74
Root
6y

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

Comments
  • 16
    Sounds like you should really look for work somewhere else.. that place is toxic. And besides, with such a terrible management, the project is very likely to sink anyway. Abandon ship and do something that deserves your time and attention :)
  • 6
    Insanely relevant: Linkin Park -- Burn It Down

    https://youtube.com/watch/...
  • 2
    Hang in there

    Bad times pass eventually
  • 3
    @FrodoSwaggins There are five people in the company: CEO (Sales), LA Sales, NV Sales, Myself, and an Intern (Support/Sales). So there are no other managers.

    (There's also a frontend contractor, a lawyer on retainer, and an accountant contractor.)
  • 2
    aww. I hope things either work out or you get out of there!
  • 4
    OMFG are you me? This is exactly my previous job. The day I quit was such a huge relief. Hope you get out soon. Fuck that manager.
  • 2
    You dont silence birds by putting blankiet over them. You have to get plastic bags and wrap them tight around those cages.
  • 1
    I'm sure @Michelle would love to help you out if you could find out a way to hire her. I believe she's also fairly close to you geographically. 😉
  • 3
    I'm so sorry I keep ranting about the same awful things.

    I'm going to do my best to get away from this toxic mess.
  • 1
    @Root don't be sorry

    sometimes, it takes hitting your limit before you do something about it

    Maybe it's time. Ask yourself "if there's any one thing I can do to improve this right now, what would it be" write down some answers. Write down any other ideas you have, new job, raise, hiring help for you, confronting boss, whatever. Then sleep on it, let it sit for a few days, and keep pondering. Eventually, one course of action will be obvious. Good luck.
  • 2
    I'm sorry that I'm late, but I totally hear you!
  • 1
    @irene Extremely high tolerance for abuse, need the income. and the economy when I started was absolutely terrible. Also, the job wasn't always crap. It was considerably better for a while.
  • 2
    @irene
    It was fun at first -- learned new things, better pay than my previous, built something completely new by myself that everyone loved.

    Then I discovered the existing codebase and slowly discovered how terrible it is.

    Then the boss and sales people loaded me down with way more work than I could keep up with, and almost everything was always higher priority than everything else. Didn't matter what projects I did, it wasn't the right projects.

    After almost quitting a few times, we had a "company summit" and changed the direction of the company, introduced feature requests and process, introduced a "no misses" policy on features, etc. Things got significantly better.

    They stayed better for awhile.

    Sprinkle in lots of promises of favors, raises, more developers, a promotion, stock, etc., and there seemed to be reason enough to stay.

    Over the past several months, things have gotten much worse again, with features piling up, technical debt eating most of my time, and the boss getting increasingly disrespectful and aggressive. All of the boss's promises have also ended up broken or become painfully obvious that he has no intention of fulfilling them.

    Additionally, I had looked for other similar jobs in town before and wasn't able to find any. With the economy getting measurably and significantly better, this has changed. There are also many more remote jobs available, and with better pay than before.
  • 0
    @Root bloody hell you are me.
  • 0
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