The feeling when eventual consistency is unacceptable for your use case and you suggest making a call synchronous only to be told it can't be synchronous and the clients need to introduce an arbitrary wait time.

Apparently our latency metrics are more important than being correct.

Rant from a previous gig I just remembered that reignited my fury lol

Suddenly, CSV exports became massively critical to our product's success. "They were always part of the plan, if we don't have them the product is a failure". Plot twist, they were NOT always part of the plan. And our backend is not at all designed for querying the combinations of data you're asking for.

Nevermind we've been entirely focused these last few months on making the new user experience as slick as possible because "our customers want cake, not meat and potatoes". Forget the fact that, in order to meet the deadlines, my team coupled the backend a little too much with the needs of the frontend because otherwise integrations took too long. We NEED fucking CSV exports of everything you can fucking imagine.

No. Fuck you. If you want it, it's gonna take at least 2 engineers and a month, and according to you we only have a few weeks of runway. No, I'm not compromising jack shit, this is the reality we live in. This is going to go nuclear in production if we don't do it right. Either give us the month and bankrupt the company, or fucking drop it.

Or...you could go cry to the frontend team for solutions. And convince them to page through ALL of the data and generate CSVs in the fucking browser. Sure, it sort of works in QA with the miniscule amount of data we have there, but how'd that work out for you in prod?

Jesus fucking christ why are you people such incompetent morons, and how the fuck did you become executives??

Any strong opinions on giving resignation notice via email? I've previously given notice in person during a 1 on 1 conversation, but I had good relationships with my managers. I work at a larger company now where I feel like the paper trail could be valuable, and I don't have a very warm and fuzzy relationship with my manager. I feel kind of sleazy just sending an email, but asking for an out of the blue zoom meeting just feels weirder somehow than tapping them on the shoulder for a quick chat.

You ever spend like 10 minutes typing up a whole-ass rant and then feel petty and dumb about it and just delete the whole thing?

I almost forgot how much I hate Jenkins. What should be a relatively simple deployment with some straightforward bash scripts turns into 500 lines of "clever" groovy code because devs can't help themselves. Add heinously slow execution times and no good way to test anything locally and I officially want to blow my brains out.

1 on 1 meetings with manager throughout the year

Manager: You're doing really well! Keep it up!
Me: Cool, thanks!

1 on 1 meetings with my manager a month or two ago

Manager: You're still killing it! I'd really like to see you challenge the status quo since you're the newest on the team. I think we could benefit from fresh perspective.
Me: Ok, cool, I'm starting to feel pretty comfortable so I'll do that.
Me: *starts challenging process, team structure, and company norms in meetings*
Manager: *confused pikachu face*

1 on 1 meetings now, right before performance management

Manager: I really need you to start picking up more important work. You're not performing well relative to others at your level, and I won't be able to represent you well during performance management.
Me: 😐

I love MFA as much as the next guy, but I bet I spend close to 30 minutes each day waiting on it. Do I really need to go through MFA in a separate app every time I want to use sudo on my local machine...?

Me: Why do we do this this time consuming, low value thing?
My tech lead: Because if we don't, a box becomes red on some executive report.
Me: Why is this deadline so important? It's not customer facing or any kind of critical bug/vulnerability?
My tech lead: Because it was a company wide mandate, and we'll show up on some executive report if we're late.
Me: *angry dev noises*

They must dole out lashings to the tech leads and the directors any time we fail to meet some completely arbitrary demand. The act like the world is going to end any time we get too close to a deadline 🤦‍♂️

Makes no sense that they then turn around and worship the ground senior leadership walks on. I wonder if it's some weird form of stockholm syndrome.

Holy shit why does change management have to be such garbage? I've never worked anywhere with a formal change process that felt remotely like it adds value. It seems like it's even WORSE when there's a dedicated change/process team. They just get super edgy and jaded, likely because no one wants to follow their ridiculous requirements, and bitch at people whenever the real world happens and things have to happen "out of band".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make some time to work on games again. It's what got me into this field, and I'd love to point to something that I'm both proud of and is actually finished.

Hot take: Serverless isn't nearly as great as everyone says it is.

That is all.