grover_hartmann

Rails programmer with ~10 years of experience here, recently I've been hired as a PHP programmer and I'm dealing with a very complex and undocumented codebase that I wish I never seen before.

You might ask "why did you took the job in the first place?", well that's either because I can't find work in my area and most of it is PHP/Python work and I can't move either, the Rails related work that is remote requires that I move and remote work tends to be "US remote".

The PHP code I'm working with is extremely complex/messy and most of the code is undocumented, I have to do lots of debugging just for changing the simplest things and I'm also not very familiar with this language.

Most of the code is a mess of spaghetti code, think of HTML, JS and PHP all glued up with no proper structure.

The git repository is also one of the biggest repositories I have worked with (247 MB), 45,000 files and 1 million lines of code for the whole project.

I was already able to complete some tasks but I can't help but feel miserable with this project.

Recently my manager started asking me questions like "How's it going? Will you finish this task today?" and I explained to him I'm having difficulties with the code and that I'm not very comfortable working with it but he's insisting that I stay firm at it and get familiar with the code. Please advice.

I'll try to keep this short.

Basically, I had a job interview 2 days ago at some startup, I'm a self-taught programmer with over 20 years of work experience.

I've been working for several startups in the last 10 years and made significant contributions to high profile open source projects so I have a reasonably good working history.

2 days ago I had this interview with a female recruiter/psychologist and the first thing she asked me was "What's your nationality?" with a sarcastic smile.

I responded, and while I was expressing myself I got some funny looks from her that I thought was humiliating/condescending.

I even saw she was talking with the employees and I know she was talking about me because I saw her stare me and they were laughing.

I thought it was maybe because I'm from a different country or because I don't have a very good accent (I struggle with my speaking sometimes), but I hate when I'm being treated differently.

She also asked me about my education/training, I said "self taught" followed by her saying "Oh, so you are self taught. Uhmm..." and I had to explain myself that it was never a problem.

I explained that I tried to apply for university in the country I currently reside but that immigrants are not allowed to enter the public university by law, even after me taking the exams and passing them.

She explained that the market would take me more seriously if I had a degree, I thought "maybe she is right" but I think it's rude not to consider someone for their skills and experience.

Anyway, maybe I'm paranoid or something but I always observe the same patterns at job interviews, do I really have to tell you my nationality, age, education, marital status, economic status, where I meet my wife, if I have children, if I smoke weed, etc?

Is it reasonable if I can keep some of these things to myself?

As a recruiter, do you ever think about how the person being interviewed feels like when you are being so disrespectful?

Do you think that your startup is so special that you feel entitled to ask all sort of personal questions?

I don't think these things have anything to do with the job at all, and I feel they always use one information or another against you.

Just because you live a normal life and you went to college and your job is being a recruiter for some startup doesn't give you the right to be disrespectful to others. I didn't had to do any of these things and I'm sitting here right in front of you, have you ever thought about that?

I don't think it's fair and honestly, I'm really fed up of playing this game.

I'm not interested about climbing your corporate ladder, I just want to get work done.

Feel free to share your stories if you feel like, I'd appreciate any advice and sorry about the rant.