Should I Leave Tech?

First off, your manager, team leader, or whomever is supposed to be mentoring you is likely worse at “leadership” than you are at programming. If you get the opportunity to provide feedback, give honest feedback. Tell them they suck at mentoring, they make you feel inferior, and that you would not recommend anyone work there based on the extremely poor environmental, professional, and career-development qualities. Second, get the hell out of there. Again, get-out-of-there. You don’t have to play the social reindeer games to simply be treated as a professional.

I have seen junior employees run up against a hard cap before. Programming might not be for you, BUT just as likely my bet is that your employer and peers have permanently pegged you as "the junior dev".

I have consulted at large, medium, and small companies and have seen this behavior frequently even to the point where employees with 10 years of experience are still referred to as "junior devs" (always will be) and treated as such.

I know it is not a great time to be looking for a new employer, I encourage you to at least cast about for new opportunities outside your current employer.

Also, with five years under your belt, you at not a junior programmer and you should be looking for intermediate or senior positions. If you have ALL the qualifications of a job posting then it is likely beneath you. Look for opportunities you can grow into but still ones where your skills can be taken advantage of.

If after a second or third appointment you still feel like this is not your cup of tea then move on to some other career but one that hopefully can leverage your experience.

Sounds like a not-so-great culture and probably poor leadership. I can relate to what you're going through; I've worked in places that sapped every last ounce of emotional energy out of me. It was hard.

No, I don't think you should quit tech. Politics are everywhere. I think a good or bad office culture is (mostly) orthogonal to whether it's in tech or not. But looking for another job makes sense; you'll probably make more money and a change of scenery could do you good at this point in your career. It's a big world out there.

> This made me feel bad because it implied an assumption of thoughtlessness on my part and did little to help me out.

You need to man up. How was your colleague supposed to know that you had already attempted that if there was no evidence of it and you didnt mention it? I can see absolutely nothing wrong with what the reviewer did in your example. The only thing wrong it seems is your attitude.

> I don't know what about my personality inspires this behavior. These comments seem to be directed more at me than at other people.

Is it possible that you just don't produce the quality of work that the rest of the team would like you do produce? What do you expect the others to do? Not point things out in your PR reviews because they dont want to hurt your feelings? This isn't kindergarten.

> Can I find a better situation as a programmer or should I leave tech?

If you left tech where would you work instead? Do you think that lawyers don't point out faults in each others work? Doctors face law suits all the time if they make mistakes. Or maybe you want to leave the professional world all together and take up a trade like brick-laying. Do you think that a building site manager won't say something if your brick-laying is sub-standard? It sounds like the issue lies squarely with you here.

> On a recent PR, someone said "you should really find a way to do x". I had already spent half a day attempting to do so. This made me feel bad because it implied an assumption of thoughtlessness on my part and did little to help me out. But I wanted to be open to the feedback, so I spent more time trying to make it work. Finally, I brought this to the team and the consensus was that my approach was fine, that I hadn't been wrong in concluding there wasn't a good way to do x anyways.

Why didn't you push back? Software is a team sport. It's a collaborative effort where people bring their own ideas and approaches to the table.

When your co-worker gave you feedback in a code review, it's feedback. It's open for discussion. You could have brought it to the team earlier for more discussion or help making a decision.

Nothing you described has anything to do with the tech industry.

It could be a crap environment, or it could be that your team is bad at communicating, or any number of other things. We've ran into cases before where competing advice was given to mid or jr devs by senior members and they waste cycles spinning in circles trying to make everyone happy. However, with some communication, things get cleared up fast. In this particular case, the recommendation to the dev running in circles was to get the folks with different opinions together at the same time and talk it through. More often than not, there are misunderstandings on both sides. A quick discussion can lead to unblocking things, stopping the spinning in circles, and get things done. On the other hand, the people you work with could just be lacking in professionalism and you can always change to a new shop.

In your particular case, it is unclear to me if you pushed back. If someone asked you to find a way to do 'x,' and you already tried for a considerable time, I'd expect any non-jr dev to push back saying they've tried and they don't see anything and to either seek additional help or escalate the issue to get a resolution -- I would not expect them to spin more wheels unless there was a consensus from the team or higher ups that 'x' needed to be done.

I'm in a similar position at a growing startup. Condescending PR comments, poor leadership in a sense where 'you should x' because another developer likes it that way even though 'way x' is not researched.

I just laugh because in reality its not a big deal and its just software. We get paid a decent amount of money to transform business requirements into reusable, testable code. Not take ourselves seriously and demean our colleagues. I try to be extra nice and supportive of everyone in almost a tongue-in-cheek way because I have life outside of programming that is pretty sweet and don't link my identity to the quality of my code (or what others think of it).

My advice would be to grow thicker skin and not take things too personally. With that, don't take your colleagues so literally either. No one is as 'smart' or 'dumb' as they appear.

I’ve been programming professionally for about five years as well and I feel the same way. The culture’s emotionally exhausting, and I feel like I’m feeling more and more dull to career growth. I think I’m simply going to have to find ways of emotionally disengaging and the right spot where that meshes well.

Do you work for a tech company, or a tech department in a non-tech organisation? Having worked in both, the IT culture are quite different, and you might fit better if you swapped from one to the other. (Of course the politics are very different as well...).

If you’re that bad, they should have let you go. So, you’re probably not that bad, or they’re not very well run and are lucky to have you.

Either way, try to change your situation.

If you want to make things work where you are, ask your manager to set up some sort of mentor for you. (Either the manager, or someone else.)

Frame it positively: You want to improve so you can start to move up in the team (or something like that). At least you will show you’re motivated to improve, and not content slacking off and drifting along.

Many tech companies have a toxic machismo culture around knowledge and skills. But there are lots that aren't that way; I'd say, try and find one of those.

Try finding a better situation. Don't change your livelihood just because negative people are bringing you down. Dump the negative people and find a better group of people who act like a team and know how to be supportive. It can be hard to find a good team, but don't let the negative experience with your current team dissuade you from finding a better situation.

code less, do more water-cooler time, if you can I could not and left tech