To anyone new to the corporate world I have this advice: there's a game no one tells you about in school or university. It's a game of politics. The good news is that you can choose not to play the game. The bad news is that others who do can change that decision for you, if you give them a reason to. So here's my tips to keep yourself from common bad situations:

* Some people will say they'd "prefer that people were honest". This is an outright lie.
* Be guarded - if a scenario could be taken out of context assume it will be.
* Mimic the office culture, don't try to rock the boat.
* Be polite, but always stay neutral between colleagues, picking a side means you're playing the game. Unless that side is your company vs another company in which case-- you are 100% on the company side and everyone else is stupid and incompetent.

You know how in war-zones they use children as human shields? Well, that's basically what I'm used for when the corporate executives arrive on site.
Send forward the young ones, and hope they show mercy!
So far it worked.

Getting the corporate hard sell - after I gave notice at my job I've had my skip level manager and then _his_ boss offer me changes to stay. It's messing with my head!

People seem to be crawling out of the woodwork to get me to stay and it feels a lot like this is how one gets into corporate politics... but I swear almost none of these people cared about me before. Make it make sense!

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.

A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.

But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.

He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).

So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.

That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.

As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.

Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...

I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.

Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.

idk when I became so jaded, but I don't have the patience to deal with a specific kind of people. the kind that are spoiled, are too "nice", in that very corporate way, speak in that nonsense business language, and they all look the same (white, well dressed, plain). the kind of people that consider making slides real work 🙄
sigh... maybe it's a prejudice of mine, but ffs... those people are fake af, and i have zero tolerance for work politics

The more I use LinkedIn the more I hate it. I know I shouldn't be a nosy fuck but sometimes I've got nothing better to do for a couple of minutes on my work OS and the tab's right there. Every time I open it up it reminds me of why I'm not on Facebook. My coworkers are probably the most benign people to follow, all they do is repost company videos and blogposts. Basically advertizing, whatever.

It's the other people who get to me, the ones who are advertizing themselves. The soapboxing, the 'look at all the cool shit im doing', the reposting shit from people who I have no clue about. It's literally a window into just the good parts of peoples lives, like any other shitty social media site, but put through the filter of corporate PR bullshit. At least you can be yourself somewhat anywhere else, everything on LinkedIn needs to conform to what's acceptable to the sterile corporate environment, which amounts to showing off your certs or marketable products and the most surface-level 'progressive' social politics.

Fuck LinkedIn and fuck my curious ass for opening it like a dumbass kid who doesn't understand why you shouldn't touch a hot stove.

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 :)

We heard you like security so we put antivirals in your docker containers despite the fact that we made you have antivirals on your machines running the docker containers.
And we won't allow to use root just in case you want to disable the av. And we don't care you need it for the docker 😂

This is how I was played when wanted to use docker containers to avoid dealing with OPS.

Some time passes, my team is going to have independent cloud infrastructure.
Doing corporate politics is challenging...

How much of fairness can human factor add to a government compared to foolproof AI algorithm. Is it too early or too utopiaic to trust AI with governance compared to agenda based corporate embracing environment destructing corrupt to the core politicians. Is AI more evil than today's politicians. Is there a project already similar to crypto currency on governance. On seeing all butt heads in power and in age where whistle blowers are caged I feel helpless tothink software cannot change the most primal thing - politics. Switching on TV and watching news had never been this disgusting. Flushing these thoughts , came back to my desk to learn something better and be at peace with programming.

All that I have been ranting about this year are first world problems. Not only because politics is the only taboo on devrant, but also because I have been making too much compromise again.

It seems that most of the money is paid in projects for industrial companies, marketing, and useless products. So I ended up doing only some work for impact projects and ecological startups, taking time to learn new technology, and otherwise waste my potential to make a change by doing web development for well paying companies.

Still better than the years before, when I was an employee. Corporate culture sucks, at least it seems so at most companies in Germany and probably also America and even more so in other countries?! As a freelancer, at least I have the choice not to agree to any offer. And I did say no to many offers this year.

But still ...

New year resolution: prioritize customers with a purpose to make the world a better place. Make less compromise. Stop complaining about bullshit tech and just get things done instead.

Fucking large ass corporate companies that outsource some apps with fucking internal politics. Can't decide the scope of what we're working and won't even let us decide or proceed with our dev.