Nitro.
They have jobs.
And STUFF.
Amy Holmes writes:
Nitro is home to the Wombat Republic, an Australian founded, San Francisco headquartered, company who are changing the way the world works with documents. From the desktop to the cloud, Nitro makes it easy to create, edit, share, sign and collaborate – online or offline.
The company with their EMEA headquarters in Dublin, is on a fast growth path and is actively recruiting in the areas of; Customer Support and Success, Engineering: Cloud, Engineering: Platform, Engineering: Systems and Infrastructure, Marketing including an internship, Ops, Product and Sales. For more information check out TheWombatRepublic.com
We are taking Dublin by storm this week, with advertisements on buses, Luas and pavements, mobile billboards and cycle-by advertising will also be appearing at random and the whole week will culminate TOMORROW at the Career Zoo [National Convention Centre, Dublin] where real life Nitronauts will be on hand to outline the jobs on offer and the perks of working for Nitro.
We have a pile of Nitro ‘stuff’ (top) including a hoodie and moleskine notebook and what looks like two stickers to give away.
Nitro would like any tech-industry working Broadsheet reader to tell them about their Worst tech job EVER….with the best tale teller winning the swag.
Lines MUST close at 5.15pm Midnight
In one of my first full time IT roles, I was the sole IT Guy – and had the PC with a new-fangled “CD Burner” witchcraft. My first week in the job, my new boss ( and MD of the business) came to my desk with a large shoe box of floppy disks ( remember those?). He wanted all the data on the disks to be burned to a CD for him. When I asked if any of it was classified/confidential , he replied “no, that’s my porn collection – you can keep a copy yourself if you want”…. I’m still in therapy…..
My worst tech job ever was working as a Software Engineer for a big consultancy in Dublin. When I was a client sites or working for clients on technical project, all was excellent. Inbetween assignments, we went ‘on the bench’ which ment that we were eligable to be put on new contracts by the sales team who had sold our capabilities as a service.
The sales team were all bought in as part of a takeover of a photocopying business and didn’t really get what Engineers did at my teams level.
However, as their sales people:
Said Yes to every contract they were asked to take on
Did not really understand the technical side of the business they used to send us on the oddest most ridiculous projects.
One project came in from a government body relating to mapping the flow of resources through Dublin county. There were two of us assigned to the project. We were quite excited by the brief which was to help [DEPT] map and represent the flow of [UTILITY] through County Dublin. We went in armed with requirements gathering ideas, software modelling prototypes, a 3-D layer approach which information could be added on or taken away… colouring plan, development estimates….. We were ready to make this the best software visual information model EVAH!
So our first clue that this project was not as we imagined came about when we entered the office that we were assigned to work from in the [DEPT] and noticed there was no computer, no phone and no fax in the room. More worringly there was no network port or even a telephone port even if we had a laptop of our own. Which we didn’t. This was 1993, the desktop PC was king and it would be another 15 years before companies would be handing them out like sweeties.
There was however, a massive pile of musty maps, sheets of tracing paper and a big container of black markers. And Yes, our “technical” job for two weeks was to trace the maps unto the tracing paper. Line by line, contour by contour and elevation symbol by elevation symbol. Then we had the further “joy” of having our line manager in the [DEPT] come in after every lunchtime to critique our work. I lasted a week, my colleague quit after three days.
Jay-sus
My worst tech job ever was when I was working as tech support, in a government department, with folk who didn’t “trust” computers.
I work in IT and I don’t trust ’em either!
Once upon a time long long ago I was tasked with sustaining the com.*.*.mail.Defang library, this was because I’d moved to the Java world from Perl and so have a good understanding of Regexen. Amongst the things I understand about regex is that you should never try to parse a structured language with regex (search stack overflow for “do not parse html with regex” for an entertaining explanation of how this lets the great old ones back).
Anyway, I tried to persuade our product manager to move over to a whitelisting of approved tags, which those nice open web application security project people conveniently provided an open source Java library for. Unfortunately incorporating this library into the product would require more resource time than was required to extend the regex in order to prevent the current attack vector… this was true for each iteration of XSS vector discovered..regex extended…emergency release forced to entire customer base…XSS vector discovered.
Total groundhog day despite an elegant solution being available, not the Augean stables, but a bit smelly all the same.
My worst technical job ever was being sent over for 3 weeks to Jakarta, Indonesia for a Proof of Concept gig with the company I worked for, for a large telco vendor. My first moment of concern was when I noticed that every hotel had massive security around it post the Jakarta hotel bombings – when I voiced this to a local-ish colleague, he mentioned “Oh yeah, I was actually staying here and in having breakfast when that one went off in the lobby!”
Things went further downhill when I discovered that the Indian colleague from another company who we were working with pretty much refused to eat anything but KFC or very bland food, which meant nearly 3 weeks of greasy shitty chicken over and over again.
On day 4, we went to their “environmentally cooled” data centre, which meant that there was no cooling and it was consistently 40 degrees or thereabouts inside.
On day 7, I got the shits.
This continued for days 8-16, which involved running into a 40 degree data centre, taking off my shoes (as was mandatory), working for 10 minutes, running back out and putting on my shoes to run to the nearest toilet (which, of course, was a squat toilet) continuously for the whole day, while trying to demonstrate technical capabilities to middle and upper management folks with minimal English.
By the time I returned home I was a gibbering wreck. I described this whole experience to my dublin based workmates, and one who’d been out before me asked “Did you eat in XXXXX?” – which I did. He responded “ah yeah, that’s where I got food poisoning too – its a bad idea to eat there.”
Information that qualifies for the Alanis Morissette concept of Irony at the very least – it’s like getting the runs, from somewhere a mate already ate.
don’t like your company logo. it seems to make fun of the flag of the california republic.
My worst IT job was working for free for my Da, aged 5, I was his secretary and all I had was a second hand Speak N’ Spell… and no printer. It was most distressing…. at least my phone was mobile, it was on wheels and I could pull it by a string !
Oh the inhumanity!!!
I have two techies in my office with the same resources!
Yes. It is very good.
Did not expect this response. Don’t know why, just didn’t.
Kumail Nanjiani is very very good. Steals whatever scenes he’s in in Portlandia too.
Kumail is excellent, his stand up album Beta Male is great.
Ok, I messed up that post
“San Francisco headquartered, company who are changing the way the world works with documents. From the desktop to the cloud,”
Anyone here watch Silicon Valley???
Yeah, new season due out in April. I can’t wait!
Silicon Valley, Veep and Game of Thrones are back on the same night. It’s some good TV watching right there.
Worst tech job ever? worked on a team in one of the biggest names in the tech industry. Great benefits, great team members, fun events,… sounds awesome right? The downside, it was managed by a dictator who excelled in micromanagement and making people feel small.
I don’t have a worst IT job but I nominate the poor Indian fella that ABM outsourced his trolling to.
So around 2001-2003 I worked for a large outsourced call centre, which is still there and I’m guessing a good 80% of all support nerds worked there too. And at this point I’m a supervisor on a team that handled calls for a large UK ISP, dialup. And between mailbox sizes and slow conneciton speeds, it was very easy for someone to lose access to their mail until we used an application to get in and delete some.
And one day a girl on my team comes up to me, on the verge of tears asking me to take over a call. It’s a full mailbox, and the guy on the line is amazingly rude, literally one of the worst I’ve ever heard. He’s full of bluster about how the contents of his mail are vitally important to his business and he can’t afford to lose any of them. But he sort of goes quiet and agrees to having his mails deleted when I say that we can see the content of his mailbox – it was full of mails from a surgical fetish porn mailing list.
In the same job, before I became a supervisor I was on the phone when the guy ringing me decided to have a screaming match with his wife, and I was once kept on the line for over an hour by an old man who I think wanted to set up a spamming business and called us for advice – but he kept on rambling on about travelling the world and sleeping with women with varying skin colours. I wish I’d kept notes, I could have written a book.
“Actively recruiting in the areas of; Customer Support and Success, Engineering: Cloud, Engineering: Platform, Engineering: Systems and Infrastructure, Marketing including an internship, Ops, Product and Sales.”
All that for a PDF writer application.
If it counts as tech, my first job was recovering 7,000 emails, individually (no code in the background to speed things up), re titling the subject line from caps to sentence font, adding date and recipient, saving into specific folders in Windows Explorer of which there was 1,100. It took three weeks, and was nothing short of soul destroying.
I involuntarily shuddered.
I currently work as a *ahem* software engineer for a medical devices company in the US. That means FDA regulated, which means that 80% of my work is ensuring requirements and test documentation is good enough to pass an audit.
I worked at a major IT company in Cork before this for 9 years. Before I moved here I was feeling kind of burned out from doing the same thing, and I honestly felt that my move would be a good thing for my career as it was a new industry.
I wish to f**k I was back working for that company in Cork right now, I realised this after 2 or 3 months in my new job.
I’ve been here working for this company for almost 2 years, and I’ve written more lines of code in a busy week at my old company than I have for the last 2 years at this new, horrible, horrible place.
Add to that, a pain in the hole manager who micromanages everything I do, who also wants to be my chummy chum after hours and is constantly inviting me to his place for drinks and bbq on weekends.
Still though, living in Miami isn’t all bad :-)
Had sympathy for you til the last bit. Not very Miami-ish in Cork at the mo so I’m sure you’ll grin and bear it ;-)