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.

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

Again I am unemployed, and now in a worse situation than before. In a country far from family, parents and everyone I know, just me and my wife and in a very difficult situation.

Summing up what happened was as follows:

My previous boss had a very horrible habit of being rude to everyone, yelling at the developers in the middle of the office and being rude whenever he could. And when he saw that we did not lose his composure and showed no fear he used the tightening of salary and employment to threaten us and do unpaid overtime.

Then he decided to yell at me, I asked him not to do this in the middle of the office that is not polite and everything else, he resigned me.

Since last year it's very difficult to find a good job, I'm not even talking about salary, I'm talking about a good job even where I earn some money to live in the least in humility but at least work with legal and educated people.

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

It would be fun to answer "myself", but I'm a terrible boss.

As a freelancer you're also helpdesk, finance and marketing of your own little company, and I'm horrible at those things.

My current boss lets me boss myself within the company, while I still get to enjoy the luxuries of company life — completely shielded from annoying questions, with a stable predictable income.

I do believe that's the optimal structure: Hire people who can manage themselves, and have a drive to improve the company with minimal oversight.

Don't have true "bosses" at all, just some people who are good at bridging communication gaps between the islands of self-reliant teams.

Motherfucking WordPress coupled with motherfucking sales people.

If you promise the client something, please fucking relay it via the correct process (i.e the fucking ticketing system that took me a month to write for the company - it's seriously just a click away on your desktop.). "I told your boss" is not a fucking apt excuse.

My boss forgets, and well, doesn't give a fuck about procedure either.

Now you phone my boss and he phones me, on a fucking Sunday evening, telling me that the client was promised a website by tomorrow morning at 10AM. You tell me this at fucking 9PM.

Why didn't you tell me earlier? How the fuck am I supposed to shit out something I would be proud of in a few hours? Nevermind me fucking up my sleeping routine; how the fuck?

Conversation went like this:
"xyz was promised this site by sales person fuckTwit, I need this live by Monday morning. I have sent you a few images. Make it in WordPress, client says they want a 'tangy looking theme'.

Me: it's a bit unrealistic requesting this, is there no way we can extend the time so I have time to create this?
Also, what do you mean by 'tangy'?

Boss: don't know. Make it happen. No excuses.

What the fuck is a tangy theme? When I become a webDev at the company? More importantly, fucking WordPress?!

Now I'm sitting on this shit, tired as a manatee in mating season, and using goddamn WordPress.

I have to halt my irritation, because I get severely irritated when I'm tired, I have to restrain myself from telling the involved parties tomorrow to install the FuckYourself WordPress plugin, coupled with a resignation letter.

Same sales person got me in shit a while ago, because I refused to give him access to the network to download fucking cartoons. Sales director went and moaned that his bitch (the sales person) needs this for a presentation. Yeah fucking right.
Go Snorkelling in a sewer truck you egotistic, megalomaniacal, indecent, outrageous, horrible motherfucker of a person.

Time to develop a fucking website with, oh, a company profile pamphlet.

Times like this I keep telling myself, "my time will come, my time will come".

Most horrible part of my life:

Boss: Hey J make an android app where people can access my website.

J: Why not just use the browser on your phone?

Boss: Because I said so.

J: Ok, you want me to make an android app for your website whilst editing photos and videos for you? Can't you get someone else to do it?

Boss: Just get it done.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

Once I've worked in a start-up located in an engineering university "incubator", so we had a lot of engineer-to-be students applying for part-time jobs.
One of these kids was hired by my boss who labeled him "highly technical, very skilled in IT".

One day, while very busy with my own upcoming release, I had to help him finding a bug in his (horrible) code.

Me: Oh, that's easy, you need to load the image from the parent directory
Guy: ...
Me: You know how to do this, right? You're 1 exam away from being a computer engineer
Guy: ...
Me: Ok, ok, don't worry. Just type "../" right before the path

The guy starts typing, literally, "dotdotslash" into the path.

I immediately stopped him, almost crying. Then, I asked him to go for a walk.
"Don't mind about your bug, I'll take care"

How many times have I ask my boss about the new project's deadline only to get "it has to be done by yesterday". Damn, boss, if you know, that we are occupied, then don't get a new project, only to blame the coder for promising an impossible deadline to the client!

Last year at the the Xmas party CEO slips in that he wants the app done by end of February, I freak because I thought he meant both iOS and Android (only dev working on both :/), anyways he wanted specifics for locking out specific people that haven't paid for some in-house training (like in app persons just not in the app lol) it required web development which I'm horrible at, I spend a whole week and managed to scrape together the right functions to do a user lock out, pretty all things considering.

A couple weeks before deadline I'm done :D, I've done a lot of testing, some in-house user testing, changes made all bugs visually possible are fixed.

Now I've been sitting here waiting, it's an iOS app that is currently completed aside from some legal work, which I kept going to boss "hey, we need that disclaimer and privacy policy", he becomes busy for the next few weeks, pester him more, pester another co-worker, only a week ago did they contact a lawyer...

I'm here stuck waiting at a roadblock, developing the Android app sure but for their iOS app that they want released first, I'm stuck on hold, so annoyed, it's not like I can just put on a lawyer hat and just right some shit that says don't use x unless you agree and such.

So annoying, for about 2 weeks I just played games on my phone, I was not expecting to waste that much time lol, I was really expecting the legal stuff to be ready.

Just a side note co-worker and boss that needed to get this legal stuff knew I needed to get this done, since I mentioned it leading up to my completion.

I don't think it'd take too long with Apple when it comes to the review, it's just an update but I wouldn't put my faith in that as an answer. Just hate that I'm on hold, was wanting to finish this app and apply for a new job (nothing against the company more so because I want to go a company where I could get a but of mentoring). But I sit here waiting, working on the Android app, it'd be sad if finish the Android app before their lawyers get back to me with the legal stuff, though Android is a lot easier for me (I did iOS after completing majority of the features they wanted on Android because I was more comfortable working on it).

:/ What a drag

I am an I.T Admin currently responsible for the URS, Validation, oversight of outsourced development and deployment of a new application for our company...

I've been saying once a week now for 2 fucking months that this thing will be ready to deploy at the end of the week.

With enough technical knowledge I know the hell business people put developers through, the lack of contextual understanding of the Job between the two sides is insane.

(I mean holy shit when you tab through various fields, even that ordering needs to be explicitly programmed.)

I refuse to put the pressure on our devs that I am told too, I cant submit a request and phone ten minutes later to ask if itll be done today, people plan their lives, the devs have other clients and projects... what the mother of fuck makes us so special that they must drop everything.

On top of that all the testing I do over and over and over and over reveals some pretty huge operational risks and I keep making changes so as to not blow up the operations of half our company.

I am not saying my boss is horrible or anything but Holy Hell, most people just can't put themselves in someone else's shoes for five short minutes

I try to please my boss while trying to protect my devs from abuse and sadly it results in me being in the middle of two sides playing tug of war and it is ripping me apart...

Why can't people just be more understanding and communicate and understand better... But don't worry all you beautiful game changing, world improving devs... I will always have your back

I have been a frontender for a long time. I recently showed interest in backend development, and said to my boss that that is what I would like to pursue. He said that was never going to happen and I would only be a frontender in this company.

A lot of horrible things happened, some of the Lead Developers bailed and another developer flatly out committed industrial spionage on the company.

Then because of shortage of staff, gave me backend tasks, which all I completed within deadlines with few exceptions of course.

My project manager was very impressed about it.

Then I noticed the project management didn't concern themselves with ongoing projects, they became more focused on customer support and management of unhacking etc.

I noticed a wide gap that made it so all projects went past due the time because lack of coordination and planning

I stepped in because I was annoyed that this was common practice in the company.

While my two bosses were on vacation, they nominated me to be the "boss" of the company.

I earn close to minimum wage, and I felt this wasn't fair if I was to continue to do what I have done. So when our boss called us into a meeting and he said that he was going to move slowly away from the company, he said we should keep the reins of the company.

I didn't say much then, because I didn't feel like taking on so much responsibility I knew I wasn't to gain anything from more than knowledge.

I confronted him today and told him how I have felt throughout a long time. He basically said I hadn't proven myself and because of my young age, I didn't deserve to have more right now.

I was annoyed, he said he expected the same from every coworker and that I wasnt special or unique and that I could easily be replaced.

Not to mention I never got to finish a sentence without him interupting me or raising his voice to deafen out mine.

Have you ever had this experience and how did you feel? I feel terrible to be honest..

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

Has anyone ever quit a job because of a horrible boss? I just quit my internship for that very reason. Ppl, of course, are saying that I shouldn't have. 😒

I don't know what to chose.

The fact that for three months, I had to design a 16-page catalog, when I have no experience and my job is web development;

The fact that I have to do SEO for the site, but that means for my boss that for a one-page long text, we have to find at least 60 (sixty! ) times the occurrences of the keywords;

The fact that when I finally have something interesting to do, the boss finds that it doesn't go fast enough and decide to drop the project even if making a whole new dynamic stock system with the db we have is something hard and long to do;

The fact that when I come to work five minutes late, my boss is at the verge on screaming on me, even if I come ten minutes early every other day;

The fact that when I'm coding, I need concentration, I don't need the boss to give me the phone to answer customers, stop everything I am doing and explain them what products we are selling;

The fact that I am paid the minimum wage for a trainee, and when there's no coffee anymore, we have to buy some ourselves because "you drink way too much coffee, you understand" (three a day, sorry for wanting to stay awake);

The fact that I have asked for one year how many days of vacation I still had, and the only answer they gave to me yet was: "Oh, we have to ask the accountant". I still don't know how many days I have left;

The fact that the site is made only by trainees since the beginning, so circa 2008, and the code is horrible but "it works, so don't touch it". The admin part is in CodeIgniter, the front in laravel 4.2, there are a lot of useless code but we can't touch it because the boss doesn't think it is worth the time.

I almost made a burn-out last year, my doc saw my state right before and made me stop for a week. I still have to work there 'till end of august, then I will have my diploma and find another company to work with. Now, I check everyday on my calendar.

I'm tired of "agile" development. Sure the concept of a hacky POC that gets thrown out for a real implemention sounds great. But it never gets thrown out. That shitty POC become the foundation for a horrible mangled mess of hacky improvement after improvement. I'm tired of my boss telling me "do it the easy quick way and fix it later", like fuck off no. I can save man weeks worth of bug hunting a year down the road by actually taking an extra day to do it right. Like fuck does no one care about quality engineering anymore?

Sometimes that extra day to write a general vs a specific implementation is worth it.

can i work in any more horrible company than this?

> got a shitty macbook air as official work laptop. i am an Android dev btw, nd fuck knows how long it took to build apps on this, but it was still okay

> after 1 year some keys started getting slow to respond but still working fine

> recently a Senior dev raised request for better laptops and somhow we all got macbook pros woth good ram/processor

> returned my old laptop, got a mail after few seconds that my laptop has liquid damage! (in retrospect , i think i knew it as my bag once got drenched in rain)

> few days later, a mail chain starts where some guy is asking for $300 approval of fixes from my boss's boss!

now fuck knows how is it going to get paid, but i cant afford it on my monthly salary.

i am already on a tight crunch as my dad recently lost his job and i am paying emis for a car loan as well as a hand fracture loan, but i am surprised that am getting notified about this.

afaik,
1. the laptop's whole value is around $350 (some corporate quote that i once saw) .

2. the laptops should be fucking insured (we ourselves are a fuckin general insurance company) as its an obvious norm in corporate equipments. i shouldn't be penalised for this

3. i was working fine with this laptop and i can still work on it if given back.

4. this can be deducted at the time of fnf or from gratuity fund that these assholes hold onto until a guy completes 5 years and take it all for themselves if he doesn't.

5 i can buy this shitty laptop back and use it as my personal device, or get it repaired for less.

i don't even claim to have damaged it, why are they putting it on me 😭😭😭

You can connect to Docker containers directly via IP in Linux, but not on Mac/Windows (no implementation for the docker0 bridged network adapter).

You can map ports locally, but if you have the same service running, it needs different ports. Furthermore if you run your tests in a container on Jenkins, and you let it launch other containers, it has to connect via IP address because it can't get access to exposed host ports. Also you can't run concurrent tests if you expose host ports.

My boss wanted me to change the tests so it maps the host port and changes from connecting to the IP to localhost if a certain environment variable was present. That's a horrible idea. Tests should be tests and not run differently on different environments. There's no point in having tests otherwise!

Finally found a solution where someone made a container that routed traffic to docker containers via a set of tun adapters and openvpn. It's kinda sad Docker hasn't implemented this natively for Mac/Windows yet.

I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.

But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.

And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.

People treat me like the adult that I am.

I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.

I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen.

A while a go, we got a Feature Request by our client, which was a bit of a stretch. and by a bit of a stretch i mean horrible shit which is totally unusable, a technical nightmare to implement with almost no accessable data.
well, the pm gave me the Ticket. when I First read it, I wanted to puke.
since the pm wasnt in a good mood, i just wrote a large comment on where to implement that Feature to be a much less pain in the ass.

many discussions with the pm and the Client later, i Had to implement it the way, they wanted. so i started.

after one and a half week, i was almost ready, just a few hours left and the nightmare would be over
what i didnt know is that the Client came over to discuss a few things with my Boss
suddenly my Boss walks in and asked, how much im ready
then He told me THE message

i should should Revert everything ive done the last 1 1/2 weeks and implement the Feature the way, i told was better

worst friday ever

Mentors dont understand the power they have...

My mentors boss (non technical) will ask me to do something that either makes no sense or technically impossible. Without a mentor whos willing to say "that makes no sense to ask" or just "he will need an extra week to do it" can change an internship from a horrible nightmare to a great experience

best boss!!

Something positive for a change and hopefully the notion that you can fire your horrible boss! (i.e. get another job because you are awesome!)

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

Discussing with the boss:

boss: < How is it going? >
me: < I'm trying to rewrite this horrible javascript code with typescript >
boss: < But release cannot support typescript >
me: < I can compile typescript locally and then release >
boss: < You are not listening to me! we can not execute a script in typescript >
me: < In fact we will use a script in javascript >
boss: < So why are you rewriting it in typescript? >

And so the discussion continued for another 20 minutes...

wtf boss!!!! Is it so hard to understand that having one column per year is a horrible bad practice?

I work in a company and they asked me to develop the official website, jointly a colleague. The boss gave us an horrible background, he says that he likes it. My collegaus designed a hideous navbar, so I drew a new navbar (still horrible but better) and I sent it to him. He said that his one is perfect and we don't have enough time to implement the mine. And in all this I'm (maybe) a webmaster, not a graphic designer. In the attached pic, my navbar is the below one

Rant and opinions wanted. Its a long one.

I have been working on a project for a month and a half. For the first week I was requesting designs that I got about 2 of out of 15. For the next week and a half the designer was on holiday so I couldn't do anything but delivered a few more designs once he got back.

This takes us 2 weeks in already. I have other things to do as well so at the same time I work on support tickets and some bespoke development coming in.

I get given 2 or 3 more designs and can't get anything else out of the designer after waiting a week so I have to design everything myself as I go and build it. Something I have never done before.

We are now 3 and a half weeks in. My boss randomly tells my pm it needs to be demo ready the next day. I work furiously to hack something together. It works but key functionality is missing.

I move house and work from home for a week and a half. I do my best but the project is full of bugs and the CSS is horrible because I didn't know what I was making at any stage. It is therefore CSS rules repeated in IDs everywhere.

My colleagues join me on the project because my boss has decided to try and sell it tomorrow.

They run through it and find all the bugs left from me working furiously to get things done quickly. Things like no search pagination and missing validation.

My boss is now pisses at me because the project is not finished, my colleagues are now all working on it. Throughout it all he knew the designer was not delivering me anything and that I was struggling.

Am I in the wrong for writing shit code that came about because I was coding with no idea of what the finished project should look like? Is he in the wrong for dumping this on me and just letting me get on with it even though he knew there were no designs?

Btw I am just finishing a 1 year internship and before this have never done web dev before.

Discuss.

All summer I've been working at a company doing some full-stack development. Starting my last year in university, I really wanted some real life experience that ties into my studies.

I did not expect to find horrible, undocumented, code that has been written 5 years ago, where the senior developer who wrote it doesn't even know what it does. The worst part? They are STILL not documenting! I tried to document, but got this in return "you don't have to document everything. Especially if it is understandable". But they don't even understand their old code!

Monday morning, we had a meeting and they asked what I thought of working here, seeing as I am done this week. I respectfully told them that their code is not readable, and it will make it hard for new employees to understand. The boss in return says "you're the third newly hired employee this summer to say this... Maybe we do have a problem then"..

No shit. Please for the love of God, comment your code!

It's now a few months that I'm doing my first internship.
And I feel pretty bad.

The company is great, but the software I'm working on is horrible, bad coded and a nightmare to maintain. I think it's a common situation: fixing a bug opens other twenty bugs.
Also, the boss doesn't want to spend time to rewrite any part of it (it's not a huge thing, it would require at most three weeks).

I feel like I'm not learning almost anything and I'm not practicing anything about what I studied.
Also, when I go back home I don't have any will to code, even just to practice.

How should I feel about this? Is this a normal situation and I'm just somehow spoiled?

I took a few days off to move and when I came back, my manager had posted a message in chat about how horrible one of the naming conventions was (an implementation I made). One of my co-workers then defended it and defended something else I wrote that he was complaining about.

We had a 1:1 the day I got back and holy shit ... I did loose my cool and I'm not proud of it, but the guy went totally bat shit. He said I was the problem with them team, screaming about going off and writing rouge things, how he was my boss and I needed to do what he fucking told me to.

In my 20+ years in tech, I have never had to deal with a psycho. He served work release for assault and witness tampering last year and he told us a story that made it seem like it was his all his "crazy ex-girlfriend" who made trumped up charges. After that conversation, I doubt that's the case.

He's still under house arrest for something else until the end of May too. The entire team told me not to do any 1:1 calls with him and our project manager, who is really amazing, will probably be on any calls we need to do in the future.

I've also all confidence in him as a manager. Even when our PM tried to do a retro for the team, he still passively aggressively bitched about things that obviously related to my projects and the entire team could see it.

oh shit oh shit oh shit...

Do to my horrible anxiety about covid-19 I have not been calling into stands up in the last 2 weeks or doing much work.

My boss just messaged asking if everything is okay.

First msg I said yes and sorry was having techinal difficulty.

Then I msged him back saying it would better if we talked. I can see he is on a conference call so no response.

Should I be honest or list fake technical reasons?

He is pretty cool boss but only been there since October.

I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.

I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)

I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:

1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company

2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)

3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth

4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.

5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.

6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.

7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .

8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.

My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?

we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.

So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?

then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?

if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.

For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.

same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS

for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .

an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".

edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"

but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product

The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad