Melon Reviews

I already had around 2 years of experience as a freelance frontend web developer when I applied for a job there. I did apply for an entry level position of a HTML/CSS developer. But on the initial interview I shared my experience in details - I was clear about the fact that I do have experience with JavaScript in addition to HTML & CSS, and I did tell them about my future goals which for a long time have been - to improve my JavaScript practical skills and learn a JS framework. During the interview - one of the guys interviewing me gave me a really unpleasant vibe. Just everything about him was off. He was very argumentative and petty. He said that I have a mistake on my CV because I wrote "SASS" as a technology that I have experience with. He was insisting that I should have wrote - "SCSS" instead, because SASS and SCSS are very different and he highly doubts that I have worked with SASS since he believes it's a lot more complicated. I don't bother going into the fact that SASS is the technology while .scss & .sass are just the supported file formats with a slight syntactical difference. After the interview I already knew that I am over qualified for that position and my gut feeling was telling me that I should only accept the job IF I am not stuck working closely with that person. I got a call from the HR lady, of course she was super nice and she addressed my concerns - I was assured that this position will allow me to learn more and progress towards my clearly stated goals. I was also assured that the frontend developers' team is of 20+ people, so I will have the opportunity to work with many of them. So I was like - let's give it a go, what's the worst that can happen right ? Well the first couple of months were sort of ok... I did get stuck exactly with that person that I didn't like from the interview - but I was thinking that this was just temporarily until I can move on to learn a framework which was though by another person. Yeah the guy who was my 'mentor' was a guy with supposedly 9 years of experience - but only ever worked in this one single company, and yet he didn't work with any JS frameworks... Also he always seemed to want to work with jQuery instead of vanilla JS - which I really found odd, but I went along with it and learned jQuery in less than a month, and just carried on doing my job. I have been working only with this one person, on a project that he built without any other frontend web developers involved. So the 4th month comes by, and I looked back and I realized that not only that I have not been progressing but on top of that - every skill that I already had was completely ignored or they tried their best to wipe it away - so it's like it never existed. • HTML - that guy said that I hardly know HTML, disregarding not only the fact that I already have 2 years experience but that I also learned .cshtml - which is what I used on the job. • CSS/SCSS - again the guy disregarded my experience of 2 years and never acknowledged that I was able to work with his spaghetti code. • Vanilla JS - the plan was for this guy to help me improve my practical vanilla JS skills - but guess what - this never happened. He kept insisting that I use jQuery, I kept insisting for vanilla JS. He gave me one exercise involving changing classes with event listeners, which I had to do in between the project tasks - lots of constant interruptions. I thought it was super low lever exercise but I did it anyways. At this point I was getting a bit fed up, I started talking to the frontend Lead about moving things along and basically going to him to teach me React - so that I can get away from this person who was watching my every move like a hawk - more correctly restricting my every move. Another big problem was that there was no one else who assessed my skills at the company, it was just this one dude... Then there had to be another thing - now unrelated to web development, I did say that I have experience working with Photoshop for over 10 years and apparently this didn't sit right with - whoever... • Photoshop - all access that I had to Photoshop was taken away - while still in the middle of the project, and only 'mr. Mentor' had license to Photoshop. So I was really forced to either ask him to edit photos, ask colleagues to edit photos or as they insisted - use some low grade online programs for editing photos. Mr. Mentor - started giving me image files with the pixels written on them - again something that I had been doing 2 years prior to that and I have moved way beyond that... so why would I want to go backwards for indefinite amount of time... Also my every move was somehow a problem to mr. Mentor, everything I asked for or did or said - it was a problem, it was an issue... had to be discussed, he had to ask me few times - if I made a mistake, and then carried on persuading me to change my mind... Mr. Mentor also liked telling me how I feel, not asking me how I feel - telling me how I feel, and it always happened to be a negative emotion. • Git & Github - I wasn't allowed to use a command line like git bash, I had to use Sourcetree and there were always merge conflicts - which were - my fault, not mr. Mentor's who was making changes on the same files after me - they were always my fault... Anyways, after I did request to somehow incorporate learning React.js at work - the big circus started. They started complaining that images are loosing quality - after taking away my access to Photoshop, but it was my fault. So there was supposed to be a meeting where we discuss the plan - The PM, Frontend Lead & Mr. Mentor had the meeting but excluded me from it. They decided to decline my wish to learn a new technology. Keep in mind they had their meeting during work hours, while 'mr. Mentor' kept me for a whole hour over time to tell me this - "The company is not a school" and "React is real programming, it's not for you" and "You are lacking JavaScript skills" - basically used what I told them from the very beginning that I feel that I struggle with - I was wrong btw, just impostor syndrome, but him using my own words against me - not cool. And that crossed every line, yes it was super insulting, but moreover - I realized that for sure I am not going to be able to get anywhere in that company. One thing really worth mentioning is that at Melon - there is a division of developers. There aren't full stack positions - there are either frontend web developers or backend developers. I didn't think that this mattered but it did... Few days after my request to learn React was declined, a new division took place - frontend developers were now split into - developers working with HTML/CSS and developers working with JavaScript Frameworks - no in between either one or the other. And can you possibly guess who became the Lead of the small group of people only working with HTML/CSS - yep - mr. mentor... He himself was trying to get away from that project that they had me working on and also the company got acquired so he knew that he must find a non-coding position ASAP. This was truly truly a disgusting work place, and I know a lot of it had to do with this one super toxic person BUT - he had been kept in the company for 9 freaking years !!! And any company that can ever possibly keep or even take someone like that seriously - is just sad...