Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

Me: Did Sherry let you know that I'm leaving today?

Coworker: what!? No!

Me: yeah... I'm leaving.

Coworker: huh, I'm not surprised...

Me: what is that supposed to mean!?

Co: shit man, this job sucks, I'm not surprised. I'll be leaving right behind you.

Me: oh.... Um... April Fools... 😬

Co: God damnit.

Me: don't worry, I won't tell the boss how you really feel.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

"Can you give an example of a work-based conflict you were involved in, and how you went about resolving it?"

"Heh, ohhhh yes. Last job actually. Manager flipped out at me for the billionth time for no reason at all. I calmly handed my notice in, changed a bunch of encryption keys and disabled a bunch of users on the server before leaving and never looking back."

"Wow. Seriously?!"

"Absolutely. I'm very forward-looking."

Still no idea if the guy just decided to turn up to the interview to waste our time, or he really was stupid enough to think that was a positive.

Today is my last day at this job.

Can't tell you how happy I am to be leaving this place in about 7 hours.

Starting my new job in January, so I get 4 weeks of nice vacation/ family time.

I was hired as a senior software engineer. During handover I found out I'm actually replacing the CTO.

I queried why he was leaving and got a simple "just want a break from working" which I found odd.

Fast forward and now I also just want a break from work, permanently. This place has followed every bad practise and big no-no out there. Every bit of software is a built in house knockoff janky piece of crap that doesn't work and makes people's jobs 5000 times harder.

The UI looks worse than Windows 3.1, absolutely horrendous code formatting, worst database structure I've ever seen.

The mere mention of using a team communication tool results in being yelled at from the CEO whom communicates purely via email, who then gets annoyed when you don't reply because they sent the email to a client instead of you.

We get handed printed out "tickets" to work instead of the so called "amazing in house ticket system" built using PHP 5 and is literally crammed into an 800x600 IFrame. Yes a F$*#ing IFRAME!

It's not like we have an outdated TFS server that has work items we can use...

Why not push for changes you say. I have, many times, tried to suggest better tools. The only approval I've gotten is using PhpStorm. Everything else is shutdown immediately and you get the silent treatment.

The CEO hired me to do a job, then micromanages like crazy. I can't make UI changes, I can't make database changes, why? They insists they know best, but has admitted multiple times to not knowing SQL and literally uses a drag and drop database table builder.

Every page in the webapps we make are crammed into 800x600 iframes with more iframes inside iframes. And every time it's pointed out we need to do something, be it from internal staff or client suggestions, the CEO goes off about how the UI is industry leading and follows standards.. what in the actual f....

Literally holding on by a thread here. Why hire a CTO under the guise of being a senior developer but then reduce the work that can be done down to the level of a junior?

Sure the paycheck is really nice but no job is worth the stress, harassment and incompetent leadership from the CEO.

They've verbally abused people to the point they resign, best part is that was simply because the CEO made serious legal mistakes, was told about it by the employee then blamed it on others.

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

When i will push my last commit before leaving this job

Best: got an offer from Google.

Worst: family and friends trying to convince me to turn down the offer and take a local job.

(I'm from a small town where family is everything to everyone and leaving is blasphemous.)

Interview (first job):

Interviewer: So what languages do you know?

Me: Well, i learnd C, C++ and Matlab scripting, but i'm learning C# as a personal project.

Interviewer: Perfect!

First day:

Interviewer(now boss): So, a guy is leaving next week and you will be replacing him. He has 70 projects and you will be responsible for this production test platform in JAVA

There is a group of ladies who work in the accounting department at my job who have made it their mission to decorate the cubicle of whoever has a birthday on a given day. They come in at 6 am on someones birthday and decorate, leaving a mess of balloons and streamers, which is a nice surprise the first time it happens (they do it every year). Well, we in the IT office decided it would be fun to booby trap one of our cubicles so that when our birthday rolled in, they would receive a surprise of their own. So we set up a webcam as a motion detector, and had the computer speakers turned up as loud as possible, so that when motion was detected, the honorable Admiral Akbar would yell "It's A Trap!". We succeeded in scaring the pants off of them, and also annoying them because the sound did not stop until the program was exited, so they had to listen to it the entire time they did their setup. It was priceless xD

I just quit my job!
The company I worked for is a small company founded in Jan of this year and I was there since the early days but wasn't a founder nor a partner.
It was me who decided on which tech stack we should use, which languages, what servers to use, best practices and almost anything related to development. I was the lead developer and project manager for the biggest project they had.
But they decided that I don't deserve to be a partner. I was making more than 50,000 SDG per month for the company but only paid 6,000. The worst thing is that the partners don't know shit about software development. They have no vision for where should the company be in the future.
I just had enough. I already had my own software dev business before joining them, and it was successful.
I am going back to building my own company with my own vision.
I know I made the right decision, but it still hurts leaving a company after u made it what it is today. It is like your own baby and you are abandoning it.
Hopefully, it is for the best.

Last day at my first job. Spent 7.3 years here.

Joined as a kid, leaving as a grown up man.

So many mixed feelings, and being an emotional person, if I were in office, I'd have surely cried.

Crazy experience. So many flashbacks all at once.

So today I got let go from my job.

I've worked for this company for about 2.5 years, and soon after joining I became the only IT resource for software. I had to support literally everything after they fired the rest of the team, but I did a great job and have been praised by all the management at the company.

A few months ago, after a salary review and a frank discussion with my boss and his boss, they agreed that I am due for a raise. They had a massive project coming up with a lot of extra expenses, but I was told that right afterward they would be giving raises.

I spent tons of late nights and weekends on this project, and we were able to get it mostly finished about a 1.5 months ago. I was instrumental in the project (the rest of the IT team didn't even know how to set up simple DNS records). An email was sent to the whole company thanking me for all the work I put into the project.

A week ago, I messaged my boss to ask about the status of raises as he had told me they should be going out at the beginning of this month. He said there won't be any raises, and that's all I heard. Then today I get a call telling me that they are letting me go.

Let me get this straight: you led me on with talk of a raise just to keep me here working long hours for your big project, and then you fire me after recognizing what a great job I did? That's just sick. I have watched them treat other employees and partners unethically, but it took getting it first hand to realize how bad it really is. My teammates were in shock when I said I was leaving as they have all leaned on me very heavily.

Fortunately, I have had several offers come in over the last few months (2 this week) for more pay. I only held off because of the lies I was told about receiving a raise and out of a false sense of loyalty. I'm not worried about my future at all, just angry at the way I was treated.

Start a new job.
It is amazing.
What, you will not pay my JetBrains? Ugh... cheap boss.
Do you call this scrum?
Now I need to build this dumbass feature.
Wait, all the seasoned people are leaving?
Why did I choose this place at first?
Linkedin.
Interview.
This sounds awesome.
Good salary.
Bye guys.

Start a new job...

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

Why do HR people ask stupid questions like the following ones? Everytime I get those questions, I have imaginary answers like the ones right after each question.

Why do you want to work here?

- Obviously, because I need the money to survive. I'm not here because I love working for you and having to endure your stress. I'm not that type of a kinky person.

Are you flexible?

- Why? Do you want to annoy me when I'm sleeping in the middle of the night because of a sudden deadline or because a god damn employee didn't show up?

Do you see yourself as a perfect fit for both developer and tech support roles?

- Read my fucking resume, moron. I applied for a developer role. Nothing else.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

- As if you would care. It's none of your business, but since we are at it. I see myself as your manager in 5 years. Hope that you like that thought.

We didn't bother reading your CV. Would you like to tell us about yourself?

- Nope. Have a nice day and suck my dick. I'm leaving.

Can you give us your phone number and the phone number of your girlfriend?

- I didn't know that I am selling my soul to your company by accepting this job offer. I'm not your slave and you will not call me whenever I'm enjoying my private time.

What's motivating you?

- Money and the peaceful vibe at work when you are shutting the fuck up when I'm fully focused during my projects.

How do you handle stress?

- I dick slap everyone infront of me.

Do you see yourself as a hard worker?

- Nah, I'm not interested in sucking dicks, eating her ass and bending over to get a little bit of a raise.

"You claim you are a developer and don't know what firebase is? Pfft"

Words uttered by one of my classmates flexing on some 4th semester college inmates. I don't know what's more annoying his squeaky voice, the pretentiousness of using headphones as a necklace during class or that I was just like him when I was a freshman (minus the low hanging fruit flexing).

God fucking damn, I'm not even mad at his obnoxious pampered kid semblance, it's the irony of this enlightened fago falling into the god forsaken rat race. Why?

Because he hasn't been magnanimously disappointed by one of the most corrupt systems I've ever been witness of, yeah keep talking about firebase to the teacher who just nods pretending she knows what you are talking about.

I've had this same teacher before and your nice asynchronous ES6 express nosql solution will come last compared to all the WordPress templates she'll approve because they are pretty and all the time you invested, yeah, right into the crapper, seriously it would've been more satisfying to just masturbate everyday until Christmas break. I'm not pissed at him, annoyed by his semblance maybe, but I actually pitty him because the system will take a big shit on his face and he's just smiling.

Damn it, all these careers ruined by lazy ass professors who think leaving a shitload of diagrams as homework counts as teaching. And before any quirky brother interjects with "oh maybe your University is shit", "muh University verry gut u suk", you shut the fuck up! I know my university sucks even tho is "one of the best ones" by the corrupt media's standards, I'm here to vent about issues, real fucking issues happening in real corrupt systems, I'm taking about professors sexually abusing students, not going to classes, no centralized teaching systems, fucking chaos.

I'm happy for you if you feel good about the piece of paper you hang on your wall that certifies you as Bobby the guy who not only learned a shit load about computers, he also bent his ass so far for us and payed us so much money for it, it's funny he thinks himself as smart.

I know, I know, you went to an ivy league college, have a wonderful job and owe some money, good for you, some are not so lucky and I'll make sure those lazy asses who take advantage of the system lose their jobs.

I'm so sick of this shit we call "moodern educashion"

Minimum wage employers and restaurants asking "and why should we hire you?".

You have 40 vacancies in your area for just your company alone.
You're paying $13.25 an hour when only a year ago you were paying $9.75.

Why should we hire you?

F*ck you, pay me, that's why.

You're not f*cking NASA
You're a God damn chain restaurant with a 40% turnover rate, who's employees probably shoot up in the bathroom on the rare occasion they even get a break.

I looked at the guy with all the annoyance I could muster, stared him down for a good five seconds and said. "You pay a few dollars over minimum. You're job is not important enough to even ask that question. Have a nice day." And got up and left.

Dude followed me and stuttered " hold up. I was just..."

But I was already out the door.

You were just what mark? Asking a dumbfuck question as if you had any leverage at all?

Your competitor *across the street* is offering 50 cents *more* per hour, and has guaranteed breaks.

What, did you forget 2008 and how you treated millions of people as disposable? The little part where you and most american industries demanded passion, without pay raises? Promotions without benefits? The jobs that if you worked hard, rather than a promotion or a pay raise, your reward was more work and less hours to finish?

You assholes thought we forgot about that? How you shipped millions of jobs overseas, blamed it on "automation" (chinese and indian slave labor), and then pointed the finger at millions of impoverished people as "lazy" in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and told them "you just got to work harder and smarter!" Or "just get a small loan and create the next google!" from the comfort of your yachts? I'm looking at you bane corp.

No, now the shoes on the other foot motherf*ckers. Hows it feel needing all *us* commoners? "Why should we hire you?"

No, why should *I* WORK FOR YOU?
Cuz I saw THREE dirty tables coming in. A line of people that could be being served. A line that could have been optimized with the proper table count and some simple changes. A menu that doesnt even incentivize your biggest sellers and a dozen other things your store is doing wrong.

Think mark, think!

This is one of those braindead questions employers paying sub $18 an hour ask, because they suffered so much brain drain from years of payola profits from too-big-to-fail wallstreet bailouts, that they forgot they are not king midas, unless they are the king midas of shit, because increasingly everything corporate America touches turns into shit.

And while were on the subject, stopping bringing in outside management to stores. It destroys team cohesion, staff morale, pisses off people *on site* who *actually know* the team, the stores daily activities and processes, and who are better fit for that role. You bring in disinterested outside management, and it's one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen: these smarmy selfcongratulating f*cks who know nothing about the particular store, have no connection to the staff, go on firing sprees or alienation-sprees to hire in friends, fuck up the schedules because again they know nothing about the employees, and then move on after a few years to greener pastures, leaving a barren radioactive wasteland of chain smokers and burnt out staff in their wake.

Dear corporate America, your free ride on the public's good will is over. It's over.

Now you're in the bitch seat. Come sit at my desk and explain to me, EXPLAIN TO ME, why I should sweat and labor to save your shitty company hemorrhaging money like a bleeding crack-addicted hobo dying with a sucking chest wound from a chicago skidrow friday-night drive-by?

You dont deserve it. Your management and company culture is worse than incompetent. It's full of smiley guys expounding about their passion for customer service while giving each other sloppy BJs in broom closets, a veritable cornucopia of cult-like corporate dick suckers *and* dickheads, proclaiming, no...PROFESSING (hence "professional") their undying allegiance and dedication to their corporate family with the intensity of cujo, foaming at the mouth, or Mitt Romney preparing for a photoshoot, plastic smiles and feigned laughs.

Dont forget to wipe your chin, asshole. It's not Ronald McDonald your blowing, but it's definitely not Gordon f*cking Ramsey either.

Would you like fries with that?

Riskiest Dev choice...

Leaving a previous job, moving 1000KM (620 Miles) away with no job prospects and going absolutely broke.

This was all in the name of “I need a better job”, so what better way to force yourself to get one.

I’m currently in my second job since then and now make just over double what I was earning before.

Sometimes it takes a high risk to get out ahead.

I am leaving my job from a very big company with very high paying package for doing my own startup.
1 month notice period on.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

Best current career choice:
Quit to become a Freelancer.

OH BOY did I sleep bad directly after that decision - no contracts, no sales running.

Oh BOY do I now 2 days later sleep like a dam relaxed, happy baby :) - My network for the win!

The days before handing in my resignation I really looked forward to just leaving, but the actual task again was scary. Why? Cause until then future for me was bound to income, job=stable income = happy me, happy wife, happy child.

Now? Just 4 days later, If all goes to plan I'm already overbooked twice. Truth told!: Couldn't have done it without the network that I built over the years where I was employed. Let's see how this works out :)

I stand up with a huge smile each morning: Just a great feeling!

Ooh this is good.

At my first job, i was hired as a c++ developer. The task seemed easy enough, it was a research and the previous developer died, leaving behind a lot of documentation and some legacy fortran code. Now you might not know, but fortran can be really easily converted to c, and then refactored to c++.

Fine, time to read the docs. The research was on pollen levels, cant really tell more. Mostly advanced maths. I dug through 500+ pages of algebra just to realize, theres no way this would ever work. Okay dont panic, im a data analyst, i can handle this.

Lets take a look at the fortran code, maybe that makes more sense. Turns out it had nothing to do with the task. It looped through some external data i couldnt find anywhere and thats it. Yay.

So i exported everything we had to a csv file, wrote a java program to apply linefit with linear regression and filter out the bad records. After that i spent 2 days in a hot server room, hoping that the old intel xeon wouldnt break down from sending java outputs directly to haskell, but it held on its own.

After two extensive talks with a potential employer (they lasted for hours), I decided to accept the offer, although the salary was ~25% lower than at my previous job. Everything else sounded fantastic and I needed that desperately since at the previous company everything was toxic for years.

These new guys wanted a senior php dev because they had none of them, except only wordpress and drupal people who were not skilled enough to take other types of projects (they called them "custom php"). I liked it and thought I'm gonna shine there and quickly earn a raise because the agency will start earning more by getting projects that they were unable to even bid for.

First day at work and I got assigned to a new Drupal project, although it was supposed to be a simple restful API for a simple iOS app. It could be done in a week or less, with no rushing at all. But it had to be Drupal. And I happened to be around to hear that there is a queue of Drupal projects waiting. After 2 days leaving the office late and having my brain melted by nonsense I was looking at, I quit the job.

No offense to Drupal people, I really do admire you, but I just could not stand it after 8 years "doing custom php". It felt too much like being downgraded. But more than that I was pissed off by the fact that I have been shamelessly lied to and tricked to accept something I clearly said that I dont want.

This happened a year ago. I now earn 2.5x more money than those guys offered and work in a very healthy environment. In the meantime, I heard that the other guys shut their company down.

Moving to a new job, a new city and leaving my parents' house next month. Can't wait!

Last day on my current job before switching to a new company.
I have 10 tasks on my "to finish before leaving" list.

Finished one task and showed it to my boss.

I now have 13 tasks on my "to finish before leaving" list.

Do you want to get people to quit? Because that's how you get people to quit.

My former boss is trying to modify a MEAN webapp I finnished before leaving my last job.

Apparently, he is debugging Node with alerts.

About a year ago I switched my job.
At the start everything seemed like magic. I was the It director, I've finally was able to call the shots on technologies, on new software architecture.
First step was to check the current state of the company.
"qqqq" as each pc password? Ok
No firewall from outside? Lovely
Servers running on Windows Server 2008? Spectacular
People leaving pc on after work and left the machine unlocked just not to type the password? Hell yeah
The IT dude playing games instead of working? But ofcourse
Plaintext passwords publically accessible eshop? Naturally.
The list goes on and on.
After all this time, I'm working to fix every hole like that like crazy and because it doesn't show results, I'm soon to lose my job. Well better luck next time as an intern I guess :')

Best carrier choice: leaving the old company I worked for...

TLDR version: I yelled at owner/director to shove it..got layed off the next day. Never regreted that day!! EVER!!

Long version: I was asked to implement storing of CC numbers (yes, the whole lot) & their matchig CVC numbers..plain text, no encription.. company didn't even fulfilled standards to store last four digits.. so I yelled at the 'big boss' that he is crazy and that I won't do it.. Next day, I got handed a letter that said they have to lay me off due to lack of work and that my position is redundant & no other workplace for me.. Never been happier in my life!!

I wanted to quit for some time, due to crazy stuff they asked me to implement & how!? & toxic personel. I was called Hitler (& am actually proud of this!!) cuz I was work oriented & didn't kiss mrs.Director's ass.. I wasn't slacking like the rest of them did, so of course, I was the bad guy..

Anyhow, fast forward 6 months, got the best job ever & am now here for 5yrs+.

I'm leaving my job.

That had already been decided when I learned that the only other front end guy at the company put in his two weeks notice. I immediately decided that I was morally obligated to put in my 4 months notice to give the company enough time to find a replacement (because, contrary to the beliefs of some programmers, front end plays a critical role in web dev).

With only 2 weeks left, I was put on his project to do some "simple design work".

Jesus christ in heaven alive and dead...

I've never in my career seen CSS with such an intense level of specificity -- nobody on that team should have ever let that code get so out of control.

I've spent the past week cursing, walking out of the room, whispering "I can't believe you've done this", ranting to non-developer friends.

Here's an example: the application has a panel used all over the place with a header and a body. Every Single View has it's own duplicated panel, each with its own unique class names and CSS. And that's just one element.

Every view has hundreds of lines of duplicated CSS. Every button, link, list, all with unique styles.

To any junior developer reading this, please hear me: Write one block of CSS for any element that will be reused. DO NOT duplicate your code when it can be used over and over.

/rant

so, I hate my job, they give me many tasks (many of tasks are not on my field) with no trainings and no time, plus a salary that is not that good.

I get angry, so I talked with the boss about leaving yhe company.
Well, our discussion ended up by convincing me to stay with the double of the salary.

So, I accepted the offer.
Don't know whether it's the right decision or not..

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

Today I left my job in which I spent these last 5 years.

My boss wasn't very pleased with me leaving the company today. But well, it had to be done

Now it's time to focus in freelancing and my own startup. Surely my work will be paid more accurately than these 5 years, one of the reasons I left.

(A fucking pushy assrat of a LinkedIn recruiter called me at my job today, this is my message after he cowardly hung up before I could inherit the call from our secretary)

Dear Mr. $PUSHY_RECRUITER

Please don't call me again, as I already wrote you my unavailability in March.
I don't see your logic in calling me AT MY JOB. It does not make any sense except if you just wanted to call me to see if I'm still there and then hang up like a fucking coward.
If you really wanted to hire me, you should have written me a more thorough description about the job after my initial message of unavailability thus creating the chance for me to reconsider your offer.

But since you seemingly thought it was an absolutely great idea to call me at the workplace (thus making me look really bad in the eyes of my coworkers) I wish you a sincere and honest "fuck you".

Please don't ever call or message me again.
I am extremely happy at my current job and will not consider leaving in the next 100 years.

Signed,
Yet another pissed off developer.

Old boss story. This guy was nice but a terrible boss. Also relevant, he has a background in IT so should know better.

Him: So when you wanna check a password is correct you just unhash it in the database?
Me: *facepalm*

Me: Hey we should be doing unit and integration testing at a minimum to lower bugs.
Him: We don't need those, we're not a bank. If a problem comes up we just fix it and push to production.
(A while later)
Him(in email): Why do we keep getting bugs reported. Don't you devs test your code.

I was mildly annoyed at that one.

Him: We're always over budget on projects, how can we fix this.
Me: What if we increase our quotes.(technically there are other ways as well but not really possible at that time)
Him: We can't do that, clients won't want to pay.

Me: *finishing off my handover as I'm leaving for a new job*
Him: Wow you do a lot of work

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

Hello everyone 👋

I see people blaming the developers when you see a crappy software product , saying that they have done a bad job.

But even it could be true also it could be the product managers who didn’t give enough time todo what needs to be done or project scope is too big for the persons knowledge.

I’ve worked in a company where deadlines were so tight I didn’t have enough time to proper UI and Testing. I used to be only developer who has someone experience and I had to train the interns as well. I am also to blame to joining such company but in desperate times takes desperate measures.

And now when i’m leaving the company and I have spend 2 years of my life for apps that I’m not proud of.

Just rant. Please feel free to give ur thoughts

I've told the same story multiple times but the subject of "painfully incompetent co-worker" just comes up so often.

I have one coworker who never really grew out of the mindset of a college student who just took "Intro to Programming". If a problem couldn't be solved with a textbook solution, then he would waste several weeks struggling with it until eventually someone else would pick up the ticket and finish it in a couple days. And if he found a janky workaround for a problem, he'd consider that problem "solved" and never think about it again.

He lasted less than a year before he quit and went off to get a job somewhere else, leaving the rest of our team to comb through his messy code and fix it. Unfortunately, our team is mostly split across multiple projects and our processes were kind of a mess until recently, so his work was a black box of code that had never been reviewed.

I opened the box and found only despair and regret. He was using deprecated features from older versions of the language to work around language bugs that no longer existed. He overused constants to a ridiculous degree (hundreds of constants, all of which are used exactly once in the entire codebase, stored in a single mutable map variable named "values" because why not). He didn't really seem to understand DRY at all. His code threw warnings in the IDE and had weird errors that were difficult to reproduce because there was just a whole pile of race conditions.

I ended up having to take a figurative hacksaw to it, ripping out huge sections of unnecessary crap and modernizing it to use recent language features to get rid of the deprecation warnings and intermittent errors. And then I went through the same process again for every other project he'd touched.

Good riddance.

I'm a junior developer working on a project that's completely out of my scope. I've missed deadline after deadline and my boss + the customer are getting very pissed off and impatient. This project has got me feeling sick. I'm not sleeping well and honestly thinking about leaving my job just because of this 1 project.

I've tried speaking with my manager but she just says, complete it ASAP to the best of your ability. It will take me months to get it right but I am really struggling.

I'm just looking for some advice please? Has anyone else been through this? Do you think leaving is stupid?

Thank you ranters 😃

We were 6 devs on a big project that needed to be completed in 3 months. Probably my first project as a full-stack dev and the work was very demanding.

The senior of my team was a very sharp and energetic, but also a very "in your face" kinda guy. Like, he was cool, but sometimes a little too much to handle for some people.

Anyway, this guy "Senior dev" worked faster (naturally) and harder than the rest of us and was always willing to help if somebody had problems with a framework, tool or other technology. Also, there was this other guy also a good dev (second best I would say) that just hated the first guy's guts for being "rude and obnoxious" as he put it.

One day, the PM and the senior had an argument about a major change that the PM had agreed to (just to save face with the client) that will force the team to come to work on the weekend. In the end he saved us the trouble of going throught that and the PM had to tell the client that the change wouldn't be made. From then on it went downhill for "Sr. dev" in the company. Until one day he was told that his contract was not gonna be renewed.

Short after, he showed some of us a screen cap. somebody sent him of an email from the "hateful" dev to the PM in which he wrote he had heard that the senior guy was leaving and he couldn't be happier because he was "damaging, problematic and a stressful part of his job". That was such a dick move, we thought he should get back at the guy.

So he sent a fake email to the PM using the "hateful" guy's email ID, that read:

"Dear PM. I'm sorry I said those things about 'Senior dev', I guess I'm just mad that he's a better professional than me and mad that I was born with no genitalia".

After the senior dev left I worked on one more project with the "hateful" dev and he was let go mid project for "not being proactive and making little effort on completing the project".

Today, for the first time in my life I quit my job

I feel very happy (refer to any of my older rants), yet i also feel very sad because in spite of all the quirks, it’s a great place to work with super nice people whom I feel like have become a big part of my life in such a small period of time

I very much doubt I’ll ever find a company like this again with such a relaxing atmosphere but I have to think about myself and my career ..

I’m especially incredibly sad about leaving one of my colleagues as he has become one of my best friends these past few months..

Let’s just hope I made the right decision ..

Woo, rant time.

I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.

However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.

I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?

I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?

What would you guys do in this situation???

I recently left a job after a few years of intense work and long hours. After leaving, I left a critical but fair Glassdoor review. Since then, I have received multiple emails from the CEO of my former employer asking me to remove the review and including (what I perceive to be) threats of the industry being “small” and mentioning my new manager by name.

I had seldom spoken to the CEO before these emails – a bit of small talk here and there in the office – and his notes to me contained details about personal and family struggles (as justification for poor leadership and mistreating employees?) that I thought verged on inappropriate. I had also delivered all of the feedback in my review throughout my tenure at the company – and, of course, had not received any interest from leadership in discussing my thoughts until I made them public.

What is the best way to respond here? As an attempt to diffuse the situation, I sent a kind email back acknowledging that working there was at times difficult, but also expressing my gratitude for all I learned and the opportunities I had. After that email, he again asked that I remove the review and made reference to the “small community” of the industry.

Should I remove the review? Is he really going to tell my new boss that I left a critical (but truthful) Glassdoor review? If he does, will my new boss even care, or will he see this as a weird and inappropriate overstep from my old employer?

I think the worst work culture you can experience is nepotism and corruption in hierarchy. What do I mean? Well, this happened (and I think is still happening) in my last job. It was a huge logistic/delivery company. I was an intern, working as assistant developer of the only developer of the site. There was also a guy that was the technician, his assistant, a DBA and that's it.

Well, my partner and I were working on a system that managed almost all the operations of the company in this city.

Well, I supplied the dev two weeks when he was on vacation. I knew almost all the system. what happened? the manager from other city came with another Dev, and I'm not saying that I was an expert or something like that, but that dev from the other city was an incompetent. He couldn't even make a small GUI change without messing it all...

Guess what? The company paid him weekly round tickets to come and go from his city to ours (two hours of flight).

I was too disappointed I started searching another job. A week after getting my degree, I left my job and started in the one I am now. Before leaving, I asked my boss if there was a realistic chance to grow up. He answered no. To be honest, that didn't surprised me :/

The thing that makes me angry about this is that a lot of companies give chances to people that come from other cities, even if they don't know anything >:v

Oh, I almost forgot it: The last five months I was working there, they quit our office and send us to trailer-offices :/

My job quickly went down the shitter. A mass exodus happened, with half of top talent leaving, and the other half let go. The gig started out great, and offered me the growth I needed at the time, but sadly, life changes and moves on.

Determined to leave amicably on my own terms, I started looking elsewhere about a month ago.

I got an offer today! It's a perm position to offer stability to my fam, but with a consulting firm, so I'm excited for the relatively consistent change of pace with projects, technologies and clients. After spending years on end working on good projects that fizzled out and never saw the light of day, I'm longing to have my code released to the wild! (Not counting various patches and bug fixes)

Wish me luck!

So yesterday i went to this live theatre drama and i had an extra ticket. I asked this random guy the way to that theatre and apparently he was looking to get ticket for the same show. I offered him my other ticket for free.

We introduce ourself to each other and i came to know he worked as salesman or something. As i talked about my job, I told about me leaving job in hopes of self employment.

*Cue the sales pitch*

He started talking about some scheme kind of thing to have financial freedom. He talks about how we can get products at upto 15% discount and we have to sell them to others.

I was skeptical about it and he talked they have website as if that will pimpress me or something.

I visited the site and i was not surprised at all. It was nothing but an halfassed e-commerce store. I knew it was halfassed and probably setup by the "CEO" himself.

And the products in that site are nothing but stupid cosmetic products!

And to top it off, you have to spend around $200 to join this scheme. This poor guy doesn't realise he is just being a talking puppet to that halfassed e-commerce business BY PAYING THEM!!!

He even said one of his friend in London took leave to join this scheme or whatever... What a stupid friend.

Anyway, i just regret giving away a ticket to some stupid people like him. I'd have been much more happier if i had just thrown the extra ticket in the trash.

People suck!

So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...

I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.

My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.

I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.

Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".

I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?

I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.

Harsh truth:

My side SaaS project made more money in its first month (built late winter last year, MVP released after ~3 weeks of development) than the sTaRtUp I work for over its total lifetime so far (built over 3+ months, MVP released in May last year)

...is it time to rage quit?

Often I have dreams of going full-time solo dev, leaving every idiotic, clueless, fumbling clown behind, but I feel like I just don't have the financial runway to do it. However, even from just a few months in 2021 while I was on the job hunt, I created some side revenue streams which I'm still receiving decent revenues from (selling courses, saas products, minor freelancing). I'm just not 100% sure if I was "lucky" during this time period, or if a few more months going at it I'd be able to scrape my way towards a meager (though livable!) income.

Give me biased views, devRant!

2 days until I leave my job and I am assigned a large, legal requirement task to complete, with no time to plan or opportunity to hand over the work. No way it will be done in time, and no teamwork, so no one else will be up to speed on it when I leave, and I daresay I'll be blamed for it not working to their 2 sentence specification! Yup, that's why I'm leaving folks!

I left my previous company because my tech leadership was insensitive and agressive.

However, I am in a start-up right now and CTO is a nut job.

He creates random Slack threads and keeps messaging me like crazy. The co-founders have shut him down multiple times and yet his only success metric is "number of deliveries".

The other day something broke in production and teams were discussing about resolving the bug in one of the Slack channels.

CTO literally wrote this and I wish I was making this up, "let us not look at the logs and trust our code to work fine."

I was baffled and confused. I realised me leaving my previous organisation because of such tech leadership was a stupid decision.

Crows are black everywhere.

After 3 years of being the first in and last to leave, of getting other people's work reassigned to me - P can't complete it on time, G doesn't like the user, A refuses to work on that module, etc... I finally blew last Sept.
In the span of 2 days, my boss brought me into a project 1.5 years in (she doesn't trust P to do the coding) and expected me to be up to speed and coding in a couple of days, told the functional dept that I would cover for one of their guys on vaca for three weeks and assigned me to take over a HUGE project from one of the other functional guys who wasn't getting it done. So basically I'm now doing Ps job AND supporting another department AND taking control of a large project from another department. I'm the idiot working 14 hour days while they're all leaving on time or enjoying their 3 week vaca to India.
I lost it. It's bad enough filling in the gaps in my own department but when I'm now taking on work for other departments, that's where I draw the line. I sent my boss my resignation - just could not take the inequity in the work load.
I'm still working here - my boss ended up hiring a consultant to handle the functional project and told the functional group to find their own vacation coverage. She's also monitoring workloads much closer now. I still habe an ongoing issue with having to complete other peoples work for them but I'm not working OT to do it. So speaking up helps. So does quitting.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

So, 2 weeks ago I started my new job at a company I had my eye on for almost a year, feeling super blessed because after leaving my previous job with such a toxic work environment, it is so refreshing to be around new people who actually value you. I’m so excited to learn new skills and push myself towards the role I was dreaming of since university. :-)

Management Double standards...
At a previous employer, the manager had me doing some QA testing for a updated version of some customer facing UIs. I spent 3 days constantly testing, except for my lunch break.
Every bug that I found I sent to a Sr dev.
Now this Sr dev was a coding savant. I mean awesome coder, but he had the personality of a rat and snake combined. If he wasn't coding he was brown-nosing the manager, talking about how he was doing all the work, or trying to rat on us other devs.
Anyway this dev has spent the 3 days of bug fixing alternating between watching videos and fixing bugs. Don't know what the videos were, don't realy care. I do know that he did not like to be disturbed while watching them...
On the third day, on my lunch break, I decided to watch two fifiteen minute videos on VSTS feeds and linking node packages.
As soon as I started Sr dev came over and asked me if I was focused on the teams priorities. I told him that it was my lunch break and since this was related to an upcoming sprint I thought it was worth it.
This S.O.B. goes full out hissy fit. He was flat out throwing a tantrum like my small daughter would. He made such a noise that my manager walked over and asked what was going on.
This shitbag Sr dev smirked at me and asked to speak to the manager in his office. When the manager called me over I knew what was up. I was lectured on not focusing on the teams priorities. I tried to explain that the videos were relevant to an upcoming sprint but was shot down. When I brought up the fact that the Sr dev was watching videos, the manager told me flat out that he didn't care. I was mad and told the manager that this was bullshit. All the manager cared about was keeping the Sr dev happy. I was told to "treat <shithead sr dev> with respect or else".
It was at that time I decided to look for another job. Less than a month later I left, for a much better paying job with awesome benefits. Sr dev acted like he was hurt I was leaving. Manager couldn't have cared less.
When some others on the team heard what he did, they started looking for work elsewhere too.
A month after I left another Sr dev on the same project left. At the same time a BA and QA tester demanded to be put on another team or else they would leave.
Manager started out with a team of 6 was left with only two people.
When the last one left, manager had the nerve to ask me why I didn't let him know anyone was unhappy. I told him if he cared so little for me, why would I think he care about them.
Ultimately, leaving was one of the best things I could have done.

Not necessarily ignorant, but funny.
Before my current job I used to work for a company that provided software services to logistic type corporations, import export and all that jazz.

I was asked to generate an admin interface that would allow people to enter scans from different products, sort them in the right place and update the main interface. During the time we were using Classic ASP with VBScript. There, AJAX and similar functionality can get quite tricky, but definitely doable if you know what you are doing, VBScript has many limitations when compared to something like PHP for example. But thus the application was created in about a week once everything was sorted and then the storage manager came back to ask me if I could put a spinner or something in it to show that the information was loading. I asked him if the information was not being updated accordingly or if there were similar issues to that extent.

He said "no, it is working perfectly and I have no problem with the functionality, but these morons keep trying to scan shit because they can't tell if something is being populated into the main table in the interface because it all happens so quickly" Me: "well it is a very simple process, if you want I can add some sort of additional message to that or a spinner or something of the like that would show for two seconds or something, just so they can get some visual clarification"

Him: "This is a pretty stupid thing isn't it?". Me: Yes. Him: "I am so sorry to ask for this, how long will it take you?" Me: "Lol give me about 30 mins maybe less, it is no problem really, let me get this out of the way so that your people can get to it without loosing anymore time"

Such things are the reason why they literally brought me to the head of the company when I told them that I was leaving in an effort for him to try and convince me to stay. I was not to be contracted into their service anymore, but a full time employee. It was nice for them to ask really, but I declined in favor of the benefits I get from my current company.

To this day I think its funny and they remember as well.

Just read a comment on rant that stated "You’d be surprised as how disgusting people are especially in the work setting.". In regard to bathrooms. This reads true, for my current place of work

I was about to reply to that, but I thought this is worthy of a rant of its own. Allow me to quote some emails...

"We have had reports of excrement being left on toilet seats, which surely could be seen by the person responsible before they left the cubicle. "

"very poor toilet hygiene in some the ladies toilets.

Firstly, someone person should I say.... has used a toilet brush to clear a blockage in the Ladies loo nearest [removed]. They obviously couldn't unblock the toilet due to the density of the blockage and therefore.. returned the brush to it's holder full of the blockage!! "

"The phantom "snot" wiper is back and is using the back of the toilet door nearest the [removed] as a tissue! Again.. the poor Cleaner has had to clean this up... "

"Toilet paper being put in the Urinal blocking the system in [removed] and faeces being left on the toilet floor in [removed]. This goes without saying that this can't go on and it's not the cleaners job to be cleaning such messes! "

Its ever worse in our other office that contains a call centre. A lady was fired for leaving shit in the stairwells on multiple instances. She had been fired from her last role for the same thing.

There were also reports of subway subs been left in the toilet bowl.

You also find the most curious items in the waste bins (they have no lid, we're not search through them - just to make that clear) everything from half eaten sandwiches to watermelon.

So it's done. I signed my new contract with my new company after I left my old job. Better contract level, better pay, better benefits (at my old office they didn't even give me a pc. I had to use mine..)..
But the sad/funny story is that my old boss do not talk to me anymore because he can't understand why I'm leaving..sooo mature!
I really don't care because actually he do not deserve anything from me, he's (and forever will be) an arrogant prig without humility.
The only regret is leaving the co-workers I bound with..but I'm sure we'll be in touch.
Yep.. maybe this is definitely a rant/story!
Wish me good luck for this new adventure!