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Sazardev
Sazardev

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My history about being the only programmer in the company

I don't want to sound like a crybaby, but I want to talk about my sad history of being forced to be the leader in my department and then be the only programmer in the company.

Well, this started when i just wanted to be a Jr Dev in a short company, I was working before as a freelancer dev, so I thought: What can be bad about having a normal job? This was a wrong decision.

Now I have the full perspective and I know that they don't even know what the necessities in the company are. How can I say that? My technical interview was only to do a script in Python that can detect the prime numbers. An extremely easy technical interview. So, if in my test I used python I thought that I'll be a python dev, but no. They send me to do "apps" using PowerApps (That isn't even programming).

Everything goes good but then having a discuss my boss want and multiplatform application via internet for everyone in the company and they can use the app wherever they want. So, I decided to use Flutter! with Django, oh my god... wrong decision again.

I started developing with a team of four people, but I was the only one that knows Flutter, the other two know a little bit of Django and the other one never touched another thing that doesn't be PowerApps (GREAT!) So, the formidable journey to developing the apps was good, in three months we had an impressive app ready to deploy in AWS! But omg... They want to launch the internet FREE! So, we had to configure a server with an exposed IP, but ha-ha, the company doesn't want the extra free to have an exposed IP (really? Yes)

The team was tired of coding and one left; the other one was a practician, and the PA guy didn't even understand what we did. Four months later it was just me in the department. Coding alone (That wasn't too bad), doing my comments, having my workflow and silence.

But I didn't even see that all the work pending of the new apps will come for me...

After 9 months in this company, I finally today decided to leave the company because i got an impressive job offer with Reac.js. The new company seems bigger and has a lot of standards.

And that's all with ugly short company, please don't do what I do.

Top comments (7)

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

Phew! Sounds like a tough time and that everybody was kinda jumping ship. Well, at least it was a learning experience about what type of place you don't wanna work in. Hope that Reac.js works out well for ya β€” they sound like they got it together!

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sazardev profile image
Sazardev

Thanks! It's time to learn a lot about React πŸ˜…

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

Haha, word to that! Cheers to new skills. πŸ₯‚

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phalkmin profile image
Paulo Henrique

Almost been there, almost done that :P

If you wanted to start as Jr, I can only believe you are still very young, so it's hard to identify the red flags. Keep it as a good story to tell to your friends and to understand what kind of professional you want to be and where you want to work

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erikgiovani profile image
Erik Giovani

Good thing you got out of there, it sounds terrifying πŸ’€.

By the way, welcome to the DEV community πŸ‘‹

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sazardev profile image
Sazardev

Thanks a lot! Such a nice community

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Nicolas Bailly

Good for you ! (That you're leaving for a hopefully better job I mean).

These stories are not that uncommon really, and they're why I'm pretty optimistic about AI taking our jobs in the short to middle term. These are the kind of jobs that AI will take : A project that has no direction, no budget, led by someone who has no clue what they want or what their team can deliver. Hopefully instead of wasting months of 4 people's life, now they'll be able to tinker with chatGPT and try to do their project all by themselves.