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During the crisis I lost my job and now I'm afraid to write smart code so as not to frighten off the latest vacancies



A couple of years ago, I was filled with anger and despair. I was the guy who spent a hundred years in one big company, burned out, but still did not know which giant market was outside. Burnout scared me. I doubted my skills and believed in hints from my superiors that you would find a better job than this.

I did not know where to go, I turned despair and anger into a text, and I liked it. I liked it so much that deep down I began to rejoice at any crap in my life - only crap made good material. Even worse, I started looking for shit on purpose.

But finding it became increasingly difficult, because in reality the life of the developer is a fucking tale. The world around is simple and clear, you have an interesting job, you always have where to apply your creative urges - and you have a lot of money. The fear of unemployment does not exist - you will get dozens of vacancies any day. There is no fear of crises - the salaries of developers are growing faster than everyone else in the country, and if something goes wrong, you just find a job where your payroll is tied to a buck or you choose a relocate. This is an industry where specially trained people will solve any difficulties for you. Just click the task at least a couple of hours a day.

We are sitting here like old Europeans and grumbling at the herds of uneducated labor migrants who are felling us for money from their stupid under-professions.

At some point, at the peak of well-being, I wrote my most impudent text. It turned out not from the fact that in my life there was real shit, but because I could not find shit, and it infuriated me. I wrote and realized that these silly articles were enough for me. I decided to become an adult and a serious uncle, as every third commentator advised me.

Seriously engaged in work, and not through the sleeves. Set up plans. I finally agreed to fly with my wife and friends on vacation (I hated even the thought of vacation), I bought tickets. He relaxed and tried to start living like a person. Even the car began to drive slowly and carefully. And it was here that the shit that I had been looking for so long found me. But this time I was not happy with him.


A week before the new year, I was severely fired from the office, where in a month I was to become a team leader. It was unpleasant, but not scary. What problems - find a new one. But work was needed right now, and the market has already entered the “come on after the holidays” mode. I agreed to the project work and part-time work, spent a couple of hours on it right on the trip, immediately received the cache and was calm.

But design work is work that will end soon. I began to look for a permanent place in advance, and could not understand what was happening. The market spoiled me, before I went only to the social security parties where I was invited because of the articles - so that I would not have to explain anything to anyone. It’s not that I was very good technically, but I’m not bad enough not to be obsessed with social security.

And yesterday there were ten sentences a day, and today suddenly zero. I was expecting quarantine to generate a bunch of udalenki, and he gave birth to an empty headhunter, ignorers and failures. Yesterday it was ridiculous to imagine that when you apply for a job you will get “no,” today you will not get anything else. Today, if they wrote “no,” that's good. At least they noticed you.

The crisis, the fucking virus, the article because of which I was stuffed into blacklists. The latter is at least a little amusing: I represent the gloating eychars - “Do you want to work again?” Well, don’t work. ” One hundred percent they think that I tightened my tail and how nice came running to ask for work, as soon as life locked.

But I know which of us is a real hypocrite. I’m not going to go to the market with this generally accepted successful mantra “oh no, that you, of course, I’m not here for the money! Since childhood, I dreamed of coming to the office by 10 in the morning and rivet the same type of task! Only the values ​​of your companies are important to me, money has nothing to do with it. ” And I know for sure that if you give a billion dollars to these mysterious burning eyes, they will immediately shit on the boss’s table, go to the ends of the world and water exotic trees in their garden and admire the stars on the lawn until old age.

We all are simply forced to work, and fucking mad at me because I had enough eggs to tell the truth out loud.

I may not want to work a hundred times, but when you are a developer who lost his seat at the height of the crisis, the world is no longer simple and understandable - it suddenly looks like a hostile bunch of crap that is about to attach you to itself. When you have a good income, you quickly grow into a bunch of obligations, and now your basic existence begins to cost five average salaries in your region. I have long forgotten what fear is to be left without money, but now there is this fear. Repeatedly amplified by the crisis.


But I was lucky - with one of the vacancies, to which I responded just in case, a positive answer came. At least they were ready to talk to me.

Vacancy on a full stack, a back on sharps, a front on a script. I am not a back-end or front-end. I call myself a full stack because I know both C # and Java / type script. But I almost did not make a backend or frontend - I did libraries, desktops and mobile phones.

We phoned and quickly agreed that we needed a test task. The simplest steal, netcor, front on something from the big three. Well, I think the offer is in my pocket. No one and nothing will tell about my skill better than my code. I will not be able to crap on a social security when there is a thoughtful, clear-cut solution to the problem behind me.

And I was right, I did not crap at the interview. I crap while doing a test.

I’m not a backender, so I don’t really imagine the architecture of such things. But I’m a professional developer, I stupidly went to Google and asked how the web api is done to the core. Google responded with articles on ISDN and posts in technical reports. I thoroughly studied all this and realized that I didn’t like Nichrome like the approach adopted in the industry.

How do they validate the data there? Attributes? The industry is over 30 years old, and we still cannot decide on a unified approach for validation. Ok attributes. You put MinLength on, and it doesn’t work because there isn’t such a constant in the database and that’s it. If you want it to be validated, either you’re saving your own attribute and embed it in the guts of EF, or validate in services. In the ass attributes.

How do they work with data access services? No, they don’t have such services. They use the repository pattern, but that doesn't suit me.

Okay, IoC is objectively a good thing. But explain why the hell do you crap these repositories without end and end? Embedding them into each other, wrapping repositories over repositories, sprinkling it all with tons of DTO just to pass your damned SELECT TOP 1 FROM ... WHERE Id = 10 to the database. What are you saying there? Being tested? Can I write a mok? It’s not that I had such a lot of experience, but I have never seen a system on services being well tested with mokas. Nobody ran into this cloud of your repositories over repositories and spent two working weeks on it - first of all, to the client and the manager, who drowned two meetings back for unit testing and almost TDD, until he saw the estimate. But your “young and successful company” has no money for the test architect.

For any hijacking for any sneeze, I must make an external DTO in addition to the rest of the ten, which will be specifically used only in the controller. And God forbid using inheritance. Once you mix the essence - then you break the leg unravel. And if you use EF-th entity as DTO, then you go out. The proxy and the attach / detach call in the most unexpected places are provided to you.

Okay, we’ve come up with an auto mapper. But they did not learn how to use it and fig a static configuration, which then, of course, would suddenly be tied to the DataContext instance, which - here is a surprise - will have to be put in HttpContext.Current. And then we wonder why all the seniors run away screaming when they are offered to participate in the translation of the project to .NET Core.

Gods, why do I know all this? I’m not a becker, I haven’t yet grown a thick skin that protects me from unnecessary doubts when you use the worthless solution adopted by all bekenders.

On the other hand, people hire a signor. They don’t need a person who spanks thoughtlessly like everyone else - they, Phil, want you to think a little. But I can’t do it a bit. I immediately begin to come up with some completely new system, a consistent, powerful approach.

I divided the application into three assemblies - date, business and web. The layers are clearly separated from each other, everything that needs to be encapsulated - I have encapsulated. No one except the data layer can instantiate models, everything is under control. As a result, I have three assemblies per cradle for one entity. I'm an idiot, redoing. They hire a signor, not an over-engineer.

The fifth or sixth circle of such thoughts has already passed. In the process, I write code that seems to be getting worse and worse. I quickly realized that with this approach I would never finish the test. I had to convince myself - stick your opinion in your ass, and do like everyone else.


This is not the first test in my life. I'm used to it this way: you cherat, as you see fit, in a couple of days you refactor once and send it. If I do forever, it will not work better. And if it does not go to the employer - well, thank God, then we will not work together.

Now the rules have changed. I need work like air, I begin to write code that I think they want to see, instead of the one I think is necessary. I have long forgotten this nasty feeling. It is one thing to doubt your decisions when you are afraid to write bad code. And it’s a completely different thing when you write a code specifically so that someone likes it.

When something does not work out for you in development, it immediately starts to seem to you that the whole problem is in you. That you don’t know anything, everyone else, their mother, knows how to work as programmers, but you don’t know how. It is an irrational, inexplicable horror that you deceived yourself all your life, it intensifies very quickly.

Yes, I know that you can’t build systems for years and not be a real developer. Yes, I know a bunch more arguments, but fear is much stronger. And now he is backed by a financial hole - I no longer play a video game, but seriously risk making my family poor. And the only weapon I have to avoid this is my skill, the faith in which evaporates before our eyes.

Now I feel more scared than ever, because I didn’t just understand, but felt it - the friendly, overweight market has always been a confirmation of my skill. As soon as I became a drop in a shoe, the market instantly rewarded me with money and new opportunities. And now, when the market is storming, then it turns out I can become nothing. There will be no market, there will be no my steepness.

All my confidence that I have the right to make some decisions, that I have some experience and the grounds for this, shattered when the conditions of the labor market changed. And now the developer is not an intellectual elite, but an engineer from a Soviet research institute. Cheap and dumb. I can’t agree with myself and do an elementary test, because fear made me unsuitable.


My last version of the beck made is a reference solution. All on the guides. It took all without a trace of moral strength. I could send what has already been done, but I preferred to throw this shit in the trash, and do nothing else.

To write a test as expected from me - for me it is a deal with conscience. I step back from my principles and write code that I think is bad. And I can’t write as I want, because I'm scared. I’m afraid that if I torture this test with titanic writings and deals with myself and get the answer “guy, you did some crap, you don’t suit us”, my faith in myself will fall so much that I won’t be able to walk around through

me again overwhelmed by despair, but instead of anger, now fear.

What's next? I’m going to tell with burning eyes how I’ve dreamed all my life of going to the office for round 10 and rivet the same type of task?


Now along with arttomI’m doing the “We Are Doomed” podcast. Everything there is as in the articles - as directly as possible about development, industry, dough, and social security. First issue here

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