Long but worth it...

So I was cleaning out my Google Drive last night, and deleted some old (2 years and up) files. I also deleted my old work folder, it was for an ISP I worked for over 2 years ago. After deleting the files I had a little twinge of "Man I hope they're not still using those". But seriously, it'd be a pretty big security risk if I was still the owner of those files... right? Surely they copied them and deleted all the info from the originals. IP addresses, Cisco configs, username and passwords for various devices, pretty much everything but customer info.

Guess who I get a call from this morning... "Hi this is Debbie from 'ISP'. I was trying to access the IP Master List and I can't anymore. I was just told to call you and see if there's any way to get access to it again" (Not her real name...)

I had to put her on hold so I could almost die of laughter...

Me: "Sorry about that Debbie, I haven't worked for that company for over 2 years. Your telling me in all that time no one thought to save them locally? No one made a copy? I still had the original documents?!"

Long pause

D: "Uh... Apparently not..."

Another long pause

D: "So is there any way you can give me access to them again?"

Me: "They're gone Debbie. I deleted them all last night."

D: Very worried voice "Can... Can you check?"

This kids is why you never assume you'll always have access to a cloud stored file, make local copies!!

A little bit of background on this company, the owner's wife fired me on trumped up "time card discrepancy" issues so she could hire her freshly graduated business major son. The environment over there was pretty toxic anyway...

I feel bad for "Debbie" and the other staff there, it's going to be a very bad week for them. I also hope it doesn't impact any customers. But... It is funny as hell, especially since I warned the owner as I was clearing out my desk to save copies, and plan on them being gone soon. Apparently he never listened.

This is why you should have a plan in place... And not just wing it...

PS. First Post!

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.

------

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 I realized that I hit a total burnout. Last 3 years were extremely stressful for me (4 jobs in 3 different countries, exhausting and toxic relationship, bad habits). Last 7 months are the worst. I became lonely isolated and miserable. I learned to rely purely on stress, determination and validation to get through my days. Was supressing my emotions for a long time just to focus on making the money. Its time to break the cycle.

Im done with this. Next week Im quitting my fulltime job. Saved enough money for starting capital of my own dev services company. Built three projects that generate stable income to cover my living costs. Now finally I can take a long break to recover from this burnout and to heal myself. That poor persons mentality that I had from my poor family has been shattered. I achieved what I wanted in terms of having the money and gathered enough experience necessary to survive anywhere.

I managed to get through all this shit on my own with barely any support. People around me were draining me more than actually helping me. But I managed to do it and now its time to focus on myself, to heal and restore love for living. Im safe now.

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

This happened when I was on third semester of the career at university. I had my first boyfriend, the "Python" guy. He has that nickname because he used Python as his main programming language and nobody on the classroom used it.

In a few words, he was a... horrible human being. He talked down to me almost all the time, saying to me that my country was sh*t (he is from United States, and for a reason he never wanted to told me, he cannot go back to his country), that my university was sh*t and he said "you're will be lucky if you rot programming in a chair".

As you might wondering, yes, unfortunately it was a toxic relationship. Once he said he wanted to kill the teacher because he though that he hacked his laptop D:

He claimed that he was going to teach me python and security stuff, bla bla bla, but nothing. I learned python by my own.

I almost lost my faith in dev future because I though that the only ones that could have a real future in programming where people without ethics and only if they have a friend or a relative on a company.

The saddest part was that I dated him because I love smart boys, but he was just an idiot that, furthermore, wanted to change me (he pressured me to have tattoos, dye my hair and have sex, things that, of course, I didn't do).

I found courage to break up with him. I waited until the semester ends (in order not to lose my programming final projects) and, the day after the last day of class, I broke up with him.

I recovered my faith on programming when, next semester, one of the teachers invited me to give a python programming workshop :D and I gave two python workshops, and two of mobile development.

Now I'm working as a junior .NET developer. Thank God I broke up with him before the relationship became even worse. "Python" wanted to marry me after a year! O_O

!rant

It's been a while since I posted here. My previous workplace was a 101 on how to burn out people.

But now I am working at a place where:

- People are 0 toxic.

- Sprints follow the premise "under promise, over deliver."

- I was having trouble sleeping (for reasons) a couple of months ago, and my boss literally told me, "If you can't sleep at night, take a few days, or if you can fall asleep in the morning, just sleep in the morning until you manage to do otherwise. Talk with your team and rearrange the meetings if you have and rest. "

- All pieces of the company (sales, narketing, product, data, devs) have a clean roadmap.

- Product and bizz understand when something can't be done on the next sprint and why sometimes some features are delayed.

- They pay well, even raising the pay twice to account for inflation.

- Full remote, If I want to go to the office, Its my choice.

I need to keep this job no matter what!

Oh you're a frontend guy? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're a backend guy too? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're a security guy too? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're a devops guy too? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're a QA guy too? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're an SEO guy too? Good, we need one of those.

"Well, sorry to say fullStackCraft, but we found your cloud architecture skills just a little too lacking for this position. We really need someone who can do frontend, backend, security audits, QA assessments, SEO, AND build scaling cloud architecture. Oh and while you're at it, can you turn fucking water into gold? We need that at our company too. You didn't get the position, but it'd be great if you could refer us to someone who is very advanced in fucking alchemy. Thanks!"

Absolutely toxic the way software people are treated I swear. The money may be the only good thing that is left.

!!politics

My employer held a company wide zoom meeting today. It was officially optional, but like 90% of the company attended.

It started out interesting as they had invited a speaker, but it quickly degraded into a gigantic political circlejerk. It was an hour and a half of bashing everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their views, calling them evil, calling them nazis, radicals, militants, racists, etc. — and I don’t share their views, like, at all, so. That really lets me know how they feel!

As far as I can tell, everyone else at the company has the same ideology. Not only does this make me incredibly uncomfortable and require me to act and pretend at all times, it’s honestly kind of infuriating, too. The amount of insults they throw around and blatant lack of tolerance displayed by these “tolerant” people is just incredible.

To them, anyone that doesn’t hold exactly their beliefs is evil, and often a slew of other things, too. And it doesn’t seem to matter how far removed those views are; apparently libertarians are evil as well? Apparently “leave everyone alone” is evil and gets you branded as a militant far-righty? Like, how does that even work? They ascribe to “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is literally Hitler,” I guess.

Fucking hell I can’t stand these people and their politics. And when they all get going on it together? Just. Fucking toxic.

I’ve been so disgusted today after sitting in on that meeting I’ve gotten practically nothing done. And I was so hoping to finally finish this stupid ticket.

Oh, and Mr. PM wants that screwdriver to do even more things now — by next week, of course. Fucking hell.

Why did I switch jobs, again?
Right, to get away from the politics.
Fucking hell.

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

When I interviewed with for an EA internship, they gave me a coding challenge after on GitHub. I tried it out and when I asked politely over email on the status of the challenge a week after, they rejected me with literally I shit you not "no :)". It wasn't even a answer to my question that makes sense. I was an underclassman so they probably didn't think it mattered that they were disrespectful to me. The lack of empathy and professionalism that truly proved to me what a toxic company they are. Any one have any horror stories like this?

I've fancied the thought of being petty enough to try for their interview again now that I've graduated and have more under my belt just to reject them with a :) but I'm not going to get down their level enough to do so

After two extensive talks with a potential employer (they lasted for hours), I decided to accept the offer, although the salary was ~25% lower than at my previous job. Everything else sounded fantastic and I needed that desperately since at the previous company everything was toxic for years.

These new guys wanted a senior php dev because they had none of them, except only wordpress and drupal people who were not skilled enough to take other types of projects (they called them "custom php"). I liked it and thought I'm gonna shine there and quickly earn a raise because the agency will start earning more by getting projects that they were unable to even bid for.

First day at work and I got assigned to a new Drupal project, although it was supposed to be a simple restful API for a simple iOS app. It could be done in a week or less, with no rushing at all. But it had to be Drupal. And I happened to be around to hear that there is a queue of Drupal projects waiting. After 2 days leaving the office late and having my brain melted by nonsense I was looking at, I quit the job.

No offense to Drupal people, I really do admire you, but I just could not stand it after 8 years "doing custom php". It felt too much like being downgraded. But more than that I was pissed off by the fact that I have been shamelessly lied to and tricked to accept something I clearly said that I dont want.

This happened a year ago. I now earn 2.5x more money than those guys offered and work in a very healthy environment. In the meantime, I heard that the other guys shut their company down.

FLOYD IS HERE 😎

Gather around kids, it's story time.

So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.

31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).

I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.

I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.

I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.

I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)

I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).

So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.

November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.

Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.

Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.

She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.

She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.

Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.

@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.

That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.

I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).

Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.

I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.

Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.

I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.

During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.

Continued in comments...

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

Office manager sending a mail that all spaces now only have "sustainable vegan leather" furniture, "to carry responsibility for the planet and commit to a greener company image".

You mean you bought uncomfortable plastic chairs.

Vegan leather is just fucking plastic.

Not all plastics are bad, but in this case it's a very toxic plastic, a PVC softened with phtalates and stabilized with cadmium stearate, produced cheaply in a country with no regards for public health or the environment.

It's about as sustainable as munching down a vegan quinoa avocado salad in a private jet on a transatlantic flight.

There are moments where I'm glad that I'm still working from home, because I would have planted that ugly fucking desk chair straight into the equally ridiculous power-slurping hipster "sustainable vertical herb garden" with its 500 watt growlight bulbs.

Best carrier choice: leaving the old company I worked for...

TLDR version: I yelled at owner/director to shove it..got layed off the next day. Never regreted that day!! EVER!!

Long version: I was asked to implement storing of CC numbers (yes, the whole lot) & their matchig CVC numbers..plain text, no encription.. company didn't even fulfilled standards to store last four digits.. so I yelled at the 'big boss' that he is crazy and that I won't do it.. Next day, I got handed a letter that said they have to lay me off due to lack of work and that my position is redundant & no other workplace for me.. Never been happier in my life!!

I wanted to quit for some time, due to crazy stuff they asked me to implement & how!? & toxic personel. I was called Hitler (& am actually proud of this!!) cuz I was work oriented & didn't kiss mrs.Director's ass.. I wasn't slacking like the rest of them did, so of course, I was the bad guy..

Anyhow, fast forward 6 months, got the best job ever & am now here for 5yrs+.

I've made up my mind, I'm leaving this toxic environment, the current company and making a switch. FUCK IT

I fucking want to skin alive my engineering senior director and VP.

Fucking piece of shit people. Looking at their faces from behind the screen, I can sense them stink doneky balls.

They have made my life hell.

The entire tech architecture is absolute shit in nature and engineers cannot even build a single blue colour button without creating a major fuss about it.

Every single aspect of product is built kept in my only the engineer persona. Everyone else can go and suck a racoon's dick.

And they have no concept of tech debt. They just keep building and building stuff. And then build some more.

Entire engineering org is in rush to ship shit at the end of sprint and if they don't then VP and Director are pissed. So to keep those two half witted donkeys happy, these people ship garbage. And all they comment is "cool, very cool".

And hence, entire fucking product is built because it's cool irrespective of whether it solves a problem or not.

A single user role authorisation or authentication is so fucking complex that it would take an eternity for even a developer to figure what's happening.

Fucking toxic human wastes.

There's a company wide mandate to use a certain tech stack, design guidelines, and a vision that all teams have to align. But these faggots are going in opposite direction to do what they feel like and forcing everyone else to ignore all other engagements or alignments with other teams.

These two people should be skinned alive in town square during noon and then left there until they dehydrate entirely. Fucking baboons.

I am so fucking pissed with such mindset.

!rant

Today I bring happy news. First company I interviewed at clicked so well, both personally and technically, and they expressed an eagerness to hire me on the spot. I figured we might as well talk salary to compare them against other interviews. The offer they made me was so good I decided to sign there and then. They said they participate in a fair wage program but for me this is absolutely the dream. I get lots of nice perks to boot. And they've already mailed me some tech documentation to go over so I can prepare, as I'll be working with the latest front end stuff and of course my trusty .NET (and yes I asked it'll be C#, haha).

I can't even begin to express how great this is. The last decade I've been unemployed for several years in total, and vastly underpayed when I was employed. I've worked in some toxic environments, been falling behind on tech and wrote a lot of rubbish code as a result of that. But it seems that somehow all the hard work I did put in paid off by taking a chance when it presented itself and go in accepting I might fail horribly. And I did bomb the tech questions actually. But they let me explain myself and come to answers together and saw beyond the black and white.

In short I feel like I've won the work lottery and will start 2018 in style. Part of me is still scared though, that there will be a mistake or a catch or even somehow I'll ruin everything. But that is the risk in life and I'm just going to have to deal. What I can control and will do is my very best, because I want to keep succeeding and have a great future career. And I hope I can inspire others in the same boat with my actions too.

My company got another contract to support a research institute. My current contract has shitty leadership that won't back us against our boss (different company, same contract) without proof. The fact that 3 of the 4 of us dread going to work isn't enough?

Anyways. Talking to the other site about transferring. Need to gtfo to a less toxic environment where I won't be made to work fucked up hours with a boss who doesn't like women in tech, and thinks he's something special because he's vegan (but had real leather jackets and bike seats, but that's an entirely different story) and does yoga and plays the guitar.

Meanwhile, he resents his kids and seems to regret getting married. All because he used his military education benefits to pay for their school.

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

I already wrote one rant about how my family deals with me being a developer, but this rant I wanna dedicate to people close to my family and what they actually think...

Earlier this year I ended school, so I was supposed to find a job. Well...I live in region where only small IT "companies" exist. It is really hard to find job as a developer around here. These small companies either do not want to hire anyone or they just hire people with super amazing university or just family members and friends. Anyway, I did not want to move to the capital city, so I just kept seraching...and that is how this family friends started to be fucking toxic.

While searching for job everyone just kept telling me how am I lazy as fuck and will not just go digging fucking drains or work for minimum wage to some korean shit company around here. Of course not literally, but I can see when someone starts to look at me as I am completely crazy. Our family lost many fake friends who just do not understand because of this. But it did not ended here...

When I finally found a job 1.5 month earlier, I was so happy. Job from home in relative good company. Ho Lee Fuk! Nobody believes me I am actually working. People look at me as I am a lazy fuck laying all day in bed and watching fucking TV. I am done with these dick people.

End of story.

I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.

For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.

They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).

So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.

You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!

Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.

The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.

There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".

The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.

I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

Most toxic work culture ?? oh boy where do I start.

Getting verbally abused and physical threats over bugs found in production.

All kinds of office politics going around where everyone openly admitted not liking others in other departments.

Your day's salary gets taken away if u are late by even 1 min. And no overtime pay and no you cannot say no to that either or end up getting laid off.

Company brags about giving their employees their salary on time.

Only the devs who have lasted more than 10 years in the company will be heard.

After so many job switches I managed to find one where I get to WFH and pretty much face no toxicity from others.

I am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

Here in Saint Petersburg, Russia, our local governmental utility company that is responsible for providing tap water for the entire city, uses crayfish to monitor the water composition.

There are some crayfishes living at the plant and there are some scientists that constantly monitor the crayfish via optical fiber to measure how they feel. If crayfish feels bad, the water is cut out and the inspection begins. There are operators that are paid to watch for crayfish mood throughout the day.

This system works flawlessly since 2005 and helped prevent several accidents when toxic stuff that can’t be monitored on a large scale ended up in our local river.

I mean coal miners was using canaries and rats for years to detect what detectors just can’t detect good enough.

Our entire tap water system depends on some crayfish and it’s amazing.

I was at a company for almost 5 years (my first job too). Got fired a few months ago by my mentor/the lead dev who was there for about 3 - 3 1/2 years of my time there. He left for better opportunities, he knew the company was pretty shitty to work for. He comes back (why???) and fires me about 1-2 months after his return.
Reason why, I'm unhealthy for the company and the company is unhealthy for me (not because I'm a bad dev, cool I guess). I don't disagree (a lot happened while he was gone, but he doesn't really know what happened) but this happens after I have a "discussion" with him about how I don't know how to prioritize my work anymore with new policies regarding billables and pms and management pushing me in multiple directions in regards to what I should be working on. (There's more to this but I'm trying to finish this rant eventually.)
I'm not surprised but I'm pissed at the company for never really improving and I'm pissed at him for drinking the kool-aid so to speak.
I want this company to fail. I'm surprised it hasn't. The place was a shit show when it came to the Dev department and my old mentors return didn't help much either.
I should get over it and move on but this place was like a toxic relationship I couldn't bring myself to leave (as much as I wanted to leave and knew I should). And there's so much to unpack with this place.
I'm hoping dev rant can be a good place to unpack the shit I dealt with there over the years so I don't burden my friends and family with my thoughts.
So yeah, hey ya'll and welcome to my rant(s).

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

"due to the amount of applicants, we can't respond to every applicant email"

let me translate the manager-speak for you: "due to us being stuck-up douchebags, we feel as though our company is more valuable than literally the 2 minutes of time it takes to write a yes or no email, so we'd rather keep you hanging and never give you feedback. oh yeah we're also not professional at all"

god why the FUCK am i even applying for jobs, each place is more shittier and toxic than the next

I finished my software development apprenticeship and aced the presentation about the software I built for the company.

I'm so happy that I no longer have to go to that workplace anymore.

Most people were toxic, rude, incompetent, slow, entitled, insulting, screaming and fake.
Most were uncommunicative.
Management was shit.
CEO was shit.
HR was nice.
But the rest of the devs were ok, kind and helpful.

Now I'm taking a big vacation to calm down from the years of torture before I can start working as a dev again.

That includes motorcycle driving, chilling with my gf and trying out NixOs (wanna see if it is really worth the hype)

Worst: Getting fired for talking too much shit about how the higher ups don’t know how to run a company.
Best: Getting hired at a way less stressful job that pays 50% more and realizing the last place was toxic as fuck.

Guess who's updating his resume and starting a job hunt this weekend?

Fucking asshole tech teams. Literally every single person I knew since I joined has quit.

Now I know. This place is full of assholes. I take back my earlier rants where I praised this team.

Company is good but this specific team is full of toxic assholes in their tech team.

I work at a 6day work week company and this week it was 7. We work more than 10hours a day in a 7×27 foot co-working office space. My manager sits just 2foot away from me to my back. He is toxic as hell and nano(micro) manages the team. I stay very near to office and I feel like I am a dead person just living to work.

Is this a good reason to change the job after an year ? I feel lonely and negative. My manager sitting just few inches away from me makes me feel like a fish trying to behave outside water.

But the best part is I got to work on many things that helped me gain lot of tech expertise still he wanted control every piece of code.

So, 2 weeks ago I started my new job at a company I had my eye on for almost a year, feeling super blessed because after leaving my previous job with such a toxic work environment, it is so refreshing to be around new people who actually value you. I’m so excited to learn new skills and push myself towards the role I was dreaming of since university. :-)

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

Everybody is criticizing Microsoft for leaving too much legacy code in Windows, etc., but let me tell you that I prefer 100% that and have lifetime backward compatibility than having to deal with Google bullshit.

Google sucks ass.
It's one of the most dev unfriendly company on this planet (along with Facebook).

You can't fucking change BASIC stuff in Android SDK every fucking version.
You just can't!

You can't use a system of "PERMISSIONS" each developer has to set in its application and each user has to accept during the installation, that a few versions later become USELESS... because "Hmmm… no, It's not enough, let's make a new privileged permission that makes the old one fucking worthless".

YOU FUCKING, TOXIC, BASTARDS.

It's my app, my code, my device, my fucking conditions. If I want to install viruses on my device, I should be able to do it.
I shouldn't have to call fucking Sundar fucking Pichai fucking CEO of fucking GOOGLE.

USERS != BABIES.
DEVS != CRIMINALS

We are the reason you have a fucking job, fucking food on your fucking table.

I want a fucking GOD_MODE permission in the next SDK, assholes!

You can't REMOVE fucking "Android.OS.getSerial()" making it only for system apps.
It's not sensible data… and if It's in your opinion, you've already created a "android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE", so what else do you want, fucking asshole?
Right, you want to introduce "android.permission.READ_PRIVILIGED_PHONE_STATE" to make obsolete the other one, son of a bitch!

I don't fucking use you're garbage Google Play Store, no worries! I won't upload my app on your servers, bitch!

They've created a monopoly in the industrial space (PDAs) and they keep making fucking wrong decisions every single year.

My job is already stressful, why you can't just stop making it worse? fml

At a previous job, boss & owner of company would waste hours of my time to show me, at his own desk, every small detail of some random feature he had fallen in love with on some random webpage he found, while saying "I don't want to disrupt your plans or anything, this is just something to keep in the back of your minds, as this would be a really nice thing to have, even tho none of the clients have asked for this and I have asked no one else for a second opinion, and I will most likely ask you to remove this feature in the future because I will finally have realized it wasn't that good an idea anyway."

Ok dipshit, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this information? Every week from this moment on you will ask whether we have found the time to implement this feature, even though you are fully aware that our schedule has no room for random, unplanned features and that we are already not able to meet the unreasonable deadline you pulled out of your ass two weeks into a development process that would end up taking 8+ months.

We are already overworked, we already work hours upon hours of unpaid overtime, and yet you still think it reasonable to pull us away from our work every other fucking day to talk about random extra features you want added, but don't want added to the roadmap because you want no delays... Fuck you, fuck your toxic attitude, fuck your meetings where you spend half an hour complaining about features we are still in the process of developing the backend functionality for (on test servers) not having the right font colour for the text, and fuck your legacy desktop software originally written in COBOL that you now want moved to "the cloud".

I would rather be unemployed and live as a hobo on the streets with a "will code for food" sign than work for you ever again.

My company is 8 days late to pay my salary.

The government (uae) recommended a 4.5 work week and my company hinted they wont abide by it

My company promised us bonuses and shares a year ago that we still didnt get

Altho we have been working remotely for 2 years due to covid, they are also trying to enforce going to the office...

Everything about the company is way too toxic

I want to leave ...

but all my applications get ghosted so i feel like a slave, its like i need this company otherwise im jobless. I haye this

I'm struggling at work. I hate senior mgmt at this company so much it's actually affecting my ability to produce work.

Fuckers high up have been delaying performance reviews for like a year, but they get their fucking bonuses with no delay. I can't afford not to have a job, so I'm trying to work, but it's hard. I try to keep things in perspective that they're still paying me so I should just do my job.. but how do you do it if you hate those cunts at the top so much. I became so toxic because of all the resentment too.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

I got a median-pay front-end job through a contractor (after a contract from hell...but yeah I didn't learn...) and I'm getting zero assignments after a month and nobody seems to know what my role is.

I'm one month in, and every week I have to email my boss to remind her to sign my paycheck, which is stressful because I'm charging for my time because my assignments are like "Research this" or "look at this Wordpress theme or brand guide". The team never communicates but once a week, and I'm beginning to believe that I'm not a good fit for the team because they are impossible to get a hold of and the sysadmin won't give me access to anything even when I CC my boss. (I don't want to grief this guy...) Despite this, I've been told privately by higher-ups on a few occasions that they plan to hire me full time by November...

My SO thinks that the reason people are so dodgy toward me is because they literally do nothing and I'm breaking the flow of that by asking for things. I'm used to agency output, which can be toxic and where everything is 'due yesterday', and I'm watching this team work on assignments ten times slower than normal. ("You want to change a phone number on a website footer? You'll get it next week...maybe." I can't step on toes because I don't have access...) I'm perfectly fine with having to wear several hats at a low-stress job, but I can't even get my first assignment and I'm still being asked who I am in weekly meetings, or asked things like, "Would you even be willing to relocate here?" (I actually live DOWN THE STREET FROM THE OFFICE!! WHY DO I HAVE TO BE REMOTE? Why am I being asked this question?) It feels like my boss impulse hired me, with zero input from the team, and had no real reason to hire me in the first place...

It could also be another issue: Yeah, my experience is in PHP/JS/React, "but here have a seven year old .NET project and a company laptop with zero documentation and make this form import data to a database we know nothing about." Lead dev won't even talk to me.

I feel like a joke.

I dedicate this to all of those hr gurus from top tech companies that rejected me cause they think I won’t fit their culture despite me crushing all their technical interviews, fuck them and their soft skills stupid questions.
I won’t fit there anyways cause I can express my own thoughts using sarcasm and irony and I’m not scared of doing it cause I don’t care about your amazing company culture that prefer robots not people with a little sense of humor. I don’t care about my failures cause there was so many I don’t give a fuck. And by the way if you ask me why I want to work in your amazing company I would always say cause you asked me to work for you and now you treat me like shit. Then 10 years later you blame everyone for toxic culture lol.

Hey all i left my toxic job a few days ago. I am searching for a job now. I had a bad experience after i did a interview task for a company a few days ago. The HR had a google meet session with me before sending me the task. She never mentioned that she wants someone who knows mysql. I finished the task using MERN stack. It was a simple blog app with a simple backend. After i sent the task, the HR messaged me and told me to do the task again using mysql. I was shocked, i told her i didnt know mysql...she ghosted me for a few days and today an hour ago she messaged me and told me that i am rejected...i dont know what to do now...

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

Question: Have you ever worked for a toxic company? If so, did do you do something about it? Any tips?

By toxic I mean the abusive kind, where racism and sexism are "just jokes" and where clients are essentially scammed into buying software that doesn't do what they think it does.

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Rant...ish? It's more mixed feelings...

Had my first day yesterday at a new job in a big company. I came dressed really nicely in a suit and tie. Went to orientation with everyone new coming in.

Felt like I made the right choice to up my effort in dress code.

Met with my manager, was led to my team. Everyone is dressed casually. Unshaved. Giving me hate stares.

Felt out of place. But kind of happy that I can try less.

Still. What's up with programmers and being toxic to people dressed nicely o.0 I don't need to look like I came out of crunch time every single day to prove my worth...

It's really weird getting these looks. It's almost like highschool all over again. When I let my mother dress me and looked like the nerdiest kid on the block...

Then again, today I'm wearing sneakers and causal clothes. I either feel like I cave in to peer pressure... But at the same time I don't mind it. Erghhh... Still hate this...

Mixed feelings... I donno.

My manager has sucked the soul out of me. I feel drained, anxious , highly demotivated and I have lost hope in life. He has a toxic way of managing people. The team is always micromanaged and even in that he keeps scolding people for not completing tasks in the timeline which he thinks is right. I am always filled with multiple tasks on my board and he wants me to complete all of it in one day irrespective of complexity. We have a standup that is scheduled for 30 minutes but goes on for 1 hour 30 minutes and all he does in that meeting is tell people they have not done enough even while we have done far above our levels. And there is a meeting again in the evening to update on the tasks where he again starts scolding everybody. Few of my teammates say that whatever we do we will get scolded. We have never really celebrated any success as a team. He expects the team to be always available like 24*7 and work for atleast 14 hours a day and sometimes overnight for like more than 20 hours a day. And we have alternating 6 days work week even when ceo has approved 5day work week for tech. My manager doesn't treat anybody as humans , we are all just machines to drive his deliverables. He values only deliverables. It's very difficult to get holidays. But the problem is he has inflated my salary a lot and I have un-vested esops which is holding me back at the company.

Quitted the job because it was too stressfull and toxic .
Hired at another company . It's too slow paced and boring and I miss my old job.
FML i have no fucking idea what i want.

My company has hired and fired 3 Engagement Managers (people who host events, refill snacks, etc) since I'm started here, and I'm starting to think People Ops is either

1) Cannot hire someone good
2) Is toxic and causing the people to leave
3) Hire and fire before their 90 days are up

It sucks that right when I think we got someone good, they give them the boot. That should not be a norm or acceptable to go through 3 managers in 9 months.

2023 is the year where i am making a lot of bold choices and immediately regretting them.anxiety is at peak, and my past good deeds are hopefully saving me from getting into a real danger, but i am not aure for how long.

1. (technically a 2022 choice/blunder but impacted in2023 ) : we go for a yearly trip to a religious place in dec last- jan 1st week. i booked a flight instead of trains which we usually take, and are cheaper but take 16 extra hours. result? flight got cancelled, wr booked another more expensive flight for the next day, i got extremely sick and being stuck on a totally strange place on the 2nd day of 2023 was a nightmarish experience for mom ( the airport was 400km away from the village we go and its a totally new city for us)

2. resigned from my job on the pretext that they will be eventually asking us to work from head office(which is in a far city). they are yet to mandate it, and are rather opening a new office in my own city , so i would have to probably report from my city's office if i had stayed. super regrets, as that company gave very less work and lots of perks. this was the first job in which i was able to disconnect from work to understand real world and care for my people.

3. when i quitted the above job, i had no offer from any company after applying to 200+ job openings. one large MNC, with which i interviewed in last November 22 had given me an offer back then which i had rejected due to being a low offer , and having shitty popularity and policies ( they are known for being a toxic, mind numbing workplace and have a 3 month notice period) . but due to panice caused by work-from-head-office rumour, i asked them to give me offer again. the did and now i regret joining them and their shitty policies

4. latest in line : i have been fantasizing a trekk/hiking trip but neither do i have any siblings to go on with, nor my friends got time or interest in it.
i saw a few pages on Instagram, they take groups of people to mountains and offroad places via buses so booked a seat for me. a freaking solo trip! lots of exciting happy thoughts when i gave them my money, but as i approach the date of departure , i am freaking the fuck out.

they are not communicating with me . i don't know what to pack, whom to rely upon , whether they will have single traveller like me or if they will have couples and i will be left out to rot and struggle on my own, will it he safe or not,... to many questions and they aren't satisfying me with any of their answers.

i know my parents are in guilt about me resigning from my jobas they didn't wanted me to work from head office and they are shit scared too, but still allowing. however, i am even more double shit scared

i hope this doesn't turn into my last worst decision.

This is my first ever post on DevRant, and it will be more of a question: Is the tech sector more toxic than others?

I've been working for my entire adult life in tech, supporting tech companies of basically any scale. I've always worked in engineering teams, building the core software/product of the company. After years of passion and working hard, I believe I gained some skills in what I do.

However, every so often I reach a point where I feel burned out by all the chaos going on around me. I work as an "expert" in engineering and frequently I get the feeling that I'm not being listened to. Any feedback I give seems to be disregarded.

On top of that, I've met many people with a rather aggressive/abusive communication style. Engineers who truly believe they're far above and beyond everyone else, but with little to back that up. Talking shit about their predecessors, trashing junior engineers,...

I've seen behavior toward women that is grossly inappropriate. I've seen female coworkers cry more than once because they don't feel heard. I've seen coworkers being criticized for personal life choices they made.

In almost every company I've worked at, there was at least one engineer who was so stubborn that it became nearly impossible to work with. Just shutting people up, forcing the rest to follow their plan, and failing to provide any form of accountability when results don't pay off.

Here's the thing. I love developing products. I care about the people who want to use them. I really try to be nice to the people I work with. I started working in this sector because I really wanted to make a difference. However, all of that melts as snow on a sunny day, when I experience toxic behavior.

I am wondering if this is the same in every sector or if these problems are specific to working in tech. Is it maybe because tech is male-dominated and we've lost touch?

Every so often, when I lose my job or leave by burning out, I wonder... Is the grass greener on the other side? Would I be happier choosing another career?

One of the most inefficient practices I've seen done in companies is the company housing 50+ devs having to hire an expensive consultant who is only available on a limited time to figure out mysterious or in-depth problems with the company's main application (for example, JavaScript problems).

Then the whole dev team sits on his shoulders and production can't run smoothly until he fixes things. Even worse, him having the so-called qualifications, being the 'expert', but when asked an in-depth JavaScript question, they don't know the answer.
When I suggest to figure out things in-depth so problems like these can be prevented in the future, I'm met with: "Nah bro, we'll just apply quick fix #2" just because I carry the title 'Junior Developer'. Makes me want to hit my head on the wall on how stupid these people are.

This could all be solved if the dev team would be competent in the first place, knows how to read documentation and isn't lazy, most importantly. I hate teams like that.
Grab, the damn, documentation, read W3C, read MDN, get educated, and stop using band-aid solutions! Gah.
Toxic companies like these are what's wrong with some places in the development world.

I'm a proponent of knowledge.
Fellas, know your stuff.

I’ve been in a sabbatical for the last few months and it’s been incredibly enlightening!

One of the things that I discovered is that I can still enjoy working with computers!! Just because something has been done doesn’t mean that I can do it again. It’s been done, but not by me yet. I’m not claiming is objectively better or anything like that, I’m just saying that is mine!

Together with that I’m also finding out that making things “my own way” is very motivating and satisfying! I don’t think this would work on a team, but it certainly makes programming a creative endeavor, which I think is why it sucks so much to work in the tech industry nowadays! Creativity is risky and dangerous and so, if Facebook became a million dollars company using ______ then let’s call that “industry standard” and do it everywhere, even if all it is is distilled excrements that only works because of the billions…

I guess the bottom line is that I’ve found out that I like programming because I’m a creative and places that force me to program while killing my creativity are both toxic and miserable… and I never wanna go back!

Dude that convinced me to come to company became the most toxic person ever after I got fed up of his lies and lame attempts to get me to do his job (so he could just get the merits). We don’t work on the same project but closely related. Every time we speak he tries to hurt me by trying to put me down/raising sensitive topics. But he gets rid of the history all the time, so I have nothing to handle to HR or manager. Time to jump the ship? Job is fine otherwise.

TL;DR: This year I changed job to a quite toxic company and because I have to work for two different clients in parallel I'm burning out. I need suggestions about telling about my mental health to my employer or request to change clients because of their incompatibility

----

At the begin of this year I changed work from a small startup (which was nice, but they didn't pay very much) to a consulting company and since then I'm experiencing my first burnout.

Just to give some context, the first month or two months in this new position were nice: the project I've been put on was difficult, but the other people in the team were very kind and helped me navigate through the codebase. After there quiet months, I've been put on a second project (in parallel with the first one), same domain but different client and the two clients must not know that I work for other clients. This doesn't work particularly well because both of the clients require me a full--time presence and both the teams have the tendency to call you without any warning and without setting up a meeting on calendar and beacuse of this I pass 3/4 of my day on such useless meetings (which many of them I have to be present at the same time, and sometimes one meeting is in English and one in Italian) without getting any job done and now both my leads are getting frustrated by my delays.

To make it all worse, when I was contacted from the headhunter it was for a mobile developer position, but because of my previous position my employer thought that I could temporary work on one java project because there was scarcity of developers and I could be a nice fit.

I'm not sure if I sum up my situation clearly of it's confused (I'm sorry about that), but tomorrow I plan to call my employer to tell him that I can't take it anymore and something has to change, I just don't know if I should put it on the incompatibility of the two clients, my mental health or both

year 2 in company, $1200 increament, no senior dev promotion, still stuck at same tax bracket that i was for last 3 years. work environment getting more toxic everyday, and no wfh jobs for Android devs out there.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHHH

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

Just got made regular at my current employer, but the last month or so I've been threading the needle on whether or not to take it (unfortunately, financial woes made the decision for me, but I digress). Thing is the company culture rewards dishonesty and is slightly toxic with middling managers, even if the work is good.

That said, given the circumstances above, how long would you consider it reasonable to stay at such a company before resigning or interviewing for a new job? Give it a year, or six months, or wait for a dealbreaker like a delayed paycheck?

I don't want to be a jerk just because I work for jerks, but the lack of positive change in our workplace is just demoralizing. Being offshore as well doesn't make it easier.

Aarrrgghhhhh!!! I am so fucking pissed off right now. It seems like I am paying for my sins in this life.

1. My cousins/relatives outcasted me after a little fault of mine. I used to think highly of them and respected them all my life and this how they acted on me.
Because of this, the entire family is boycotting my parents and they are pissed at me for getting them disowned.

2. My health is a mess. A toxic infection along with SAD creeping in due to less sun exposure. No matter how much I take care of myself, some shit shows up after periodically.

3. My wealth scene is as confusing as it can get. Not only I am unable to make up my mind on the finance strategy and execute it, but also frantically making silly decisions which is causing stress, confusion, and expenses.

4. That Narcissist bitch who abused me and destroyed my will to live is still stalking me after months and causing harassment. Only if the gender roles were reversed, the guy doing so would be in jail but fuck our legal system that biased towards women. This shit is causing me psychological distress.

5. Been away from work for few days due to sickness. I texted my talkative colleague whether she'd like to sync up and help me get upto the speed with updates. I listed 4 bullet points as agenda from my side. They were crisp short serving as pointers to remember. I even asked her to add her points if any.

Now she comes back saying that the way I send communication is it seems like she reports to me.
I have been praised time and again by countless people on my communication structure and soft skills. Never once I received such feedback in years.

I do accept it gracefully. However, I am unsure whether it is even a relevant feedback, since it's coming from someone who is literally struggling with communication with everyone (that she herself mentioned in the same thread).

Funnily she did say that when our manager departs, they'd make her report to me and I was like nah! that cannot happen.

She kept saying various great things about the company when I was new and slowly as I settled in and discovered the reality, her truth changed.

WTF!

Fucking annoying. I am all in for feedback of any kind but how should I figure which should be considered valid and which as invalid?

Life is nothing but a quicksand, you just keep sinking in irrespective of whether you try to get out or stay still. There is no external help or resources available.

So much mess to deal with.

Laravel, Symfony...

It doesn't seem to matter what framework I pick to learn next. I rarely get past the Installation step where I have to install and learn a bunch of command line tools first.

It makes me realize I no longer want to be a web developer as even the biggest step I can reasonably make in my career will still not result in an income change significant enough to pay for a mortgage, and the smallest step still expects me to understand all of these command line tools for seemingly no payoff whatsoever.

I feel stuck and depressed looking at all the toxic positivity on LinkedIn. I cannot fathom the amount of indoctrination that must be going on between all these people chirping about how great it is to work for their company.

So we have this local competition and i was tasked to pitch in some help. 2 weeks before, we get a problem with the database so we pull someone from another team to fix it since our hands our full. But his PRICK OF A TEAM LEAD is forcing him not to do it because "It's not priority". So day of the competition - EVERYTHING WAS A MESS. The competition was forfit. We tarnished our company name. BuT his PRICK OF A TEAM LEAD suddenly comes in POINTING FINGERS AT US SAYING "they dont communicate and dont seem competent enough" OHHHH SNAP YOU UNCULTURED GOOSE PRICK FOR TWO WEEKS YOU IGNORED US BUT WHEN WE WENT DOWN YOU SHOWED YOURSELF TO THE BOSS LIKE "it's because they didnt rely on me" WELL KISS MY ASS PRINCE NOT-CHARMING. I really like my company but some people are just TOXIC.

I work under a highly toxic boss who expects me to work on all 7 days and give most of the time to the company. He makes us work on public holidays and weekends as well. We are literal slaves of him.
I had planned to leave on december this year , but in the aprils appraisal i got 116% hike and i got lot of esops and retention bonus. And retention bonus needs to be returned if not in employment till next june. Now i am crazily stuck and have become an official slave of him. Now i am neither able to leave the company, nor able to stay. And after accepting the money, Everything is in his hands. Now he is acting like he owns me as an object.

Guys kindly guide me on what to do.

February will be the first full year at this company as full time employee.

I've updated so many legacy projects, optimized a lot of workflows as well as built new tools to improve efficiency and remove unnecessarily duplicate projects (sometimes literally only 3 variables were different between multiple projects)

My one co-worker taught himself enough code to do the job but doesn't think like a programmer though he is asking me for help and advice to improve what he does since ive proven i know a little. my other direct co-worker I'm practically teaching a Programming 100 course to them

My direct manager at one point said he was so happy he took a chance on me even though I didn't interview well

I like my job, I find it so much better than my last job which was horribly toxic, and more fun than my first 'real' job as a night shift help desk for basically a warehouse environment.

But I feel under paid sometimes for how much i do and all ive improved in my first year, I have my first yearly review coming up. I'm hoping to get a decent raise for all ive done and I want to somehow go over everything with the HR person to justify it. But I have no idea how to talk about my dev work to them in a way a non technical person could understand. I'm also not sure how the review process will work. Like will my manager be there. Or is it just me and HR, is there a paper I'll be sent to fill before hand,

Got a Micromanager and bossy CTO after my old CTO and senior specialist manager resigned...
(TLDR; new CTO breaching company policy; Passive Micromanager; resigned after getting a new job (7 days after the incident) and told him, the CTO, directly in the discord to expose everyone)

On one random day, the bossy wanted a private Google Meet to talk with me as the direct passive "Micro" manager told him I was not doing what he wanted (He was passive because he was usually reluctant to tell my team)
Then I say a lot of issues for the working process
CTO rejected my opinion and then "command" me directly to do as he wanted

I refuse them right away and dismissed Google Meet by myself (I didn't want to talk to him anymore since he simply ignored my request for everything, neither tell the reason for the rejection nor acceptance)

He stayed silent for 2 weeks, no calls, no DM whatsoever but I got my back, colleague from the development team, that CTO was shit talking about me to the devs (OOPS)

To HR, I told them that I would resign only 3 days from the resignation notice (This company requires 30 days notice period, not required by law in this country) any dispute will lead to labor legal proceedings with no hesitation - HR stays shut and normally let the salary paid normally.

Then I got my salary,same day as the resignation day, I tag CTO in the discord server room that you need to read this FREAKING company policy.
After I left the company, dev colleague told me he was VERY angry, super ANGRY!!
I was like... HAHAHA he deserved it

for the passive micromanager, he unfriend me in the discord (as expected from the passive behavior)

BTW I got my new job offer after the shitty CTO Google Meet by 7 days, the same day with the resignation notice
Dev colleague also tells me almost everyone hates new CTO and sightly annoy this micromanager but they could not find any new job yet

The lesson learned:
- SEE something, SAY something
- got F around and got found out
- LEAVE toxic working environment with hesitation
- Your boss is NOT always your friend, don't trust them 100%

I used to love the hero treatment I got long ago in my previous company. Appreciations and what not for conducting events, contributing to open source. I think I burned out later. Later the hero treatment stopped there and I craved for it when I wasn't doing the stuff I used to do - basically I was previously keeping others happy I guess, instead of keeping myself happy. Contributing to open source or conducting events was not even part of the day job and was mostly considered outside the working hours and hence one had to stretch to do all that extra stuff. I over did stuff I guess and burned out

In my current company, I see heros and appreciations so much for contributing to open source though not all our roles are completely defined as open source roles and we instead have to work on closed source or yet to be open sourced stuff. My role is contributing a very tiiiiiny testing bit in an yet to be open sourced project, but a few other colleagues of mine work on closed source paid advanced version of the open source core project

Seeing all the hero treatment where I'm not the hero and seeing all the appreciation, I wonder how it doesn't seem right. Surely I'm jealous, lol. But I also felt the treatment also shows some sort of Special treatment for some people. It's "Special" and not exactly for all and only for open source contributors or people doing all the popularly so called as "cool" stuff. Fortunately for them their job role kinda mentions that I believe. And people working on closed source are now trying to contribute there. I'm stuck with some of my main day job work and dying in guilt for burning out, and not being able to contribute to open source and also kind of starting to hate open source for it's dark sides. Reminds me Batman dialogue "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.". Open Source dark sides - of course the possibile dark sides of companies funding open source, the people behind the companies and also of course my company being one of them possibly, though if you ask anyone they say "Community comes first". That's full of lies is what I would say.

Inclusivity gets thrown out the window. Heroes get to talk. Heroes get worshipped. Others are not even noticed I think. I guess the only way to get noticed is to imitate the heroes

At some point I realized I'm envying or idolizing a crazy set of people, or like putting them on a pedestal. I'm trying to fix that in my head. But oh my, you should see all the treatment, the respect, etc. Surely some people just are there to do meh or grunt work or even good work or whatever without much appreciation, and then have to move on. No respect or consideration for opinions, thoughts usually. Some of them don't even have the time to care to check what people have to say. Top down hierarchy but they say it's flat hierarchy. They don't even wanna listen to some of us I think, that is during team meetings. Only very few care from what I have noticed

One good thing is I have to come to realize how much I'm like them in some behaviours and feeling damn guilty. I sometimes spend time thinking how to change myself for the long term. And how to avoid the toxic behaviors in the team and also control my anger and control my response to their behaviours. I'm also trying to understand where I'm climbing the ladder with my assumptions and also trying to see the "real" thing instead of assuming or being blind or imagining etc. But it has become so hard because idk if people are faking it, it's become very hard to always assume people are telling the truth 🙈 though it makes to assume or believe that by default. If people are okay with themselves lying, who am I question that huh

Screw it! Finally moved out of toxic, demotivating, slow paced, but really comfortable comfort zone(large company).
It's been a month, relatively very happy, latest tech stack, fast paced environment (literally no one has time to play politics or gossip), with 40% hike. I can clearly see I'm burning out but at least I'm enjoying work.
Down the line I'm sure I appreciate myself for this big move.

Usually this is somehow fluent what is "the worst" advice, since it rather depends on context, and contexts changes.

There is, though, one thing that was bad idea from the start, on so many angles that even now I believe it is actually " the worst " idea you can have : imagine you have a team, you have work to do, and, as usual, there are people there, and people have their goals and opinions. The worst thing you can do there is to engage with politics, either team- or company-wide.

I was specialist from Poland in German automotive branch. Cars, trucks, AI, this kind of stuff. ( It just sounds interesting, trust me )
Small company working as subcontractor.

The first thing I though is something like, why this or that person is going to tell me what to do or why is he allowed to rat me out or talk behind my back... so this guy told me this is how it is around here and you either play it or suck for everyone. So I went with it, if they want to fuck with me, I will fuck with them.

So fast it went House Of Cards kind of way and in the bad way kind of way. Instead of getting progress we were busy doing political stuff, usually law related, like finding each other misconducts, and there were no end to it. As I had most experience I with systems and stuff we were doing, outcome was pretty good for me, but after some time it escalated to such size that atmosphere was unbearable and I was so stressed and tired of this shit I left. It's miracle that management tolerated this so far. People were as toxic as nuclear waste site (or dota/lol players)

So far the conclusion is to sometimes suck it up once in a while or just clear the atmosphere as fast as possible. Otherwise you will wade in shit up to your chin for very, very long and it is not really healthy on the long run...