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Find a place where management is able to handle some criticism.

I personally think Agile/Scrum is holy, and I don't mean "yeah we kind of do our own version of it", no, fucking do it by the book. The PM shouldn't assign estimates. Developers shouldn't receive bugfix requests from anyone other than the scrum master. The CTO can't be your scrum master... etc.

If a company can't answer the question "What were the points of feedback during the last retrospective(s), and how are those points being picked up?" -- Don't work there.

Many other things are optional in my opinion. I could work at a company without QA, without fruit baskets, table tennis, without Friday drinks. I could even live without git & continuous integration, just emailing patches to a patch integrator. I don't care.

But maintaining a safe bubble of serenity and sanity for devs to do their work in, that is an absolute must.

Also, option to WFH as much as wanted. Offices are nice for social bonding, but they kill productivity for me.

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  • 4
    Couldn't agree more.

    Every profile exist for a reason and people should start taking their roles seriously.

    Having said that, I have reached a point where, for me, generating output is more important than those bean bags or brand swags. To put it in simpler words, functionality matters more than fancy CSS design and animation.

    Everything else is just hollow and time is a meaningless entity anyway.
  • 9
    Mostly agreed. You crossed the line when you said you can live without git. I don't think I can.
  • 2
    @hack I worked at a Microsoft department where everything went through mail.

    You received a zipped copy of the master branch of the codebase with a task description, and mailed a zip back.

    They had a department full of VCS conflict resolvers.

    As a developer, it wasn't bad at all to work like that: You had clear requirements, and other people worried about branches, merging and deployments for you.

    Everything else about the company was pretty awful though at the time (toxic managers, blatant racism/sexism/harassment, etc)
  • 2
    I hope this is my next job. Though I wouldn’t mind some free swag now and again.
  • 2
    @TrevorTheRat What kind of free swag?

    I prefer high enough salary, so I can decide for myself how to spend lunch, travel, pension, etc.

    My current employer also offers a $2K electronics budget once per 3 years, so you can choose a laptop/workstation/displays/etc yourself.
  • 1
    @bittersweet my salary is already pretty high until I can move up a level I don’t think it’ll increase.
    Wouldn’t mind a few hoodies and I’m running out of mugs :-)
    More than anything I could do with more holidays but unless I start freelancing I don’t think that will happen, and even then I might be put off by not being paid for annual leave
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