Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine who got selected at PwC from campus placement. The contract was 6 months of internship after that 1 year of full time job. Now here’s the thing. The internship went pretty well and after that she received joining letter for 1 year full time as an Associate. From the day of joining she was put on bench for a month and then next month they put her on a project where she was doing exactly what she was told. No complaints about her work. But then after one month they took her out from the project apparently. And after a week she received an email regarding a meeting where she wasn’t informed about what’s gonna happen in that meeting. When she joined there was her manager & a consultant. They told her that her communication skills weren’t that good that’s why they are putting her on PIP. Like seriously no prior warning nothing. No mails regarding why they are putting her on PIP. And a month after that they told her to resign and said if they fire her it won’t be good for her resume. And since she was new to all this she resigned without asking anything. Now we have been looking for jobs for like more than 3 months. The company was PwC . Such shameful politics going on in these so called big MNCs and this is the truth.

Só queria fazer esse post pra compartilhar minha felicidade com vocês e também desmitificar algumas coisas que tem circulado pelo sub há algum tempo.

Fui contratada como desenvolvedora full stack júnior CLT e remoto. Estudo em uniesquina e não possuo estágio ou experiência anterior como dev. Meu salário tá bom pra uma empresa de pequeno porte. Não fui indicada também - aliás, a única indicação que tive não passei nem da triagem.

Então sim, é possível e essa história de que quem tem uniesquina ou não tem estágio não consegue é pura ladainha. O mercado não está tão ruim pra vagas de entrada quanto parece.

Não tô dizendo que é fácil não, obviamente se você estudar numa federal/estadual, seja de renome (USP, UFRJ, Unicamp, UFMG, UNB) ou uma outra que seja (particulares prestigiadas como PUC e Mackenzie entram aqui também), terá acesso a muitas portas que estão fechadas pra uniesquinas. Falo com propriedade, já estudei em federal de renome (em outro curso não relacionado).

Minhas dicas pro pessoal:

1. Tomem leetcode e hackerrank no café da manhã. Virou padrão até pra pequena empresa usar esses testes. Não concordo com isso, mas é uma outra história. Recomendo o neetcode pra estudar.

2. Busque fazer algo de útil na sociedade. Você não precisa ser o próprio jesus cristo encarnado, mas faça alguma coisa pra ajudar algum grupo de pessoas. Não precisa ser altruísta e fazer algo que ajude moradores de rua, faça um sistema de conquistas pra jogos que não tem, que seja. Se alguém tá usando, tá sendo útil.

3. Faça um portfólio decente. Sinceramente pensei que portfólio fosse inútil até o meu ter sido analisado nas entrevistas. Sem to-do list, sem sistema de barbearia, sem projetinho de calculadora, sem landing page de loja de hambúrguer e sem pokedex. Mostre que você não é só mais um. Projetos legais tem funcionalidade real. Eu gosto bastante de softwares em CLI e acho que dão um destaque.

4. Serviços de nuvem são seus amigos. Aprenda a usar Docker e a fazer deploy da sua própria aplicação com nginx e/ou apache em um serviço de nuvem e apontar o domínio. Não é bicho de sete cabeças, é até fácil. Ninguém quer saber se você sabe subir aplicação no Vercel ou Netlify.

5. Aprende Linux, porra. Saber fazer scripts em Bash e rodar um cronjob é um diferencial massa e Linux te dá uma produtividade boa demais. Também não é difícil, não se engane.

6. Se enturma com a galera, todo dia nasce projeto de desenvolvimento em equipe com o intuito de gerar valor e experiência pros participantes. Para de perder tempo e entra.

7. Saiba inglês. Não tem desculpa e para de preguiça. Aprendi sozinha sem gastar um centavo. Você também consegue. Usa seu computador pra algo útil.

8. Não ignore a faculdade. Faculdade não ensina a programar, mas te ensina os fundamentos não só de código mas de trabalho. O tanto de gente que não sabe fazer um diagrama de entidade e relacionamento ou não sabe definir regras de negócio é ridículo.

9. Saiba se vender. Isso começa no currículo e só termina quando você é contratado. Tem que mostrar que você é foda mesmo que você seja um merda. Se você é um neet desajeitado socialmente, só lamento, a sociedade não precisa de vocês a menos que vocês sejam gênios naturais. Vai trabalhar esse seu jeito deprimente.

Se você acha que isso é coisa demais, já pode começar a reconsiderar suas escolhas. Aqui só tem o básico, para de se sabotar. Você já começou atrás da elite, então corre atrás e sem choro.

Quer entrar em estágio que pague bem sem fazer isso tudo? Para de estudar Javascript e vai estudar pra fazer o Enem ou a FUVEST pra começar de cima.

OBS: Essa é a realidade de uma estudante em tempo integral que sempre teve afinidade com computadores (no sentido de ser reclusa da infância até o começo da vida adulta - pc direto fora o horário da escola e o de dormir). Se você trabalha em outra coisa e estuda, lamento mas vai ser mais difícil pra você mesmo.

Pra referência, participei de meia dúzia de processos seletivos que foram pras últimas etapas antes de conseguir. Quando consegui, tinha proposta pra duas empresas (uma presencial e uma remota) e estava caminhando em outro processo pra uma empresa de nome aqui do estado.

Boa sorte pra quem tá tentando e obrigada pela atenção, pessoal. Tô feliz demais e queria compartilhar minha conquista e dar umas dicas sobre como consegui.

I feel like this is applicable to IT contractors and every time I'm asked 'why do you cost so much? I could've done that with a junior admin!'

There is an old story of a boilermaker who was hired to fix a huge steamship boiler system that was not working well.

After listening to the engineer’s description of the problems and asking a few questions, he went to the boiler room. He looked at the maze of twisting pipes, listened to the thump of the boiler and the hiss of the escaping steam for a few minutes, and felt some pipes with his hands. Then he hummed softly to himself, reached into his overalls and took out a small hammer, and tapped a bright red valve one time. Immediately, the entire system began working perfectly, and the boilermaker went home...

One week ago, on May 9th, I released a demo on Steam. I'm an indie dev, so there was no major marketing blast associated with it. At that time, the game had ~1200 wishlists, and a small but active fanbase on Discord.

Demo Content

The game is a hybrid action RPG and bullet hell. The demo features three characters and one main infinitely-generated area with 3 bosses. It also includes a sort of prototype infinite scaling endgame for players who have gotten through all of the existing demo content.

The demo focuses heavily on loot. Players find randomly generated items with up to 6 modifiers from a pool of potentially hundreds of mods, and can craft those items with really wacky crafting tools in order to gain exponential increases in power. The demo also features 9 skill trees, although these are somewhat reduced in scope compared to the full version.

Visibility

Near-immediate visibility on Steam was the most surprising aspect. Within a few hours, impressions skyrocketed from ~1,000 per day to ~15,000 per day. According to Steam's internal analytics, more than 70% of this was due to the Free Demos Hub:

Investigating further, the game had hit the top of the "New and Trending" section on this page pretty quickly. Day one downloads were in the thousands, which may have helped.

The remaining 30% came mostly from two Reddit posts. One on , and one on . The former was eventually deleted by the moderators after 20 hours, as it was in violation of the 10% self-promotion rule. I suspect they're very strict and counted my self-posts in my own subreddit for the game.

I'm honestly not sure if the high visibility on the Steam Demo Hub was luck or if I had selected my capsule and game title well. Valve is pretty opaque with regards to how their algorithm works.

Visibility slowly tapered off with time. The effect of the Demo placement completely wore off by May 13th, and Impressions reduced to around ~2,000 per day. I expect this to slowly continue to drop off as well.

Player Stats and Retention

Daily active users peaked around 120, and has slowly fallen off to around 60. Active player counts peaked at 15, and have fallen off to ~4-7 depending on the hour.

Western Europe's peak hours appear to be the game's peak hours, with US peak forming a secondary peak. The game is only available in English currently, so it's not surprising that the peak hours matched this.

Median playtime is holding steady at around 17 minutes, which I suspect is pretty decent. About 15% of players bounce in a minute of opening the game, which tells me there's some work to do on the new player experience still. 20% of players spend over an hour on their first session though, which is a good sign.

There were some major outliers in total playtime as well. A few players, who I'll talk about below, logged over 20 hours in just 3 days. Many others logged at least 10 hours in the same window, indicating to me that there's aspects of this game that absolutely hook certain players.

Wishlists

I can't decide whether to be excited or disappointed here. The game gained around 300 wishlists, topping out just around 1500. Percentage-wise this is a substantial increase in 3 days, but it's also nowhere near enough to enter Next Fest any time soon.

Daily wishlist gain spiked at around 60 at demo launch, and has slowly petered off into 10 or so per day. I expect this to continue to decline without further intervention from me.

Community and Bugfixing

I have a Discord server for the game's community, which grew from around 60 users to 75 or so. Nothing too amazing, but the "super fan" count increased as well. Prior to launch I had a few power users with hundreds of hours in the game who eagerly playtested, and a few others have now joined that community.

These users are pretty aggressive bug reporters too! While the core game tends to work very well, once players start scaling into the 20+ hour range some unexpected interactions tend to occur with the large complex item modifier pool, the crafting, and the skill trees. These fans are invaluable for finding interactions here that are unexpected. I truly believe some of them know more about the second-order effects of items and skills than I do at this point.

These players also helped with improving game performance. While it performs very well for the core demo vertical slice, very late endgame players can find themselves slaughtering hundreds of enemies per second with complex interactions triggering an obscene number of second-order effects per second. This performance has been substantially improved, and I'm tempted to write a separate blog post about my discoveries there at some point.

Fortunately there were no major showstopper bugs for the core gameplay. This is likely due to running a playtest prior. I strongly recommend everyone take advantage of the Steam Playtest feature prior to a release.

Next Steps

This is the hard part. The demo launch was somewhat bittersweet. Gaining more super fans was a great experience, and +25% wishlists is nothing to sneeze at. Still, I'm left with the concern that I'm not going to be able to push the game to the 7-10k wishlist threshold for a decent launch. Next Fest might gain an extra thousand or two, but there's still a lot of ground to gain before that's viable.

Things I've tried or am trying:

• Reddit ads - I ran a low cost campaign for a few days ($60/day). It actually drove a decent amount of traffic and has helped keep game placement from falling too far. It may help a bit with the intangibles surrounding the Steam algorithm, but it's definitely not going to deliver a direct return on investment. I likely won't continue for now.

• Streamer outreach - I located around 30 streamers in the relevant genres and sent them the standard press kit + pitch combo that's frequently recommend. Only 1 replied, and it was a talent agent for a streamer with a few hundred daily viewers asking for thousands of USD. Definitely not worth paying that at this time. I'll continue to try to refine this approach, but was disheartened by the fact that even small streamers these days seem to have talent agencies as their contact info.

• Steam's Endless Replayability Fest - I had high hopes for this, considering that game festivals are frequently recommended as the best way to market indie games. My experience was pretty lackluster. Demos are placed so deep into the festival UI that there's almost no organic traffic. I was showing up on the first, and sometimes second, page of the "Most Downloaded Demos" section, but that was delivering absolute peanuts in terms of impressions. For this festival at least, I think you wanted to have an already-released game. I've applied to a bunch of other festivals anyways, maybe it'll help!

Summary

Launching a demo was a fun, but somewhat nerve-wracking experience. I learned a lot, but am still left in the same position I was before, and am unsure if the game is truly viable or not. I'm always interested in hearing advice from the community as well, if anyone has anything to share!

Game link, in case you want to share or compare experiences:

I've had a few jobs one was business casual with jeans on Friday. One was a straight up uniform.

Now with the government and I feel like I dress like I work at GameStop.

What is your dresscode for IT? I'm not customer facing and only deal with users so maybe that is why it's so relaxed.

I have been in the industry for 9 years and counting and this is my SiL's first job, she's on probation at that.

My SiL had verbally asked her manager for a leave yesterday, starting from today till monday, which the manager approved, VERBALLY. Today, at around 1pm, she got an email from her manager informing her that her leave from 16-20 has been cancelled and she has to join work tomorrow.

The first thing she did is call me, told me of the incident, shared a screenshot of the email with me and asked me to pretend to be her dad. I told her that thats a stupid idea and instead she should respond to the email, i drafted her one, something which I myself would send in this situation. But instead of sending that email, she decided to call her manager and tell her that she'd be joining tomorrow. Seeing how submissive my SiL was being, the manager asked her to work from home today, which was not even brought up on the email. She then called me again and told me of her stupidity and then asked me to draft a mail saying that she'd be joining but she had to drop her trip midway and that caused her inconvenience etc etc. Before sending that email, she got on a call with me and discussed how tomorrow would play out.

Just wanted to share this incident as a teaching moment to all the freshers in the industry or any corporate for that matter.

1. This is not school/college where you can ask your parents to be stand ins in difficult situations, you have to face them yourselves.

2. If something like this happens to you, stand your fucking ground. If you give in once, you will be oppressed every single time.

3. Managers and HRs will tell you that you can't take a leave during probation and notice period, but always make sure to read your Offer Letter if it mentions the same.

P.S. We don't work in the same company.

P.P.S.

1. Email 1: Since you had verbally approved my leave, I had already left Mumbai blah blah blah. I'll have to make alternate arrangements to return blah blah blah. Please confirm if you want me to rejoin tomorrow.

2. Email 2: Since you had verbally approved, i left blah blah blah, my family had to return to Mumbai since we were traveling together blah blah blah, please inform me before hand or don't approve my leave in the first place to avoid the inconvenience caused blah blah blah.

P.P.P.S. Since i don't care about that company, its Tech M.

Edit: I know verbal approval has no grounds, and that isnt the issue either. Its not like the manager denied approving the leave, the problem is her cancelling the leave once it was in progress. Her mail explicitly said, "Your leave is being cancelled". Also, she did hear it from me regarding Verbal Approvals.