As a dev, what made (or almost) you quit from a job?

I've been setting up massively complicated sending rules for a webshop in health care products so that it selects the correct carrier for the products in a client's cart. This webshop has own stock, but also does drop shipping and depending on what products are in the cart, different carriers should be selected during checkout. Then they also have discounts / free shipping for some products, but not for all, and some products can be paid in 3 terms, but not all, and some products can be selected for saturday shipping and/or next day shipping - but of course, not all.

So if a client adds a product to the cart and selects Saturday delivery, the shipping costs change but only for that particular product in the cart because drop shipped products can't be delivered on Saturday. So this requires a bunch of custom notifications to inform the client about this, custom calculations of shipping costs and a lot of if/else crap to figure out what carrier to select. I hate it, it's so complicated.

Anyway I emailed the client about this and that I needed a bit more time to set this up because it was very complicated. Her reply?

"Maybe it's best if you just enter the shipping rules again if the current ones are too complicated for you to understand."

I wanted to throw my fucking computer out the window and become a surfing board vendor on a beach in Cook Islands. Fucking hell I spent HOURS on that and she has absolutely no idea how complicated this all is. I HATE THAT WOMAN and she makes my job absolutely miserable to do.

I joined a Haskell team working on some pretty cutting edge stuff. A new VPE was hired from a FAANG background to "get the company more focused on delivery." He spitballed a deadline for a prototype. He insisted the date was just "to help us focus."

Turns out he constantly berated our manager for not being on track in private. But publicly acted cool about it and said the deadline wasn't real.

Oh, and all the while, he hired "his people" in another office who were C++ devs with no Haskell experience or interest. Nobody was hired for our team despite the time pressure.

He actually blocked literally every potential Haskell hire. I found this out once I started interviewing. Good Haskellers rejected one after another. The vote? 4 for, 1 against. Guess who was against.

Then suddenly, we had to abandon the Haskell prototype when we were almost done (like final testing was all that was left). "Most of the team can't learn Haskell and don't want to." How convenient!

It all came to a head in a meeting where I mentioned some of the stuff he was saying to me privately about Haskell and the Haskell team. It was more critical and contradictory to what he told others. The guy was clearly manipulating us - he even went around our manager to garner support from some senior devs before we as a team could discuss and object privately.

Oh and when we discussed all this, one engineer was DMing the VPE about this conversation in real time. Rat.

I and many other of the Haskellers dipped. I'm pretty sure that was his real intention all along. A lot of them were with the company from its earliest stages, so they were pretty ingrained. But he didn't like them and wanted control.

I make a lot more money and stress a lot less now. And still write Haskell.

1. Inner dev loop (build, run test suites) took about an hour when it worked, and was constantly flaky.

Every dev had to just suck it up and cope, while still delivering their own work. I went to the director (boss' boss' boss) and told him how much productivity is being left on the table. He said he was completely aware, and felt like this was a perfect project for someone to take up in a grass-roots manner (i.e. 120% time).

2. Under-leveled on hire (i accepted it, so that's on me), then promotion held hostage to deliver larger things, with ever expanding scope of the promotion rubric.

Boss / marketing lady getting pissed when I didn't share posts / update my LinkedIn. I communicated it was a glaring violation of the boundaries of work and personal life.

Aside from that, one of the founders would just randomly fire people and say "we liked them but they just weren't a great fit for the company" - then go on a charade about how "you'll know if you're not in good shape".

The last straw was the usual "if you're not consistently going above and beyond on all fronts we question if you are committed to the company". I work 45hr weeks and do on call rotations one week a month - candidly, fuck off.

The event that I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933566

> CEO of my current company pitched partnering with a consultancy to fill our resource needs (can’t hire anyone). During an org wide meeting, he promised that this wasn’t going to result in layoffs. That we needed to work with them so that they could help. Thus ensued 6 weeks of helping them learn our systems and business processes in a process, that in hindsight, felt like knowledge transferring. After that, a bunch of people were laid off without warning and the CEO has still yet to address the org directly.

I was just another name in the list of devs that ended up leaving in the aftermath. This event wasn’t the only reason I left, but it certainly was the tipping point.

General lack of competence/direction. We spent over half a year building something with no users being allowed to use it, and, unsurprisingly, it did not do what it was supposed to. Product org's idea? Let's do it again, without talking to the users until 6 months later. The entire dev team bailed within a month. The PM still works there, 5 years later.

I got an engineering manager who was a hardcore micromanager. He insisted on adding a lot of process, but refused to conform to any processes himself. He caused numerous false SEVs because he was picking around in ancient logs, assuming every error message was actually a production outage.

He was like having -2 engineers on the team. I'd been in the job half a decade. I quit 2 months after he joined.

Small company hired a certain VP who the engineering team reported to. He had experience in our industry but was clearly not adept at actually managing us. He had extremely unrealistic expectations, like he'd demand hour estimates for each ticket, and whatever estimate we gave he would just shave a couple hours off, and then chastise us for being too slow when we didn't make his own artificial deadlines. Occasionally he would insult us in very unprofessional ways and when one of the engineers complained, he played the "English isn't my first language" victim card like we were the unreasonable ones, even though he had been living in the US for 20+ years. In my mind, that wasn't a real excuse for when he told the team "Maybe you're just too stupid to figure this out".

I was severely underpaid anyways, but it was a fun job until that guy showed up. I know at least 1 of my coworkers on a different team quit because of the same VP.

Worked at a faang for several years. Some things I didint like:

- They make team members compete with each other

- creating false narratives about peoples career progress

- people don’t want to share key and useful information even with team members

- false promises of verbally giving you a project and taking it away

- invalidating impact of a project because you don’t fit the narrative for a promotion just yet

- people get credit for work they didn’t do etc

- Micromanaging PM and other devs trying to appease him. I hate staring at IDE and most of the time I am "procrastinating" while thinking about code. Then once I have a concept of what to do, I type it in run tests etc. so I know that to someone I could look like slacking whole day. So every time I had Reddit or Hacker News open one of the devs sitting nearby would take a note and then report to the PM. At the end of the week, the PM asked me to come and "have a chat". He asked me if I have a problem and that he is concerned that I am not working. I said I am fine and asked why would he think that? He said that our team mates complained to him numerous times that I spend the day looking at funny pictures instead of coding and that is unfair for the team. They feel like they are doing all the work while I am taking the p*s. I asked him if I have delivered everything they needed on time? He confirmed that my delivery is on point. I asked then, do I get fewer tasks to do than other team members? He said no. I told him that maybe he should talk to other team members and ask them to focus on their work rather than snooping around? He didn't say anything, so I said I think the meeting is over then. I had a good relationship with the CTO and mentioned to him what happened. He sacked the PM next week and the developer he said he was snooping. If the CTO wouldn't have sacked them, I would have left, because the atmosphere wasn't great after that meeting.

- I took a job at a start up for a slightly lower salary than a market rate, because they were doing stuff I was hoping to improve on and they offered shares in the company as a part of package (which if added the value to the salary, it would actually be very nice). The work was great, but month after month there was always an issue with sorting out the shares (government's EMI scheme). 18 months later I felt that they started recycling old excuses and company was growing rapidly, so I had this feeling that they just found a fool and are playing games. After yet another excuse I handed in my notice. I don't regret it, because I quickly found much much better paying gig, where my gained experience was very useful.

I was suddenly having fantasies about pushing my boss through a plate glass window. I quit THAT day.

The triggering incident was being told that I was on corrective action because I refused to falsify technical documentation at the request of a client. Oh, did I mention that this consulting company had issued a press release when they hired me because I was a well known expert in the field?

Externally: he’s an expert! Internally: bow and obey!

I started my own company and have been my own boss for the last 23 years.

Got a call from my manager:

— Arent you coming today? You are late.

— I was at the office until 2:00 am yesterday, Im coming late today.

— It doesnt matter, you should be here, now!

(some fruitless quick discussion)

— Ok, I quit.

Lack of autonomy and lack of clear goals. I’ve quit one job over both of those. Almost quit my current one but then got a lot more clarity after a couple of raw 1:1’s. Was good in the end. Going to see how it shakes out.

A company asked me to use Windows on my first day once, after promising me I could use Linux in my interview.

I put in my resignation on the spot which prompted them to change policies to get me to stick around.

First job out of college and I was living upstate and commuting by train to Manhattan. I wasn't paid enough to live closer to, or in NYC.

They opened a disaster recovery office upstate. They wanted me to work there instead. Mostly alone. I was young and naive. I asked for them to give me a bonus/raise enough to cancel out the cost of a new car. It wasn't much. I should have got a fancier car. It was still a 1 hour drive each way!

I had already basically finished the project I was working on, and they gave me a new project. For the new project they gave me no instructions, and no requirements. I tried and failed to independently gather requirements.

They never checked on me at all. Didn't ask about my progress, and didn't respond to my requests for instruction. I spent quite awhile enjoying being paid to do absolutely nothing, but that wore off pretty quick. Maybe if I had been paid to do nothing from home I would have tolerated it a bit longer.

Eventually I accepted another offer.

So I told the old job I was coming to work in Manhattan for the day. I got there and they were so happy to see me. They wanted to talk about all kinds of stuff. I told them I was quitting. They actually seemed upset! I thought I was putting in notice, but they had me meet with HR and escorted me out that same day. I told them I hadn't done any work, but I didn't get much reaction. I'm still really curious about what was going on there, but it's long in the past. Seems like that company still exists, though, somehow.

I was on a contract once and witnessed a grown adult man punch another man about "the goddamn fucking merge checks" and I just packed my laptop up and left and never looked back.

Quit two jobs as the solo dev at small companies because the cofounders changed their “product vision” before we finished most features.

Nothing more demotivating than building something that never gets shipped.

Considering to take a long break rn. I love programming and software development, but my current boss keeps sending me “in link is uuid need to pass it at newcode and this new service when will start check-status of this uuid if it changes during 15 minutes then like we’ll send status as in second case”. This is our usual technical requirements document, no preface, no follow ups expected. They like multiple simultaneous references in speech, like: this takes that then it goes there, second sends, … all [mis]referring to different things. These are all pointers into their mind which obviously nobody can read, but it doesn’t bother them. I literally experience mind segfaults as in xkcd/371, and guess what, it really isn’t fun.

If you don’t understand where this link will come from, which new service (does it exist? should it be created? should it be a service, or is it just an assumption?), how and where to apply a 15min constraint, what’s the second case - neither do I. Every task starts a hard deciphering process of a context, a goal, a supposed solution (which is not how it gets done anyway) and a sentence itself. It doesn’t take much time to sit and try to form some structure in a dialogue, but it takes so much mental energy that it hurts.

The job itself is hacker-ish and includes funny tech like xvfb/vnc, adb, ocr, some infra, frontend, some hw. Which I like and not afraid to use, learn or hack. But this constant contextless gibberish just drives me nuts.

My working hours are 12 PM to 8 PM. We had a manager have us do calls with an overseas vendor at 6 AM in the mornings. One time is fine, these things happen, but then it became a weekly thing and it started grating on me to basically be at work from 6 AM to 8PM, but then that same manager said "we should do sprint planning at 9 PM today" after being on a 6 AM call. Then he broke out the "we should all pitch in and take ownership" talk and I was done.

1. My stock options had vested completely.

2. New VP on a conference call extolled the virtues of 8051 over cortex m0.

3. Stock price hit a 15 year high.

4. The answer was simple.

Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time.

Witnessing repeated sexual harassment of female co-workers.

Verbal abuse, and witnessing verbal abuse of co-workers.

Told to fire gay employee on bogus dress code grounds.

Rampant drug and alcohol abuse evident in the office.

Manager repeatedly taking credit he didn't deserve, and blaming his staff for his own mistakes and poor judgment.

I have also quit to move to a different city, because the company was losing money and laying people off, because I found a better job.

What really boils my shit is when I explain where I currently am and what are the current problems and the customer / boss just scoffs and says "well just do X, duh!". Happened many times and happily I managed to tell 90% of these people to eff off.

Currently working with one guy on a startup idea and he's often like that. I understand his side of the bargain is not easy either and perhaps my problems as a tech-cofounder and very likely a future CTO in the company (if the idea, funding and market fit take off) might seem trivial to him but... it's just disrespectful and infuriating all-around.

He knows his stuff and that's what drew me to him. But this continued ignorant disrespect I can't tolerate much longer. He's also genuinely baffled and surprised when I blow up. I don't know how much more time I can last like that. I am considering ditching him.

A scam of top-5%-bottom-5% rule. I hate this stupidity of non-tech people out of business schools who understand zilch about tech companies.

For information on how this rule has affected people, watch BBC documentary on this topic from the series "Billion dollar dreams".

I once told my manager to stop talking on a call with the client. I quickly got another job.

As a rule of thumb...no future.

Ultimately, it's a relationship. There will be ups. And downs. But if I look into the future and don't see it looking back at me...

I update my CV and start looking. Life is too short for relationships with no future.

Frivolous meetings all day and the expectation that I’d do my dev work after hours, just like my boss and his boss. Then when the team started getting behind on tasks, the solution of course was…

wait for it…

More meetings!

Spent six months rebuilding data infrastructure for a product team. The team got canned the following month.

Early 2000s, new boss came in and mandated we'd be using Lotus Notes going forward.

Yeah, no. Bye!

You can count me in as one of the participants in the Great Resignation. I might be fucking up here because anyone who reads this and knows me will probably instantly recognise me and I haven’t yet moved into another position so I might be jeopardising my reference if word gets around. But fuck it. I will preface this cautionary tale by saying there were some great people at this company including some of the managers and senior engineers (you know who you are) who I still have tremendous respect for and always will. But this company has some serious ethical problems in the way it treats employees.

Got on a grad program in the fall of 2020. First ever dev job. Height of pandemic. Company makes all devs work on site despite it clearly being feasible for us to work from home because half the developers are contractors living in Eastern Europe. Literally 100s of devs in the same room. It’s clearly a breach of the covid rules but whatever, its my first dev job, I’ve got my foot in the door to a better life, don’t rock the boat.

Graduated grad program after 2 and a half months to become “Junior Developer” on £23k/year. Got minor promotion four months later after a bunch of pissed off devs leave after getting low balled in pay review. My official job title is now “Developer“. I’m leading a team of devs and doing scrum master duties because they’ve also just fired all the dedicated project managers. Despite these extra responsibilities, I’m apparently still a junior developer because “they’ve just done away with the junior title for this pay band but it was previously one of the junior pay bands”. I am being paid a whole extra £3k for my troubles for a grand total of £26k. Ok, whatever, it’s my first dev job, foot in the door and all that.

A few months later the company then hires some devs with more experience and allocated a few of them to my team. They’re getting paid significantly more than me. I should have demanded a pay rise there and then or quit but didn’t. Again, first dev job and needed the money. I’ve got debts to pay after having been stuck in dead end minimum wage jobs for years. Oh and by the way, it’s now autumn 2021 and the pandemic restrictions have been lifted. At which point the company issues all devs with laptops and tells us we can work from home. You could really not make this shit up.

Over the next three months, I lead the team in building a feature that automated away the biggest reported user pain point and that was considered by other devs to be a very difficult technical challenge. We achieved this in just three months and a couple of days ahead of schedule. We also did this in the face of a lot of aggravation and deception from the business department product owners that even caught the attention and wrath of some of our higher level IT managers for being so out of order.

In the next four months, I then went on to single handedly rewrite the feature, improving its performance to under a second in benchmarks (was previously 18 seconds) whilst simultaneously extending the functionality of the feature to cover pretty much all realistic scenarios. Amongst other achievements, I also spotted improvements in our DevOps flow that had been missed by senior engineers and which improved our build speeds by over 3 minutes.

During this time period, the war in Ukraine starts. All of those Eastern European contractors I mentioned earlier? Every single one of them fired within days of the war starting. Many of them were from Ukraine.

Salary review comes around. My offer? £30k. A whole £4k more than the previous year. With 10% inflation taken into account, a real terms pay increase of £1400. This salary would still have been less than what they were paying other devs on my team over the past year not to mention the same devs were also due a pay rise themselves later that year. Apparently I was meant to be grateful because it was a 15% increase. Please bear in mind that this was not a small or medium enterprise struggling for money. This was an international privately owned company worth over a billion pounds and opening new stores every month.

Enough was enough. I told them it was a disrespectful offer and that they left me no option but to quit. I had my perms revoked that evening and had to email my official resignation letter the next day from my personal email account. I sent my laptop back through the post as the only other option was to leave it with security at the gates. I was put on gardening leave for a month and that was that. I didn’t get to say goodbye in person to any of my colleagues with whom I had spent the last 18 months of my life working with.

I started working on an iOS app for a month or so after this but my head was not in the right space and I needed a break. I took a couple of months off to enjoy life again and I’m now grinding my way through the neetcode 150 whilst reading “cracking the coding interview” and “system design interview”. I don’t know what company I’ll end up at next, but one thing is for certain: I will not work for abysmal wages ever again.

I worked with two other devs, they both seemed nice at first. But the one who was nicer left, and the other one turned out to be an alcoholic, with accompanying mood swings.

I almost quit over a micro-managing, angry chief technical architect at a small company. I was leading development, but he overruled all my decisons, hired different people, and was generally unpleasant. He was friends with the owner.

The COO talked me into taking a different position working on protocol development, where I would largely be free of him.

Six months later, the person who replaced me as development lead very memorably and repeatedly accused this architect of being a psychopath in a senior meeting.

Too much M$ BS. Not just windoze, but azure, teams, outlook... Who wants to work with that shit?

A few coworkers on my team were clearly clinically depressed.

Never quit a job. Only managers.