Is this really what tech-startup culture is?

A year ago I wanted to make a change and joined my friend who is a VP at a startup. She and my team are great even up to the C-suite level. But after a recent encounter with the core developer team here… I’m at my
breaking point.

This dev team is extremely tribal. It’s as if they view other tech teams as “others” and it’s “us vs. them”. My team works on a different vertical so I’ve never interacted with them before and a timeline of events is below. Is this kind of behavior a normal thing at a tech startups?

/story
Here’s some highlights from the last month…

- Customer demands a deliverable because it’s in a contract signed a year ago.
- No one in dev can be troubled to lift a finger (holiday season). I get called in to support.
- This isn’t my code - I’ve never seen or used it before.
- None of dev’s documentation is up to date.
- Find out dev hasn’t touched client’s project in a year.
- Spend weeks working with it. Find fundamental flaws which could have put us in legal jeopardy.
- I realize dev never finished this project because it doesn’t even have basic functionality to do what customer needs.
- Spent entire Christmas/New Year working.
- Create dozens of bug tickets and merge requests.
- Barely squeeze by and save multi-million $ contract renewal.

So what happens next?
- Reprimanded by the dev lead. He tells me I’m “hurting people’s feelings” by pointing out so many problems.
- A PM in a public Slack channel told me I was “passive aggressive” for a Jira issue where I wrote (verbatim) “Can we enable code highlighting in this text box? It’s difficult to show steps to reproduce the bug.”
- get told by VP to stop talking to them
- a bunch of merge requests rejected without explanation
- weeks later I see someone in dev run into a bug I found. I sent him the fix. They accepted his MR in the same day and it actually added another new bug.
- I lookup the recent commits of the lead-dev who chewed me out, he’s been working on adding colors to his console log output for print debugging. This is a time-critical application and he adds 30% overhead with logging debug information in production.
- Meanwhile dozens of major bugs exist and are ignored.
- The CTO at this company loves these people - though he hasn’t brought in any new business (literally) ever.
- My team is about to close a new contract and we’ve spent 15 days to work on it.
- The CTO said my team is slow and doesn’t fit with the business model of the company.

My team has never dealt with these devs before, so I checked Glassdoor for other experiences, the dev team apparently…
- uses “vulgar slurs for women”
- talking about technical issues “resulted in a lot of resentment”
- has an apparent “desire for revenge”

/ end story

This last month really shocked me because for my career so far I’ve never dealt with this kind of behavior. I could see a startup accepting this kind of culture if was bringing in a lot of revenue but they aren’t. They dropped the ball so hard we all lost our bonuses this year. It’s made even worse with the fact that they are constantly producing complete dog poop code (I’ve kept that opinion to myself though).

I’m really left wondering if this is just how it is in the high-stakes startup world.

Sorry - this started out as a question but ended up another dev rant.

Have you ever pushed out a crap update? What's the most expensive system you've ever brought down?

Today I took down a $0.7M system with an uppercase "S" in a string.

Client: *Notices a css glitch with a draggable box*

Me: *Looking through LESS*

Me: Did someone write "opac-titties" on purpose?

Co-worker: *literally falls on floor*

Just discovered Template Literals in JavaScript.

I can die happy now.

client: I don't want our stuff in git, it's the single point of failure that ruins everything.

me: (weeps)

Even I make mistakes!!

chmod 744 /tmp/out/*/*

Say goodbye!

Network admins deleted the VM my team's git server ran in.

I'm trying to focus my fury into a work appropriate message to their boss.

"fire everyone" is my first response, what would you do?

On vacation with only a chromebook, want to shoot myself.

var me = q.defer()
//bug: these don't seem to resolve to anything, why do we do this?
meeting
.start()
.then(dumb_requirements => boss.accumulate(q.all(dumb_requirements))
.then(me.reject)
.catch(boss.getMad)

return me.promise

Other team asked for a "data model" of how to store their documents.

I sent them this

/** WAS THAT SO HARD */
function Document() {
this.sections = []
}

Trying to debug the clients nonsense webpage, it loads over 50 proprietary JavaScript files.
*maximum facepalm*

The flight control software for a long range drone, ~100miles

There's a conference room on the other side of the office. I've never been in it but I feel like only nonsense happens there.

*conference room door opens*
Someone in room: 'Taylor Swift is single again!'
10+ people inside: 'WOOOOOOOOO!!!'
Me: *smh*

Wrote a small fix to some css and asked the production guy to pull it...

Prod: pull what?
Me: the prod branch.
Prod: from where?
Me: the only git server we have.
Prod: Oh yea let me go and download the zip, give me like 5 minutes I need to open chrome.
Me: (smh)

He's been unpacking copies of the prod branch by hand for months

A Java hard client that had be abused by countless developers, the task was "make it faster". It was a simple dead locking issue and the Delivery date was one week.

It took one year and I rewrote it from scratch.

(Computer reboots)
Me: F**k!
(Starts up, chat window pops up)
IT guy: Okay we fixed it.
Me: Fixed what? You shut off my PC I was in the middle of something!
IT guy: I have here Jeff needs Java updated
Me: This isn't his computer
IT guy: Have a good day (chat status changes to "in a meeting")

For retaliation I found him on AD and spent the day writing a script to reboot his PC every hour.

Tech lead on three projects last year, a Java hard client, a WDF driver, and the front/backend of a NodeJS app.

I'm sick of jumping across all these paradigms and technologies.

Does anyone else have to deal with this.

Hired to make an end-point that leverages their SSL cert-only REST service, I'm still waiting for the certificate.

This started months ago.

Thank god for that flat rate $$$

Had devrant whitelisted on the company firewall.

Say goodbye to my productivity ^^

When your IT department needs to make a DNS entry for you and it's been blocking your sprint for 9 days.

What are your thoughts on higher education? Does a having a BS, MS, or PhD really make a difference?

When you say "2 months" but they hear "two weeks" and that was two weeks ago. FML

Thoughts on 'assign and return' shorthand?

const assign = (obj) => (obj.prop = 5) && obj

When your team wants to do daily scrum but there's only four of you and you work for different clients.

He writes "location.reload();" as the default error handler for everything he does.

CoWorker learning Splunk, "We should stop using databases and only use Splunk."

When boss says 'stop all development' to review the beta of the product that was abandoned 7 years ago.
We were two months in...

When your boss wants to do code review so he finds a third party and only sends them a few random class files.

Reviewers remark "looks good."

When my client asks my team for a simple script and my coworker spends an entire sprint writing a C++ application and complaining about how difficult it is.