So this is my first company as a developer — and honestly, I’m starting to wonder if all the stories about toxic tech culture are actually understatements.

The rules here are straight-up painful. First off, if you introduce a bug — even in the development environment — you're immediately pulled into a one-hour lecture. Not a discussion, not helpful debugging — an actual verbal beating like you crashed the production server during Black Friday. It’s development. Mistakes literally come with the job. Apparently not here.

But wait, it gets better.

You're only allowed one commit per day. Just one. Doesn’t matter if you’ve done 10 things. Doesn’t matter if they’re unrelated. It’s all got to go into a single, glorious mega-commit. Because hey, why use Git properly when you can treat it like a dusty USB stick?

Merge requests? Those are another exercise in corporate gymnastics. You have to assign the reviewer’s name in both the "assignee" and "reviewer" fields — because clearly, assigning someone once just doesn’t drive the point home.

Oh, and commit messages must ONLY be the branch name. No description. No hint at what changed. If you want to understand what happened, better roll up your sleeves and start reading raw code. Context is for the weak.

And then there’s the AI hypocrisy.

Since our work is mostly CRUD, I figured it’d be smart to boost productivity with a GitHub Copilot subscription — paid out of my own pocket. I actually got it finalized. Felt like I was finally arming myself with the right tools.

Then the Shopify internal memo about AI leaked and made waves online. And suddenly — surprise! — my company is now super into AI. Out of nowhere, they’re encouraging everyone to “leverage AI tools” and “accelerate with generative intelligence.”

But here's the twist:
We're only allowed to use the free versions. No budget, no support, no actual tooling strategy. Just “use AI” because it’s trendy, but don't you dare expense anything that works well.

So here I am, in my very first job, trying to grow as a dev — while navigating rules that feel like they were designed by someone who read half a blog post about software engineering and called it a day. It’s like Git but with handcuffs. And blindfolds. On a unicycle.

Is this normal? Do all first jobs come with a side of chaos and irony, or did I win some kind of cursed lottery?

Would love to hear if anyone else had a first gig this absurd. Or maybe I just unlocked hard mode early.