How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

I'm 4 days into my new job, and so far I am absolutely loving it. Here's my setup. Yes, they gave me 3 monitors plus a laptop, so my setup has 5 screens! Now I can die happy :D

Definitely worth noting as well, since it caught me by surprise - the company-supplied laptop is a powerhouse. High-end i7 CPU, mid-to-high-end NVIDIA GPU, tons of ports, 1TB HD, 4K display, and 48 GB RAM. Yes, 48 GB. I am truly blessed, starting off my career with this. ^_^

Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with me.

Thankfully, one of the most important skills that I learned is active listening. I am less vocal about my silly thoughts and shitty opinions these days.

I don't feel dumb. Instead, I realise that I AM dumb.

The people in my new org are exceptionally smart and talented. Each everyone is a hand picked gem. This isn't a coincidence. Rather it's evident that they hire folks very carefully.

In my previous org, I used to be the one driving everything. Like the smartest guy in the room.

But here, I am just quiet in every meeting and I enjoy working 12 hours a day. I am the dumbest guy in the room surrounded by people who are brilliant and humble.

I truly feel fortunate and grateful to be part of such an amazing org and wonderful team. One of the best decisions I made in my career and life.

I'm loving my new job. Not for the salary or perks. Just for the simple fact that my developing opinions it's been taking in consideration!

In knew it was bad at the time, but holy shit have I realised how shitty my last job was!

Underpaid (though still not doing too badly), underappreciated, and no promotion or raise despite promises of one for over a year. Of course the minute I handed in my notice, they immediately offered me a 15k raise and "oh, we can get you involved in the management side in 6 months".

Guess what bitches, my new job * is * being a manager, and I get a 20k pay rise. 2 weeks in and I'm loving it, wish I'd switched sooner!

The catch is, I'm now a manager. Does this make me the future bad guy?

I’ve been working at my company for about 3 years now and under 2 managers. In my time I’ve grown to be a technical anchor and SME in multiple facets of our architecture. First manager was cool and I could really see my development under him. Then he gets promoted and I get a new manager. New manager just rides me and bleeds me dry, all while telling me “you’re just a couple months away from Senior” for like 2 years. Every time I meet with him he still says I’m not ready even though I step up and do more and more and more. He’s never satisfied. Then we recently had a shift in the roles in the company where there’s a new intermediate role in between my role and Senior which I was gunning for. After a few more months he says to me “Congratulations, we finally opened up a position to promote you… to this other role that you didn’t want”.

Naturally, I’m pissed. So I start looking at open reqs for the Senior role I’m looking for. I applied for a job and interviewed for it. I “aced” the Senior interview. The new team wants to bring me on. They tell HR that they want to hire me. Now HR is pushing back saying “hey now, you can’t just SKIP roles like that” even though it was an open requisition that I applied to, not even an in-line promotion and also they just opened this intermediate position I’m skipping like 3 months ago and again I’ve been here for 3 years. So even after crushing the interview and the other team loving me I still won’t get the job because of stupid corporate bureaucratic bullshit.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?