I feel like a fucking abomination at the moment.

I have been working on an app that is almost like Wireshark. More so for practice than anything else.

I decided that today I would try it out on the network here at my house, so I started the packet sniffer and wanted to see what was going on. I was checking for unencypted text (like telnet and whatnot) and came across this odd address that I hadn't seen before.

I did something that I shouldn't have done, and I fucking clicked and did the equivalent of "follow TCP stream" on wireshark. I fucking went and looked what the text being sent over this fucking network was.

It was my girlfriend, using fuck knows what messenger, but it was unencrypted. I just found out that she is cheating on me. I don't want to go into what the texts exactly say, because it fucking hurts me deep down.

Why didn't she just use whatsapp or something, fuck man. I really don't need this in life at the moment. I am genuinely trying to get my shit in order, I have been coding my ass off at night for extra money to make it, I have been working overtime where I can - fuck I have even tried sucking up to management (I would never do this under normal circumstances) - and to top this off, the motherfucking tax man is giving me hell.

Fuck sakes.

If you want to cheat, fucking do it properly. Because I am in a state of pure sadness and hatred and the moment - and I don't know what the fuck to do.

Working 160 hours of overtime in one month in order to help out our biggest client, and getting told only afterwards that company policy limits overtime compensation to 40 hours a month... My boss saw how much effort I was putting in, and could have warned me, but no...

This week I quit the corporate life in favour of a much smaller company (60 people in total) and i never felt so good.

After 3 years in 2 big corporations, I began to hate coding mainly because of:
- internal political games. It's like living inside House of Cards everyday.
- management and non-tech people choosing tech stacks. Angular 4 + Bootstrap 4 alpha version + AG-Grid + IE11. Ohhh yeah. Not.
- overtime (even if it was paid double). I never did a single minute of OT for fixing something that I caused. I spent days fixing things caused by others and implementing promises that other people made.
- meetings. I spend 50-60% of the time in pointless meetings (I tracked them in certain time intervals) but the workload is same like I was working 8 hours / day.
- working in encapsulated environments without access to internet or with limited access to internet (no GitHub, no StackOverflow etc.)
- continuously changing work scope. Everyday the management wants something new introduced in the current sprint/release and nobody accepts that they have to remove other things from the scope in order to proper implement everything.
- designers that think they are working for Apple and are arguing with things like "but it's just a button! why does it take 2 days to implement?"
- 20 apps installed additionally on my phone (Citrix Receiver, RSA Token, Mobile@Work Suite etc.) just to be able to read my email
- working with outdated IDEs and tools because they have to approve every new version of a software.
- making tickets for anything. Do you want a glass of water? Open a ticket and ask for it.
- KPIs. KPIs everywhere. You don't deserve anything because the KPIs were not accomplished.

The bad part of the above things is that they affect your day-to-day personality even if you don't see it. You become more like a rock with almost 0 feelings and interests.

This is my first written "rant". If anyone is interested, I will post different situations that will explain a lot of the above aspects.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

A guide to estimations.

1) don’t give an immediate answer. The first “timeframe” you give will be held against you and will result in overtime and working weekends.

2) think of a relevant piece of work and the time that took.

2.1) if it’s something you haven’t done before, add some adequate research time.

3) allow half a day of testing for every day of development.

4) add a day as buffer - this is good for on the fly bug fixes

5) calculate time

6) now give an educated estimate.

7) this should take you 5 seconds to get through mentally.

8) if scope creep occurs: goto:1

Working overtime

A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.

I’m so mad I’m fighting back anger tears. This is a long rant and I apologize but I’m so freaking mad.

So a few weeks ago I was asked by my lead staff person to do a data analysis project for the director of our dept. It was a pretty big project, spanning thousands of users. I was excited because I love this sort of thing and I really don’t have anything else to do. Well I don’t have access to the dataset, so I had to get it from my lead and he said he’d do it when he had a chance. Three days later he hadn’t given it to me yet. I approach him and he follows me to my desk, gives me his login and password to login to the secure freaking database, then has me clone it and put it on my computer.

So, I start working on it. It took me about six hours to clean the database, 2 to set up the parameters and plan of attack, and two or three to visualize the data. I realized about halfway through that my lead wasn’t sure about the parameters of the analysis, and I mentioned to him that the director had asked for more information than what he was having me do. He tells me he will speak with director.

So, our director is never there, so I give my lead about a week to speak with her, in the mean time I finish the project to the specifications that the director gave. I even included notes about information that I would need to make more accurate predictions, to draw conclusions, etc. It was really well documented.

Finally, exasperated, and with the project finished but just sitting on my computer for a week, I approached my director on a Saturday when I was working overtime. She confirmed that I needed to what she said in the project specs (duh), and also mentioned she needed a bigger data set than what I was working with if we had one. She told me to speak to my lead on Monday about this, but said that my work looked great.

Monday came and my lead wasn’t there so I spoke with my supervisor and she said that what I was using was the entire dataset, and that my work looked great and I could just send it off. So, at this point 2/3 of my bosses have seen the project, reviewed it, told me it was great, and confirmed that I was doing the right thing.

I sent it off to the director to disseminate to the appropriate people. Again, she looked at it and said it was great.

A week later (today) one of the people that the project was sent to approaches me and tells me that i did a great job and thank you so much for blah blah blah. She then asks me if the dataset I used included blahblah, and I said no, that I used what was given to me but that I’d be happy to go in and fix it if given the necessary data.

She tells me, “yeah the director was under the impression that these numbers were all about blahblah, so I think there was some kind of misunderstanding.” And then implied that I would not be the one fixing the mistake.

I’m being taken off of the project for two reasons: 1. it took to long to get the project out in the first place,
2. It didn’t even answer the questions that they needed answered.

I fucking told them in the notes and ALL THROUGH THE VISUALIZATIONS that I needed additional data to compare these things I’m so fucking mad. I’m so mad.

In the darkest of days, I discovered how to remote login to my computer at work through the company vpn. I then proceeded to work overtime at night in secret for a week or so, writing documentation and refactoring code.

I finally woke the fuck up and realized that I shouldn't be obsessing over proprietary codebases that do not belong to me, and I should put this misguided energy into my own projects.

So yeah, as a bad dev habit I'm working on fixing, this fits the bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The company I recently started working for are young guys my age, who want me to create awesome stuff, however I feel is best, and they let me think and try stuff, like new cool design ideas and use latest API's to create the most modern site possible. "Whatever you think is the best way to do it"

And I'm paid a decent salary. This is the first job I liked. Ever. I literally wake up early to get going, and work overtime (without them knowing nor paying extra) because I think this project is so amazing and I feel like giving back.. I usually hate PMs, but these guys rock.

Its so weird working in this company. No onboarding, no micromanaging, noone to track your progress or performance. U can basically do what u want and ask what u want and requests will be fulfilled.

Initially was assigned to a random team and started fixing stuff. I hated the scope so after 2 months in requested to switch teams, request approved.

3 months in realized I lowballed myself during the interview and actually am doing better than half of the team, so I asked for a 43% bump, request approved.

4 months in I realized that I did atleast 100hrs overtime in a month during crunchtime, burned out. Asked for a paid week off to recover, request approved.

5 months in realized that we have many MR's piling up in the team and I could help with approving some of them, but they grant MR approval rights only when u work here for a year or are a decent dev from the get go. Requested for MR approval rights, request approved.

Again it feels so weird working on a big product with 6-7 scrum teams. Its like there is no bullshit, just ask what you need you will get what you asked so you can continue working.

On the other hand its kinda weird to keep asking everything, in other companies a good teamlead/manager shows more initiative takes care of stuff like this without even asking.

What is it with the overworking fetish in IT?

I mean, I certainly do like my job (working in a SOC), but I also enjoy time off work. I get paid 8 to 5, so I'll stay at work from 8 to 5 and do my job to my best capacity. Certainly, if something happens at 4:50, I won't run out at 5:00 sharp, but I also won't voluntarily stay til 7 or 8.

Somehow, several of my colleagues pride themselves in working overtime pretty much daily. At least one of them doesn't even write down the overtime 'because he enjoys his job'. I also heard similar behaviour from several friends and feel like I read about it kinda frequently on here.

Free breakfast before work starts
Overtime if working on weekend
Decent coffee
Quick meetings
New and fun challenges for every new project

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

We were already working overtime all Saturday. Boss came in the evening to demand some ridiculous shit. Me and senior dev agree it's ridiculous. It's already 1 am Sunday. I already explained to him why it doesn't make sense so he suggest more changes that doesn't even solve his initial problem. He asks me if I can do it by Monday morning. I can't. He suggested way too many breaking changes that I don't even agree with and I have to sleep like a normal human being.

I shit you not, he says he will do it himself. This guy barely even codes and has never seen a single line of code for this project. I didn't stop him. I went home and slept.

End of rant.

#rant

Instead of receiving a motivation in 2018, my boss decided to go anti mainstream and started with demotivation speech.

He started with how good we were last year even when he wasn't around. Well done team! But after that, it went downhill.

We were asked to work even harder, we got new policy (no unpaid leave, no paid overtime, minimum 40 hours working, etc) which some of them make sense and some don't, a specifically set break time (apparently to shut down smokers for smoking at random times), and warning for not being punctual.

And pay rise only after end of financial year.

To make it worse, we are not allowed to take naps or watch youtube on our desk on our breaks.

I seriously wonder what happened during his Christmas NY break. I'm not an entrepreneur so I have no idea if that is a right way to run a company or if Australia government just created new law. But surely I know this is when I say "New year, new company"

So... Facebook canceled our plugin since we did not update it to newer version.
Fine.. I'm fine with that. There was no time for that since there's was some very very very fucking important projects, tasks and side requests requested by administration for customers that are actually not real customers since they don't pay or have a contract yet (or ever will!)
Administration... Wtf our plugin is not
working?! We are receiving complaints from (paying) customers!!
Me. Since you assumed the team leading and revoked my rights on leading the team we are doing shittttt work for non paying customer...
Administration... Resolve FB issue then do non paing customer work. Hum! bether otherwise.. No, otherwise. No. Do both ASAP
Me. Sure! It's Friday, I'm overtime already by 10h at lunch time,. So I'm fuck off outa here and pick up on whatever I'm keen to on Monday morning after guide the other colleagues on the crapp you dropped on them with your seagull managent!
This means I might start on Wednesday!
Xau

So.... We spend most our lives learning languages and methodologies and best practices and all that crap while depriving ourselves of sleep because the rules said if we did that we'd make something cool and have fun doing it...

But then *any company here* comes along and says make this shitty feature in *arbitrary time here* for our stupid *product here*.
You do it working overtime and sacrificing quality to have the client say afterwards that he wants something different (from his own specs).

And then the circle repeats...

I should consider a different profession...
Hey plants don't speak... Maybe I'll be a gardener!
Clip here clip there - done. I'll be a happy fucking script

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.

I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.

There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.

There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.

Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.

I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.

I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.

I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.

And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.

I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.

I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.

My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.

On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.

I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.

I think I'm fucked

So today I had a discussion with my manager that I have been working unpaid overtime everyday (close to 5 hours overtime). She responds with saying that I am quite young (24) and these are my golden years of learning and I should be working overtime for atleast 10 years of my life during the start of my career to learn stuff because I will regret it later. Idk how am I supposed to react to that. She maybe correct, and I do work overtime sometimes out of my own interest but this is getting way too much and pushing it. any suggestions about how do I deal with such a manager?

Let's start the story with just a bit of a background: I'm coming from a rather poor family so I always saw my parents working 24/7 to, you know, have a decent future. When I first got into the IT industry, I went full workaholic and worked overtime every day, taking other responsibilities etc. Got promoted fast, jumped through 3 companies, and all is good.

Present day company:
- I'm working 12 hour days
- Managing smaller teams and interns
- Starting new projects incognito and giving them to the execs (for the good of the company ofc)
- Doing lots of stuff outside my responsibilities

COVID hits, I get very sick 2 month ago... I get laid off??? I'm literally 5 employees in one, and, "the fact that I got sick means that I left home and wasn't working"???

This also comes at a time when every family member was also laid off so I had the only stable job.

Not even sure if I even have the will to work hard for someone else anymore, this is fucked up.

!rant

I started my new position in Ireland about a month ago (relocated from Switzerland) and it‘s amazing how awesome life can be despite working full-time..
I have a 8-5 job, I usually get home around 6PM and have 6 hours left for myself every evening.. no calls, mails or similar after I leave the office.
Im actually not allowed to do overtime..

Everyone in the company is super nice and the Irish people are so incredibly welcoming and are happy to help if you need something..

So thankful right now..

Quitting my last job. I had been there for about 3 years and had a great time there.

It was only my boss and I, we were developing software and websites for events so we were quite often out meeting and partying with people, it kinda became a part of the job. We had a fridge always stacked with beer and champagne which was for us and our friends to use. The office was located in the middle of the most exclusive business and club district in the city, so I could use the office as I wanted during evenings to meet up with friends and drinking beer.

But it was expected to work a lot of overtime. I was single and young and really liked what I was doing so I didn't mind. But then I met the love of my life and started to spend more time with her. I couldn't stay and work as often and would rather be with her on weekends.

It became quite hard to live up to my boss's expectations and it always felt like I disappointed him if I didn't (or couldn't) stay for an after work, and when I did, it felt like I disappointed my new girlfriend instead.

Ultimately I felt I had to choose one of them, or I would definitely loose her. It was a no-brainer since I knew I couldn't keep working like that forever, and didn't want to risque a relationship because of work.
It took all of my courage to do it and I felt so bad because I knew my boss (and my friend) would feel like I betrayed him, but I knew it was the right thing to do.

I can still miss it sometimes, but I don't regret it.

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)

Company requests that I do overtime to meet deadlines, I start working overtime, a week later I get an email "clarifying" the rules for overtime. None of which I have complied with because I didn't know about the fucking rules because they never told me about them.

Now they will "try their best" to put the hours through for me but they can't promise anything.

That's 10 hours of my life I probably won't get back, just glad I didn't do more now.

Hey. I am recruiter X from irrelevant startup Y. We automatically sent you a message with our LinkedIn bot because we think you may like working in an irrelevant language and an overhyped useless technology. I hope you love working overtime and getting burned out. :)

Free beers, silicon valley blabla. Insert irrelevant information about millions of dollars of funding blabla.

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

Took a bit of time, but yesterday I sent in my resignation letter, long and some wat detailed list of grievances against the guy running the project.

Gonna suck to leave the team, but working for that man was tantamount to torture.

He actually gave me a lecture on Monday for not forcing my team to work unesesarry over time, because he can do nothing but make changes. I was also trouble for not doing his job and not treating my team like shit, as he does. According to him, forced overtime, disrespect are just the way leadership is.

Hey guys.
Sorry for the absence.
So... Lately I've been working in shifts, doing extra hours and stuff... And today, Saturday I went to work for nothing... My boss fucked me just to make me go to work, when there isn't much work to be done...
Btw, I have a burn out for more than two years because I had to work and study and sleep for 4 hours a night, for months.... (check my profile for more info).

Today I had enough
Almost got killed while driving... felt asleep.
I'm saturated.
Monday I'll talk to the owner of the company
and If I don't like what I ear I'm making several complaints:
- One for the organization that protects workers
- One for the work court (we have that In Portugal)
- And one criminal complaint... After all they fucked my health, my life and are putting my life in danger just because...

Lets see how it goes...
Better part... If I make any of the complaints above they can't fire me, make me work overtime or in unpaid shifts...
Oh, and someone else also made a complaint recently... Governement oficials spent two days this week checking the company accounts and calling workers for confidencial intervews...
So, I guess It's the perfect time to drop the bomb on them.

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

I wish to create a guild for software developers. Like in the old age, where certain masterwork developers work together in order to provide non-hacky solutions. The beauty of a guild is that it would allow proper apprenticeship, Blacklisting of toxic companies and directly help with wage negotiations. Too often I see proper professionals working overtime just because they are harassed and having "impostor syndrome" (I know the term is hated, but passes the idea much better). Also maybe that would eliminate technical debt...
But hey, this is just a vision... :')

After like half of a year crunch, when I was working 10-12 hours a day and no one was paying for overtime I was finally moved to next project. We are working in a field where everyone is completely new to it, except me BUT I didn't admit to that. I complete tasks faster while taking remaining time back!

Best/worst career choices.

Worst: working overtime and performing awesome feats of superhuman strength to the point of being burnt out and bitter. Turns out I'm just a human being. Cool.

Best: learning, implementing, pushing my comfort zone, and sharing/learning with others. Standing by my design decisions and seeing them blossom into elegant/robust solutions is so incredibly satisfying, and kinda scary. Believe in your abilities, yo.

Pathetic third world country salaries. I made around 670$ this month with overtime which funny enough is about 2.6x the avg median salary in my country. We have low wages, europe's taxes (with none of the benefits) and a higher cost of living lmao. there was some weeks where I worked 50 to 60 hours, some people tell me I should be grateful but with night shifts and working 12 hours a day I feel like I should be making much more...

I'm the kind of dev who is willing to overtime because I enjoy coding. But my previous boss (owner) abused this opportunity and thinks he can call me whenever he wants. After my shift, he would be surprise if I go home immediately and ask If I will be working at home. He even called me while I'm in vacation (he wants me to work on a new feature). I already filed my leave 3mos before that. He is very manipulative to the other devs and doesn't even trust his managers.

Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:

1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...

2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...

So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?

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

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

Working on photo contest site, no design, no specification. 2 weeks until deadline.

CEO: Deadline is one week earlier, and client wants to have video uploads and automatic facebook share too.
Me: We don't even have a contract and design to work with yet.
CEO: No worries, the contract will be signed by the time you finished the website.

Site done in 1 week, including weekend days and overtime. Production on client's server as asked by CEO.

3 weeks later...

Me: So van you pay the overtime I worked?
CEO: Sorry client not payed and says they don't like the end product. I can't afford to pay you overtime.

2 days later.
CEO: The online department is lossy so you have to work harder in the next month, we have 3 sites to be done.

Me: Do we have the contracts?
CEO: No worries...

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

It's fucking never worth it, to be decent to colleagues. I got prove of that just this evening. Sorry, this rant will be a bit longer.

A colleague of mine inherited some legacy project that I worked on in the past. He clearly hates working on it. And tbh. I can't blame him for it. It's not very fun. He also makes virtually no effort to become more proficient in it.

This usually leads to him calling for my aid, whenever any problem arises, that would require any kind of effort to solve. I would normally cave in and help him. Mostly due to the fact, that without any intervention from me, it would end on my desk sooner or later.

That changed in the last few months, as I simply couldn't make free time to help him. anymore. I was working overtime and the associated project barely got done on time. During that time I would, as politely as possible, deny him. He knows fully how stressful the project was getting.

Today he asked for help again. I denied again, as a task was due very soon. He didn't reply to my message afterwards. After a few hours suddenly I got a bunch of his jira issues assigned to me.

The motherfucker simply shoved _all_ of his support issues to me. Not only that, he also assigned the issue he was asking for help for earlier as well. All without consulting me or anything. Then he pissed of into his vacation.

Some of his support issues have been created last year! And they are still not solved. He simply isn't replying to questions in those issues or just assigns them to others colleagues without any instructions.

Fuck him. Other colleagues don't even respond to him anymore. He fully fucking knows that I have a tight deathline on my current task. And still he chose to dump all his work on me, so that I have to waste time to reassign it and report it to our superior.

Fuck him for creating more stress in this already stressful situation. Enjoy your vacation you fucking leech. I will have quite a "nice suprise" waiting for you, when you return.

So when I joined the company 2 months ago I was told they offered flexible working, today I received this email. (I can't help but think it is aimed at me given I often arrive between 9 and 10....I'm always the last to go home)

Oh and yes they have named some of the team DevOps and others just Developers, they haven't quite grasped the concept!
-----------------------------------------------------

Morning All,

I have been noticing the start time for all the team members. Some like to start early while some likes the late start. So before Senior management raises any questions below is the shift pattern I would like everyone to stick to it.

I have assigned name against each of the shift which I am aware of. If you would like to change it please let me know. We need at least one Developer between 08:00- 17:30 and at least one Devops between 07:00 – 17:30.

If we have any emergency issues and takes longer to fix it , I would appreciate if you guys can work after your shift. We can adjust this overtime by leaving early next day or whenever possible.

7:00 – 15:30 - @Michael Smith
7:30 – 16:00 - @Sarah Twist @Jim Bob
8:00 – 16:30 - @Lesley Matthews
8:30 – 17:00 - @Bill Best
9:00 – 17:30- @Jennifer Rowe @me!
9:30 – 18:00

With 3 weeks until deadline, been working massive overtime and under massive pressure.
My body just gave up finally, for 5 days I've been unable to get up at all.

Guys I need your help. I'm a student working at a very small development business as a developer ( who would have thought) and I really love working there ( nice colleagues, I learn something every day) but recently I don't get enough work. it really feels like half of my day is spend running after the seniors asking for work and it starts to get really annoying not only for my but for them too. and most recently I'm just going home early because I don't want to just sit there unproductivly :/ but this is not really a solution either because at the moment I'm trying to work 40 hours ( I get paid 20) to get some overtime to not have to work as much as soon as my university starts. but now I don't get my hours and have to chase for work... does anyone have any advice for me?

Rage!!!

Coworker checks in not working major changes and goes home for the weekend yesteday. When I ask him politely in an email to just check in a feature branch he says he has no time for that and it doesn't matter since the program is shit anyway.

Meanwhile I'm working overtime to get the program ready for a demo next week and another developer has already starting using his changes so I can't just roll it back. Spent my whole morning fixing it, and now can finally start my work in the afternoon.

Arghhhhhhhhhh!

Worst part is... He's the solution architect so anything I bust my ass to get done he'll take credit for and anything that goes wrong he'll blame on me. Can't wait for this contract to end!

My mentor always told me.

If your life outside work isn't directly taking harm from you working overtime. Then you probably don't have to think about it too much.

It's when problems occur that you need to rebalance.

Being a team leader some times sucks have to take responsibility for everyone's elses functionality that doesn't work or wasn't tested in production. Leads often ends up working overtime fixing everyone elses work :(

When applying for your first ever job, which of the following is/are/can be acceptable?
- Bad company culture
- Slavery pay
- Bad location
- No benefits (health care, etc.)
- No coffee/free snacks
- Long working hours/Lot of overtime work
- (Other)

🙄😐

Everyone leaving early on Wednesday and you realize that it's not weekend but just No overtime working day.
#welcome #to #japan
Weekend still 2 days away.

Am I contractually obligated to give a shit after 9pm?

Today, I say no.

I spent 4 days working on a new feature of our program. A real pain in the ass! Even did a few hours of overtime.

This morning I go to my boss to tell him about a performance problem I was trying really hard to solve, but couldn't still totally remove...

His answer: "Don't bother with that! Our client is not going to use it. They simply forgot to remove it from their request. So we are going to deliver it so they will have to pay us!"

FFFFFUUUUUUCCCCKKKK!

Most pissed off I've ever been at work when was I attending some development meeting about the "slow progress we were making", in which the boss (same one giving us shit for being slow) came up with several new good ideas that he wanted implemented ASAP. Same thing he'd been doing all year; fucking up our plans and adding a metric shitton of feature creep. I tried to give realistic estimates for how long it would take to implement, and casually mentioned that working on this would also push back the other stuff on our plate, but he snapped at me and accused me of being a "negative influence" and "sabotaging the project", and went on in a long rant about how we didn't take the work seriously enough and that we didn't put in enough effort.

I was a hair's breadth away from flying over the table and strangling him with his keyboard cable, and the only thing that kept me in check was the tiny amount of steam I vented by snapping the pen I was holding in two. We'd been working overtime every day for months to try to meet his insane demands and accomodate him by doing all the changes and additions he wanted done, and I found his tirade - mainly targeted at me - highly unfair.

Somehow I managed to exercise restraint, and I'm not sure if he even realized what happened.

Heh promotion? I only get fake promotion..

For two years, I was doing so many *free* overtime, manager is a big liar, he said that it will he considered on the yearly evaluation.. cool, the thing is there is no evaluation at all, just lying and lying.

Few months ago I took a vacation of 1 month (I am expatriate so I get one vacation per year, my home town is too far..) I talked to tye manager about salary taise and he said absolutely we will talk after I get back..
He called me during my vacation to do some urgent (as always) work, I worked about 5 days, and for free.

After I get back to work, he was angry about my *attitude* that I wasn't available more time.. oh and there was no fucking raise. always lying..

In this country, if you're an expatriate so you can travel outside the country without the validation of the employer (yeah like that) and the notes period is about 3 months, what makes very hard to find another job, no one will wait for 3 months, unless you vanish during a vacation.

So, why didn't I gave my resignation? well, life is hard when you have unemployed wife and a little baby, and the pay is, let's say OK comparing to costs here.

I am charged to learn and work with another language and framework, and when I asked for a raise they said no, so I will stop working in this language and let's see..

The problem is that other employees in thus company are literally bitches, they don't say no to anything, so I am the special guy here who does not a blowjob..

So, what do I do? I am hunting for a new job since a while but no luck.

Regain work life balance.
The last few years especially with COVID I've started to do way to much for the company's I've worked for. Working while I was coughing my lungs out when I had COVID. Working during my holiday because it was finally a fun feature to develop. Working in lunch breaks because people would call me all the time (remote there are no boundaries)

I left that company on a good note, started actually healthy as the new company actually understands flex working. However as I gained responsibly more meetings started to appear also causing rushed lunches no more walks of sport activities. Than I was lead in a project and because of some personal circumstances (death in the family) that was running long. Again started to work overtime trying to catch up.

I need to stop doing this. Caring is fine but I just give to much when I feel responsible. Good thing is that my current company actually wants to help me with this.

My company have become fucking douche bag! I have been working overtime everyday day till late nights for 2 weeks including one weekend and I got a notice for slow work just because I was not able to work on the second weekend because of health issues. Fuck this insensitive shit company treating employees as a piece of shit!

Can anyone tell me how to become less resentful and less bitter? I am becoming a miserable fuck. Its true that I burned out in this job after doing 100hrs overtime during previous month, its also true that I am pissed off about having to wait 8-9 weeks for my raise to happen. I cared so much that I burned out and now Im trying to set some boundaries but damage was done and Im struggling dealing with it.

I took 6 days off to disconnect from work (still was responding to some major blockers and monitoring stuff). Today I got back at work and interacting with two incompetent devs immediately sets me off. Imagine taking 2-3 days and extra meetings to do a simple fix which shouldnt take longer than 30min. My mind was blown and still gets constantly blown about how ineffective some members of team are.

I am becaming a ranting fuck. I even noticed one person escaping my rants once he sees that they are taking longer than 5min.

Right now I started setting boundaries - I clock my 8 hours, disable slack/email notifications and get the fuck out from the office. I dont care if I will have to sit in traffic extra 30min during summer heat, Im done with putting in overtime and caring so much about being efficient. I will just start working on my side project and put my love/learnings in that. Hoping that by the end of year I will have couple projects to show in my portfolio so I could find a better paying job...

In the past I was the sole dev responsible for apps and I was communicating with ceos/ctos/product owners/designers directly. This is my first position where I work in a dev team and boy oh boy out of 8 devs barely 3 are competent enough but their output is how to say... Not the biggest. Anyways...

Transition to boundaries and 'normal life' is so hard. Nobody told me that I will have to learn to work with and tolerate such retarded and incompetent people. Im talking about illiterate monkeys who cant even read or write. Im amazed how they manage to code.

How to deal with a boss who wants you to work overtime for free?

Me rightnow: Working overtime for free on a sunday morning 😂

Hello,

Wondering if anyone can give me some advice regarding stress management.
I am a sys admin of a continually amount of growing servers (now at over 130) and I do coding when I am not busy being screamed at by users. The stress is coming from the workload, but also the way that the workplace is running. The manager left, and now I am handling all his shit, and my own shit as well, and all his accounts have been handed over to me (accounts being clients here). The other IT guy who is supposed to help out with the server admin just finds other work to occupy himself, and I am losing my mind. There is literally an insurmountable amount of work that needs to be done, and it just cannot be done in the time that is allocated in the working hours. I am working overtime, unpaid overtime by the way, until 9/10PM at night to try and get through everything (*cannot apply updates and work on the app server while the users are live) and I am just starting to lose grip. I am taking my stress home with me (not taking it out on anyone), but I am not sleeping, not eating properly and even starting to dream about possible ideas to fault resolution when I sleep. I find that I am constantly tired, and it feels like a world is about to cave in on me. There is literally too much work to be done in too little time, and although I am more than capable of doing it (and will get it done, or the director will physically assualt me and accuse me of being useless, again) I feel that the struggle is just a bit too much.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to "wind down" or to "let go" just for a few minutes a day at least, so that I don't feel like I am on the job 24/7.

Thanks.

Hi, everyone!

I was struggling to write this rant (it's been a while since I've posted anything here) and was trying to put in enough details, but it was getting too long and heavy, so I thought I should try to keep it concise.
I get frequent headaches and feel physically and mentally exhausted all the time. Here's a little list of what I think lead to all this -
- Leading a team for the first time
- Not-so-great junior teammates
- Working with backend for the first time (doing it on top of my frontend work)
- Long working hours (unpaid overtime)
- Being underpaid (for all the things I now have to do)
So, I overworked myself (and still fell short in delivering my sprint goals) and after some time, considering all of the above things, I decided that the best course of action would be to give my notice and take a break for a month or two.

I talked to my boss about my struggles and my intention to leave, and after some discussion, he basically said that the difficult part of the project was over and things would get smoother from the next sprint, and so I should stay on and discuss on the matter again after the sprint. That sprint has passed now and I have still somewhat struggled to work each day with diminishing motivation.
I'm not sure if this is the right time to leave, and I just don't have enough energy to look for another job and go for interviews. So, I guess it is a bit of risk not having something lined up before I quit my (first ever) job, but I think I shouldn't have much difficulty finding something for myself.
At this moment, I don't know what to do, but maybe, if things continue to be dour, I may hand in my notice soon.

Ideally

UX designer:
User oriented, design stuff that fullfill actual needs of user
Engineer:
Focus on utility, how to execute designer's desin

Reality
UX designer:
Personal oriented, design stuff that "they" think user will prefer. End up design some unrealistic functions.
Engineer:
Working overtime to fullfil designers' fantasy thought

That feeling when the team works so much overtime that one of your colleagues looses sight on an eye and starts wearing sports sun glasses when working to protect his one functioning eye :/

I've been trying for the last 3 months to land my first development job. I have a good (over 3 years) amount of experience, but no industry experience and no degree. So it's been a uphill battle. Currently working at a call center making garbage and most of my time and energy is invested into this. Currently am not mobile so most of my money is being geared towards that. It's just frustrating to see all these over glorified job postings that ask so much for just entry levels. I haven't even gotten a damn interview, I feel like in houston it's either you have a degree or you are not even considered for just a fucking interview. If I can get at least one they will be able to see my drive, persistence and skills that have been developed overtime. And fuck recruiters, have been interfacing with them over linkedin and not one of them seemed eager (initially yes) to land me an interview. Most of these fucks don't even fucking understand the technology or buzzwords that are on the job posting. If I were a recruiter I would at least put a little research into what the different technologies are so the process will seem less abstract. The tech will have more meaning and maybe I would be able to get a better success rate with clients if I knew what was really required of them. Not just looking at xyz and seeing if client has experience with them, but really see if they know what they are; that way I will have more confidence sending them into an interview. But of course that's not how it works. "Oh yeah Java and javascript are very similar"... get the fuck out of here.

Right, so I know I'm smashing this server right now, but I didn't even know this was possible!

So I'm in a scenario I'm uncomfortable, need some encouragement from fellow devRanters. (Looong post)

I've been working at this startup for about 10mths (since I graduated). They have been really good to me since the start, and overlooked some fuck ups I did at first.

But now I've been way more experienced , picked it up really quick. And I've basically redesigned several of their admin solutions and data products. Also, I'm basically their entire data analysis team now. I do backend (node, PHP, MySQL) and analysis for them (stats, deep learning, python, big data packaging for clients).

But seeing as I've moved in their company, and have been consulted on several major decisions, as well as built a really good relationship with some of their clients. I still haven't seen a raise, moreover I've been told that I'm expected to work from 8am to 5:30pm (9.5hrs no overtime pay). Which really pisses me off, since I know I'm worth more than what I'm paid (about 40k a year).

My brother (who's also a dev) suggested to tell them that I'm not happy at work due to this. And quit if they don't react well.

How should i bring this up? Should I really quit? This is all new grounds.

It's 8PM and I've been working since 8AM straight. Needless to say my hands kinda hurt already.

Finally got a project I’ve been working overtime on for the last 18 months or so ready for a 1.0 launch! Still some features we want to build in for down the line, but it’s nice to finally hit a meaningful milestone...

From such a healthy environment this job turned into an extremely toxic one. Now i finally understand how a toxic environment looks like. It's extremely disgusting. Putting 5 tasks on my name to work in parallel and as i work they put 2 more. All High priority tasks. It is physically impossible. The scrum master whore told me to just check the code how to do something to users and understand this for monday so i can help QA guy to test it. I went over the code with a colleague and understood it. Today she screamed at me angry i didnt do the task. What the fuck are you talking about? I checked the code and im ready to do help the QA guy test it whenever necessary. Then she talked shit changing the task that i was supposed to not only understand the code but also do the task on Monday and now its the end of tuesday and its not done. Fuck you. That was not what she said initially. Its very Fucking confusing. Then she said to QA guy i give up i cant handle it with this guy sorry but ill have to report this to product owner. So be it. I dont give a fuck. I am ALONE working on a GIANT, unmaintainable, spaghetti, caveman technology codebase with broken outdated or nonexistent docs, nobody to help me, the colleague whos supposed to guide me is a good guy but overloaded with tasks himself so he doesnt have time, i him and many of us requested another person to join to work with me on same role but they dont have the budget which is a Fucking lie, a client worth trillions of dollars does not have a budget, yeah get fucked retards. This suffering and downfall of your project is mostly their fault. Theyre too arrogant and proud to understand or admit that it's not possible physically for 1 person to manage and keep knowledge and code on 7 tasks per day. All that for Fucking $8 an hour?????????? I hope cancer eats all of u. Every single one to the very fucking bones till ur bones break. This is fucking disgusting and sickening. Right when i was supposed to get paid $17 an hour (and thats gross income not even net.....) I am now fucking forced to quit this shithole toxic job. Because i realized no amount of fucking money, not even before-tax-$17-an-hour money is worth the weight of stress that i get punched with every fucking day. No fucking job is worth more than health. This is saddening and depressing extremely. All of my fucking plans are ruined. The car to buy on leasing--ruined by a whore. The 2 day vacation this week--ruined by a whore. Going out with my hot blonde gf during this miserable 2 day vacation--ruined by a whore. Meeting with 2 american clients I've been in touch with for several years to work on a side project--ruined by a whore, meeting canceled and delayed due to my overtime work. I am literally fucking treated like the Moscow Crocus Hall terrorist. They have no fucking sympathy or understanding for how fucking HARD this fucking DevOps job is where i work on a 30 year old legacy codebase with no fucking help. It is simply not possible. Now its a race between who's gonna fuck who: either i quit first or they fire me first. At this point its not a matter of if but when. Surely soon enough. Cant wait to get the FUCK away from these pieces of shitheads. I either have option to cry and go mentally insane by giving it my all until i fix the task on time but the stress i would get for that would need them to pay me at least 9 mill $ a year. Fuck with someone else you fucking retards. You're using slave labor to work for basically free just so u can profit a lot. Literally on the meeting one of their bosses said they get 50% of margin which is a lot in biz world for tech field. This is absolutely sickening and saddening that im treated like a fucking terrorist. Fucking Disgusting. Cant wait to not Ever fucking work in this toxic fucking place. Quitting by max 1st of april.

I currently don't work over 40 hours a week. When I come to work, everyone else is setup in the "war room," however my monitor and laptop are still at my desk (it's quieter with everyone out in the war room).

I have a good work/life balance, and I'm not alone. One of the other employees also refuses to work over 40 hours or on weekends. He has a PhD and teaches classes on the side. We both did at least participate in a Sunday all-day work session to get something to production.

What I'm worried about is resentment. I have taken zero vacation and was going to bank all my time, then in January take it all at once. I was going to ask for 3 weeks of unpaid on top of that so I could get a month and a half off to go south for the winter.

Even though my output has been really good while I've been working, I have a fear of resentment from others who do put in the extra time. We're all salary and none of them get paid overtime except for a one-time bonus for that Sunday I mentioned.

My Project Lead got me to work overtime, I was doing 150% of what I was supposed to do.
After 4 months of tremendous working and smart planning, I planted a small bug in the software we build, and used that to exploit the Software yesterday morning, and today by 3 PM (Our Usual. Lunch Time), He was fired.
Finally, that donkey is fired and now he must rotten in hell, yeah, he got that stamp on his resume for being fired.

Now I am feeling guilty that I have almost ruined his career (30%), but I am happy, that rascal got what he deserved (70%). Yay!

A few years ago, one of the largest customers of our agency came up with an idea for a facebook app for Easter... the day before Easter Monday.

Managed to get the app working, but I didn't receive any overtime compensation from my employer...

I don't work there anymore, and I couldn't be happier.

During the interview I was told that overtime will be paid. I'm working on a project which requires a lot of overtime so we can meet deadline. I was told that there is no budget for overtime.

I have also done 50 hours of overtime so that means 50 hours of overtime will not be paid to me.

This morning, I realized that my most productive moments for work usually happen at home, working overtime. :/

When you are working late, is there a role on your team who grabs you dinner / does other odd jobs?

We used to have a producer job role, but those employees had their title changed to program manager at one point, and since the switch there really isnt a role whos obligations include grabbing dinner for the team on late nights and doing other odd jobs / tasks. How does your org handle this? Are you "entitled" to dinner if you stay late, or do you figure that out on your own?

Quick disclaimer: I kind of feel spoiled / ridiculous for expecting someone to grab me dinner, but if i'm working 12+ hours and I have to leave to get dinner, i might aswell just go home as my concentration is going to be broken and im sure the business would rather my butt in its seat coding.

Am currently handling a very bad code, once you add any feature the app crash and you have to fix the whole POKER application ( as you know poker is a really complicated and everything related to each other). The app crash and every single line of code goes wrong. As well i do barely have a break and am working overtime and during the weekend.
In addition to all of this i have a very complicated design and animation to the chips. Adding to this am the only developer working on this project.

Summing-up am working 10 to 11 hours per day 7 days a week. And still the manager is dissing me as if am not a good developer.

I feel so bad, i cant describe how am currently feeling.

So guys do you believe handling a very bad code might reflect your coding skills ?

I have been asked to submit an explanation since i didnt complete the work on friday as well as not using saturday to complete it .

I only got into this particular project after the working hours which was 6 pm and worked until 9 pm on friday. Extra 3 hours was for the some apis for pdf generation and mail. ( i do front and back according to situation).
I was too tired from multitasking all weekdays..
(no overtime pay. I work like atleast 9-10hrs regulary without including lunch )
.The remaining work is frontend arrangements. Yeah forgot one things. 2 months salary pending.

I need some judgements

I let my clients set deadline and I’m working overtime now 😂

Weekend of our big re-platforming finally comes. I'm not invited for overtime work during this transition. Boss emails on Sunday wanting me to test some code.

What the actual fuck? HAHAHAHAHAHA!! Nope. Office could be on fire - not being paid? Not working. 🍺🍺🍺

Once I was working on a project that had a few complex implementations that needed to be done. So I got a colleague to get me a few Coronas from the staff bar on a Friday afternoon and did a little overtime. For some reason I was extremely focused, my mind was rushing, and I managed to do some pretty good implementations as well. I guess beer can make you smarter.

Hey guys,

I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.

Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.

Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.

However there are some cons:

My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.

Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.

Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?

They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.

All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"

What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.

On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.

Any thoughts?

Whenever I see the name @CoffeeBoy come up I think to myself:
-Umm hey I think we just ran out of coffee,
-Aw shit and we are working overtime till we finish.
-Are you thinking what I'm thinking ?
-Are you thinking about how good it would be to be a cat.
-Uuh no why do you want to be a cat ?
-Well duuh cat's sleep all day. It's great !
-They also live for only 15 years so I would think in total you will sleep more than cats do.
-You like to ruin things for me don't you.
-I call it productive refactoring. But getting back on topic. I hear we have a new intern ?
-Yeah, that's Jim over there.
-Well lets tell him to get us coffee.
-Oh yeah that's a good idea, because interns already have the bare minimum of expectations from their life anyways !
-Hey Jim, yeah you Jimmie buddy can you get us a few cups of coffee we really need those to stay functioning right now.
-Yeah sure, what do you need.
-George drinks cappuccino, you can get me whatever. Thanks man here is the money. Buy yourself a cup too it's on me.
-Oh thanks.
*Jim walks out of the room*
30 minutes has passed...
-Dude where is Jim at ? It shouldn't be that hard to get 3 cups of coffee from just a few blocks away.
-I hope he didn't get robbed or something he has MY money on him.

*22 minutes ago, jim walks out of the coffee shop carrying the 3 cups securely held under his arm *

-I thought he was just gonna use me as an errand boy or a coffee boy to be exact in this case. But it's nice of him to also pay for my cup. Maybe they are not such bad--

His sentence got cut off by the sudden impact with a metal surface at high velocity. He got hit by a car while he was crossing the street, too deep in thought to notice the speeding car in time.
After hitting Jim the car suddenly come to a halt with a screech noise from it's tires.
But it was too late the impact shattered his lower spine. Leaving a blodied body on the ground. Coffee from the smashed cups merged with his blood. Little did anyone know that day would be the birth of a new hero.

He,he,he he is the COFFEE BOY,
Fighting the evil villain Sleep Deprivation day and night, but mostly night. And his sidekick Mugatron always covering for Coffee Boy !!!

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

So I'm assigned once again to fix a new someone else created and that seems to be the case whenever there's an issue...

Boss just assigns it to whoever is most likely to be able to investigate it... which is basically me. Other than the little time I can use to develop stuff, I'm usually cleaning up other people's messes.

And these other people are to busy working on new crap to properly explain how their existing code/processes/changes works.

And well the fact that anything breaks in production (that's not due to upstream one off issues) whoever does not think he needs to take responsibility for it.

So everyone else and especially me has to spend time understanding the shit they wrote and fixing it for them.

How do I tell my boss this nicely that we need clearly definitely ownership and whenever a component blows up in prod, the guy that wrote the code fixes it no matter what? Thereby incentivizing him to not write shit code in the first place and be more proactive in making sure it doesn't in the first place since he knows otherwise he's doing overtime to fix it?

Is it just me or is there really no such thing as a dev job where something doesn't blow up due to poorly tested and designed code every other day?

So this month I had to do two major features which required unexpected refactors and I had to handle unexpected edge cases all over the place. Since I work in another timezone and time was of essence, I was kinda working around the clock to complete refactors as fast as possible because it was "important and critical". I have 7 other devs in my team but only half of the team are actually competent and even less are motivated to push through. Most of the team prefer to sit on low hanging fruit tasks and cant even get that fucking right.

So that resulted in me doing at least 100 hours of overtime this month. Best part all I got for pulling it off was a thank you slack message from teamlead and got assigned even more work: to lead a new initiative which seems to be even bigger clusterfuck...

So today I had a sitdown with my manager and I asked for 3 paid days off and told him that I did 50-60 hours of overtime. He okayed it as long as my teamlead was happy.

So I created a chat, adder manager and teamlead to it and explained my situation. That Im feeling burned out, I need 3 days off and combined with the weekend that should allow me to finally relax.

My fucking teamlead told me that these days are mine and he cant take them away from me. But then he started guilt tripping me that no one else will be working on the new initiative these days so we will have a very tight timeframe to deliver this (only until August).

Instead of having at least a drop of empathy that fucker tried to guilt trip me for taking days off for fucking unpaid overtime. What a motherfucker. Best part is Ive talked with manager and we actually have until end of August to deliver the new initiative, so fucker teamlead is gashlighting me with false sense of urgency.

I guess a hard lesson learnt here. Waiting for my fucking raise to be approved for the past 6 weeks (asked for a 43% bump which is on the way since I got very strong positive feedback).

So Im done. I proved myself, will get the salary of which I only dreamed about few months ago. Not putting any overtime anymore. If something is very urgent, borrow fucking decent devs from another team. Or replace half of our useless team with just one new decent dev. I bet our producticity would increase at least by 50%.

Its not my fuckint fault that 2-3 people are pulling the weight of 8 people team. Its not my responsibility to mentor retards while crunching under immense pressure just because current processes are dysfunctional. Fuck it. Hard lesson learned. If you want overtime, compensate with extra days off or pay. Putting my 7-8 hours in daily and Im not responding to your bullshit slack messages or emails after work. I dont give a fuck that you work in another timezone and my late responses might result in stuff getting done postponed by a few days or a week. Figure it out.

I hate the company (agency) I moved to...I've negotiated good pay and the project for cutting edge medical product which will change the world (cancer diagnose and it actually works).

Now the dark side I've got shit tier laptop which I don't want, overtime is payed 30% less, all the people in the agency from development team don't know shit and are mostly I would call them juniors (of course who would with enough seniority work with shit hardware and almost not payed overtime), only tap water and since this is the old part of town you instantly get sick, they treat people like shit.

The product dark side. We are actually working on crm for doctors to input patient data, we cannot have any real data because we are the agency people, product is being led by the guy who has 0 production experience (they choose the database basically with coin toss and emulated the mongodb in postgress with jsnob, they don't know how to build their own auth system hence my previous rant about b2c, they are using cognito and now moving to auth0 which probably won't fit their need because a lot of stuff needs to be custom), they are choosing every hipe tech out there without any prior experience. It's chaos...

I'm trying to guide them but i think this will be a huge expensive failure and that i need to leave asap.

There I feel better now, moral of the story, choose startups wisely.

Soo since my last rant on my whole f'ed life last December, life has been going on for a while.

I've been married and FINALLY land on 2 part-time job ( both require on site but time is flexible), so I do both currently. But after 2 month or so, I start to have some problem with my health. I've been working 12 hrs a day, not mentioning average 2 hrs on college classes daily, and my body health starts to weaken overtime.

I've lost 7 kg of weight in a single month and another 5 in the second month. ( Granted I as m obese so this is quite a good thing).

While one of the work still under trial period for 3 months, but sign says that I would asked to stay longer. And I can't afford to stop working bcs I need both salaries to help my little family stays afloat.

Wish me luck

*Btw, oot Question, but had anyone here working with an SDK from Russian based Security video management system named Axxon? If yes I want ask some question regarding their SDKs...

This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :

• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*

Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.

While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.

The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!

Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.

One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.

Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.

I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.

bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)

--------------------------

There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!

• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))

Worst exp. on group project? I guess I was lucky, there isn't any. There were tough ones (like one member of our group of three drops out) but nothing what cannot been managed...

Or maybe, just maybe, it was because I wanted to get it done so hard I was working overtime and I wasn't caring much about some stress...

Yeah, that's it, I guess.

Our working hours is 9 to 6, but it feels embarrassing to go home at 6 because you are expected to work overtime.

anyone else having a project and getting behind schedule and working overtime and still not getting it done?
no? it's okay, i know it's only me so dumb :(

Most of my team works on a per-hour basis, I work on a fixed, monthly wage. They don't get it. If I work overtime, the customer gets billed, I don't get paid. No, I don't like working overtime.

To the slackers on this team - fuck you all.

I know you don’t work during the day. I’m either getting another job or moving into management, and god help you if either happens. Your current manager has been watching you like a hawk, but he’s scared of attrition. But if his manager pushes him on it he’ll PIP you all. He hates you too.

If I get a new job - our manager’s manager will know, our manager will get pressure to PIP you, and you’ll endure months of hell while every stakeholder with deadlines realizes they can tighten the screws on you and if you don’t respond well you’ll be seen as even bigger fuckups.

If I move into management - PIPs incoming. You’ve made my life hell. But I’m going to make sure you’re stuck in this hell with me for as long as possible. That transfer you wanted? Fuck no, you will maintain this legacy system under increasingly unreasonable deadlines until you quit. Should’ve done your work back when there was still time. And until you quit, it will be torture. I plan on asking for constant status updates that are sure to break your flow. And when you quit - better leave us off those references.

Fuck you. The rest of the team is working overtime because of your shitty personality. I know you like this job - get ready to lose it and watch everyone who’s been chomping at the bit to make your life miserable take swings at you.

What is the general rule/idea around meetings outside of your work hours?

It has happened several times that I wasn't able to join some meetings that were outside of my work hours. I try to join but some thing or the other comes up and then I miss it. I make sure to join any meeting that's highly important or if it's about anything related to my work (or if I'm required to attend).
I work with people in different time zones and there was a meeting set after 8:30pm my time, and I wasn't able to join. My coworker messaged me, in a passive aggressive way (seemingly), asking if he needs to remind me before every meeting in my calendar so that I would join.

I feel like I'm not being paid enough for the work that I do, and I work around 8-9 hours (sometimes 10 and I don't get paid for overtime).
On top of that, am I obligated to attend every meeting and not have anything planned or unplanned to do after work hours? (I don't think I should have any obligation)
I don't have previous experience of working with international teams/clients before, so I'm not sure what I should do here.

163/5000
Bullshit company began to grasp the attendance, let every morning on time to sit on the desk, leave in advance of two or three days to report, why not leave work let us go on time? That management shouldn't bring up overtime requests, that the company will remember our contributions, that's bullshit. It has been forced to work half an hour more every day, but our average working hours are too short, not Shenzhen, Beijing company's working hours are too long, fuck you, why don't you say that their wages are so much higher than our Zhengzhou, a group of idiots, can't earn money began to transpiration our employees