I realize now I probably shouldn't have called out my manger's bullshit if I wanted to keep my job. We were told to work a Sunday and our PO called it a "Smack-a-thon."

I said, "No let's not use stupid names. Let's call things what they are. This is a management failure Sunday."

That was during new hire lunch, in front of my manager.

I worked the first Sunday. I refused to work the second one. I've also been refusing to work over 45 hours a week.

So I guess I could have seen it coming. My manager didn't even have the gums to do it himself. He had the HR lady do it, while I was working remote from home. She told me it wasn't a 9 to 5 shop and that people there are expected to work long hours (People on my team are working 80+ a week for several months).

I took the train in to get my stuff. No one was there. My computer already gone. Couldn't even say "Go fuck yourself to anybody."

So I feel better now. I haven't taken a day of since I started in February, so it's time for some vacation and an unemployment check.

It was a really terrible job, and terribly mismanaged. I'm glad I stood my ground and knew what I was worth. I wish my co-workers had done the same.

I should have tried to start a union.

I'm unbelievably angry. So please bear with my venting.

QA guy and I are stuck working the entire weekend. A few months ago our company decided to promote an account manager to a Product/Project management role with 0 experience and offering them 0 training. They have no experience working with devs and have been making our lives hell. I work easily 50-60hrs per week and they still budget projects according to 40hrs/week meaning they're stealing my time not to mention they're incorrectly setting the client's and company's expectations.

They now have complete control over roadmaps, client communications (this wouldn't normally be bad except that they're having technical discussions with the client with 0 tech experience), timelines, etc. and since their experience was in account management they are now working with devs but making decisions that exclusively put the client first at all costs, even if it means everyone else has to work weekends while they go on vacation!!!!

I've approached them several times to offer help on budgeting time or to propose that we do a Q4 planning so that we can improve the product instead of stay in a shitty position as we are. I'm responded with "You deal with what's in front of you. It's my job to look at the bigger picture."

They mismanaged a $500,000 project and our CEO got wind of it because the client called him while he was travelling. He in turn gave shit to our Directors who in turn chewed the QA guy and I out. "You need to be more meticulous when deploying. How could you let this happen? We're eating shit because of this. You need to work over the weekend to make up for this", etc.
I'm now directly responsible for having delivered something that wasn't up to standards even though I was already putting in the overtime.

This is honestly fucking ridiculous. How can I be blamed when I'm truly doing the best I can and putting as many hours as I can while edging toward burnout.

I love what I do but I hate feeling extremely pressured to turn down friends and family like this. Maybe I'm just too easy going and need to say no more. Who fucking knows. I know that I'm angry with the company right now.

What do you all think? If you read this rant, thank you. Feels better to write it out.

Today I decided that I will quit my internship.
So mamy things are mismanaged and my supervisor avoids helping me. I'm not gonna even rant about shitty coding practices, or rather, lack of them.

Now out of 10 ppl team I'm sitting alone in the office because everybody, apart from me, can work from home. When I asked why do I have stay in the office - this is to provide me the best placement experience (wtf). So I sit here, knowing that even if I send an email with a technical questions, I will not get an answer. Atm, can't even give a fuck about trying to be productive. I'm so tired with these fake smily faces that cannot manage a single intern but expect me to do everything without any help.

Product owner and scrum master prioritized a not important user story. We are just new to the assigned team without proper turn over, KT, vague user story(one sentence) and no time to prepare our local environments. Then after sprint 1 the client wants a demo by next month but the PO and SM had prioritized the wrong user story so now they are pressuring the developers on finishing fast the other correct important user story. They mismanaged it and now they say the development was slow thus blaming us?! WTF. We hit the deadline of the first user story with unpaid overtimes.

The other PO was always asking us on how to fast track the development lol.

I'll tell them all their faults in the next meeting. As usual we are just high paid corporate slaves with golden hand cuffs trying to escape the rat race.

I used to work at a startup company that was so mismanaged that they lost track of when the Visual Studio licenses expire.

So during a critical week, the Visual Studio instances stopped working, and they have to scramble getting new licenses, which took a while.

In the end, the client lost confidence, pulled the plug on the project. I also lost confidence in the company and bailed out. Less than a year later the company went totally bankrupt.

While in Mec engineering university program I was in a robocup team (small robots playing soccer against an other team of robots using AI).

I designed the mechanical structure of the robots. After 2 years of development (while all those years our goal was to participate in the upcoming international tournament) we realized the software part of the project was mismanaged and really far behind. I couldn't accept that and learned how to code over night. Couldn't let the project I put so much time in die because of someone else.

With the help of others that came from other backgrounds than software, we made it the to tournament and the following two others after this one.

Now my job involves programming more than standard mec engineering. It also pushed me to do a masters in robotics in which I developed my coding skills even more.

So I got an offer to do part time on a project that was mismanaged for two years.

After hearing the comments about how ugly the code base was.

I took it. So now I'll have something to rant here. 🤣

I was one of the original developers behind the AuroraUX project. I left fairly early on as it was clear it would be a mismanaged disaster (we changed SCM three times before I had even finished initial planning).

About a decade later and, despite my initial work, no one did ever get GNAT and GIGI yanked off GCC, let alone put onto LLVM.

For the record, I think this is a bad idea now. GNAT and GIGI are awful and need to be replaced. GCC does a good job at executable code generation, and is generally competitive with LLVM. LLVM seems to have some better stuff for front-end designers that cause me to still favor it, but that's a different matter.

!rant(maybe)

So after taking a long weekend and applying to some different companies, doing some cultural fit and technical interviews, I thought to sit down and take a different look at my situation (with the help of my partner, of course, bless her patient soul).

* My work output isn't bad; all things considered, it's the people I work for who are doing a shitty job. If my project fails, I have to remind myself it's not my fault or my team's because we're doing all we can to the best of our abilities. I mean, it's not our fault we're being mismanaged.
* The best way I can effect change is if I am in a position to do so. Instead of looking outside, I should be challenging my way up - and if no opportunities are there, then I have to make them myself.
* This is still a year of uncertainty - starting fresh isn't going to be easy. In contrast, I've already built a rep in my current company - why throw it away because I work for sucky people?

Looking at my previous rants, they were definitely coming from a place of frustration; but as the saying goes, if I'm not part of the solution then I'm part of the problem. I'm gonna see how I can fix that then without clamboring for an escape hatch.

Yes, it was a very insightful Valentine's dinner conversation.

It seems that my barometer for whether I would stay long in a company is roughly 1.5 years. Because apparently that's how long it takes to gauge if:

(a) The work I'm doing is fulfilling or self-satisfying
(b) My colleagues make work a fun and challenging experience
(c) My bosses are people I can be proud to work for.

Right now, the tally thus far:

(a) The work is half crap, supporting old code (fuck Swig and Architect, by the way) or fixing bugs on old projects. New projects are always mismanaged, and I mean ALWAYS (let's do Agile and create tickets but hey the requirements are still in progress so do start anyway and we'll file everything as bug tickets until they're done)

(b) I'm sure it's an effect of going remote working for the last few months, but I'm feeling detached from my team. It's fine I guess.

(c) My manager is okay, he's a good guy who listens and is also technical so we get along. But his boss (who oversees several teams. including ours) is a total prick who loves to insult people at their expense as a joke. He knows nobody's gonna talk smack back so he just does it without repercussions.

I'll probably see if I can move around internally to a different division since the pandemic makes it difficult to find work externally. I'm grateful I have a job, but I shouldn't have to feel like I owe the company for that at the cost of my personal happiness.

Just gotta #survive2020 I suppose.