Anecdotally, after participating in some mentoring programs I believe most junior developer jobs in 2021 are actually quite good. At least among the mentoring cohorts I’ve mentored.

I think developer salaries have risen a lot since many of these negative anecdotes took place. The higher salary expectation for local developers has pushed a lot of the sketchy small shops to look for outsourcing opportunities for their tech work rather than trying to hire in house.

I’ve started noticing the inverse of this situation: Some of the juniors I’ve mentored end up working at ultra-cushy jobs at overfunded and undermanaged startups where they’re paid a lot to do very little. After those experiences, it’s hard for them to go back to a regular job where they’re paid normal comp to do normal amounts of work. Once they’ve had a taste of working 2 hours per day on projects that will never actually get shipped , it’s hard to accept the types of workloads, expectations, and accountability that come from a normal job at a well-managed company.

On the other hand, people who start in bad jobs tend to thrive when they’re hired into a normal, well-run company and realize just how much better it is.

> I’ve started noticing the inverse of this situation: Some of the juniors I’ve mentored end up working at ultra-cushy jobs at overfunded and undermanaged startups where they’re paid a lot to do very little. After those experiences, it’s hard for them to go back to a regular job where they’re paid normal comp to do normal amounts of work.

The "normal comp" is now bellow their market rate.

> people who start in bad jobs tend to thrive when they’re hired into a normal, well-run company and realize just how much better it is.

There is something to be said for the amount of skills you get by running 12 hours a day.

I also lucked out with my first job. It was a part time gig at a small company of about 8. Had I saw a job listing for it, I would have been sure that it was a scam to exploit university students looking for experience. The saving grace was a classmate who worked there as well.

Their idea was to have 1 or 2 senior developers with a few part-time university students. They'd negotiate contracts with clients for websites or apps. Their rationale was to give students more experience than a summer internship while having some quality control in place with a few experienced developers and engineers. The pay was great too.

I recommended a classmate a year behind me as my replacement when I left.

Same here. I lucked out by getting my first job in a very successful app development company that followed best practices, had an excellent UX design team (before "UX" became meaningless), and actually made some genuinely innovative apps. And my immediate boss was excellent. The pay wasn't great, but I had no experience and it pretty much set me up for the rest of my career.

However, my second job (I did a degree in between which is why I didn't just stay at the first one) was not a dissimilar experience to this article. Not quite as bad, but they clearly didn't really know what they were doing.

Says how luck weighs in one's life and how dealing with chaos, randomness and risks is important.

My first gig felt horrible, I left for freelance, drowned and never recovered.

Also the importance of networking and support.

Thanks for the tip. I see they are opening an office in Nijmegen as well, nice.

This one was a US company. Since I knew everyone involved, I’m fairly certain we weren’t a front for the Yakuza. It was fun though, had lots of freedom and could do anything I thought necessary.

Ah, I see. Was it truly a subsidy of an US company, or one of those "name and brand" licensing things they do in Japan and China?

It was truly a US company (well, Japanese subsidiary of one). It’s total size was 8 employees across the entire world, so I had a fairly complete view ;)