You work your ass off up the corporate ladder, except no one cares. You're overqualified and you have a large skillset, a high determination and work ethic, yet again no one cares. You have years of experience and on various projects, for various companies.

Your colleague doesn't lift a finger half the day, takes naps, barely has the basics down and gets promoted to systems architect immediately.

What, the, f.

I'm sure this is a familiar situation.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time 10 years and tell the coder-wannabe I were back then to choose something else to do for a living, like being a carpenter or something like that.

Sure, the money is good, and the job is super comfy (working from the bed is awesome), but dude, the stress of corporate client-crisis caused by poor management bullshit 9-5 is going to kill me.
How you deal with this fucking toxic environment? There are some alternatives to this? I love to code, a lot, but lately I'm wishing it was just a hobby.

Well, seems working in toxic corporate environments for too long has had an effect on me

"Please ask permission the day before when you have do something in the morning that will make you late" I wound up not being late after all but anyway

Sorry I come from a place where the only to get that kind of stuff down was by being cagey with information and leaving things as vague as "I have to run an errand" at the last possible minute

!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.

Meta, Microsoft, Google, and countless startups have been investing and growing, making devs crazy with incredible salaries, incomprehensible hiring processes, and toxic corporate culture. They tried to make masses of end users beta-test their MVP products and services, turning them into subscribers and regular customers. Then they laid off many engineers and now try to run their businesses using immature artificial intelligence instead.

AI, also known as "the one guy that can type real quick" can be very eloquent and replace some junior devs, marketeers and supporters, so it seems, but once someone has a problem that is not already documented unambiguously, then they have a real problem.

So this is my first company as a developer — and honestly, I’m starting to wonder if all the stories about toxic tech culture are actually understatements.

The rules here are straight-up painful. First off, if you introduce a bug — even in the development environment — you're immediately pulled into a one-hour lecture. Not a discussion, not helpful debugging — an actual verbal beating like you crashed the production server during Black Friday. It’s development. Mistakes literally come with the job. Apparently not here.

But wait, it gets better.

You're only allowed one commit per day. Just one. Doesn’t matter if you’ve done 10 things. Doesn’t matter if they’re unrelated. It’s all got to go into a single, glorious mega-commit. Because hey, why use Git properly when you can treat it like a dusty USB stick?

Merge requests? Those are another exercise in corporate gymnastics. You have to assign the reviewer’s name in both the "assignee" and "reviewer" fields — because clearly, assigning someone once just doesn’t drive the point home.

Oh, and commit messages must ONLY be the branch name. No description. No hint at what changed. If you want to understand what happened, better roll up your sleeves and start reading raw code. Context is for the weak.

And then there’s the AI hypocrisy.

Since our work is mostly CRUD, I figured it’d be smart to boost productivity with a GitHub Copilot subscription — paid out of my own pocket. I actually got it finalized. Felt like I was finally arming myself with the right tools.

Then the Shopify internal memo about AI leaked and made waves online. And suddenly — surprise! — my company is now super into AI. Out of nowhere, they’re encouraging everyone to “leverage AI tools” and “accelerate with generative intelligence.”

But here's the twist:
We're only allowed to use the free versions. No budget, no support, no actual tooling strategy. Just “use AI” because it’s trendy, but don't you dare expense anything that works well.

So here I am, in my very first job, trying to grow as a dev — while navigating rules that feel like they were designed by someone who read half a blog post about software engineering and called it a day. It’s like Git but with handcuffs. And blindfolds. On a unicycle.

Is this normal? Do all first jobs come with a side of chaos and irony, or did I win some kind of cursed lottery?

Would love to hear if anyone else had a first gig this absurd. Or maybe I just unlocked hard mode early.