toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

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On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Messaging me at 4:30pm on a Friday about a high priority issue currently in production.

My reply: a link to the code review from 2 months ago that literally explained the problem and what to do to fix it. That got implemented. Then removed. For some reason...

Feels good.

I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉

Some time ago I quit my job at a big corporation. Getting treated like a resource, a production line robot, just isn't for me.

My current job is way better. Small company, lots of freedom, getting to work on multiple projects, the result counts. But, as a small company, we also collaborate with big corporations. So I joined a team at one.

Watching my coworkers there, I'm reminded of robots again. Lunch break? 15 minutes tops. Just shovel some edibles into your face hole and back to work. Five minutes break between meetings? Open laptop, work work work. The concept of "needing rest" seems entirely foreign to them.

Yesterday our product owner "relayed some criticism" from other team members to me. Apparently, me going to the toilet in breaks is "suddenly disappearing". Or me not replying within 15 minutes in the chat is outrageous. And then he tried to berate me how I'm "his developer" and his team's tasks have top priority. So, according to the PO the problem is me and I should "get used to their mode of operation".

How about "no". I quit a fucking job because that "mode" is simply inhuman. After that feedback, you bet I'm taking my legally protected 30 minutes lunch break and any other break I can. Because fuck yourself, you're not going to burn me out. The best part, that team has smokers who "suddenly disappear" twice as much as I do, but apparently that's somehow a-ok.

I had to remind him that his project is just one of several I'm working on, so no, not "his dev". While that wasn't exactly a powerful comeback, it did shut him up. Still going to talk to my boss on Monday, at least to ensure that the PO can't talk shit about me behind my back.

This happened via mail thread today.

Boss: we need this new brilliant feature I just made up and running asap! Top priority, it has to be done well, for my reputation is on the line!

Me: *looks at the specifics* 'kay, looks easy enough, this evening max and it will be ready. I just nees some extra info about what kind of data validations (I speak no accountant) are needed, and some other details (a total of 3 questiona).

B: Sure! Remember, it needs to be perfect, as my reputation is at stake. Call me on the phone and I'll give you the details!

M: Can't you answer via mail? Thua way both me and the other devs will have clewr guidelines

B: Just call me! Why do you need it to be written down? It's faster this way!

...Fine. I'll keep asking until you're ready to give me a written answer to my questions. No way I'll take security details via phone for something you want in production this evening. No chance in Hell I'll take responsibility for "misunderstanding" what you said on the phone. Why does it always has to be like that?

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

Refactored an authentication library a while back and teams are now getting around to updating their nuget packages.

It is a breaking change, but a simple one. The constructor takes a connection string, application name, and user name.

A dev messages me yesterday saying ...

Tom: "I made the required changes, but I'm getting a null reference exception when I try to use the authorization manager"

Odd because the changes have been in production for months in other apps, so I asked him to send me a screen shot of how he was using the class (see attached image below).

Me: "Send me a screenshot of how you are using the class"
<I look at what he sent>
Me: "Do you really not see the problem why it is not working?"
<about 10 minutes later>
Tom: "Do I need to pass a real connection string? The parameter hint didn't say exactly what I should pass."
<not true, but I wasn't going to embarrass him any more>
<5 minutes later>
Tom: "The authorization still isn't working"
Me: "Do you still have 'UserName' instead of the actual user name?"
<few minutes later>
Tom: "Authorization is working perfect, thanks!"

A little while later my manager messages me..

B:"I'm getting reports from managers that developers are having a lot of problems with the changes to the authorization nuget package. Were these changes tested? Can you work with the teams to get these issues resolved as soon as possible? I want this to be your top priority today."
Me: "It was Tom"
B: "Never mind."

The guy who became my manager just pushes to the prod branch.

On a repo where another team clearly set up development and production branches.

This guy has been pushing code like crazy and I always wanted to take my time setting things up properly in our team: TDD, CI/CD, etc.

Because he pushed so much he became my manager and I was seen as unproductive.

Data Science and software development best practices just dont coexist it seems.

Yeah yeah, it's up to me to start introducing good practices, but atm "getting it done" takes priority over the real based shit.

"when you get a low priority ticket during a production outage"

Got informed that there is a bug in production that needs to be addressed on top priority.

Me opens Android studio to check.

Android studio: chill bro

Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.

Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.

Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.

// Delivery manager rant part #2

When one of your many stakeholders asks "why isn't feature X built yet?"

Response: have you seen the state of production lately???? Do you really think your item is top of our priority list right now?

Production broke today because Google code removed a project that was hotlinked, but cleanup is not a priority #fml

Tl;Dr Im the one of the few in my area that sees sftping as the prod service account shouldn't be a deployment process. And the ONLY ONE THAT CARES THAT THIS IS GONNA BREAK A BUNCH OF SHIT AT SOME POINT.

The non tl;dr:

For a whole year I've been trying to convince my area that sshing as the production service account is not the proper way to deploy and/or develop batch code. My area (my team and 3 sister teams) have no concept of using version control for our various Unix components (shell scripts and configuration files) that our CRITICAL for our teams ongoing success. Most develop in a "prodqa like" system and the remainder straight in production. Those that develop straight in prodqa have no "test" deployment so when they ssh files straight to actual production. Our area has no concept of continuous integration and automated build checking. There is no "test cases", no "systems testing" or "regression testing". No gate checks for changing production are enforced. There is a standing "approved" deployment process by the enterprise (my company is Whyyyyyyyyyy bigger than my area ) but no one uses it. In fact idk anyone in my area who knows HOW to deploy using the official deployment method. Yes, there is privileged access management on the service account. Yes the managers gets notified everytime someone accesses the privileged production account. The managers don't see fixing this as a priority. In fact I think I've only talk to ONE other person in my area who truly understands how terrible it is that we have full production change access on a daily basis. Ive brought this up so many times and so many times nothing has been done and I've tried to get it changed yet nothing has happened and I'm just SO FUCKING SICK that no one sees how big of a deal this. I mean, overall I live the area I work in, I love the people, yet this one glaring deficiency causes me so much fucking stress cause it's so fucking simple to fix.
We even have an newer enterprise deployment. Method leveraging a product called "urban code deploy" (ucd) to deploy a git repository. JUST FUCKING GIT WITH THE PROGRAM!!!!..... IT WAS RELEASED FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO......

Please..... Please..... I just want my otherwise normally awesome team to understand the importance and benefits of version control and approved/revertable deployments

Our company doesn't have much structure. One of 4 people can have me working on a project, or all 4 at the same time. And every few hours 1 of them asks how their project is going and get huffy if I'm working on one of the other guys, claiming top priority. After 3 years, I've been able to just go with it. Half the projects have never actually made it to production. Sometimes, they'll even forget about their projects.

We had a production outage directly caused by our team not following a change procedure correctly. Now we're under a microscope and in a "get well" program.

They took over the daily standup for this high priority program and are organizing efforts in confluence instead of jira.

Now we have a confluence doc of what everyone is working on with someone changing the text status in a table by hand every morning along with the comments in a note section...

That feature that needed to be taken live asap. Who's priority was set the highest. For which i had to stop the code i was developing, to work on that.

Post going to production, one month's passed and the feature still awaits there in its lonely world to be used by someone, anyone.

Please use it.

Was working on a high priority security feature. We had an unreasonable timeline to get all of the work done. If we didn’t get the changes onto production before our deadline we faced the possibility of our entire suit being taken offline. Other parts of the company had already been shut down until the remediations could be made -so we knew the company execs weren’t bluffing.

I was the sole developer on the project. I designed it, implemented it, and organized the efforts to get it through the rest of the dev cycle. After about 3 month of work it was all up and bug free (after a few bugs had been found and squashed). I was exhausted, and ended up taking about a week and a half off to recharge.

The project consisted of restructuring our customized frontend control binding (asp.net -custom content controls), integrations with several services to replace portions of our data consumption and storage logic, and an enormous lift and shift that touched over 6k files.

When you touch this much code in such a short period of time it’s difficult to code review, to not introduce bugs, and _to not stop thinking about what potential problems your changes may be causing in the background_.

Debugging is fine, totally part of the job!

Constantly fixing sh1t and new reports of another pile of sh1t coming every day like somebody is throwing them with shovels at us just to open the codebase that is written by the folks who aren't here anymore with some list of obscure libraries that is last maintained about 5 y ago is not ok.

It is not buggy codebase it is actually coddy bugbase!

I tried to be vocal several times to change technology to more suitable one, to make some improvements and to remove code smells(there is a ton of it, smells like organic garbage dumpster with rotten eggs) but "everything works" and there is no real "value for the customers" in that(fixing, refactoring etc.)!!!

Yea it works with sh1t ton of bugs reported every week. Nobody gives a shit, just contempt with their mediocre lives solving bug at the time while i feel like I'm wasting my time and talent on wrong people and fixing other's shit.

That is what happens when prototype becomes product and ships to production because numbers, money and sh1t!

this is why we who care about our career can't have nice things! I am not god damn pest control, I am f*ckin developer.

I'm tired. I don't want to do these tests anymore. These vague test scenarios I have to decrypt on my own lest asking business shows signs of weakness. I'm slow to test and going way beyond the hours the client estimated and you folks just accepted. How can I finish this when I get pulled to meetings which I am not the decision maker but I'm supposed to be the technical one to help them decide. In between this testing I get emails to help check on issues I'm not even a part of. Production issues I can understand because those have a feel of critical and priority but if you pull me to that I lose time testing. I'm trying. But I'm truly very slow at this. I'm a slow tester for this set of test cases. I'm hating myself every minute as the hours inch to the deadline which is today. I want to sleep but I want to finish as well. Shitty days of drone work that could have been given to somebody else but I can't say no to because you guys accepted. Someone from management just see please, don't give this to me. But you can't see. You probably don't even understand. They asked, you caved because you can't see the list of tasks and level of detail that comes with each thing they ask. This testing is a ridiculous use of my time but I can't say that to the client. You could have. I want to. I truly want to say "Fuck these tests". I tried to push back. But the client of course reasoned back and it was understandable to ask. To do what's good and what's best. How can I say no to that?! I'm almost depleted. I'll just finish this somehow.

I cannot access one of production machines from home while behind VPN. I wrote to support that I need to access it right now and stated this is very urgent. They changed priority form high to low... access will be granted withing 2 weeks....

Just today.

A production issue was assigned to me a while ago and the OSE and I were volleying it back and forth (I don't have access to even see anything production) because neither of us had any idea of what to do.

Here's the twist: the OSE's analysis (and my assumptions) of the problem was off, so we were basically running around in circles.

Today, he and I had a good one on one as the only priority to put this mother fucker to rest. Turns out he assumed a lot of things in his hurry to give his analysis to his boss.

Confirmed a few things, lo and behold, it's a non issue. That's how the legacy, 13 year old system (that no one in the entirety of the company knows end to end anymore) works.

Fucking eureka.