I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

*me and my manager, during my appraisal meeting

me: *talks about work done in previous project, and the current one under him

manager: but your JIRA throughput is very less.

me: the tickets which I pick are more research oriented and almost always take more time than the other config- fix type ones, and due to me being shifted from another team, there has been an increasing learning curve, I realize that, but...

manager: look at Jack, his throughput has been consistently high.

*me, after realizing my appraisal has obviously gotten affected and this discussion will lead nowhere

me: I would like to have a chat with HR before I sign the form with the percentage increment you are offering.

*me, with hr the next day
hr: your manager tells me that your throughput has been less than satisfactory.

me: *goes on to explain about the type of tickets I have been working on, along with other enhancements done to make people's lives easier

hr: but the throughput...

me: where the f**k do I sign?

Fuck appraisals and their 8 page document.

So this might be a very long post , but i am sure most of you can relate to it .

So , the year end . Time of joy and appraisals right?You have slogged your ass off the entire year and are expecting amazing ratings.Then boom , your piece of shit sadist manager starts of his review by saying 'there are worrysome things to discuss' after not saying shit for the entire year . I am pretty new to corporate , in fact 1 year old , still managed to handle devops for a team of 130+ , majority of whom have no work apart from playing a blame game and indulging in cheap politics. I mean , bro , I am literally your son's age , i dont see the point in playing this cheap shit with me.On top of that this sadist and borderline piece of shit manager has the audacity to say that I did not raise any blockers , while I have CCed him in every fucking mail possible.How big of an a****** can you be bro?
I counter his points for 40 45 mins straight ,leaving him stuck without words for solid 10 to 15 seconds many times during the 'review meet'. This guy is in the same place working on the same shit code , which 90% of this community can't even think of. Every thing is bloody manual and apparently ' I should have tried to streamline the entire f**** process' . Cool bro , why not open a startup while I am at it ?

Then this piece of poop gives me a rating which is just above the inconsistent performer bracket :) .

I just dont get the points what do these people get by giving shit ratings and not even having valid points to back up their fuck all arguments.This guy , throughout the duration of the call did not say 1 (bloody 1 ) good thing about my efforts. Past context is majority of the smart people who were literally running their pods single handedly , were under him and were fed up with not getting hikes and appraisals.Apart from me ,everyone resigned and left with hikes as high as 50% (LOL right).

But I have a year of experience and its really difficult to perform well in 4 rounds of bs compititive coding rounds, after which I get the generic ' oh you did well bro but we are moving on with other candidates' (FFS) .

I pray that even my worst enemies don't get such managers and I hope he rots in hell.

Amen and sorry for the cussing :)

I'm convinced that the PRODUCTION servers can smell your long-awaited salary appraisals from a mile away.

#FML

HR's keep delaying the appraisals letters.

!tech (sorta)

I am a 24yo Software Engineer guy and had just started working professionally 2 years ago, and most of my work life went in WFH due to covid. Before that, my college was also near to my home, so i have never left my home for more than a few hours to do studies.

Life had went pretty smoothly so far but now I see a lot of hurdles coming into my path . i am 24 and don't have a license for even a 2 wheeler. I don't have a good idea of my own city (but fortunately it has a great infrastructure , so i know how to travel via public transport to anywhere easily). mainly I don't know how to live alone.

The worst thing currently happening for me is that my company is transforming from WFH to WFO. The office is in a different metropolitan city which is crazy expensive and short on space. I already am uncomfortable with the idea living on my own but the thoughts of sharing a room/bed with some other guy and having my savings cut from 90 to 50% is worse.

i am hopeful that the financial hit will not be that bad as appraisals are coming, but this picture of hustle is scary. will i indulge into bad habits (drinking, gambling, smoking)? will i loose my health? would i need to wash my clothes and cook my food everyday? would i even have time to think and watch some web series, video tutorial? would i cut cost everywhere? every thing is scary. the market is also very bad right now, i am not getting any interviews even after applying to many places.

how do you prepare yourself to live away from home? Also , how do you prepare your family to live away from you?

(for 2nd question, i am a single child of a nuclear family with rarely any relatives or friends. my parents , especially my mom have been super involved in my life and we both have an exteem8 attachment to each other. i have recently started going away for short trips and travels, but she gets super emotional and concerned on thinking about me living and managing things on my own , away from her)

how does it feel to reject a company when :

- its in your own hometown and offering remote work (whereas your current company is in a different ,v expensive city and is asking for relocation)

- its offerring a 60% hike on your current salary (whereas your current company is asking to relocate therefore a 40-50% cut in savings)

- is a major mnc with blasting profits and known for never making layoffs (whereas your current company is not even a unicorn)

i just wanted a 70% hije instead of 60 coz i have heard of work stagnation, government job like culture and poor appraisals in this org. however my current company, even though not being a unicorn has shown to offer great salaries ( to sr employees though) so kinda hopeful there too.

but yeah, feeling like a shit who missed opportunity to get bought in gold

I have joke on appraisals but you won't get it in this year.😂

Appraisals are pretty insightful times. I wanted to check how much work I do as compared to others in the team. So, I tried to pull up number of pull requests created by me and others in the team. And to my surprise, I create 4x(I created about 850 pull requests) more pull requests than the next contributor(200 pull requests). I knew in general I was doing more work and much faster, but this is just too much.

I know number of pull requests is not an indicator for the amount of work done by anybody, but I had this feeling as well that I was doing more than others. I often see other members of the team not putting that much effort, and rather have a relaxed approach to getting work done. They pick one ticket and take the whole week to complete it slowly. While I hustle to get as much done as possible.

As far as the appraisals go, I am kind of laid back in terms of contributing towards overall organization which is now getting more weighted for my appraisal. So, despite me doing quite a lot of work, I am getting the appraisal at par with others in the team.

So, its kind of feels a little bit uncomfortable.