The meeting was about an app that integrates credit card payments, billets and bank account on a terminal that is going to be available to the general public.
The deadline? 11PM of the same day. Final version. From 0 to 100% in 6 hours.
I said that it was impossible. He said that I was incapable.
I remember coming back home with a feeling that I was incompetent, even with my 11 years of experience with JavaScript. I didn't sleep that night, trying to build it even with delay.
Saturday morning I had a burnout. I was afraid to lose my job because I sustain my family. I thought throwing myself from my apartment window. That was one of the worst days in my life.
I got fired on Monday morning.
Got another job on the same day. Almost twice the salary.I told them that I need a little time to cleanup my mind and they gave 2 weeks to recover from that situation.
I'm happy now.
Did I mention that the DOS application is a HIPAA billing application that must meet all HIPAA guidelines as well as write EDI X12 billing files?
I'm very junior, been coding for ~5 years, 3 professionally, but this is my first real dumpster fire. We were about to hire a second developer, but turns out he had a record. Not for just anything, which we don't really worry about, but for embezzlement on the healthcare billing application he used to own. So, no. No can do.
So now poor 18-year-old me is knee-deep in a ton of shit I don't understand, working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO, and trying to get details out of my older supervisor who built the code we're using, but he's near retirement and has so many vacation days saved up that he spends maybe 10 days a month in the office. I honestly can't blame him, but I either need resources to help me deal with legacy code, or a nice entry-level rails job, because I want to finish learning rails.
So, for starters I'm already really depressed and low energy due to a death of a really close family member. I have particularly low tolerance and high fatigue due to this.
So, we shipped a product, successfully on time in a company that has had many years of difficulty of shipping products in our target market. Which was the goal. So the new management decides to disband the team, most of the team is already laid off.
I get moved into an adjacent org, onto a ~15 person team building a complicated piece of technology that I have great expertise in, and have built 3 versions at other companies to commercial viability, sounds great.
Well, the team has nobody else anymore who has the experience building the tech we are trying to build. Has existed for nearly one year, and (almost?) the entire team has changed through attrition already (maybe more than once). We have the sunk cost of almost 150k lines of code, that is immensely over-architected, and still doesn't provide any customer visible features for what's expected of this type of software. The team is stuck thinking way to big, and the few people who will focus are kept chasing around the rest of the team like cats. At this rate we will build something that can solve any conceivable problem in about 20 years.
There are already a lot of hands in "architecture". Politics, and honestly my previously mentioned fatigue are preventing me from fighting the engineering fight I need to try to get a handle on it myself.
I honestly like the new manager enough. He listens to my complaints and recognizes my experience, but solving the problems are more difficult, and honestly I think we really should just scrap everything. This is already a rewrite and we have an old version of the code base that would be a better start, or I have enough experience to properly build a new one. But the sunk cost fallacy is ohh so stronger when you have this much of a sunk cost, and a lot of expectations from execs and external teams.
Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine.
Anyways, thanks for an opportunity to rant.
Working for a boss who's a dangerous cocktail of arrogance, incompetence, and is self-conscious of it. He's the kind of person who keeps a copy of Steve Jobs' biography and The Design of Everyday Things around his desk. If you ask him a yes-or-no question he responds with, well that depends. And if you ask him to clarify be prepared for a journey through tales of the south, hippie communes, anthropology, and how it all relates to the tragedy of choice and material design. He has an opinion about absolutely everything. He always tries to get the last word. He gives speeches about failure way too much. And if you get on his bad side be prepared for a word-tsunami. You will know it's coming because you can hear him typing furiously from across the office -- the little typing notification flickering on and off in Slack for ten minutes while he composes the final word.
He's the kind of person who will swear he's your friend and has your back. And in one on ones he'll make you feel like people are saying things about you. He'll put you down in front of your direct reports. Will insist on winning an argument even if he's obscenely, incontrovertibly wrong because he's too embarrassed to admit he doesn't know. He once told me that I wasn't using abductive reasoning and if I was smart I would be able to figure it out. I had asked him if we could cut one or two columns from a table in a view so that we could ship on time with a nice user experience after patiently explaining why. And he collected negative feedback from people about my work, without telling me, in order to throw me under a bus at an important meeting with advisors. Then he rolls with my ideas as if they were his own.
I'm looking for a job but I rather just be laid off and collect unemployment for a while. I've been working for 17 years with no employment gaps. I'm tired.
I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed state, then canceled.
I'm on a very small team, I am the only expert in infrastructure, but all infrastructure code is reviewed by the lead engineer who is a complete novice at AWS/GCP. I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.
In my other areas of responsibility I am prompt, spot-on, and thorough. I bring experience and perspective, challenge half-baked ideas gently and constructively, and have shipped tons of solutions. I keep proving myself, and I do my best to celebrate my other team member's wins.
I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default. Plain wrong solutions get approval, and prudent, cost-effective ones are ignored or even ridiculed.
I would understand a bit of politics and orthodoxy on a large team, but for such a small team I'm stymied as to why that needs to exist. I keep losing bits of myself as my genuine efforts are met with forceful rejection, day in and day out. I've sought direct feedback and gotten vague responses if any, followed by closed door meetings about me as I do.
The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.
The primary developer walked after the launch. The new site was buggy and the whole thing had been rebuilt without any of the previous security tooling. Phishing and fraud against the user base were everywhere.
I spent a year fixing this site, combatting fraud, building anti fraud tools, setting up DMARC, learning both the old Perl system and the new rails system, adding new features, running the servers and being on call 24/7 at the expense of my home life.
I did it too. I stabilized the site, rendered the fraud and phishing ineffective and saved the company.
At my review they thanked me for saving the company...and told me they didn’t think I was working hard enough.
I realized that if they actually believed that after the year I just put in there was nothing I could do to change their mind and I was really, seriously depressed for most of the next month. As you might expect, during that month my work actually did suffer and the CEO sent me a nasty note over a weekend while my wife and I were out. She saw the note and told me to quit because she didn’t want me working for somebody like that. It was the biggest relief in the world to hear that from her because I was struggling with how to tell her any of it. I internalized it all. I asked what about money? She said we’d figure it out.
So I called and resigned immediately and told them I’d write up transition documents for the next developer. Told him what he needed to do moving forward to make the company work and he actually listened to exactly what I told him to do and paid me an extra 2 weeks after my last day to actually thank me for saving his company.
Couple of months later I got a good job for the next 5 years and now that experience has me working in the email security and antiphishing world...very happily.
The acquirer means well, but as a public company there is little intellectual honesty and projects are going off the cliff while my fellow executives not sharing the truth of how bad things are going and asking for help from one another for the good of the company. I'm increasingly demotivated having to deal with lying and intellectual dishonesty at every turn.
I can quit, but then I lose out on almost a million bucks that's unvested, not much compared to what I've made so far but I'd really like to just be fired (without cause) and get to walk away and start a non-profit.
If it does come to that sticking point I'm trying to figure out how to be the most assertive and diplomatic. I.e. How do I convey that I badly want to keep this job but those new terms are a non start?
When he fired me, he asked me if I would have liked a warning that my performance was effecting my job. I told him yes. Then asked what the reasons were that I was being fired. "You're a good developer but this team needs more speed." Whatever that means, there goes my 10% at a startup...who saw this coming (hint: everyone)?
He fired me before I went on a 2 week vacation. During said time he got a good taste of the difficulty of the project and why I was resistant to quoting times. Would a manager ever admit a mistake?
(1) Architect for significant updates to one of our financial projection models. The requested timeline for results from these changes has been changed (directly by C-suite) from mid-November to late October to ASAFP over the course of the last week. Said model was built by non-programmers using a 20-year-old modeling platform; the lead architect was a new grad with a CS minor. Ever tried debugging a runtime error in a >1000-line C++ function, with no error messages, using nothing but cout? Try it sometime, if you've got a good therapist.
(2) PM for an internal application that executes the projection model in (1) on our in-house grid computing platform. The developers and tester for this are great, which helps. But none of them had seen the codebase until a month ago, since the previous developers and tester all moved to different teams since the last time we worked on this application. They also don't fully understand what the application is doing (I haven't had time to get them totally up to speed, though I'm working on it!), which means I get to build a lot of the testing tools myself, the highlight of which has been writing a FoxPro DBF parser in R (long story).
(3) Reviewer for the twisted hellscape of Excel workbooks that makes up one of my old (~2 years ago) team's processes, since the guy who was supposed to be reviewing them quit out of the blue (can't say I blame him) and my old team apparently couldn't find anyone else to do it. The old team usually gives me a heads up when they make substantial changes to parts of the process while I'm reviewing them, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.
I should mention that I'm ostensibly a data scientist, but sometimes management seems to take the idea that data scientists should be generalists a little too literally.
Over here employers must give you a notice of termination, the length of which depends on how long you worked for the company. For employees with over a decade of loyalty, this period can be a year or more.
The intent is that a worker can get enough time to find a new employment.
The regulation has a perverse effect. As an employee who is on notice is generally no longer trusted to prioritise the company's best interest, the practise is to just pay out the wages for the notice period but prevent further access to the business and its clients.
This makes firing someone with enough tenure an expensive deal.
There are two ways around this. (1) If you can fire someone for 'grave and urgent resons', let's say you caught them stealing from the till, the the termination period does not hold, and you can fire them on the spot. Problem is that 'grave and urgent' is not a very well defined concept, and therefore is open to abuse. You got ill and did not submit a doctor's notice within 24hrs to HR? That is formally 'illegal absense' and could be a 'grave and urgent' termination offense.
(2) The notice period is reversed in case it is the employee quits. Then they have to give the company the lengthy notice. Same as above the employee is usually alowwed to leave much sooner if he agrees to tie up some loose ends and do a handover. In practice many employees that a company wants to fire will be nudged/pestered into quitting by making their work more difficult or less attractive.
The regulation is well intended and for the right reasons, but fails in practice.
Now, I run a tech recruitment consultancy and if programmers come to me about changing jobs, in most cases the reason is the boss.
Most programmers invest a lot of time in coding and related activities but neglect most other aspects of their career. This Ask HN is a proof of this. (Shameless plug: I am writing a guide on how to be more efficient in the workplace and get better compensated, pre-order "Coderfit: Make more money as a programmer" here: https://gumroad.com/l/cdrft)
I was hired three years ago to write web apps for a major children's hospital, but given no web servers to run the apps. That hasn't changed much.
Let me repeat that. My job is to write web apps. I have no servers.
The first "servers" I was given were three old RedHat boxes that were used in a share environment by researchers. Ports to the box weren't open and basically everyone was root to install whatever they wanted.
The second set of "servers" I was given was this "enterprise solution" called BlueData. It basically runs crippled versions of open source software and to top it off, our "DevOps" team did things like not open any ports to the farm and set up one command line ingress to it.
I spent years arguing this was insane and I finally had it. It was low stress and I hardly did any work, but at the end of the day, I didn't feel good about taking salary for money that can go directly to children's care.
A company merger resulted in lots of engineering talent leaving with multiple unfinished projects and very little documentation. We’re at a point now where only 2% of the original team remains.
I was hired to complete these projects and clean up the technical debt left behind. That priority shifted to work on new products. That priority changed again. It changed a third time. Now I’m being tasked back with coming back to cleaning up the technical debt and security mitigation’s I was originally hired for after a weekend outage that affected the wrong client. Suddenly the critical infrastructure weaknesses I pointed to needed our full attention and system reliability became the first class citizen I long argued it should be.
Except every time I make progress on patching up and stabilizing one system, a new hole springs in the dam.
I’m the Dutch Boy of DevOps at this place.
Despite recent increase in funding, management refuses to backfill any of our open vacancies, project management refuses to budge on timetables, and as a result we’re putting out fires daily with water guns and spray bottles.
Meanwhile we’re on our third VP of product in two years, and our second Director of Infrastructure.
Two years more later and I’m well beyond the threshold. Hoping there’s an offer letter coming soon after interviewing the last few weeks.
I was hired back 3 weeks later, with a small apology and no pay. I looked for another opportunity right away and quit the job.
Today, I design and build automated systems for a startup. I made sure that the "AI" has a big red button that stops the process and spits out a backtrace of all the steps it took so we can be accountable and reverse any damage.
I usually have comparable or better options available at any given time due to the sheer number of recruiters who are constantly floating things my way.
An up-to-date, relevant skillset is worth a potential 5 figure pay bump in the near future, which tends to be much more lucrative than slightly increased job security at my current pay rate.
They usually get one screw-up before I skip out for a better paying gig.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Have more than tripled my salary in the last 6 years hopping around like this.
But honestly, I'm also just not a fan of management styles which attempt to extract additional value via appeals to fear.
Usually if I see workplace management react to crunch time by letting shit roll downhill while making negative implications about how resistance might impact job security, that instantly puts me in job hunting mode.
I might stick around for a bit to help out people on my team that I actually like, but at that point I'm already mentally checked out and looking for my next gig.
Just finished four months of overtime to meet an arbitrary executive-decision deadline. Now I'm on a new project, and I'm finding out just how horrible the other teams had it: legacy systems from the dark ages of tech that are being shoved into the cloud, critical account access is shared with everyone, everything was built by hand two years ago by people who are no longer here, nothing is documented, and 4am maintenance windows are a weekly thing. There's aloof parent companies imposing draconian pointless restrictions, finance has a strangle hold over everything (hiring, new hardware, new software, etc) and kills any funding no matter how much we need it, but somehow execs will buy a giant pointless thing that we never use, all the bosses refuse to take responsibility to push back or even fix problems we can control, and we have to go through three different teams to get changes made outside a single cloud account. Developers don't want to have any responsibility whatsoever for how their code actually runs or is supported, scrum masters impose ridiculous process requirements that have nothing to do with productivity, we never actually see a single customer/client until we launch a product, we have almost no tests, and almost no plans for what to do if we can't just build more cloud stuff to fix any problem. There are 10 architects whose sole job is to tell you to use arbitrary technology with absolutely no context or consultation, security is one guy who doesn't know what metasploit is, and the people building shared services for internal use don't want to actually support the users using them. I'm the only one trying to improve anything because I'm new. Everyone else is either job hunting or is super green and in love with the constant free food and beer.
My employer is also allergic to open source, even though we are a huge publicly traded software company, so we're reinventing wheels for things that are already solved problems.
Toxic hell, I should be gone in weeks.
I guess this is why nothing else at this company is documented, because why write things down when you can waste multiple people's time repeating things.
I am in a role where I'm in leadership of a startup. I got there by being ambitious and pushing my capabilities. Now that we've experienced some success because of that, the company needs me to maintain a high level of performance. Further, I have a lot of equity tied up in the company. I feel stuck from the perspective of wanting to support the team, because of my equity, and honestly because when I'm normal, this is what I WANT to be doing.
I would love to be "fired" and just spend time with my kids until I figure this out.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_prostatitis/chronic_pe...
- Compensation is great.
- Few calls, very little micro-management.
- People I work with are great.
- They don't care about where I'm working from as long as the timezone isn't too far off.
Somehow I feel miserable. I can't quite explain it. I think it's because the work I do is boring and I've been doing it for a long time. I've been working fewer and fewer hours because I just can't get myself to work more. Also I don't really like being an employee, even if my relationship with my employer is great. I yearn for the ultimate freedom of owning my own business. I wish I could just be happy with my situation which is fantastic in every way.
Had I known this I wouldn't have signed in the first place.
Any infosec companies with sane hours hiring trainees in the Netherlands?
There is this continuing comedy where a bug or enhancement arrives and they say they'll do it - we don't need you (implied). I say sure, and they fiddle around for days or weeks, occasionally a small one is fixed, but usually they just fiddle around the edges. Eventually they give up and I do the work, and they spend all their time trying to poke holes in what I do so they can prove that they don't need me.
I asked for a couple of pay rises initially and they don't want to pay me more. Here's the bit that really gets me - this has been going on for a couple of years, and competitors products are overtaking ours which were leading edge. They spend all their time saying they don't need me and to the extent that they're actually hurting their business.
I've given up a long time ago and have moved to part time and I'm developing my own business, so I don't really care, the cash coming in is enough to keep me going, so all good. They still keep asking me to go back full time, but they don't need me, and they don't need anything changed. It truely is the most bizarre experience.
(It feels good sharing this :-) )
I went from medior to senior developer pretty quickly and eventually they asked me to take on a technical manager role at a different office abroad.
After my move, I was assigned development work rather than management work, and I assumed this was merely a transition to my new role. This continued for 2 years, even after I flagged it multiple times with my superiors.
Eventually, about 6 months ago, I was told I hadn't been taking on my new role, and that they were considering letting me go or sending me back (I'm on a visa and depend on this company for my stay here). This came directly from the people who both asked me to take on this new role and who were not allowing me to do said job. I was completely in shock by the absurdity of it. We cut a "deal" where they'd allow me to do my "new" job and to reevaluate a year later.
I'm 6 months in now and I think it's going fairly well. I'm learning a lot and working really hard at this role. In reality though, I'm using the job to learn how to perform in this role and I'm planning my leave to take on a similar role elsewhere. This whole episode has left a really bad taste in my mouth (that and a change in leadership which is more passionate about money than craft), and I have no intention of staying after this year is over. I hope I get fired, since it would require them by law to pay me a months salary for every year I've worked there.
Feels amazing for a brief moment but you need a very long shower and a doctor's appointment after.
Then confusion and anxiety sets in because you're afraid you'll never have that high again and some part of you wants you to go right back for that perverse rush even though your smart brain says "HELL NO".
You see all your friends working for their dream companies and wonder not if you'll ever have that, but if ~anyone~ will welcome you again and you long for that filthy job.
You're spiraling into darkness and come to HN for the Who's Hiring posts and see all the other depraved lunatics and that's when you realize - you are not alone and you are not special and that you're gonna be downvoted just like everyone else - and it feels like home and it's ok that you're a miserable aspiring founder like everyone else who isn't happily employed.
(I say it with love from past personal experience)
Tired of staring at a screen for 80% of my awake time and constant puzzle solving. Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough, that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work.
I’ve reported these concerns to the HR team, but they’ve been completely unresponsive, which makes sense seeing as their job is to protect corporate interests rather than employees, as is the case with all HR teams.
It’s been over 10% attrition in the last few months, and we’re two weeks away from annual bonus payouts. I sense a mass exodus coming as soon as that happens.
What if I don't fit in anywhere? I'm extremely sensitive with a high EQ, am an INTP. People really like me, and I make fast friends and can run a room extremely effectively. I've always been "the funny guy."
I'm absurdly driven A-type and I go crazy if I can't hack and distinguish myself through my natural work ethic and intellect.
I do EXCELLENT at both the interpersonal and implementation part of software engineering. I've never had a bad review.
I've fucked my career up while actively trying to build my resume. I thought building a successful start up would help my resume. It doesn't. Nobody cares. People want to pay me the same mediocre pay for a harder job five years later. They want to see Google and an ivy league on the resume.
I don't know what to do anymore. After 10 years and a 4 year degree, I'm totally lost as to what to do next.
A week later I finished something early and was instructed to not bring anything else into the sprint because, you know, visibility is more important than actually being productive.
I get that deadlines and metrics are important. And I get that managers/mgmt will never see eye to eye with developers about how long stuff takes. But this is just sheer idiocy, encouraging doing the bare minimum and a culture of fear instead of rewarding good work. If I actually told the next up the chain about it, they'd absolutely sweep it under the rug.
So yeah I'm interviewing looking to go somewhere way, way smaller at this point.
I left because the code base for their main product was incredibly bad. Brittle, opaque, undocumented, buggy, and virtually unmaintainable.
That alone wouldn't have been a dealbreaker as long as the company saw the problem and we were working to fix the situation. That wasn't what was happening, though, because the Big Boss didn't agree that there was a problem at all, even though literally every dev was telling him so. He saw any effort to improve the code quality as a waste of time and money.
So, I had to leave in part because it was a terrible working condition, and in part because I didn't want my personal professional reputation to be damaged by being associated with that project.
The best thing you can do for yourself is to take responsibility for your part in a toxic relationship. Don't wait for other people to make your life decisions for you.
Before anyone starts in with the "but there aren't better opportunities"--if that's really true, you don't want to be fired, so what I'm saying doesn't apply to you.
Having worked as a dishwasher, line cook, pool manager, business analyst, software engineer, and startup founder, I have to say software engineer was, by far, the most coddled job.
How about this:
I'm a line cook, and I can't afford to be fired. I make minimum wage, and burn or cut myself badly at least once per week. I'm not allowed to take the day off and have to work through it. I work 8 hours nonstop above a very hot grill. I can't see any windows during my entire shift. Nobody respects me. My coworkers are alcoholics.
Edit: of course this doesn't mean software engineers shouldn't work to improve their well-being at work! Yeesh. Just adding some perspective. Earlier in life, I would have killed to have 95% of the work situations described below.
When HR asked why I still have not signed the papers, I said it was forthcoming and BTW, can I collect unemployment if I don't? Mysteriously enough, half hour later I get an email from the CTO. :) So I told him I want to get laid off since the company was terrible. He promised to fix thing, but of course nothing happened and I ended up quitting anyways a few months later.
The first sign that there was a problem was when the guy who also interviewed that day got hired. If you go back that far, you might remember that there were two piece power headers on motherboards. If you didn't install them correctly (with the ground wires in the center) and forced them the wrong direction, you'd let out the magic smoke. Somehow they thought hiring the guy who made that mistake was a good idea.
The first week wasn't so bad, but then the bullying started. Verbal abuse. Name calling. Giving me nickname that they'd use to remind me of every mistake I made. Harassing me over mistakes I made to the point that I wanted to cry. If I didn't know something that they knew, even if I couldn't be expected to, I was berated and treated like an idiot. I was young, and so badly needed that job because I was living with my grandparents at the time and they made it clear that I was to get on my own ASAP. They were kind, and didn't kick me out (and it wasn't threatened) but I wanted to be a Good Boy and Do The Right Thing. But it wasn't easy.
Then there was the shop talk. Sometimes they'd talk about work, but most of the time it was talking about strippers and drugs. I was in a shop full of coke addicts.
8 weeks in, I was let go. I was never more glad to be fired from a job in my life.
The agency is a community benefit NFP, consensus led policy. The decisions we take off-policy worry me intensely. But realistically not all things can be done by consensus. I do think there are some pressures in this space which are similar to the above: if your own moral compass and how the enterprise is driving don't align well, you really need to talk to yourself about why you are doing things. (I am not so far mis-aligned i have this problem, but I have in the past)
Friends left e.g. the IETF, precisely because of this. If you can't adhere to the norms, you need to ask why you're going.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/05/30/what...
* no reasonable reaction on devastating feedback
* purely numbers driven. Ignoring tech debt and creativity
* no new recruits in years
* not honoring experienced programmers
* no working creative process to bring the product to the next level
* naive and reactional cargo culting
I have great colleagues. Workload is usually fine, except too many topic on the table. We have quite a lot freedom how to handle things, but not so much about the what. Our tech management is quite horrible. The top manager has unsolved conflicts with the majority of coders. Mostly because he has no idea about tech and never gives reasonable feedback. Fluctuation is currently extreme and I will be leaving soon with only 2 tech people remaining that have been there long term.
Our company has the potential to break the 1bn threshold next decade, just to give an idea about the scale.
as they're moving backwards from what really DevOps means, I want to move out as I fail to see any outcomes of this move which will turn out to be good for either of us.
also, if I start back up with Development I'll be treated as a Junior developer and will be shoved to work on non-interesting parts of the project.
At some point he invited manipulative manager into the team who had a very bad habit of making friends with people by badmouthing other people. Founder did not want to read these signs until the point that manager got private phone line with investors and started badmouthing founder and everyone else. Half year later founder was fired, that manager took over. Soon after I was told off, but I was on my way out anyways after I found him shouting at his subordinates. Anyways this was way too long after I was stripped off from any voice in the company.
I'm an outlier, but I've been homeless and I have no wife nor children to support, so I don't fear just quitting if any BS comes up.
My advice, FWIW, is to always have your "FU" money.
(Money is a technology, here's a good simple manual: "The Richest Man in Babylon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28... )
I think it would force me to get out of my comfort zone, find something new to be excited about. I'm pretty sure I'm to comfortable at the job I hate. I guess it would be interesting to see what I end up doing without work sucking up time. Maybe ill find time to be excited about programming again. Maybe get good at something that I want to be good at.
The founder seemed far more interested in attending conferences and becoming a "thought leader" in the industry than actually building the product and the company. I'd consider myself as someone who enjoys working in a startup setting with ambiguity and the opportunity to shape the product vision. But there never seemed to be any effort to try to resolve the ambiguity.
Instead, we had major problems with secrecy/lack of communication and the inability to be honest with the current state of the product. A lot of people in the company (including myself) tried to introduce some rigor and establish common ground, but none of us were successful.
And honestly, this felt like it was by-design. Every employee was only privy to understanding part of the problem and only the founder held all the cards. My opinions would frequently be superseded by "you're wrong because you only understand the user side, not the customer side" while my colleague who worked on sales/business-development would hear the opposite.
At a certain point, it just felt like an uphill battle with the founder that was no longer worth the debating and shouting. Any effort to measure efficacy was dismissed. No one could actually articulate the problem we were trying to solve, how our product solves it, and whether or not it was effective.
It's a real shame because on paper the domain and vision of the company is exactly what I'd want to focus my career on, but this was starting to feel more like a shell of a startup than an actual one.
Two years ago I reported a female colleague whom I witnessed being harassed. After reporting it I was harassed by different employee ..nothing came from reporting my harassment and so I left. That place was terrible and no longer exists.
Overall There's too many jobs out there in our field to have deal with b.s. and stress.
Someone not in the IT department went around our back (held us in disdain because we pushed back with his silly demands and deadlines) and got an outsourced team to build us a solution to replace our proprietary accounting software, which needed to tap into the accounting software's MSSQL db, and our ageing OSCommerce MySQL database.
Because he didn't talk to us, the spec was completely absurd and he didn't even mention that there were two completely different databases.
So my task was basically to take the immensely poor quality, wrongly specced code, and "make it work". Think having to chew through a giant class with literally thousands of mysql_ (no escaping or anything like that) queries and having to rewrite them either using PDO or the mssql extension. I think I lasted about a week on this project before I got up from my desk and left, never to return.
Unfortunately it took weeks to find a new offer and so I accepted the first that came in and it was a completely crazy contract that required me to do parts I never did before (e.g. database and mobile related) in a very short time. Additionally it was a few weeks before X-mas where I should have planned with some holidays.
The other ugly downside of this task was the contact person behind this. He was unfriendly and put huge pressure on me, insisting on the contract deadlines and adding requirements (I know now this is not uncommon, but I hadn't this with my few older clients). Additionally or logically I got ill a few days before X-mas, which made the already crazy project now impossible. The client called me one day after X-mas about the progress (was still ill) and I got crazy and didn't know what to do. Luckily my wife earned money too! Still I needed to find a solution of how to end this and still get a bit money for the done tasks. After my health got back I discussed with the client of how to define the next milestone and I tried hard to avoid to state that I cannot fulfill the contract although in retrospect no one could have done this. This process took 2 weeks and I was able to remove many requirements from the contract and somehow was able to deliver this and got some money.
A few months after this I got a shock when I got another Email from this company and thought now they'll sue me, but luckily the original contact person left the person and they just wanted to know how a few things work. So finally I was really able (with 2 other founders) to rescue my plan to make the open source project a product, which is now a smoothly running, small company.
Lessons learned:
* as a newbie define smaller milestones, include holidays in your plans, include at least monthly payouts
* never give your clients your private phone number and let them know when you are available (e.g. not on weekends)
* do freelancing with enough money in the bank or enough clients
In my IT department, everybody gets two monitors, unless of course, your contract is a "partial" one. Then you get work with one monitor, regardless of doing the same job everybody else does. They buy you second one, after they sign you with the full contract...
I was working a Fortune 500 corporation. Been there 5 or 6 years. Pay was ok. Culture was meh. Technology was open source. I was happy enough but figured it was time to start looking around for other opportunities. Coincidentally, just about this time I get promoted to senior and the senior gets promoted between me and my current boss to be my new boss. He was not really prepared to manage people, was not given any training or preparation for the new role, was still expected to mainly write code, and probably preferred it that way. Because I'm pretty good at expressing myself and he wasn't so much, I think he also felt threatened by me.
We had had a perfectly fine working relationship before this. But I started to hear from other team members that new boss was badmouthing me behind my back. Didn't make me feel good, but shit I'm doing my job and, you know, you can count up my story points at the end of the sprint if anyone's worried.
Things came to head during my first annual review under new boss when boss gives me a mediocre review. Tells me I ask too many questions, and says I don't have adequate knowledge of our applications. I'm kinda dumbfounded. I point out to him that, besides having worked on most the applications for several years, I'm the one who set up the wiki and has written most the application documentation found therein. His reply: "That's not knowledge. Knowledge is what's in your head." I'm at a loss. I felt like I was being gaslighted before that word had entered the popular vernacular and provided me just the word I was looking for to explain the strange feelings I was feeling.
I made the mistake of challenging the review with HR. It immediately became a shitshow and I quickly learned what people mean when they say HR is not your friend. Put on a PIP. Everyone I knew told me to put my head down and get the hell out of there as soon as possible. So that's what I planned to do. Problem was every other company I interviewed with seemed like it was the subject of another post in this thread. Besides, my commute was only 10 minutes with no freeways involved at current employer and I was being kinda picky on that point.
Six months drag on. About everything that could go wrong while I was looking for a job seemed to go wrong. At one point I had a couple decent offers in hand I was ready to accept and then fumbled them both by trying to play one against the other. Meanwhile, I am keeping my head down and doing my job. I mean, my take on things is probably a little biased, but I'm pretty sure I was the most productive and reliable member of the team and the objective data, if management could have been bothered to try to collect any, would have backed me up. After all, in the not so distant past, they had promoted me to senior.
So the period assigned to the original PIP expires. I'm ashamed to still be there. But at least I figure they'll let that go. Nope. Boss comes back with new PIP. Totally fabricated stuff. Like "On project X, Klenwell did work to which he was not assigned." I point out that I was updating everyone on the project every morning on what I was doing in the daily daily standup. Including my boss. "You were standing right there!?" I'm furious, demoralized, ready to quit. On advice of a family member, I talk to an employment lawyer.
Best $300 I may have ever spent. "Yeah," he tells me. "You're fucked. They're papering your file. But don't quit. You'll sacrifice any benefits, including unemployment." I learned something that day. And the screw turned. That point forward, I'm not taking shit from anyone or anything. My boss. My boss's boss. Fire me? Cool! I'll take my unemployment checks and have my new best friend lawyer be in contact with you!
It was a very satisfying two weeks. I was like a kid peddling around on over-inflated bicycle wheels. But all good things must come to an end and the final straw came in a sit-down with my boss when boss said boss's boss (my old boss) was questioning why I was writing tests for a critical piece of ancient real-money-processing infrastructure that we needed to upgrade. My response: hey, is Boss's Boss writing code again for us? Great. Let him take over this story and I'll move on to something else.
I was fired the next morning. Walked out of the building with my belongings in a garbage bag. And a shadow was lifted off my little world.
Lawyer never returned my call. Took me exactly 6 months to find a new job. Things have been much better since then.
People do actually read these comments so please give it a shot (even with a throwaway) just to see what's out there at least:
Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? October 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126012
What do you have to lose, you want to be fired anyways!
That was almost a month ago. Currently struggling with the realities of unemployment and depression. Not sure where things will go from here. I haven't discovered any kind of support system for software developers who left their jobs because of their personal morals.
Decisions are often made very spontaneously, the process (Scrum) is often skipped and a lot of blaming happens even in meetings. One guy sometimes spontaneously walks up to others and starts loud arguments or blaming. Also there seems to be low trust among the department heads. Many tasks I work on the agreed upon solution changes back and forth.
It's a real mess, so getting fired would be the easiest option. But probably I'll just have to keep my eyes open for a new job and then switch.
Every day is another bunch of meetings, political posturing, or just dealing with people who don't care.
So a friend of mine got hired by a bank that needed to hire 100 technical people in 30 days time. He told me how awesome of a job it was, because they had nothing to do so he spent his day doing whatever he wanted and getting paid mad money. Something happen and 2 people got fired so they needed them replace asap. He ask me if I wanted to throw my hat in the ring. I got such a gleaming referral from my friend they skip the interview process and hired me on the spot. In the week time of those 2 people getting fired though everything had changed.
We came to find out those 2 people got fired because the project was suppose to be 80% done by then, but instead it was more like 10%. They fired them 2 to show they meant business and they had the lowest performance score out of the entire 100 people so they were made a example. New policy was created no more headphones, meetings everyday, only work allowed on your computer screen, no smartphones out, and a old grumpy man was put at the back end of each isle to watch us. To make it worse all the cubicals were only shoulder height. So you had all the disadvantage of a open office with all the disadvantages of a cubical farm in a neat little package. The cubes were also smaller then normal with only enough space for your chair to slide back against the wall so you could slide out.
This is when stuff gets really strange you would think with all this distress and work needing to be done everyone would have there head down pounding out whatever they were suppose to be doing? That is the thing there was no work to be done. In my 6 month contract there I probably spent 3 hours actually doing work. In reality a 10 person team could have easily done what we had to do in a month time, but because of how the bank and management had structure everything it was impossible to do anything. There was also another strange thing people were expected to work 50 hours a week no matter what. When I started I put down 40 hours and got told by my manager, my recruiter, and a higher up I need to work more to help them catch up. The following week I work only 40 hours and the talks turn into threats so I started to work 47 hours a week and the threats went away. If you work 51+ hours a week it would give you the awesome option to work weekends as well.
So with all this stress, anxiety, and boredom a good number of people started to act really strange. A handful of people had stop taking showers leaving a noticeable smell in certain areas. Some people would squirrel food away leading to infestation of bugs and a underground market for trading and selling junk food. Some of the higher ups notice people were wearing the same cloths every day so after a talk those people started to wear jackets and such so the higher ups couldn't say anything to them. It became a normal thing for some to just sleep at there desk the entire day. Office supplies were constantly going missing even with the higher ups guarding them. Fights would break out randomly some just shouting a couple physical ones. Every other week a women would normally have a break down and cry in her cube because managers had started to use them as there own punching bags over emails/IMs. Lunches became more group therapy then a enjoyable outing. At some tipping point the main recruiting agency came in and had us all sign something basically pledging we would act professionally from that point forward and they were not held legally for our own actions and such.
To make the matter worse the recruiting agency was adding more anxiety and stress on the people. Most of the people there had work VISA and needed a job to stay in the country. The agency bully them into working 6 days a week. Someone accidentally sent out a email letting some of the people know they were no longer need on the project would be let go in 2 weeks. All the recruiters instantly contacted all 25 contractors that email went to saying that was a mistake and not true. They said they would be on the project for at least 6 more months and to ignore that email. 2 weeks later they were all let go.
I was told my contract was only going to be 3 months, I ended up 6 months there. When I hit the 3 month period I started to do whatever I wanted thinking I would get fired, but it never happen. I repeatedly reached out to my recruiter telling her to put in my 2 week notice, and it never happen. It finally hit a point where I told my manager my recruiter told me this was my last week. After my last day my recruiter contacted me 6 days later asking me why I wasn't at work. My friend that got me the job stayed on for another week, but ended up getting fired. A manager that leaned on him heavy for answering technical questions got scared he might replace her and told the higher ups he attacked her during a meeting. Security came and lead him out of the building.
Lying to employees. Army-type discipline at the office.
Any non-payment of salary (unless it’s not employer’s responsibility, but 3rd party and I‘m given full transparency on why that is, like a bank transfer issue etc. with a promise to sort this out).
Indeed, I quit a bunch of jobs for these reasons.
Why this arrangement? Because they figured hey, what better way for him to find all the pain points and automate them, than to have him use this crappy cobbled-together system himself! Well sure, I'm all about seeing it from the user's point of view. So yep, did that, figured out long ago everything that's wrong with it, but now what? I'm stuck. Forget burger flipping, let's say this time, that I'm an axe maker. A craftsman of fine chopping implements. And the job they gave me is to chop wood all day with somebody else's dull axe. Um that is a different thing, that is not what axe makers do! And it's not like, okay make us a new axe, here's everything you need; they need someone to chop the wood! Pretty much the stupidest situation to be in.
Then there's the team - it's totally silo'd, a bunch of little fiefdoms, run by naysayers, and my every minor request for an enabling technology or whatever-it-might-be, is met with an unanswered phone call or email. I'm still kind of new, so I have no clout whatsoever, that is a truth, but I can also see that it's not just me. You've read much about the conflicts between Dev and Ops that led to "DevOps." Well on this team the Database people and the Programming people (hello, those two are the same thing, or perhaps you are an asshole) don't even see eye to eye.
Also - and this shouldn't matter - but the developers are somewhere else. Instead of being surrounded by developers bouncing interesting ideas all around (not that these particular ones would), I'm here physically sitting with the other burger-flippers. Yes we're back to that metaphor. These are people who either can't, or never wanted to, be anything other than burger-flippers, and everything they talk about is in terms of burger flipping, and life is just a big burger to be flipped. Starting to sound elitist, but keep in mind I'm intentionally not telling you what they, what we, actually do. They are skilled workers. Just not the same skills. I probably should've held out for something else.
And I'M going to look like the jerk on my resume for quitting before a year is up.
God love capitalism!
However, what would get me the most is the interaction/attitude between my team and boss.
Also, a terrible salary makes for a low tolerance.
From a programmatic point-of-view, inadequate framework, legacy code, and disagreeable methodologies.
My last employer was ByteDance, the creator or TikTok and Toutiao. Actually, the situation was a little better than 996, we call it "big small week", we work one more day per two weeks, not each week.
But I'll play.
My $dayjob involves hosted healthcare software. Looks more like bespoke outsourcing than SaaS. I'm on a two-person team responsible for a relatively tiny number of systems within each customers' deployment. Officially I'm on-call every other week. In reality, on a team this small, everyone is always on-call.
During my first year here, we busted ass to reduce after-hours calls -- cleaning up our own messes, giving support teams access to handle certain internal items, demanding better judgement of "Is this potentially affecting medical outcomes, or can this wait until normal working hours?", etc.
This year the company launched a more formalized and automated Major Incident process. Much human judgement has been removed -- if a Major Incident is raised, every team is contacted by a PagerDuty-like system to join a WebEx.
At the start of implementing this process, I found myself being called out-of-schedule by the automated systems. MIs weren't being raised that often so it took a few weeks to figure out that we were both being called every time and then months of venting to everyone up-the-chain as MIs were increasing in frequency before they finally believed us and got the right person engaged to fix it.
Then the reality of having a process with little human judgement really started to sink in. People default to CYA behavior. We're getting called for things that don't come close to meeting the criteria for a Major Incident. Often the MI process is initiated after the right teams have been engaged and are working towards resolution. We're getting stuck on calls for hours where the incident manager doesn't want to release anyone, "just in case they're needed later."
Right now I feel thoroughly abused by this process and automation and being such a small team. We've removed too much human discretion, and where there's any left, it's being exercised poorly. The anxiety I and my family experience when my phone rings is palpable.
Apart from this aspect of my employment, my job is pretty cush. The work itself isn't stressful, most of my coworkers are great to work with, management is above-average, PTO is generous. I've been officially 100% remote for three years now and at this point my life is completely structured around the freedom it provides. My salary is relatively high for direct W2 employment in my field -- nobody has come close to offering a big enough bump to make up for the monetary expenses of a soul-crushing commute, loss of benefits for a contract gig, and needing to pay for after-school care for my girlfriend's twins. Nevermind the intangibles.
Which makes me feel trapped.
The girlfriend changed jobs last month, trading a negligible amount of salary relative to shaving a dozen stressful commuting hours from her week and getting home about the same time as the kids. So that's a massive improvement to our lives -- I say 'our' because, aside from happier wife happier life, I'd not fully appreciated the burden I was feeling this past year having to be at home for the kids on an inflexible schedule -- plus we've removed the greatest obstacle to my changing jobs...
Tho I still feel fairly pessimistic about finding another job that doesn't leave me worse off financially or mentally.
Got and accepted an offer just to show up day one to a weird point & click/drag & drop visual programming thing called BluePrism. Tried to make myself like it, but couldn't stick it out.
Moved 800 miles for that job too, just to get bait & switched.
Nothing annoys me more than people exerting power over somebody else unnecessarily, especially to coerce or bully somebody in a social or work related way.
Also, if there is gossip about other people, then I don't want to work in that environment. Social gossip is toxic.
But if I am in over my head, I hope I get fired. Because at least I was challenged enough where I hit my limit for the first time, from a technical standpoint. And then I will be free to move on and do something else with my life.
If I succeed, then I will be happy continuing to succeed in this role, working on difficult problems. So it is a win win.