I thought you had two full-time jobs yourself? I think the work itself is pretty reasonable - this feels easier than a few years back when I did something similar mostly because I've gotten better at communicating and somewhat better at managing stress and expectations, both internally and externally. The really tough part is balancing it with spending time with kids. This past weekend was surreal, spend time with kids all day, going out and what not, then work all evening/night, rinse and repeat.

Yes but I have nothing to do at one of them.

To clarify - I'm not talking about working 70 hrs/week. I'm talking about working 70 hours/week and posting 10k words/day in this thread.

Hahahaha, I see, my brain does need a break every now and then - I probably don't post as much as you think, it was mostly just today and it's pretty rare that I post while working during the day. Today I did have to wait around a bunch at work, too many meetings, outages, missing people and stuff.

To be specific, in this new job - I used to post almost exclusively at work in my previous job but this job is way more intense and I'm new here.

Now you're replying to yourself. It's 1am - get some sleep dude!

I would like to but this seg fault won't fix itself. Somehow I'm working in C++ now, shoot me.

Gross

Btw Job #2 is really fun and interesting. If someone came to me with this as a side project I'd probably be doing it just for fun and learning. $85/hr on top of that is major gravy. What a country!

That's good to hear! Definitely keep me posted. I've definitely been learning more about react and the whole ecosystem around it. Then again I've also been re-learning C++ and various strategies for dealing with memory issues while sending data between a runtime with GC and native code. I think I'm slowly going insane.

Anyway, fixed the memory access issue - finally going to bed - good night!

We got the guy I used to work with who is super sharp and has been working extensively with react for over a year. Landing him is one of the big reasons I'm having fun. I'm no longer terrified about the front end. It really is a pleasure to work with people who are great at what they do.

I may be a little buzzed right now.

Same.

Also a point that hasn't been mentioned is this whole discussion seems to assume web development, because there are a lot of industries where specific languages are required and absolutely have a big impact on where you can go with your career. It's important to make that distinction if we're looking past Noodle's job and discussing general programming advice.

I'm also not buying that there's no objectively bad languages to learn, maybe PHP isn't terrible enough to illustrate this point. If Noodle had said his job offer was at some government agency's records office maintaining legacy COBOL applications would the advice be the same? Because it shouldn't be.

This is not correct in general. In acquisitions (of smaller startups) the employees pretty much all get interviewed and vetted.

There is so much I could state about this. Craggoo I agree with your point that this is an undesirable and pretty much an unnecessary situation. This is not untypical though. However, I don't think you should just suck it up and be stoic about it either. This situation calls for "finesse" in my view. You need to come off as a good team player but you need to get your proper share of the credit for doing this. Obviously other team members don't see much upside in tackling this assignment. There are many who would be more than willing to share any credit for tackling it that they don't deserve at your expense though. I'm guessing your lead/manager isn't the greatest person to work for either. Always keep your future career goals in mind and proceed accordingly. Memos are one of the tools you have at your disposal. Meetings perhaps too.

Depends on the company maybe. I've had it happen to me 3 times so far and the buying company has never so much as talked to me at all.

This is true but you can just learn that language if you want to go into one of those career tracks and it's not a big deal if you don't. Learning PHP instead of Ruby isn't going to hold him back from later learning q to get kdb+ jobs or learning Verilog to get into circuit design or learning any other language. We're on this derail because some people thought PHP is something that should be avoided. I'm not saying learning French over Mandarin is a great idea if you plan on moving to China - merely that French, in a vacuum, is not a bad language to learn, especially if that's the only foreign language offered at your school.

Well if that's the best job he could get, it is what it is but this is a good point and that's why I qualified it as "mainstream language" - this was my first post that triggered this whole thing:

There are definitely some languages that simply don't teach you how to program in a modern context but PHP is not one of them - it's firmly in that group of popular languages that largely share similar semantics (Perl, PHP, JavaScript, then looking slightly broadly, also Python and Ruby) and switching between them should be largely seamless. Btw, I think Ruby is probably the language to avoid if you are sensitive about this kind of stuff but again it's a minor concern. If you're a good Ruby programmer, you're a good programmer and if you're a good programmer, this kind of thing is a fairly minor concern.

Yeah good point.

Specifically for lowkey anyone from that company finding this seems ridiculously unlikely.

Btw, you completely missed the point here. I wasn't making an appeal to authority - I was saying that goofy's point that he would have appreciated advice and opinions earlier in his career from experienced programmers is quite silly given how he's reacting to advice and opinions from programmers that are considerably more experienced than he is.

sorry, I dont mean to pile on, but maybe you can clarify what you mean by unit tests here.

Like, I cant imagine writing code and not also creating accompanying unit tests. I also think it would be pretty damn hard, and certainly inefficient on the whole, to have a separate developer writing unit tests for another developers code.

You are making all sorts of assumptions candybar which are mostly wrong. The basis of your argument is I have access to all the company repos. I do not. Any repo I need (or want) access to has to be granted by one of the handful of people that have the permissions to do that. The code I'm looking for isn't necessarily in any of the repos I have access to.

Yep this is the case where I work. They are super diligent about protecting IP so you probably have to make a case for even being granted access.

Then do research, find out what you need and ask for access? Why is this unusual? I'm not here to tell you how to do your job. You're the one who was trying to say you have some kind of unusually terrible situation on your hands - why is it that I have to play 20 questions to figure out what's bad if anything is bad at all? Remember, you started out with how it's just the worst thing in the world that you have deal with duplicate fields in different tables. Maybe point out something that is actually unusually bad? Because not a single thing you've mentioned qualifies. People build complex software, people move around and the knowledge of how things came to be gets lost. Sometimes documentation is sparse to non-existent, people who you feel like should know don't seem to know. Systems that you feel will be helpful in troubleshooting aren't accessible and things you don't even know exist are responsible for the problem you're dealing with. There's nothing unusual about this and it's quite hard to believe given what you've mentioned so far that you're dealing with a situation that is actually unusually difficult. You mentioned working with terrible coworkers - how do they get by?

It's a good thing you aren't being paid for your reading comprehension because it leaves a lot to be desired. That is about the nicest thing I can say about you right now.

Well I'm not interested in you saying nice things about me but please do go ahead and point out where I misunderstood because I'm interested in improving my reading comprehension. What did I misunderstand about what you wrote?

I see. Maybe this is just a Bay Area thing. A friend's company got acquired and he went through many hours of technical interviews. The company even hired someone to prep the employees on solving algorithms problems.

I don't think it's a Bay Area thing. It's probably much more correlated to the type of acquisition than to geography.

If you're talking an acquihire of a small company, everybody is very likely going to be interviewed (barring special circumstances). If you're talking one company buying a whole business unit for 9+ figures - the individual employees aren't going to be vetted.

And there's lots of room in between.

This is like a perfect small example of what's wrong with this thread. Everybody speaks very definitively and is quick to jump to calling someone else wrong based only on their personal experiences - which are almost never representative.