Find a place where management is able to handle some criticism.

I personally think Agile/Scrum is holy, and I don't mean "yeah we kind of do our own version of it", no, fucking do it by the book. The PM shouldn't assign estimates. Developers shouldn't receive bugfix requests from anyone other than the scrum master. The CTO can't be your scrum master... etc.

If a company can't answer the question "What were the points of feedback during the last retrospective(s), and how are those points being picked up?" -- Don't work there.

Many other things are optional in my opinion. I could work at a company without QA, without fruit baskets, table tennis, without Friday drinks. I could even live without git & continuous integration, just emailing patches to a patch integrator. I don't care.

But maintaining a safe bubble of serenity and sanity for devs to do their work in, that is an absolute must.

Also, option to WFH as much as wanted. Offices are nice for social bonding, but they kill productivity for me.

Crappy team bonding or conference days where you spend the day away from your machine listening to motivational speeches from arsehole senior managers!!

"And don't forget everyone, there's no I in team."

"No, but there's a U in cunt."

My boss and one of my coworkers “touch me”...

I’m usually one of the first ones in the office. When my coworker comes in and walks by, he touches my shoulder from the back in a “hello friend” kinda way.

Especially when I’m trying to ignore him he pokes my shoulder. He could you’d waved his hand in front of my head.

My boss is trying to be the “buddy” I guess. When having lunch and someone says something funny, he literally rests his hand on my shoulder or kinda rams my shoulder with his shoulder..

They think that’s nice and “bonding” but I hate it and it makes me very very uncomfortable. The ONLY ones who are allowed to touch me are my GF (I don’t have one) and other girls i know in a night out after a few drinks.

Not even my best friends touch me cause they know I don’t like that.

Im giving obvious signs that they should stop but they don’t get it..

On the other hand I probably have some serious problems that It makes me that uncomfortable in the first place, but not sure how to fix that.. i don’t even go to the barber shop because they have to touch me to cut my hair. So I cut them myself or my dad does it once in a year.

We got a new manager. He has us doing scrum meetings in the morning. He is slightly amused and annoyed that I refer to this time as:
"Software developer bonding time."

The whole company [cult]ure bullshit has really gotten out of hand. When management sets new deadlines that only put stress on the devs then decide to have some cringe AF company bonding soirée in the middle of the work day who benefits from this? The rebranded HR platoon thinks all employees want to participate in basically mandatory chum-it-up gatherings. Don’t get me wrong I love to party and enjoy myself, but I go to work to do just that. Work. And when other departments whose main responsibility is setting up events for the technical staff, they never seem to consider these work loads or what other people actually want. It might seem all fun and dandy on the surface but when you hear tales of people talking in the closed offices about so-and-so because they aren’t reflecting the cultural values, it starts to seem very fucking problematic. Like why would anyone ever say anything when you would probably just get the boot for just being too different, even though all this sits on top of some guise of, “a diverse work environment”. All in all I hope this [cult]ure shit summers down sooner than later. And I’m in a right to work state, so transparency be damned.

Fuck those team bonding activities.

Got my dad to try Fruity Loops so that he can compose with his Tyros 3 keyboard on the computer. If he likes it, I will buy producer edition (that one can also record, that's why) for his bday soon. For Christmas I already ordered midi to USB cable for him. Finally I know what to give to someone who already has everything. He needs stuff for his stuff :p

It will be much fun experimenting together with it. My dad can go very hard on new things, he always becomes a pro in it.

I hope it will be just as nice as the time we spent together on Autocad. He later even made Autocad exams for schools.

He learned me how to install windows 3.11 as very little kiddo.

I like my dad doing computer stuff. It's the moment we really bond.

I hate people who think they are always right.

A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.

Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.

And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.

Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.

This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.

In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.

So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.

Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.

I know that you two guys don't get together well. Shall we(the management team) send you guys for some team bonding training sessions? Whatttt?? 🙄🙄🙄

So we have this team bonding and feedback session every monday, where everyone in the team needs to say what they appreciate of their team member and what they wish the team member would change... The whole thing takes about 2 hours.

Honestly, feel like a corporate BS, what feedback do you want? Just do your job and I am happy with it... Well I guess that's part of the corporate world, instead of just doing your job, it is about how big your "influence" is in the company and how many people like you

Just discovered "channel bonding".. I couldn't put myself to sleep for 3 hours, even though it was 3 in the night.

remote team bonding/social activities like playing pictionary or whatever

can we not? maybe its cute the first time, but we're all awkward and i just wanna go home

i dont even understand where this is coming from, if u actually want to make people happy u could just send them home earlier

otherwise why have this stuff instead of just making us wageslaves work like normal anyway

is this another thing like how the hiring budget is bigger than the retention budget or is there different MBA research for why the fuck this is a thing to begin with

I can't stand how big tech companies treat you like a child. Every fucking team bonding activity is more childlike than the other.

Its like they are about to bundle crayons and pizza next time you are on crunch.

Was going to work on learning more about creating APIs in ASP. Net core today. Instead playing video games with my son. Much more fun!