Manager: I need you to come up with a quick, temporary solution.

Me: Ok...but it will be kind of hackish and ugly.

Manager: Yes that's completely understandable.

Me: So again you say this is just temporary right?

Manager: Yes we will come up with a permanent solution soon.

*that was over a year ago and the "temporary" solution is not-so-temporary it seems*

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

I'll say one thing for June job searching...just by looking at logos it's really easy to shop around for a job that won't be at a woke company. Now I just need a job search filter that lets me sort out the temporary rainbow logos from the normal ones. (Honestly, how does anyone, gay or straight, work at any company that so blatantly shills for dollars through performative pandering? Just June. After that, "Gays? What gays?" Either commit to the WHOLE narrative all year long forever and change your logo permanently or GTFOH.)

Sorta rant.

Now that this drama shite is calming down, here's my tuppence on how connections management should be implemented.

We really need something that is in between blocking and doing nothing. This, in my opinion, is temporary silencing. Having the ability to mute a person or rant, or notifications altogether, for a set period of time would be very useful when a situation needs de-escalating. As this social network (let's not beat around the bush, this is a social network) grows in size, this will be a handy tool for calming storms without burning bridges permanently.

To sum up, I think it would be a good idea to have three available options for notification muting:

- mute notifications/this person/rant for 24 hours
- mute notifications/this person/rant for 7 days
- mute this person/rant forever

As for implementation, I'd wrap up the call to the user's notification assembly like so:

If(!notifBlocked(<typeofnotif>)
{
notif.push()
}

And use a date field in the DB to handle timescales.

Also, I suggest the addition of this tag specifically for suggestions, just so we're not all using different tags

@dfox