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I worked for Freelancer.com briefly as a software engineer at their HQ in Sydney for about 1 month (that was in the year before their IPO) - I was fresh out of

I worked for Freelancer.com briefly as a software engineer at their HQ in Sydney for about 1 month (that was in the year before their IPO) - I was fresh out of university. The culture within the company was toxic. They treat developers like crap - Both those who use the platform and those who work at HQ. They fired me after 1 month during my probation because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spending extra time writing tests. I remember the tech director telling me "That's not the kind of engineering we do here" after I tried to justify why tests were important. Several of these horrible people went on to work for Facebook later. The CEO of Freelancer.com is a complete jerk. A few years after I had gone, I spoke with engineers who used to work there and there was gossip going round that the CEO had sex with a female employee and she got pregnant. He also hired his friends in top positions; some of which were utterly incompetent. Some of the CEO's favourite employees got drunk during work hours in front of the overworked engineers. Employee retention was very low.

Exuma 9y ago
In their defense, the one thing that bothers me most is if I specifically tell someone to code something a certain way (for example, to skip tests on this project), and they don't listen and do it anyway because "it's the right way." I on the other hand know what is right for my project... not the person I'm hiring. That's why I asked X person to do it a specific way. Btw Im not saying they arent toxic, they sound like pieces of shit. Just pointing it out more generally.
- jondubois 9y ago
  They didn't give me any instructions about how to implement the feature. I had just arrived 2 weeks earlier and there was a lot of code there so it would have been impossible for me to get it to work (without breaking existing stuff) if I did not write tests. Also this is a company that handles business transactions; high-value stuff; there should have been more tests.
  - Exuma 9y ago
    Fair enough, sounds like a horrible place to work. D:
gardenpuppet 9y ago
Sounds like you learned a valuable life lesson. It's always been obvious that freelancer had no test platform and that they would simply push releases to production and wait for things to break, and then maybe fix them. The most interesting lesson from this was that this attitude has no apparent downside. Users either don't care, don't even notice, or sadly, may have no choice given that there are not many sites that fill this niche. The company went public a few years ago, investors have no clue as to what's under the hood, and tbh it doesn't seem to matter much. It's interesting to see what freelancer is doing now that they are accountable. Me, I think it will be more of the same.
justboxing 9y ago
> because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spending extra time writing tests. This. Just yesterday, I was asked by an interviewer at a Startup. "How do you test your code? Do you write tests? What's your familiarity with TDD." My answer: "I prefer to do a test driven approach. However, none of the companies I worked for allocated time for writing tests in the sprint, so I have not been able to actually do this in practice. I usually debug my code and run it through all the happy path and edge cases." Was bitten once very early in my career just like OP, and decided to only write tests after initial coding, if there was time left. Most (not all) Companies expect you to do TDD, but never allocate time for it in the estimation. So I've made it a point to ask the PM if there was time allowed for writing tests in the estimate, and if they say something like "Oh no we don't have time for that" I don't do it.
- wirrbel 9y ago
  I couldn't imagine to work without writing tests and I firmly believe it actually makes me quicker than manual coding. Sure, if you aim for 100% code coverage it takes time, but instead of trying out my code a few times, I just write those try-outs as tests and am happy ever after. I don't really mention tests to my management. To me, they are just part of coding. My coworkers don't mind, they are happy when maintaining or changing my code that they have tests for support.
  - nkristoffersen 9y ago
    I just started learning how to write tests for my APIs. Changed my life! Now when I need to make broad changes I can easily tell what needs to be fixed because my tests cover each end point with multiple success and failure cases. Love it.
  - Denzel 9y ago
    This, exactly this. I've felt the same increase in development velocity; and an equal increase in confidence. I'm able to deliver systems and walk away with 99% confidence that no one is going to come back to me with a problem. And if they do, it's easy enough to write a regression test to prove the problem and then fix it. I've adopted your same approach. I don't mention testing, but I'll be damned if I'll ever write a piece of code without it. The light-bulb moment for me was when I realized that testing happens one way or another. Either you're in the console manually setting up and running everything... or you could just write a program (a test) to do the same thing for you. Once I realized that, I never looked back!
ashleyn 9y ago
>Several of these horrible people went on to work for Facebook later. Seems like they're a better fit anyway for the company of "move fast and break things".
mapl 9y ago
I bet Martin Scorsese would love see this story to hit cinemas
jaaames 9y ago
Good to see you post defamatory things under your own name in a public forum Jonathan. https://github.com/jondubois https://github.com/jondubois Matt is a nice guy, shame if this comment got to him directly.
can09 9y ago
>Nice to see you post defamatory posts using your real name on a public forum Johnathan. >https://github.com/jondubois https://github.com/jondubois >Matt is a nice guy, shame if this comment got to him directly. I noticed this reply to your comment - it was here briefly but has now been deleted. This "Matt" referred to is presumably the CEO. The comment seems to read like a freelancer.com employee trying to threaten you? Your observation on their corporate culture may not be far off...
wryun 9y ago
I'm a slightly longer term ex-Freelancer employee whose tenure overlapped with Jon's, and I feel like I should say that my experience wasn't that bad. As I suspect afflicts many companies, when I joined it was struggling with the transition between "hack something together so that we make some money" and "we need to care about the long term". Not to mention the usual small-ish company disregard for HR niceties. It didn't finish that transition while I was there - and may still not have - but I mostly had a good time (worked on a huge variety of stuff, and even wrote a bunch of tests). Also, though there were other factors, I think the primary reason retention was low is that Freelancer's hiring policy was geared towards 'cheap grads', so people tended to leave for better paying positions elsewhere. PS Hi Jon - sorry you had that experience. I wasn't privy to exactly why you were let go. PPS And yes, I think there were definitely parts of Freelancer which were (IMO) far too focused on making money without caring about the customer experience. On the other hand, capitalism (argh).
dang 9y ago
Taking to an internet forum to vent personal grievances is a shaky business. The audience is ever-eager for red meat, but that doesn't make it ok. There is also the question of how low you really want to go. And HN has rules that you need to abide by if you want to comment here. Here you go below what's acceptable by HN's civility rule: > The CEO of Freelancer.com is a complete jerk. And here the bottom falls out altogether: > gossip going round that the CEO had sex with a female employee and she got pregnant Please don't sling mud like that here, regardless of how disgruntly you feel or how justified your grievances are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Exuma 9y ago

In their defense, the one thing that bothers me most is if I specifically tell someone to code something a certain way (for example, to skip tests on this project), and they don't listen and do it anyway because "it's the right way." I on the other hand know what is right for my project... not the person I'm hiring. That's why I asked X person to do it a specific way. Btw Im not saying they arent toxic, they sound like pieces of shit. Just pointing it out more generally.

jondubois 9y ago
They didn't give me any instructions about how to implement the feature. I had just arrived 2 weeks earlier and there was a lot of code there so it would have been impossible for me to get it to work (without breaking existing stuff) if I did not write tests. Also this is a company that handles business transactions; high-value stuff; there should have been more tests.
- Exuma 9y ago
  Fair enough, sounds like a horrible place to work. D:

gardenpuppet 9y ago

Sounds like you learned a valuable life lesson. It's always been obvious that freelancer had no test platform and that they would simply push releases to production and wait for things to break, and then maybe fix them. The most interesting lesson from this was that this attitude has no apparent downside. Users either don't care, don't even notice, or sadly, may have no choice given that there are not many sites that fill this niche. The company went public a few years ago, investors have no clue as to what's under the hood, and tbh it doesn't seem to matter much. It's interesting to see what freelancer is doing now that they are accountable. Me, I think it will be more of the same.

justboxing 9y ago

> because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spending extra time writing tests. This. Just yesterday, I was asked by an interviewer at a Startup. "How do you test your code? Do you write tests? What's your familiarity with TDD." My answer: "I prefer to do a test driven approach. However, none of the companies I worked for allocated time for writing tests in the sprint, so I have not been able to actually do this in practice. I usually debug my code and run it through all the happy path and edge cases." Was bitten once very early in my career just like OP, and decided to only write tests after initial coding, if there was time left. Most (not all) Companies expect you to do TDD, but never allocate time for it in the estimation. So I've made it a point to ask the PM if there was time allowed for writing tests in the estimate, and if they say something like "Oh no we don't have time for that" I don't do it.

wirrbel 9y ago
I couldn't imagine to work without writing tests and I firmly believe it actually makes me quicker than manual coding. Sure, if you aim for 100% code coverage it takes time, but instead of trying out my code a few times, I just write those try-outs as tests and am happy ever after. I don't really mention tests to my management. To me, they are just part of coding. My coworkers don't mind, they are happy when maintaining or changing my code that they have tests for support.
- nkristoffersen 9y ago
  I just started learning how to write tests for my APIs. Changed my life! Now when I need to make broad changes I can easily tell what needs to be fixed because my tests cover each end point with multiple success and failure cases. Love it.
- Denzel 9y ago
  This, exactly this. I've felt the same increase in development velocity; and an equal increase in confidence. I'm able to deliver systems and walk away with 99% confidence that no one is going to come back to me with a problem. And if they do, it's easy enough to write a regression test to prove the problem and then fix it. I've adopted your same approach. I don't mention testing, but I'll be damned if I'll ever write a piece of code without it. The light-bulb moment for me was when I realized that testing happens one way or another. Either you're in the console manually setting up and running everything... or you could just write a program (a test) to do the same thing for you. Once I realized that, I never looked back!

ashleyn 9y ago

>Several of these horrible people went on to work for Facebook later. Seems like they're a better fit anyway for the company of "move fast and break things".

mapl 9y ago

I bet Martin Scorsese would love see this story to hit cinemas

jaaames 9y ago

Good to see you post defamatory things under your own name in a public forum Jonathan. https://github.com/jondubois https://github.com/jondubois Matt is a nice guy, shame if this comment got to him directly.

can09 9y ago

>Nice to see you post defamatory posts using your real name on a public forum Johnathan. >https://github.com/jondubois https://github.com/jondubois >Matt is a nice guy, shame if this comment got to him directly. I noticed this reply to your comment - it was here briefly but has now been deleted. This "Matt" referred to is presumably the CEO. The comment seems to read like a freelancer.com employee trying to threaten you? Your observation on their corporate culture may not be far off...

wryun 9y ago

I'm a slightly longer term ex-Freelancer employee whose tenure overlapped with Jon's, and I feel like I should say that my experience wasn't that bad. As I suspect afflicts many companies, when I joined it was struggling with the transition between "hack something together so that we make some money" and "we need to care about the long term". Not to mention the usual small-ish company disregard for HR niceties. It didn't finish that transition while I was there - and may still not have - but I mostly had a good time (worked on a huge variety of stuff, and even wrote a bunch of tests). Also, though there were other factors, I think the primary reason retention was low is that Freelancer's hiring policy was geared towards 'cheap grads', so people tended to leave for better paying positions elsewhere. PS Hi Jon - sorry you had that experience. I wasn't privy to exactly why you were let go. PPS And yes, I think there were definitely parts of Freelancer which were (IMO) far too focused on making money without caring about the customer experience. On the other hand, capitalism (argh).

dang 9y ago

Taking to an internet forum to vent personal grievances is a shaky business. The audience is ever-eager for red meat, but that doesn't make it ok. There is also the question of how low you really want to go. And HN has rules that you need to abide by if you want to comment here. Here you go below what's acceptable by HN's civility rule: > The CEO of Freelancer.com is a complete jerk. And here the bottom falls out altogether: > gossip going round that the CEO had sex with a female employee and she got pregnant Please don't sling mud like that here, regardless of how disgruntly you feel or how justified your grievances are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html