Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

Day 1 10:00 am
Login to email account (Zimbra)
Your password is incorrect (I entered it correctly, this was a permanent issue ,used to happen in the company with many employees)
Reset your password by logging into internal company portal.

11:00 am
Logged into company portal, somehow. 2 Mbps internet shared among 104 people, you can imagine the speed.
Reset email password
* your password has been sent to your email id*
Are you fucking kidding me? U have emailed me the password to the same email I can't log in to?
Where did the architecture designer get this top notch weed from?

Day 2
Asked HR to reset my password (using a colleague's email)

Day 3
No reply from HR yet

Day 4
I went to meet HR, she's on vacation. So they have 1 person managing the password reset, for 5000 people with no backup person. Cool.

Day 5
Your internal company password has expired. Check your email for link to create new password. This is some next level shit going on.

Day 6
I called up Internal IT team to generate a new email for me.
They asked me to raise a ticket.
I can't raise a ticket because the only way to do so, is through the portal.

Day 7
Nothing. Btw, personal email and all social networks were banned. You can't even open stackoverflow.
And this was a research lab, amazing huh?

Day 8
Loss of pay for 4 days since I can't login to company portal to fill timesheet.

Day 9
HR comes back. Resets my password.
I try to generate my new password for portal.
The password policy:
Password can't be same as last 10 passwords
Passwords expire every week
8 characters minimum, 2 upper case, 2 lower case, NO SPECIAL SYMBOL. WTF. How long do u think its gonna take to crack that?

Fuckers had a company wise policy to automatically lock PC every 1 min if not used. Who the fuck can keep on using it continuously! I'm reading an article, and bam ! Locked. 2 wrong entries and that's it, repeat all steps again. Fuckers really didn't want to let me do my job, just keep on logging in all day.

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

TL;DR
Management eats shit for breakfast

Context:
I am the sole Dev on a project.

Stack: Postgresql, redis, nginx,Java with Spring Boot, Neo4j.

I am the only one nearly familiar with : Redis, Neo4j and anything Java.

I'm gonna be on vacation for the next 15 days since they have told me that we where gonna be on a "testing/feedback" period.

My vacation was approved.

Today's meeting: we have a URGENT deadline to meet some criteria that might be the difference between have further investment or not.

Urgent deadline: last day of my vacation.

My face: poker

My thoughts: attached image

Going on vacation in a few days bug tonight is my last chance for getting ready at home.

Am now applying loads of stickers to my netbook which I'll take with me 😊

Just canceled my last week vacation (of three weeks) because the deadline is in that last week. I requested my days off BEFORE the project was even planned.
They better appreciate I did this, otherwise I'll be absent when the next deadline is due.

our HR made a survey about home office and how people think about coming back to office in the future. Shortly afterwards, our new CEO sent us an e-mail saying that he would like to see more employees in the office again soon. After all, it is paid for and must therefore be used. Of course, it's better for everyone to commute 2 hours to work every day, and last year home office worked well for everyone.
Personally, I can do without constantly sitting with my colleagues in a noisy office where 10 people are on the phone at the same time.

Bonus: In his opinion, software is better when it has more LOC.

Bonus2: Last working day for me is end of September. After that I start my new job with 43 days vacation per year :D

1.
!dev

Found a gray hair and plucked it. 😢 I'm too young for this shit. Whyyyyy oh god whyyyyy.

2.
Linux 5.8 has been breaking my shit. Like, keyboard and track pad stop working. Apparently, a fn key is to blame. Fixed it for now, but can Linux kernel fuck off? I can't have my system break so often. This is the third time I'm reverting or man handling the shit in the last two months.

3.
I need a good expensive fucking vacation. 😢 And a dedicated eye candy (gender doesn't apply) to keep in my line of sight. Maybe then I can recover.

4.
The last 7 days were an emotional rollercoaster. Specifically, from work perspective. I need many hugs. Like, real hugs. Also need good food. 😢

5.
Overall, I shouldn't be stressed but shit is not going great. 😭😭😭

I rage quit my last job, I didn't want to do 'my last comand'. So I requested my 15 days of vacation from the previous year I had at thursday. And when my boss aproved it I delivered my auto fired letter at friday. Since then when someone just leaves in one day they call it 'to do a Dani' in honor to me XD

Desperately frustrated since my little brother started studying Software Engineering in college. I was so happy that he wants to do this, but they study 10 types of math and Java.
When he gets home from vacation watches movies for weeks and weeks. Haven't seen him write a single line of code for a year and some. I believe he thinks the outdated stuff and the piece of math they study will get him a solid job with the diploma.
I am a self-taught developer and for the past 11 years I have gaps in top of a week where I wasn't studying/coding/working and by watching him throw his good years ... this is not how I see good dev raise.
I was super pissed, because he started looking for a job last month (for me he has 0 knowledge to lend a job) after 50 applications he got 2 calls (one because of me calling an HR friend of mine and the little brat refused it). I tried giving him a part in project of mine - quick piece of work 2-3 days tops so he can add something to this one page empty CV and yet he refused.
I don't know what to do anymore. For me he has no real future if he relies on the stupid college education and the piece of paper with no real knowledge for the past 2 years of studying.

After 3 years of being the first in and last to leave, of getting other people's work reassigned to me - P can't complete it on time, G doesn't like the user, A refuses to work on that module, etc... I finally blew last Sept.
In the span of 2 days, my boss brought me into a project 1.5 years in (she doesn't trust P to do the coding) and expected me to be up to speed and coding in a couple of days, told the functional dept that I would cover for one of their guys on vaca for three weeks and assigned me to take over a HUGE project from one of the other functional guys who wasn't getting it done. So basically I'm now doing Ps job AND supporting another department AND taking control of a large project from another department. I'm the idiot working 14 hour days while they're all leaving on time or enjoying their 3 week vaca to India.
I lost it. It's bad enough filling in the gaps in my own department but when I'm now taking on work for other departments, that's where I draw the line. I sent my boss my resignation - just could not take the inequity in the work load.
I'm still working here - my boss ended up hiring a consultant to handle the functional project and told the functional group to find their own vacation coverage. She's also monitoring workloads much closer now. I still habe an ongoing issue with having to complete other peoples work for them but I'm not working OT to do it. So speaking up helps. So does quitting.

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

So our HR have recently started to enforce arrival/departure time while also giving us a room for freedom (we can be at work from 7:30 till 9:00 and leave accordingly from 4:30-6:00)
So 2 weeks ago my manager asked me why on a date I didn't checkout/checkin, I looked out in my vacation log and sure enough it was a day off. I said to myself maybe be ause this day was requested last year they didn't remember it no problem
Anyway fast forward to today and my manager asked me why on the 25th of January I left (early) at 1?
What? I don't remember leaving early except for one day last week (Feb 7-personal reasons and was requested days before)
So i check my vacation log to see if I forgot something and i see that Jan 25 is a Saturday. We don't work on Saturdays! I go and check with my manager telling him that.
Then it hits me. I checked my taxi app and on Sat Jan 25 I had a ride at 1:22 AM!! from work to home. Yes i remembered that on that day I had to stay late for a project
WTF HR??!
Sorry for the long post

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 have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

Last job search was in mid 2020. I thought I had a pretty good offer: getting 40% more in gross salary. But then I asked some pretty standard/clarifying questions about benefits and all the red flags started coming out 🚩. They really used the pandemic to sell ppl short. TLDR I turned down the offer.

PTO was the dealbreaker. Their PTO was 16 days: 6 holidays plus 10 personal days. Even though any paid time off is PTO, I thought it was pretty gross to count holidays in the PTO bank like that. My friends agreed with me.

Yes, this is a US company.

Then shit hit the fan when I asked about sick days.

Me: What’s the policy on sick time?

Talent/HR: We have a flex time policy, so you don’t have to take time off for a one hour doctor’s appointment.

🤨🚩
I didn’t ask about flex time.

Me: The PTO is really low.

Talent: Well, you could use your sick days for vacation.

🤨🚩🚩

Me: I just asked you about sick time and you didn’t mention sick days. What are these sick days?

Talent: Oh, well technically the personal days are 5 sick days and 5 personal days… [I swear this is what I heard over the phone.]

🤨🚩🚩🚩

Me: 😤 This isn’t going to work.

Talent: I can see about getting you more PTO.

Talent comes back with 5 additional personal days. And it wouldn’t be included in my offer letter it would only be a note in my file. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

The gross thing was this startup was in the healthcare space: it’s a prescription meds delivery service/pharmacy. I know ppl say startups are the “throw money at you and go cheap on benefits” type. But how can you be in a healthcare space and not give ppl decent PTO? And during the pandemic and pre-vaccine existence? They were trying to con me. It was bizarre because it’s not my first job search. I was still employed so I wanted a new job but I wasn’t desperate.

I couldn’t see how anyone would accept that abysmal PTO offer. Maybe if they were really desperate or naive. I suspected this company had a big PTO disparity because I’m positive most employees would have negotiated for more time.

It was hard to turn down the money because I was afraid of not finding a job. Luckily, I did get an offer with really great benefits from a different company later on.

Last summer we went camping but it was raining for 4 days straight. The first and second day we all went to a nearby mall. On the second day I bought a new mobile router with the only carrier that had reception on the camping grounds. The third day I stayed in the tent coding along while the rest went for the mall. In the fourth day I got angry messages in slack telling me to enjoy my vacation instead of working. Fixed a major bug that day the team had trouble with. It was a very nice vacation and on the fifth day the sun came out and never left until the vacation was over.

My lesson learned was: if it's raining, fix the production bug to get sun again

I’m in a high-stress work situation where the organization is way too reliant on me to maintain day-to-day operations. We’re working on hiring a second person for my role, but it’s likely to take six months to find someone and get them on board.

And I’m afraid that I’m burning out now. I’m tired all the time and grumpy. Worse, in the last couple weeks I seem to be losing the ability to think. I’ll read an email and be unable to make sense of the words, or unable to figure out what to do with it – it’s just a blank white fog in my brain where I should have words and ideas and next steps. My productivity is less than half what it should be, and I’m horribly embarrassed and ashamed of myself.

I’m taking sick days and leaving work early when I can, which helps a bit, but not enough. I’m also doing all the recommended self-care stuff – diet, sleep, exercise. I’m scheduling a doctor’s appointment for next week.

I have a very good boss, which is the only reason I haven’t said screw it all and bought a one-way plane ticket to Tahiti. (I hear it’s a magical place.) Any thoughts on how to approach this with him? Under normal circumstances I’d try to arrange for some vacation time, but I’m afraid a week or two of rest isn’t going to fix the problem, just delay it a while. Any substantial amount of time off is going to really hurt my department. They may need to bring in someone to cover for me, which would be very expensive. I’m afraid it’d destroy my reputation as someone who can be relied on. What options do I have? What should I be doing next?

Hey! This is a followup to my last story.

TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.

First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.

Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.

One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.

The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.

I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.

Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.

Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...

Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.

One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.

I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...

I am just so tired these days and find it extremely hard to work at all, let alone on the tasks I'm supposed to work on. I spend a lot of time distracting myself compulsively instead, even off work.

I have a vacation planned soon, but I do need to finish an important project before that (which I have been procrastinating on for the last 2 weeks).

These days I often feel like quitting tech altogether or at least taking an extended break.

My last company during the interview said I could do hybrid.
It was about 6 hours of public transport a day. One way was 3 trains and one bus. If everything went well. Which it almost never did. Had days where I had to travel 9 hours.

My whole plan was to move closeby but was going to lean on the hybrid to stay somewhat sane.

They said well we kind of want you to work in office only for a bit. I was like fair.

I went hard responding on home for months.

I asked if I could do hybrid now because it got to the point it really started affecting my productivity.

They said nah we dont do that here.

(They literally had hired an third party dev that was fully remote)

Month later I said wasn't it possible to do at least something.

They offered me 1 day every 2 weeks. Like that was gonna make a fucking dent you fucking crownies. I had to act like it was a god damned privilege.

I made it 9 months in before I was like I really can't do this anymore like this.

The CTO was very quick to move me to HR. They wanted me to mutually unwind the fucking contract.

They were saying well you've got this many vacation days left we'll add 2 days so you'll have pay next month.

Last day was friday where the CEO came to me. Was like here a little something.

A 10 fucking bucks amazon gift card. Are you fucking mental.

I was so fucking done with it.

Work should be a two way relationship you fuckers.

I always did my work. I did it well and it really felt like they just didnt even acknowledge me as a human.

So last year I was working for this company and worked there for about 13 months. I was hired as a web dev but was soon moved on to creating web banners in html5 so that a friend who was doing that before could focus on design for prints. Well few days ago that friend called and said he was going on a vacation and was wondering if I would like to come back an fill in for him while he is on vacation.

Since the company can't find anyone willing or that did that job before and nows all the specs like I do I was their only choice for the job (yaay me). Of course I accepted the position as it wouldn't require me to be in their office from 9-5 but only on certain days when banners need to be created and for few hours only.

The downside of this is it will last for a whole month (didn't expect that) and it poses a chance to conflict with my current job. But my current boss is ok with me doing this as long as my "day job" doesn't get affected.

So now that I know I'm their only choice for the position and they don't have time to look for someone else and train them as the friend already left for vacation.

What do you guys think, how much should I charge them for this work ?

They are still waiting for my quote on the price.

I'm thinking of a fixed price for 1 month of work and somewhere around 600€ minimum.

My salary while working for that company full time was 400€ and I did web dev + banners (static and dynamic).

On a side note:
I heard from a few friends who still work there, that they might offer me full time job there again. But that is a whole new rant for another time

Hey people, I could use your help on deciding which of 2 job offers to take.

Offer 1:
- same city as me right now
- around 30 minutes commute total per day
- average salary (for my experience)
- tasks: infrastructure, windows, Linux
- 30 days vacation
- financial sector

Offer 2:
- one city over
- around 2 hour commute per day (but home office is possible after the introduction period)
- pays 600 euros more than offer 1 (greatly above average entry salary, for me)
- tasks: infrastructure, mostly linux
- 27 days vacation
- e-learning industry

Both jobs are in the German state of Saxony.
This will be my first full-time job, since I finished my apprenticeship last year.

Make a flow document on the integration between web and iPad app via deeplink/universal link to streamline some stuff.

Went to three days vacation for friends engagement.

Today reached the official and found out that in last three days, my boss and my pm had a meeting and changed whole flow without asking and that flow is impossible to implement.

Spend whole day talking to both and revert whole thing.

What a waste of time.