Job Experiences

Post any programming job experiences you have so I know what to expect in the future.  I'm getting my feet wet doing freelance web work right now and I want to know what to expect when I land a full-time job or get some interesting work. 

Right now, I'm just tweaking Wordpress sites with some plugin recoding and saving 6 similarly ancient PHP e-commerce sites from the agony of a PHP4->5 upgrade.  I also have a side gig doing some microcontroller + PCB design work.  The freedom is great (I can work from home), but the client is some whackjob religious nut who apparently is addicted to prescription anxiety pills.  He also runs his shipping/customer service people into the ground like a true capitalist.  Ugh.  Luckily, once these jobs are done with, I'll have a portfolio to shop around.

So, now you.

Started working earlier this year. Freelance. Web stuff. Built stuff from scratch with Django and App Engine. Got hired as a contractor for Google, porting the internal tools they acquired from Zagat over to App Engine. The manager I worked for quit to start his own business, so I started working for some another company that had a CMS written in Django. Eventually I started making Android and iPhone apps for them. Now I'm splitting my time between them and some clients of theirs that have contracted me for more customized work of their apps. The Google guy has contacted me about working for his new startup, making apps, but I'm under legal obligation to finish my contract work, which may take until next year. ;_;

"web stuff" is not programming.

Web work? As much as I'd like to have an stable source of income, I'd never get into web shit.

I'd rather be a sysadmin or something silly like that.

Programming for a living is stupid. You'll end up doing mindless ENTERPRISE crap all day. Then it's not fun anymore. Plus the pay is shit and eventually they'll just outsource your job to curry niggers.

>>3-5
Enjoy your poverty.

>>6

enjoy your ruby on rails enterprise solutions ,,faggot''

I tend to agree with >>5, but I'm stuck in the boat for now so I'm riding it.

I do Drupal. I just kind of rolled into it, the people who employ me use Drupal so I learned it. I'm not going to say it's total insanity but the amount of crap layered on crap layered on crap (Drupal is written in PHP, we develop on Mac and deploy it on Ubanto, we use MySQL for everything) requires a certain Zen attitude to work.

The good thing about Drupal is you can learn to click together a site in a couple days, and that's what you'll be doing day in day out if you go into web development. Deploying maintenance updates is usually fingers crossed. Also expect to be doing an import from legacy systems every couple weeks (often from a bare database dump used by whatever custom built CRMs/CMSs they used previously).

On the side, I'm trying to figure out what other skills could possibly be marketable. I know a little of everything (being the /prog/rider that I am), but not enough to really say I'm experienced in it. I'm looking for something interesting that might blow up in the next 5-10 years, so that I can spend some energy on getting to know it. Interacting with a database and generating HTML5 gets old fast.

>>7
I work on Django and App Engine because I like Django and App Engine.

I don't work with Ruby on Rails because I don't like Ruby on Rails. Though I once got hired to perform penetration tests on a website running Rails. I only learned enough to understand the common security holes and trust me, I found them all. There was nothing that couldn't be wrong with that site that wasn't wrong with that site. After I was done with it was probably the most secure Rails application on the web.

>>8
My first summer job was working on a Drupal extension. That experience almost made me quit programming. At the time, Perl was the only scripting language I knew and I had heard and naively believed that PHP was just Perl with a built-in templating engine tailored to the web. Boy was I wrong ! I'll never touch PHP again.