These questions are directed to all programmers with 5+ years

>>61421515
>Are you happy with your job?
It's not like I'm jumping of joy and getting out of bed with a grin on my face, but having a free car+fuel and work laptop+software licenses, comfy pay, easy-going bosses/rules, fairly relatable, productive, cooperative, and smart colleagues, flexible hours, nice offices, free lunch, coffee, water, and snacks, and occasionally a project where you can actually work with tech that's up to standards as opposed to being forced to work with legacy garbage, I sure as hell have nothing to complain about.

>What do you do?
developer in the java spearhead subcompany of the belgian cronos group. Work includes backend, database, frontend and everything in between, and more languages than just java of course. Very diverse workloads. Currently an in-house project with a bank as our customer, previous projects include an on-site project of said bank and an on-site government medical services project.

Our end of the work is always pretty nice, but the bank's internal systems are a fucking nightmare... mammoth truth tables containing all constants used throughout their system in one big database table, cryptical names that mean nothing for every single parameter, an outsourced core system from some shitty french company that got paid millions of euros to deliver a horribly subpar system (kloss koder-tier quality) that has no test coverage or analysts who understand their own system (they cannot even tell us what some of the error messages actually mean, for example), an external interface (for mobile apps and stuff) that consists of a single stateful endpoint taking commands in the form of a list of cryptically named parameters that then actually performs its work by screenscraping a motherfucking internal website that interfaces with the actual system... It's a goddamn nightmare. The people who built the system and the managers that approved it ought to commit sudoku.

>What path lead you to the point you're at now?
College internship.

>>61421873
>a single stateful endpoint taking commands in the form of a list of cryptically named parameters that then actually performs its work by screenscraping a motherfucking internal website that interfaces with the actual system
That's impressive in all the wrong ways

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>>61421984
The Wrong Way(tm) = The Bank Way(tm)

It's beyond impressive that they haven't yet managed to just lose someone's money or transfer it to the wrong recipient or some shit... It's a miracle that any part of their ecosystem works as intended.

This is basically what their system looks like to anyone not part of their little dinosaur club: https://www.csee.umbc.edu//~squire/blueball.htm

I don't feel safe keeping all my money in accounts with that very bank anymore. Not with the shit I've seen. I know other banks are probably just s fucked up but at least I haven't actually seen it of other banks.

>>61421515
>Are you happy with your job?
Yes

>What do you do?
PhD student

>What path lead you to the point you're at now?
During my bachelor's, I did some part-time programming jobs.

I started working full-time as a programmer in the middle of my master's degree because I needed to support myself.

Started working as a back-end C++ developer and finished my master's while working as this. Quickly started feeling like the job was neither challenging nor a good fit for what I wrote my master's on, so I decided to look around for an embedded position that was relevant to my interests.

Got a position at a company where a couple of friends I studied with also worked. Found out that the entire company was a mess (basically, four friends started the company ages ago and the lead of developers was a complete fuckwit). The code base was absolutely appalling, everything I did felt like patching up some boilerplate shit with tape, etc. I let my old master's supervisor know that I was interested in coming back to do a PhD if there were any positions, and he let the word around. Got contacted and encouraged to apply, applied and now I work with systems stuff and am a lot more happier despite a huge pay cut.

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>>61422061
>It's a miracle that any part of their ecosystem works as intended.
Well, a miracle, but also due to external parties' good work. I mean, just today I ran a query on their endpoint for bank cards that's supposed to return a json list of cards with numbers, accounts, available money, transfer limits, etc. Our system crashed on it because a field that was expected to contain "123 EUR" (amount in the account) actually contained "electronic transfer" and some other description text in one of the cards. It turned out to be one of those constants from their mammoth constant table (which contains all the system's error messages in 3 languages, country postal rates, named parameters for all sorts of shit, etc), that somehow sneaks into the output through some or other bug that they don't want to bother fixing.

So now our system checks that the first character is a digit, and if it isn't, outputs the amount as 0 because we have no way of knowing what the real value is. That's just 1 minor example really.

I have no expectation of this project (we're rebuilding their mobile apps for them) to actually succeed if they keep pulling this kind of shit.

>>61421515
>Are you happy with your job?
On some days accomplishment feels good. On other days overtime, responsibility and amount of work still ahead of me makes me depressed.
>What do you do?
Implementing a telecomms stack. Currently by myself. There's work planned for the next 20 man-years.
If I finish this and it becomes successful, I'll be like Torvalds or Wozniak.
There's no way I finish this...
>What path lead you to the point you're at now?
Probably autism.

>>61421515
>Are you happy with your job?
No, the company is a shit hole that believes that reinventing the wheel is a virtue. If it weren't for the fact that the place is so management and bureaucracy heavy that no one has noticed that aside from showing up on time I've essentially done no work for the last three years.

>What do you do?
Financial software devops

>What path lead you to the point you're at now?
The need for money dear boy

>>61421515
I am very happy with my job, I design and develop information systems.

I lead myself down this path, it started as simple video game modding which lead down to a full career path.

>>61421515
>Are you happy with your job?
Yeah. Problem solving is engaging. I have tons of flexibility, work fully remote, can choose what I want to work on, etc.

>What do you do?
Tech lead at a web startup with ~15 employees, six of which are programmers including me.

>What path lead you to the point you're at now?
Self-taught, shitty foot-in-the-door web dev jobs with chop shop agencies, springboarding every year to higher salaries and better positions, eventually landing on a nice comfy product startup with competent people.