for the entire line of ie. Even WinAPI didn't infuriate me so much during the desktop development period. I hated and loved php - for its irrationality and for the fact that it was my main tool. How can you not like the language you write?

And I also knew all the fear, all the pain and hate of an uncompromising bloody outsourcing with a foreign intermediary.

Do you know what outsourcing is? Connoisseurs of English will tell you that this translates as “code out”, which may mean including the issuance of the source code of the company's product to the customer. Spit in their faces, they don’t know anything. Outsourcing is when everyone doesn't care.

The customer company is usually foreign, do not care for them all and for the performers in the first place, if only to squeeze out all the functionality on the terms of reference and a little more from above, which they put in the terms of reference.

We had only one customer, we even allegedly were his subsidiary, and therefore allowed to climb out on his head. Because ... [drum roll] ... the owners of the subsidiary company-performer (ours) can’t do anything at all while the grandmas pay. They were involved in the manufacturing process a little less than in the least and their whole role was to remove the margin from our RFP.

And, as a result, the programmers do not care about the quality - to quickly deliver the project to the mountain - askew, crooked, if only alive. Under the pressure of someone else’s management, with insufficient testing, in a state of permanent time pressure, and with the complete connivance of the native management.

The 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 simulator of violent activity, and he also knew how to promptly push in a sugary loyal speech in front of his superiors. This character is not uncommon for non-IT offices, but I came across an extremely sensible and charismatic instance, capable of existing even in a team of programmers busy with real work. And he kind of loved coding too.

Fundamental flaw in the system: the inability to write at least some good code. Writing something well is only possible by accident. Why live like this?

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

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

Anya and I worked on paired projects for a while, they became friends a bit. Paired? Well, this is when because of seo you have to make mirrors, but different. SEO? Later.
So that Anya loves, and that no, I hardly know. He loves to ride and travel. And he can code, but no, he doesn’t like it.

Vitya’s “Kachek” - everything is classic, the nickname for slenderness - he’s “who did it”, was the only real programmer among us. Very attentive and helpful with the client, he gave out the highest quality code and the best layout. He wrote some creepy framework on PEAR classes and was the best versed in Linux. Guru. In addition, in his spare time, he made websites for some Canadian office and sometimes he gave us jobs. So I studied rapid development after work and abusive English in disputes with a customer - a window-mediating office intermediary from Canada. With our official Dutch superiors, it wasn’t much to argue.

Glory to the digital gods, a crisis has struck. Here our owners got wound up and our sharashka started sluggishly and ineptly fluttering in search of orders. But the local market is poor, and beyond the hill of the client we still have to look.

Just in case, we began to be blundered by teambuilding, corporate spirit and other fashionable methodologies. Andryukha already spit in loyal sayings, sometimes at feasts. We now hid in the mornings - became a circle and shared with everyone what exactly I hadn’t done yesterday and why. And that I won’t do today. Tell me - a sect? No, agil, in all its glory.

All these gestures, as expected, did not lead to anything - it’s too late to drink Borjomi when the liver has resolved. The office was not overgrown with new customers, and the old ones themselves seemed to burst. Glory to Torvalds, I came under the reduction. But I wasn’t nervous, because by that time I had already gained experience in this very commercial development, which differs from programming as a city battle from a trap shooting. After all, programming itself is like an ongoing test in higher mathematics. But the capricious customer brings into the process the elements of hopak, striptease, exorcism and a burning bike. With mathematics, everything was fine with me, but I had to pull up hopak and exorcism.