So since I had a thread all to myself and all and some people here actually seemed to care about my well being (you're cool
) I figured I'd give an update on how things are going.
Short answer: Sucky, then pretty good, then sucky, then awesome
Long answer:
So after I and 10 others were laid off at <nameless social gaming company> I pretty much said screw it and decided the next two months would be my vacation. It was nice having two further paychecks coming and living such a nondescript lifestyle I could live off that for that long, without filing for unemployment... which I actually should have done, but I couldn't be asked.
So I basically had two months to myself sometime during which I obviously came back here. It was nice being able to go through E3 and Google I/O all day every day. Speaking of, I basically took this time to de-rustify my Android skills, which were pretty darn rusty... they're better now but not nearly where I'd like them to be yet.
So during all this I had been getting calls and stuff from like recruiters, which was nice. I turned from "OMG I'M GOING TO STARVE TO DEATH IN A WEEK" the day I was let go to "I'm taking two months off and can probably find a job at the end of that."
And find a job I did. I started working about a week ago, on July 30. It was a contract role, 15 hours a week initially but paid, uh, let's say 4.254 times the minimum wage, which worked for me. Just about enough to pay my rent and expenses but a ton of time to myself to hack away on my stuff, which is important to me -- it's how I learn new stuff and stay competitive I guess.
But this place... was weird. I met with the founder and the CTO for lunch a couple weeks prior and they seemed like good people. The CTO seemed like someone who you didn't want to be on the bad side of... But to me he was good and funny. I partnered up with this other guy for the main project I was given to work on, who was awesome and I plan to meet up with him again someday.
But the other dude in our area was just... weird... He had like this extremely dry sense of "humor," well not even humor... It's like, you'd try and say something amusing and he'd just stare at you and blink and make you feel awkward.
Well anyways, on my first day he found out I didn't know Backbone.js. "This entire project uses Backbone! How are you going to work on this project!" nevermind that he wasn't even on the project and from scanning the code I saw no references to Backbone... So he takes me into like this meetup/conference room and procedes to "educate" me for like an hour,
starting with Backbone but then going off on all these tangents, somehow we ended up talking about Heroku and backends as a service and a bunch of other stuff, which I found interesting, but it was kind of unnecessary.
So I come in on Tuesday, he turns to me and says, "Whoops, my bad, this project doesn't have any Backbone whatsoever." YOU DON'T SAY?
He then quit the next day because he wanted 1.5x his salary or something. Dude was crazy. Also on this day, Wednesday, I got a LinkedIn mail from the guy who hired me at <nameless social gaming company> saying he's now at this new company, <nameless analytics company> and he's in charge of growing it from 20 engineers to 40 and he wanted to know if I was available. Now, I've been digging into the source code of this project and I wasn't liking what I was seeing. What basically ended up happening is that <German company> hired <developer company> to make <product>. <Developer company> was handed PDFs for how <product> was supposed to look and interact like, but they didn't have enough people to complete it, so they did like a whole bunch of Javascript and some of the UI before handing it over to us.
I'll get to more of this project in a sec, but needless to say I was having second thoughts about this job. So I replied to my old "boss" and said yeah I have a contract job, but I wanted to know more about this job he had in mind for me. I felt really scummy "leading him on" while I already had a job, first time I've ever done something like that, but it worked out so I don't feel too bad. But I'll get to that...
Oh! And they also didn't have a computer for me when I got there. I had to use some really mismatched four-year old box and like 4k monitor. The PC didn't have enough horsepower for all the pixels, but it was mostly a Git server or something before I had to use it anyways. Needless to say, this was a step down from my old job. Oh! And they wouldn't give me a key to the building. So I had to either wait for someone to go inside and follow them, or call the receptionist every time I want to get inside. They wouldn't give me one because I was "just" a contract dev...
So on Thursday they had finally gotten my Google Apps account and source control stuff all working. Score! I was finally ready to do some actual work. In the meanwhile, I had been mocking up a version 2.0 of the product in HTML/JS just to bounce ideas off people and because 1.0 was turning out to be a cruddy janky ungodly mess of spaghetti code and glitches, which I was now dreading having to work on.
But yeah, I was feeling a bit more confident and upbeat with all my stuff finally set up and my workstation tweaked to my fancy. Let's do some work!
Come in Friday. Founder: "Bad news, the funding just isn't there, we're going to have to close."
Subconsciously I know I fought the urge to crack a huge grin. But still, I was shocked. When I had lunch with this guy he said he was thinking of expanding from the one floor they were on to the whole building, putting WhitePaint on all the walls (he knows the guy that runs that company and could get it for like 80% off), etc. The company was three years old, too. I thought things were on the up and up. In fact on Thursday him and the CTO were cheering in the office over getting some kind of <sports channel> project.
So yeah. That was a crazy week. Luckily, I DID have my old boss' connection to fall back on. I followed up on that as fast as I possibly could. Email on Sunday: "You wanna come in for an interview?" My reply 8 minutes later: "YES"
So yesterday I did an interview.
And this place is perfect.
Fantastic view that overlooks this gorgeous park and what I think is city hall. Glass walls (if you dream to work at startups, glass walls are always nice to see.) My old boss said he's bringing in four other people from my old job (who had a second round of layoffs apparently and is now down to ~10 employees compared to ~50 when I was there.) It's only five subway stops from where I live. They have FREE GOURMET LUNCHES CATERED EVERY SINGLE DAY OMG.
He asked what my salary requirements are, and I was like, "Well you hired me in January for <$X>, and I've learned and grown a ton since then, so think maybe around <$X+5000>." And he's like "That's fair."
I don't have an offer email yet, but my old boss is in charge of the final decision, he's the one who brought me in, and he said everyone else I talked to was positive (even though I botched one or two questions... I can't believe I never looked up $.load()...)
Anyways congrats if you read all that, I'm happy I was able to make at least one of these memorable-ish humorous job-related posts.
