And then finally, because I was suddenly relieved of all of my burdens of, ya know, turning up for (unpaid) work and stuff, I took an impromptu 1-night mini holiday away with my excellent friend aimee, staying in a nice hotel on the Danish north coast. It was lovely.

Here’s a (wonky) picture of the sea this morning, as I just went to watch, sit, relax, enjoy…. and smile.

The end.

So there we have it: they wanted software made by a highly experienced professional, but without paying for it. They thought that that was what they were getting; however, they got a well-deserved rude awakening.

After updating them on the story, I posted this to a private friends chat group.

A week or so earlier, I had anticipated that this might happened, so I had stopped pushing my work to their git repository. Because the code was only on that 1 laptop, I took a backup of my code onto an external device.

Then, after the hostility arrived on Friday, at the weekend I made sure to remove my work from their laptop. Just in case.

So yesterday, as it all comes to an end, I hand over the laptop, and I tell them: “You know the code’s not on there, right?”

“Oh? Where is it, then?”

“It’s at home”.

“What, on your own laptop or … ?”

What a strange question. “Why do you care?”, I ask. The conversation ends there.

Day 1 of week 4 arrives, and we resume the conversation. Now some more details come forward, and eventually we come down to what the real sticking point is:

Those tests that I wrote, as requested? They want the source code. They say that they own the source code that I created.

I have a different view of the matter. I say that that was never part of our agreement, I have agreed to no such thing, and therefore, anything that I create is mine, until I decide otherwise. I tell them that they’ll get the source code, and own it, as soon as I’m employed, and not before. “You don’t get it for free”, I tell them, repeatedly.

And here we reach a stalemate: I have the code, I say I own it, they say they own it. They want the fruits of my labour for free, I say that I’m not free, I require paying for my work.

So it’s over, I hand back the laptop, and I walk.

The next day I’m told that they can’t offer me paid contracted employment, because, and I quote in full, “We want to see more.” This is the entire explanation given. Instead, they ask if I would like to extend the praktik (just as a reminder: the unpaid work) to 8 weeks, not just 4. I say absolutely not.

I ask for more detail on why the sudden hostile approach, but all my questions go unanswered, unless you count “We want to see more” as an answer.

Thus ends week 3 of 4.

So now we’re near the end of week 3 of 4, and here’s where I demonstrate the tests I’ve created, running in both Danish and English, testing the exact thing I had been told to focus on. Two videos, each 57 seconds long, posted to Slack. These are met with very positive reactions indeed.

I walked through my code with the existing senior tech guy, explaining how it worked, the various product bugs I’d found along the way and how I’d had to work around them to get any kind of whole-flow test working.

Still: so far, so good.

I’m given the task of writing automated tests for their product. But for a rounding error, their monolithic central product has zero automated testing. No unit tests, no integration tests, no end-to-end tests.

So I get to work. I ask questions, and learn the lay of the land, the history, the architecture, the deployment mechanism, the internal code base structure, etc. At the end of week 1, I and the other two senior engineers (who are of course both actual paid employees) discuss my findings, and agree a way forward. We agree that I’m going to spend a week writing browser-based end-to-end tests, then we’ll see how we go from there.

It’s a very short week though (only 2 days, due to 1 public holiday, 1 day off sick, and 1 day interviewing for another company — which, weirdly, I am obliged to do). So my 1 week of testing ends up overflowing to 6 working days, not 5.

I get some paperwork explaining the rules and context. It says that I’m obliged to turn up, and that the purpose of the praktik is for the would-be employee and the would-be employer to see how each other works. For example, that I can complete tasks given in a satisfactory way, etc. Overall, the goals include working towards employment or perhaps “at least” a longer praktik, plus networking, blah blah blah.

So I start.

Day 1: bit weird, they’ve known for ages that I was coming, and they asked me what hardware I wanted to work with, and yet they had got me something very different and entirely inappropriate. I point out the problem, and start using my own machine, just so I can get going. A few days later, I get a (rather underpowered) laptop.

There now follows a long, disjointed conversation between me, the Job Center, and the company in question. We three never all speak /together/, of course. That would be too easy

Eventually one day the job center calls me and tells me that agreement has been reached (if I’m ok with it), of a 4 week “praktik”. Ok, I say. I hang up, and see an email has simultaneously arrived from the company, telling me that agreement has been reached, of a 3 month “praktik”.

This idea, of course, they can shove up their arse.

So I politely point out that that’s not what the job center told me, and eventually, it is all sorted out: 4 weeks.

Job-seeking update: I’ve been unemployed since mid August 2024, constantly looking for and applying for jobs (as a software engineer) since then. Zero offers so far.

I did have one that did better than most, recently. Until they did worse than most. Here’s what happened.

Mid-March, I applied for the job, through the recruitment agency. I was initially filtered out, so I asked what I didn’t have they needed, and was told that they needed a Danish speaker. I pointed out that I do speak Danish (and it says so on my CV). They put me back into consideration.

I’m selected. I do the on-site interview. I do an online personality / logic test. I do an online meeting where we discuss the results of that test.

So far so good, I suppose.

…