Background: I was a developer at Near-Reality from October 2019 till July 2020 (August 2020 officially, but I did no work in my last month stay after the sheer fatigue; I gave a 1 month notice before officially leaving).
Lol tell that to lare96, who he paid
very well for Group Ironman.
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For reference: The update was on April 16, the messages above are from late October.
nothing at you Optimum you know I love you
I'm not sure on the trustworthy bit either. I was agreed to get paid a certain amount per week. I agreed to take 35% of what I agreed to while the server was down in development. Sure, fair. Then, the server launched, and I got a "raise" up to 50% of what I agreed on.
After the launch in December didn't go amazing, he went MIA for almost 2 months. Here's one month in.
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So after basically taking responsibility of being owner (while getting paid 50% of my agreed amount), I eventually received another "raise." This time it was about 72% of what I agreed on.
So yeah, trustworthy.
After a bit, I got sick of working so hard, so I messaged basically saying how I would work for only 18 hours per week. By the way, this was
strict hours. I did not include meetings, talking to staff members, all that jazz. I only went by the timer in my IDE that showed that I programmed for x amount of hours. The timer would automatically stop if I didn't do any programming for 2 minutes. So no, this isn't just an 18 hour week, but it works out to be much more. If one did the math on just those strict hours, it was about 25 to 30 dollars per hour. He didn't like that though.
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I think he thought that the amount he gave me was sufficient for a full time developer (which, doing the math, was about 12 - 13 dollars per hour if one did full time).
This is my smallest complaint, by the way, but I think the topic of pay is probably most important to a lot of people when applying for a position. I didn't complain much, if at all, about it and that is my fault. But I still don't regard that as trustworthy.
That alone was not what drove me to ultimately end my 8 month tenure, though.
Cons
- Everything written above in regards to pay.
- The lack of availability for his own server, infamously always being "MIA." You can ask any single player or staff about this.
- The lack of presence in his own server by not logging in game for weeks, commonly months, at a time.
- The lack of knowledge of his own server, to the extent of not even knowing his own dedicated server's password. Hell, in the aforementioned 2 month hiatus, [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...].
- The lack of accountability for one's self by always claiming to be the victim of everything rather than taking a step back and thinking there is an error in his own way.
- The lack of shame when not giving his own players the prizes from server hosted competitions (do you think he will pay you if he can't pay his players prizes?) because he kept stalling it for weeks. Or not paying people he said he would pay who did hard work (volunteer work, not development), only to be greated with a ghost.
- The lack of truthfulness when lying about various things; I recall a yellow flag the very day I got hired being that he told his staff team that he has "known Arham for years" so as to sway their opinion of me when introducing me before hiring me, when I really had just met him that week. I brushed that to the side though.
The combination of all these things made me leave.
Pros
- The Near-Reality community is a great community when they trust you.
- Unfortunately, Near-Reality manages to get some of the best staff I've seen that are happy to help developers to the best of their ability. The unfortunate bit is that they are at Near-Reality, instead of another server that can use their infatuation and actually appreciate it.
- The source code for Near-Reality is not bad to work with. This is majorly credited to developers I regard as pretty great, like [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...], touching it. It has its very ugly bits, like hard-coded custom models in the client, but it has an overall better codebase than a lot of other servers I've worked with.
Foolish Arham continued to work for many, many more hours over the 18 hours mentioned before. I believe in the week leading to launch, I had a 100 hour week (two all nighters!). A pat on the back is all you will receive for such efforts, though, (not extra money) so I highly suggest you not do this, nor get carried away in your effort. If you are to leave his server, he will probably talk bad about you despite such efforts of yours anyways. Remember that in his eyes, you will always be a replaceable tool in the shed. I suppose the same can be said about any other place to work for, but it isn't quite as bluntly displayed as working at N-R.
All in all, no, I don't vouch for Jacmob. There are many developers who have worked for him in the past that can basically attest to some, if not all, of what I have written here. It is about time this information comes open to the public rather than only knowledge of the people who have worked for him in the past, lest we see new developers join not knowing what they are getting themselves into.