dsc_

Don't forget, it is YOUR choice to have Slack open. Nobody is forcing you to. It might be an unspoken rule to do so, but I value productivity more. In the event someone has something important to say (rarely the case), come up or call me (or PM me on IRC).

"There is no such thing as stupid questions". This however, is a stupid question.

Solely depends on your effort/motivation to pick up a new skill. As with anything...

30 usd a hour is not a fair wage for a programmer (considering 10 hours a week, 40 hours would be a different story) - you need to increase it. Please note your employer benefits from having an employee with decent living conditions. He knows, you know. If he's not willing to increase either your hours or rate I suggest to find something new.

Because your HTML generating AI framework would not be able to deal with Mandy from upper management that wants that one button to have a rounded edge in the upper right corner just like the button she saw on Bloomberg, her favorite website, they make a ton of money so there should be no reason Mandy can't have a button with a rounded edge in the upper right corner, except that your framework can't deal with questionable input from humans at which point you will try to override it with CSS and another thing and another thing and before you know it you'll have a colleague come up to your desk complaining about the fact the codebase has 4 years worth of overriding CSS spaghetti and wondering if switching to ThatOneFramework^tm he read about on hackernews the other day will solve the issue of backend/frontend integration.

Pick your battles, this one is not worth it.

Congratulations!

I'm doing exactly that right now. Hired for a decent salary - but quiting.

I don't know what ill be doing in 6 months. I don't have a financial buffer. This is scary but it fits my hippie-like personality. Not to say you should not have anything lined up. You also should not mind 60-80 hour work-weeks or dealing with stressful situations. These are personality traits that provide a good foundation that allow you to be independent.

If the need is there, I am certain I can trust on my network (of friends & ex-colleagues) and my own skills to help me get a job.

Without a family to provide for, radical decisions like these are easier. Live a little. Jump into to unknown. And for future replies on this comment pointing out that my suggestion is a downright dangerous; I concur.

Instead of complaining, how about you fetch the package and reverse engineer it so you can answer your own question.

Good post. Would have liked to see the actual offenders in question.

High-school dropout here. I was homeless for ~16 months around 2010. I knew I wanted to get into IT but I figured I should not pursue HTML, PHP or .NET jobs, as most schools and educations here taught exactly that. I knew I couldn't beat the competition, even though I had experience using those languages.

I went into *nix, Python and C instead. Hanging on IRC taught me hacker ethos and the lingo that comes with the work. Made friends, embedded myself in various communities. Got job offers through some communities.

First job was doing 50% support (servicedesk) and 50% Python. It was horrible at times. But I did have a job. I met a guy there that went out of his way to personally get me up to speed with Python/Linux - like a mentor. I worked there for a year but we always kept in touch since.

Fast-forward 8 years later; I can now actually code some decent stuff and that mentor just joined my team and we're reunited again. But that's off-topic.

TL;DR: Learn something that is in demand and be prepared to make sacrifices.

As cold as the above comment may sound - I concur, there's always a way to earn more.

Perhaps you would need to find remote work or learn another language. Or simply work hard(er). Whatever it takes.

We (a big newspaper - 5k-10k visitors at any time) run on Flask. Quite a big application.

It was the biggest reason why I choose this job, as many python shops seem to run Django which I'm not a fan of.

Have you heard of ZomboDB? It aims to provide the best of both worlds; transactions and elasticsearch. I've been using it on my own pet project and am very happy that I only have to care about dealing with Postgres (the ES part goes automatically).