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Interviewer: Welcome, Mr X. Thanks for dropping by. We like to keep our interviews informal. And even though I have all the power here, and you are nothing but a cretin, let’s pretend we are going to have fun here.
Mr X: Sure, man, whatever.
I: Let’s start with the technical stuff, shall we? Do you know what a linked list is?
X: (Tells what it is).
I: Great. Can you tell me where linked lists are used?
X:: Sure. In interview questions.
I: What?
X: The only time linked lists come up is in interview questions.
I:: That’s not true. They have lots of real world applications. Like, like…. (fumbles)
X:: Like to implement memory allocation in operating systems. But you don’t sell operating systems, do you?
I:: Well… moving on. Do you know what the Big O notation is?
X: Sure. It’s another thing used only in interviews.
I: What?! Not true at all. What if you want to sort a billion records a minute, like Google has to?
X: But you are not Google, are you? You are hiring me to work with 5 year old PHP code, and most of the tasks will be hacking HTML/CSS. Why don’t you ask me something I will actually be doing?
I: (Getting a bit frustrated) Fine. How would you do FooBar in version X of PHP?
X: I would, er, Google that.
I: And how do you call library ABC in PHP?
X: Google?
I: (shocked) OMG. You mean you don’t remember all the 97 million PHP functions, and have to actually Google stuff? What if the Internet goes down?
X: Does it? We’re in the 1st world, aren’t we?
I: Tut, tut. Kids these days. Anyway,looking at your resume, we need at least 7 years of ReactJS. You don’t have that.
X: That’s great, because React came out last year.
I: Excuses, excuses. Let’s ask some lateral thinking questions. How would you go about finding how many piano tuners there are in San Francisco?
X: 37.
I: What?!
X: 37. I googled before coming here. Also Googled other puzzle questions. You can fit 7,895,345 balls in a Boeing 747. Manholes covers are round because that is the shape that won’t fall in. You ask the guard what the other guard would say. You then take the fox across the bridge first, and eat the chicken. As for how to move Mount Fuji, you tell it a sad story.
I: Ooooooooookkkkkaaaayyyyyyy. Right, tell me a bit about yourself.
X: Everything is there in the resume.
I: I mean other than that. What sort of a person are you? What are your hobbies?
X: Japanese culture.
I: Interesting. What specifically?
X: Hentai.
I: What’s hentai?
X: It’s an televised art form.
I: Ok. Now, can you give me an example of a time when you were really challenged?
X: Well, just the other day, a few pennies from my pocket fell behind the sofa. Took me an hour to take them out. Boy was it challenging.
I: I meant technical challenge.
X: I once spent 10 hours installing Windows 10 on a Mac.
I: Why did you do that?
X: I had nothing better to do.
I: Why did you decide to apply to us?
X: The voices in my head told me.
I: What?
X: You advertised a job, so I applied.
I: And why do you want to change your job?
X: Money, baby!
I: (shocked)
X: I mean, I am looking for more lateral changes in a fast moving cloud connected social media agile web 2.0 company.
I: Great. That’s the answer we were looking for. What do you feel about constant overtime?
X: I don’t know. What do you feel about overtime pay?
I: What is your biggest weakness?
X: Kryptonite. Also, ice cream.
I: What are your salary expectations?
X: A million dollars a year, three months paid vacation on the beach, stock options, the lot. Failing that, whatever you have.
I: Great. Any questions for me?
X: No.
I: No? You are supposed to ask me a question, to impress me with your knowledge. I’ll ask you one. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
X: Doing your job, minus the stupid questions.
I: Get out. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
All Credit to:
http://pythonforengineers.com/the-p...89 -
Not only in my work, but in my life.
My biggest inspiration is the popcorn seller that patiently stays outside the subway exit, standing, every fucking day, from 4-5pm until 0-2am.
He stays until after the subway closes, and only leaves after everyone waiting for their Uber or their ride do.
In the rainiest day of the year, he was there.
In the coldest day of the year, he was there.
In the worst crisis of our country in the last decades, the region became temporarily infested by bandits and beggars. Sometimes I had to work overtime until 11:30pm and I had to be very cautious with all the robbers in the empty dark street. But guess who was there, sometimes calmly saying "get out, go work" to the bad elements bothering him?
I find it reallybfunny and refreshing when everyone is inside waiting for the rain to settle down, while he is standing in the middle of it. Or when I'm coming home really late, and he is still out there freezing cold.
There is no excuse for not doing your best. Life sucks sometimes, but there are no excuses. Just work hard, and laugh at the bad times.
Every time I saw him there, I thought "my day was hard, but I could've worked even harder". At the same time he made me feel better for having a better job, he inspired me not to bitch about any little things.
Then you might ask: "isn't he dumb to stay until 2am even though he is probably not getting any costumers after 11pm?" or "how can someone so unsuccessful be so inspiring?"
Well, I don't know. He just is.
Do almighty, genious people like Steve Jobs inspire me at work? Of course. More than this man? Certainly not.8 -
Working 160 hours of overtime in one month in order to help out our biggest client, and getting told only afterwards that company policy limits overtime compensation to 40 hours a month... My boss saw how much effort I was putting in, and could have warned me, but no...18
-
This week I quit the corporate life in favour of a much smaller company (60 people in total) and i never felt so good.
After 3 years in 2 big corporations, I began to hate coding mainly because of:
- internal political games. It's like living inside House of Cards everyday.
- management and non-tech people choosing tech stacks. Angular 4 + Bootstrap 4 alpha version + AG-Grid + IE11. Ohhh yeah. Not.
- overtime (even if it was paid double). I never did a single minute of OT for fixing something that I caused. I spent days fixing things caused by others and implementing promises that other people made.
- meetings. I spend 50-60% of the time in pointless meetings (I tracked them in certain time intervals) but the workload is same like I was working 8 hours / day.
- working in encapsulated environments without access to internet or with limited access to internet (no GitHub, no StackOverflow etc.)
- continuously changing work scope. Everyday the management wants something new introduced in the current sprint/release and nobody accepts that they have to remove other things from the scope in order to proper implement everything.
- designers that think they are working for Apple and are arguing with things like "but it's just a button! why does it take 2 days to implement?"
- 20 apps installed additionally on my phone (Citrix Receiver, RSA Token, Mobile@Work Suite etc.) just to be able to read my email
- working with outdated IDEs and tools because they have to approve every new version of a software.
- making tickets for anything. Do you want a glass of water? Open a ticket and ask for it.
- KPIs. KPIs everywhere. You don't deserve anything because the KPIs were not accomplished.
The bad part of the above things is that they affect your day-to-day personality even if you don't see it. You become more like a rock with almost 0 feelings and interests.
This is my first written "rant". If anyone is interested, I will post different situations that will explain a lot of the above aspects.13 -
One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.
I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.
No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.
The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.
The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.
Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.
Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.
Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.
Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.
Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.
Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.
We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.
Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.
The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.
Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.
Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.
I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.
But I worked support after the launch.
And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.
Back to support.
Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).
So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.
And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?7 -
*company introduces no overtime pay during coronavirus*
"I've hit my monthly hours so what we doing for the rest of the month?"
Boss: "basically, we thought you could work for free" 😂 😂11 -
Client: I need this *insert app/machine/thing* ASAP! No excuses!
*work overtime just to get it done*
*after 2 weeks of finishing it*
Me: So has the thing worked without issues?
Client: Oh, I haven’t even used it yet!
:/5 -
Manager: "If needed, are you willing to work overtime this month?"
Developer: "Yes. [ ... pause ... ] would you give me some over my salary for sometime?"
Manager: Yes, increment happens every 6 months.
Developer: "I am thinking beyond it".
Manager: "No, it is not possible"
Developer: "Okay"
** alarm clock vibrates **
Developer: "It is 5:00 PM now. I need to leave. See you on coming Monday at 9:00 AM sharp"
[Developer left]
Manager: "Byeeeee ... "2 -
Mgmt: We will need you to work on Saturday
Me: I'm afraid I can't, I have plans that cannot be rescheduled.
Mgmt: Then please call your coleague out of vacation. Treat this as super urgent.
Me: I do not feel comfortable calling him out as, as you know, he is on leave (family emergencies) and it is a weekend. I do not think it would be ethical to do so either.
Mgmt: *crickets chirping in my mailbox*
Me: *Updating my LinkedIn*6 -
Again I am unemployed, and now in a worse situation than before. In a country far from family, parents and everyone I know, just me and my wife and in a very difficult situation.
Summing up what happened was as follows:
My previous boss had a very horrible habit of being rude to everyone, yelling at the developers in the middle of the office and being rude whenever he could. And when he saw that we did not lose his composure and showed no fear he used the tightening of salary and employment to threaten us and do unpaid overtime.
Then he decided to yell at me, I asked him not to do this in the middle of the office that is not polite and everything else, he resigned me.
Since last year it's very difficult to find a good job, I'm not even talking about salary, I'm talking about a good job even where I earn some money to live in the least in humility but at least work with legal and educated people.15 -
I’m so mad I’m fighting back anger tears. This is a long rant and I apologize but I’m so freaking mad.
So a few weeks ago I was asked by my lead staff person to do a data analysis project for the director of our dept. It was a pretty big project, spanning thousands of users. I was excited because I love this sort of thing and I really don’t have anything else to do. Well I don’t have access to the dataset, so I had to get it from my lead and he said he’d do it when he had a chance. Three days later he hadn’t given it to me yet. I approach him and he follows me to my desk, gives me his login and password to login to the secure freaking database, then has me clone it and put it on my computer.
So, I start working on it. It took me about six hours to clean the database, 2 to set up the parameters and plan of attack, and two or three to visualize the data. I realized about halfway through that my lead wasn’t sure about the parameters of the analysis, and I mentioned to him that the director had asked for more information than what he was having me do. He tells me he will speak with director.
So, our director is never there, so I give my lead about a week to speak with her, in the mean time I finish the project to the specifications that the director gave. I even included notes about information that I would need to make more accurate predictions, to draw conclusions, etc. It was really well documented.
Finally, exasperated, and with the project finished but just sitting on my computer for a week, I approached my director on a Saturday when I was working overtime. She confirmed that I needed to what she said in the project specs (duh), and also mentioned she needed a bigger data set than what I was working with if we had one. She told me to speak to my lead on Monday about this, but said that my work looked great.
Monday came and my lead wasn’t there so I spoke with my supervisor and she said that what I was using was the entire dataset, and that my work looked great and I could just send it off. So, at this point 2/3 of my bosses have seen the project, reviewed it, told me it was great, and confirmed that I was doing the right thing.
I sent it off to the director to disseminate to the appropriate people. Again, she looked at it and said it was great.
A week later (today) one of the people that the project was sent to approaches me and tells me that i did a great job and thank you so much for blah blah blah. She then asks me if the dataset I used included blahblah, and I said no, that I used what was given to me but that I’d be happy to go in and fix it if given the necessary data.
She tells me, “yeah the director was under the impression that these numbers were all about blahblah, so I think there was some kind of misunderstanding.” And then implied that I would not be the one fixing the mistake.
I’m being taken off of the project for two reasons: 1. it took to long to get the project out in the first place,
2. It didn’t even answer the questions that they needed answered.
I fucking told them in the notes and ALL THROUGH THE VISUALIZATIONS that I needed additional data to compare these things I’m so fucking mad. I’m so mad.15 -
One of my previous managers would constantly make promises our team couldn't keep. "You want it in a week? Sure, we can finish it in a week! You want it tomorrow? Sure, we can do that!"
It got so bad that our team basically had to stage an intervention. At one of our standups, we flat-out told him that even if the entire team dropped all of our other tasks to focus on the one big project, we still would not be able to meet the deadline he'd promised the client.
And that fucker actually said, "Well, if you want to come in on the weekend to work some overtime, I don't mind." as if he was offering to do us a favor by "allowing" us to work more.
No overtime pay because we had salaries.
So glad I don't work for him any more. Of course, my next manager wasn't great either, it just took longer for us to figure it out because she wasn't nearly as blatant about it.7 -
I love it when companies expect you to care about their vision and act like the work is 100x more important than it is.
Oh yes and of course no overtime pay or decent salary that'd be too much!
😒😫🤯3 -
Not a dev job but one I quit.
The company had Windows 98 on all their computers and we had to use it for our daily activities. Being relatively young, I'd only used Windows 98 for a couple of years between the age of 5 and 8 and mostly for playing games.
The company was paying me overtime to stay late and familiarise with the OS.
Basically, they were willing to spend money to train employees to use an obsolete OS - what a bunch of idiots and poor decision-makers.
I left after three months because I could no longer cope with their nonsense.1 -
I've only experienced a quitting coworker once.
In a previous job a coworker quit with the words directed to the boss in a very loud and aggressive manner: "Ich künde, du verfiggti pissmorchle!!!"*, while throwing around office chairs and swearing all kinds of nasty stuff.
My boss at that time was indeed a fucking wanker. He exploited the shit out of every employee and expected from us that we work overtime for free. No pauses were paid, eventhough he'd had to by law.
I don't have to mention that he was a sexist fucktard and 3 female ex-employees sued him for sexual assault.
Sadly he is still in charge of that wanker company and he "miraculously" dodged every "bullet".
* trigger-safely and roughly translated to: "I quit, you fucking wanker!!!"7 -
I'm unbelievably angry. So please bear with my venting.
QA guy and I are stuck working the entire weekend. A few months ago our company decided to promote an account manager to a Product/Project management role with 0 experience and offering them 0 training. They have no experience working with devs and have been making our lives hell. I work easily 50-60hrs per week and they still budget projects according to 40hrs/week meaning they're stealing my time not to mention they're incorrectly setting the client's and company's expectations.
They now have complete control over roadmaps, client communications (this wouldn't normally be bad except that they're having technical discussions with the client with 0 tech experience), timelines, etc. and since their experience was in account management they are now working with devs but making decisions that exclusively put the client first at all costs, even if it means everyone else has to work weekends while they go on vacation!!!!
I've approached them several times to offer help on budgeting time or to propose that we do a Q4 planning so that we can improve the product instead of stay in a shitty position as we are. I'm responded with "You deal with what's in front of you. It's my job to look at the bigger picture."
They mismanaged a $500,000 project and our CEO got wind of it because the client called him while he was travelling. He in turn gave shit to our Directors who in turn chewed the QA guy and I out. "You need to be more meticulous when deploying. How could you let this happen? We're eating shit because of this. You need to work over the weekend to make up for this", etc.
I'm now directly responsible for having delivered something that wasn't up to standards even though I was already putting in the overtime.
This is honestly fucking ridiculous. How can I be blamed when I'm truly doing the best I can and putting as many hours as I can while edging toward burnout.
I love what I do but I hate feeling extremely pressured to turn down friends and family like this. Maybe I'm just too easy going and need to say no more. Who fucking knows. I know that I'm angry with the company right now.
What do you all think? If you read this rant, thank you. Feels better to write it out.13 -
Ask questions during interview.
Ask about trainings - it's usually a good sign when company offers training budget. Ask about specifics - sometimes it's a shared pluralsight account, and nothing else, which means that that had an idea and half assed it into existence.
Ask tech recruiter about overtime, a good sign is when they have no idea or say that it must be budgeted and scheduled - it means that it does not happen often.
Ask if it is possible to select and change projects, and how often it happens - if often, it may be bad low level management, or people learning new things and jumping between projects.
Also make sure to ask about rules for promotions and pay rises. Good company wił have a clear set of rules in place.
All of the above apply to mid to large companies.
For small company, i'm sure it will be different.3 -
Previous job:
- Every dev needs to connect to a remote server, and do the coding there because the bosses are afraid that we will "steal" their legacy spaghetti written by the CTO in 2006 (the current year was 2016-2017).
- There are no QAs, because "why do you devs need mommy to look after your codes?"
- Bosses think it's our duty to stay extra hours without overtime payment while talking bullshit about a culture that promotes work life balance. You receive no bonus for staying late, but if you leave work 15 minutes early, HR will have a serious talk with you the next day.
- Bosses require "evidence" when you submit a leave request. For example, you tell them you're taking a vacation, they'll ask you for a copy of airline tickets, hotel bookings, etc.
- Bosses spend a ton on hosting parties for the customers while we're using 6-7 year-old laptops
- The CEO loves firing people for ridiculous reasons. Once he considered firing a guy because the way he walks is funny11 -
I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.
Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.
I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.
No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.
The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."
Fuck Everyone.
Time to find a new contract.11 -
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
#rant
Instead of receiving a motivation in 2018, my boss decided to go anti mainstream and started with demotivation speech.
He started with how good we were last year even when he wasn't around. Well done team! But after that, it went downhill.
We were asked to work even harder, we got new policy (no unpaid leave, no paid overtime, minimum 40 hours working, etc) which some of them make sense and some don't, a specifically set break time (apparently to shut down smokers for smoking at random times), and warning for not being punctual.
And pay rise only after end of financial year.
To make it worse, we are not allowed to take naps or watch youtube on our desk on our breaks.
I seriously wonder what happened during his Christmas NY break. I'm not an entrepreneur so I have no idea if that is a right way to run a company or if Australia government just created new law. But surely I know this is when I say "New year, new company"7 -
So... Facebook canceled our plugin since we did not update it to newer version.
Fine.. I'm fine with that. There was no time for that since there's was some very very very fucking important projects, tasks and side requests requested by administration for customers that are actually not real customers since they don't pay or have a contract yet (or ever will!)
Administration... Wtf our plugin is not
working?! We are receiving complaints from (paying) customers!!
Me. Since you assumed the team leading and revoked my rights on leading the team we are doing shittttt work for non paying customer...
Administration... Resolve FB issue then do non paing customer work. Hum! bether otherwise.. No, otherwise. No. Do both ASAP
Me. Sure! It's Friday, I'm overtime already by 10h at lunch time,. So I'm fuck off outa here and pick up on whatever I'm keen to on Monday morning after guide the other colleagues on the crapp you dropped on them with your seagull managent!
This means I might start on Wednesday!
Xau3 -
TM: Hey, do you have a moment?
Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.
TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.
Me: Hmkay.
...
Later that day:
TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.
Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.
TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.
Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...
TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?
Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.
TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?
Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.
TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?
Me: Beginning of December, yes.
TM: Sigh.
Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...
TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.
Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.
...
Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...3 -
Applied for a company and received a contract today. I can't believe what I'm looking at. (Graduate software engineer)
- £30k starting salary
- 28 days annual holiday
- no benefits whatsoever
- no work schemes
- reserve the right to tell you to work overtime without extra pay
- reserve the right to work you from home on weekends in emergencies
- you will only work on what they tell you to and nothing else
This company has awful reviews all over the internet which I didn't see until after applying.
Going into their offices for interviews, all I saw was a bunch of slaves on their screens, no one talking, no one smiling.
Spoke to the CTO whose words were, quote: "we only care about making money, we don't care what people are saying about us as long as they are using our service and paying us."
What the actual fuck?15 -
this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.
I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.
There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.
There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.
Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.
I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.
I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.
I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.
And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.
I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.
I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.
My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.
On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.
I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.
I think I'm fucked25 -
By not having them. Seriously, every job I had was more than average paying and I was overqualified for the tasks. Sure I didn’t develop oh-so-important software but I never had to do overtime, lose sleep because of workplace difficulties.
Pick your fights well. This profession is unfair. No need to endanger yourself for idealism. -
Everyone's crying about big bad companies using innocent graduates by offering them a few non-paid internships. But when it comes to mgmt manipulating devs into non-paid overtime by questioning their estimates, noone sees a problem.
For fuck's sake, you are the devs, YOU and ONLY YOU can do tech estimates, not the mgmt. You are nothing close to a developer if you allow them to manipulate you like that. Just a dummy coder at best. A puppet with no backbone. An amoeba. You are DISGUSTING and a disgrace to developers' proffession.
Start acting proffessionally for once!!10 -
Most toxic work culture ?? oh boy where do I start.
Getting verbally abused and physical threats over bugs found in production.
All kinds of office politics going around where everyone openly admitted not liking others in other departments.
Your day's salary gets taken away if u are late by even 1 min. And no overtime pay and no you cannot say no to that either or end up getting laid off.
Company brags about giving their employees their salary on time.
Only the devs who have lasted more than 10 years in the company will be heard.
After so many job switches I managed to find one where I get to WFH and pretty much face no toxicity from others.8 -
Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!
Anyway, story and rant:
The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.
All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.
This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.
The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000
I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.
I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.
The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.
I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.
She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.
I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.
Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.4 -
The inevitable has happened:
"please make yourself available during the weekend for any request/question." ...
*sigh*7 -
Switched jobs one month ago.
Used to work overtime on complex features, every engineer was 10x, learned a bunch, worked my ass of everyday. Switch due to overtime and because I wanted more personal time.
Anyways, at the new job I’ve completed two tickets in a month, code is shit, no one cares about the quality, scalability, etc. I’m payed 2x more and I currently work max 3 hours a day. Feels weird AF. I guess I got what I wanted, but didn’t know back then that professionally I’m going to degrade. Didn’t happen yet, but I can see that in the future.
🤷🏻♂️8 -
Our project schedule is quite full at the moment, we are basically at the limit for the next three months.
In comes one of our sales people: "Hey, can we squeeze in a little project, nothing fancy just a very basic static web page." (No question mark there, it was not a question...)
I say no, we are full, the deadline is to tight (3 weeks), can't do it.
In comes boss: "Sure you can, just push everything else back." (We won't change deadlines, what he actually means is for us to do unpaid overtime for two months so he can barocke make a few thousand extra bucks...)
So I cave and allow it. It were just 4 hours of work, we can squeeze it in, maybe do a little less R&D this month.
Next day, the project scope changed, suddenly we are not taking about 4 hours but 80. Sure, we can squeeze two extra weeks into the month.
That is when I realized, I don't hate my work, just my work environment.4 -
!rant
I started my new position in Ireland about a month ago (relocated from Switzerland) and it‘s amazing how awesome life can be despite working full-time..
I have a 8-5 job, I usually get home around 6PM and have 6 hours left for myself every evening.. no calls, mails or similar after I leave the office.
Im actually not allowed to do overtime..
Everyone in the company is super nice and the Irish people are so incredibly welcoming and are happy to help if you need something..
So thankful right now..11 -
Performance Review: You’ve slowed down.
My head: I never get to code cause all we do is meetings. Like no shit I have slowed down. Why the fuck do we have 3 days just full of meetings that I don’t even contribute to ?! I’m not gonna do overtime for this shit
Me (actually): Ah, shucks! Guess we can work on that huh?32 -
Quitting my last job. I had been there for about 3 years and had a great time there.
It was only my boss and I, we were developing software and websites for events so we were quite often out meeting and partying with people, it kinda became a part of the job. We had a fridge always stacked with beer and champagne which was for us and our friends to use. The office was located in the middle of the most exclusive business and club district in the city, so I could use the office as I wanted during evenings to meet up with friends and drinking beer.
But it was expected to work a lot of overtime. I was single and young and really liked what I was doing so I didn't mind. But then I met the love of my life and started to spend more time with her. I couldn't stay and work as often and would rather be with her on weekends.
It became quite hard to live up to my boss's expectations and it always felt like I disappointed him if I didn't (or couldn't) stay for an after work, and when I did, it felt like I disappointed my new girlfriend instead.
Ultimately I felt I had to choose one of them, or I would definitely loose her. It was a no-brainer since I knew I couldn't keep working like that forever, and didn't want to risque a relationship because of work.
It took all of my courage to do it and I felt so bad because I knew my boss (and my friend) would feel like I betrayed him, but I knew it was the right thing to do.
I can still miss it sometimes, but I don't regret it.3 -
I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.
Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).
(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)
1.4 hours after regular work hours:
Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.
.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.
Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.
Me: [ugh] okay
.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.
Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?
Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.
Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.
Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...
Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.
Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.
Logged off.
I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.35 -
My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.
Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.
Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.
- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.
- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)
- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.
- Feedback is consistently ignored.
- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.
- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.
- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.
This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:
- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.
- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.
- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)1 -
Manager: Can you stay late as fuck today? One of our bitchiest vendors is gonna update their piece of crap and I'm pretty damn sure shit is gonna hit the fan
Dev (inner voice): no fucking way, I have kids to watch and chores to do!
Dev (outer voice): can't we just check everything in the morning?
Manager: No fucking way! If there is some fucking "challenge" when our "people" try to log onto their shit, I'm gonna look like a chump!
Let's talk silvers, I will sign on that bloody commie bullshit for your hours tonight.
Dev (outer voice): Fine. Until how late?
Dev (inner voice): Wait, I was supposed to do it without getting overtime bonus?5 -
On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================
Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.
2 -
Our boss did always the same thing. When there was a BIG potential customer who indicates a small interest in our software, then he lied constantly about features. After the customer bought our software we got a deadline and should develop the missing features. I could remember two features: The first one was a quote tool for a car transport company. The tool should estimate a price for a transportation from an email with no structure and the other one was an API which should be possible to write dynamicly to MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, MSSQL, DB2, Mongo or better said any possible dbms. The API should guess the structure of the dbs and offer CRUD actions. The funny thing is must write the api with go. Yeah dynamic and GO.
At some time, we told him we wont make any overtime and if the deadline is not possible we told that immediatly the customers, so that they call him. Thank god I don't work anymore in this company.1 -
After like half of a year crunch, when I was working 10-12 hours a day and no one was paying for overtime I was finally moved to next project. We are working in a field where everyone is completely new to it, except me BUT I didn't admit to that. I complete tasks faster while taking remaining time back!
-
I'm in the process of changing jobs and at the point where I need to sign the contract with the new company.
The concern I have is that of work life balance. There is a clause that obviously speaks to overtime and renumeration thereof, etc. But, there is also a clause that mentions that their office hours extend to Saturday mornings.
Speak to my wife about it and all I get is "That's how it is in your industry. I know of my other programmer friends who work late and long hours, so the fact that you don't currently work overtime seems very rare."
I don't think it's rare nor should it be the normal to have to constantly work extra hours. This is not a thing of being lazy or not dedicated to your job, but rather that you put in the time that is required and that alone should be enough to show your "dedication" to the job. Personally I feel that if you're fucking there everyday, giving your best, and you leave at the end of the day, no questions asked, that it is good enough!
3 -
!dev
A child's mind is fascinating.
I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.
Things were magical, mystical and happy.
I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.
But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.
And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.
I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.
I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.
From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.
When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.
"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".
I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.
My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.
The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.
It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.
Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.
Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.
I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).
I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.
I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.
It was dreamy.
Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.
So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.
I started to get annoyed at the game.
"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"
At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.
Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.
And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.
And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:
I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.
(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).
That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.
A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.
and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid
you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy
you get attached
that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.
Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.
and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts17 -
So at this startup i was single iOS dude age 34, android had 1.5 dudes, one older, one you ger. That 0.5 younger was tech director, really good, so they churned for two guys. Millenial, nice guy, never making conflict, just being sleazebag.
Nobody explained to boss why iOS was always late with features, even when i complained. So i got help, 10 months later, project was unpolished but stable, codewise. Now i interview and hire a guy, age 27, who was all yeah dude no problem, and that being my first interview, i fell under his friendly appearance. I ignored a fact that he didn’t know 90% of stuff i was asking him, because he was so friendly and outgoing and we will do anything attitude.
The guy knew very little, was childish and irresponisble. He showed at work at noon. He started telling me what to do, his senior collegue who started the project. He argued about everything that i would tell him. So i spent three to four hours a day charting with him, because we were in different cities. He had two uears of experence, but he was below junior level. And he refused any of my advices for learning in free time. No, he said, thats my free time, you will not tell me what to do. Well, how do you plan on being better, i asked. He said, i learn by doing. But, since he was at his job only six hours a day, instead of eight, and since he was productive only for 2, i guess he was lazy.
He would deliver a UI he would make, without business logic, and tell it is done. Then clients would call me and ask why text fields are not saved..
This all took me month to understand. I lost time, i lost trust, and soon he was fired.
But, soon i was fired also, replaced by another two devs who i had interviewd and formed a team. I was discarded as trash, just like that. I have even worked overtime to catch up with android guys, unpaid.
Took me year to recover mentally from this.
Lessons learned: be objective when interviewing. Job is business, not friendship, trust no one, keep neutral on work. Leave honesty for someone else, honesty will be used against you. Never criticize two girls in office who disturb developers by talking about sex and dicks all the time, dressed sexy, they are girlfriends of people ranked above you. Leave code perfection for your projects.3 -
I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.
"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.4 -
New boss gets us to work overtime, all weekend and till 9pm. Promising that we will get that time back.
We get the project through the door. His KPI looks great to his boss. He then slithers his way around hints about this time back. Someone confronted him today and he says he can't officially recognise the over time due to company policy. The fucker.9 -
This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.
I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.
First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).
The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.
And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...
And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).
Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.
- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."
But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.
-
* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.
** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.
*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.
**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA2 -
I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??
What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔
I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.
So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.
To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦♀️🤦♀️
So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.
Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.
Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.
Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.7 -
I have been sick for a week now. All I needed was one day of rest. But no, can't rest on the week days because I work late. Can't rest on weekends because work fucking calls me for retarded tasks that they are just too fucking lazy to do themselves.
Look gobknob, I understand you're not paying me overtime. Fuck you for that. But to deny me a day off because "we are too busy" and you can clearly see I'm fucking falling around due to illness is just a shit move.
"no doctors note, no time off". Yeah. You don't give me time to go to the doctor.
So you know what I did? I fucking went to the doctor now. Said I'm sick as a dog. Gave me a few days off too.
I should have asked him to prescribe my director a butternut sized suppository that cures all "I'm a shithead" ailments.
Time to try and turn my phone off for a few days (won't work. "oh no! We hired fuck twits who can't do their job, and now our skilled dev is sick" director "FUCKING PHONE HIM" this shit really happens.).
Excuse my grammar, my spelling, and possibly my punication. Time to sleep after 65 hours.4 -
When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.
It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.
The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.
I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.
Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.
I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.2 -
So...Just got moved from salaried to hourly for an already extremely overworked, underpaid position. Lost our flexible hours and our platform is moving to drop and drag...Watch them say no overtime now. Beyond pissed!😡1
-
Working on photo contest site, no design, no specification. 2 weeks until deadline.
CEO: Deadline is one week earlier, and client wants to have video uploads and automatic facebook share too.
Me: We don't even have a contract and design to work with yet.
CEO: No worries, the contract will be signed by the time you finished the website.
Site done in 1 week, including weekend days and overtime. Production on client's server as asked by CEO.
3 weeks later...
Me: So van you pay the overtime I worked?
CEO: Sorry client not payed and says they don't like the end product. I can't afford to pay you overtime.
2 days later.
CEO: The online department is lossy so you have to work harder in the next month, we have 3 sites to be done.
Me: Do we have the contracts?
CEO: No worries...4 -
I saw a rant about overtime or staying late if your boss is still at the office.
It's the same in a(lmost all i think) Japanese Company.
9:00-18:00 work schedule.
Come in earlier than your boss before actual work schedule.
Go home after your boss after the actual work schedule.
There's no more work to be done and they think you going home early weren't doing enough work and shit.
Good think i left that company.3 -
It's fucking never worth it, to be decent to colleagues. I got prove of that just this evening. Sorry, this rant will be a bit longer.
A colleague of mine inherited some legacy project that I worked on in the past. He clearly hates working on it. And tbh. I can't blame him for it. It's not very fun. He also makes virtually no effort to become more proficient in it.
This usually leads to him calling for my aid, whenever any problem arises, that would require any kind of effort to solve. I would normally cave in and help him. Mostly due to the fact, that without any intervention from me, it would end on my desk sooner or later.
That changed in the last few months, as I simply couldn't make free time to help him. anymore. I was working overtime and the associated project barely got done on time. During that time I would, as politely as possible, deny him. He knows fully how stressful the project was getting.
Today he asked for help again. I denied again, as a task was due very soon. He didn't reply to my message afterwards. After a few hours suddenly I got a bunch of his jira issues assigned to me.
The motherfucker simply shoved _all_ of his support issues to me. Not only that, he also assigned the issue he was asking for help for earlier as well. All without consulting me or anything. Then he pissed of into his vacation.
Some of his support issues have been created last year! And they are still not solved. He simply isn't replying to questions in those issues or just assigns them to others colleagues without any instructions.
Fuck him. Other colleagues don't even respond to him anymore. He fully fucking knows that I have a tight deathline on my current task. And still he chose to dump all his work on me, so that I have to waste time to reassign it and report it to our superior.
Fuck him for creating more stress in this already stressful situation. Enjoy your vacation you fucking leech. I will have quite a "nice suprise" waiting for you, when you return.15 -
I did it. I finally fucking did it.
After a year of anxiety, entire months of wasted time, bashing my head against the wall trying to solve stupid issues that should not have been there in the first place, and learning a lot of stuff for the first time, I have finally finished my first real project.
All I have left is to polish up some documentation and then ship it. And then I will actually get paid for the first time.
There are no words to describe the joy of seeing all the pieces falling into place and the project coming to life.
Now, how do you tell a client that you went overtime as fuck?5 -
The level of desire to give my boss a positive klap right now is too damned high.
Cunt flies us across the country to work 4-5 hours of unpaid overtime every day for a week to fix his Royal fuck up, some of my guys decide they gonna take the later uber into work cuz we gonna grab a run or an extra hours sleep cuz we fucking tired after a 13 hour day and this is the shit we get:
No wonder they call it Slaapstad 😜 - guys, no later than 8am at the office please so we can make a collective start.2 -
I'm going to start searching for a new job next month. I was let go from my current one because my co-workers were putting in 60~80 hours per week and I was only putting in 40 (plus one 13 hour weekend, which we were paid for. I refused to work the next Sunday and was let go two days later. We were salary exempt; no overtime).
When interviewing this fall, I do intend to list a 40 hour work week as something I'm looking for, but what do I say about my current employment status?
This has only happened once in the past; years ago. I simply said "My contract ended" at the time, and I got a job really quickly so it wasn't an issue.
When a potential employer asks, do I say I was let go because I couldn't keep up with the two months of 60~80 hour work weeks, or do I simply say, "My contract ended." (A little bet of a stretch since I was an FTE, but a work agreement is technically a contract and it technically did end).5 -
At a previous job, boss & owner of company would waste hours of my time to show me, at his own desk, every small detail of some random feature he had fallen in love with on some random webpage he found, while saying "I don't want to disrupt your plans or anything, this is just something to keep in the back of your minds, as this would be a really nice thing to have, even tho none of the clients have asked for this and I have asked no one else for a second opinion, and I will most likely ask you to remove this feature in the future because I will finally have realized it wasn't that good an idea anyway."
Ok dipshit, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this information? Every week from this moment on you will ask whether we have found the time to implement this feature, even though you are fully aware that our schedule has no room for random, unplanned features and that we are already not able to meet the unreasonable deadline you pulled out of your ass two weeks into a development process that would end up taking 8+ months.
We are already overworked, we already work hours upon hours of unpaid overtime, and yet you still think it reasonable to pull us away from our work every other fucking day to talk about random extra features you want added, but don't want added to the roadmap because you want no delays... Fuck you, fuck your toxic attitude, fuck your meetings where you spend half an hour complaining about features we are still in the process of developing the backend functionality for (on test servers) not having the right font colour for the text, and fuck your legacy desktop software originally written in COBOL that you now want moved to "the cloud".
I would rather be unemployed and live as a hobo on the streets with a "will code for food" sign than work for you ever again. -
Have you ever argue with a developer who:
+ have the same level as you
+ on the same position in the company
+ in the same team
+ OLDER than you
+ thinks their code is the best
A few years back, a coworker and I argue about how to implement a feature. I proposed an approach. He proposed a different one. I immediately saw some problems and told him. But hell no, he defended his idea so strongly that I just gave up since I will leave the company soon.
2 weeks later, when the sprint was about to end, the whole team had to work overtime to fix the mess because of his terrible approach.7 -
Got this in Slack from the owner of the firm I work for...
I mean, you already pay me half of the average salary I should be making, but yeah, let me get right on that...
To be fair, I work with this guy because he is a really good guy to work for, is very hands-off (no micro-managing), doesn't expect me to work on the clock or any overtime and lets me make all the calls with our directions in development. Plus he pays me all he can afford, so it's not like he's trying to screw me (he shares the books with me to prove it).
But still, the dude has to realize you get what you pay for. You don't go to McDonalds if you want a gourmet burger...
2 -
Most incompetent worker?
I had this coworker who doesn’t do jack shit in the morning shift (10am - 12nn).
Taking long breaks, like staying at cafeteria and chatting. Always on company IM talking about gossips. Reading manga online and shit.
I wouldn’t be complaining about that if this coworker can deliver. But no! Only has to do 1 module, it took almost a month for this person to finish. Always doing overtime without an ounce of progress. Siphoning the budget of the project. Everyone on our team were doing overtime trying to deliver function after function, modules after modules. Every other parts were finished except this person’s task. Took over it, done for a week. Told my project leader, transfer this person or you’ll see other core members leaving.
Person got transferred. Everyone felt like they had a massive load off their shoulder.2 -
Everyone leaving early on Wednesday and you realize that it's not weekend but just No overtime working day.
#welcome #to #japan
Weekend still 2 days away.1 -
Got a new job a couple days ago, cleaning cars at a dealership. One of my friends works there doing the same and he told me I should apply.
The hourly rate isn't much more than I was making at McDonald's, but I have very consistent hours now. I'm only scheduled for 35 hours a week, but normally we don't get out on time. On Friday we didn't get out until an hour after I was scheduled to leave, so chances are I'll get overtime here.
Basically all I wanted in a job was to have consistent hours. Come in at 2, leave at 8, rinse and repeat. McDonald's was basically, come in at 4, leave at 10, maybe stay until 11. Next day you're coming in at 7 and closing, next day you normally work but now you don't. Just very inconsistent, and basically no chance at full time unless you're a manager's favorite.
I like the new job, I get to drive nice cars and clean them, and that's basically it. I got to drive a car that's the same model as my mom's car, but 7 years newer (she has a 2011, the one I drove was a 2018). Even got to drive the exact model of the car that hit me a few months ago (same year too).
I've never been a huge car guy, but I really like it there. There's just something very satisfying about driving a brand new car. Also, at McDonald's I wasn't allowed to have a beard. At the new job they don't give a shit, as long as I work.3 -
When applying for your first ever job, which of the following is/are/can be acceptable?
- Bad company culture
- Slavery pay
- Bad location
- No benefits (health care, etc.)
- No coffee/free snacks
- Long working hours/Lot of overtime work
- (Other)
🙄😐4 -
Regain work life balance.
The last few years especially with COVID I've started to do way to much for the company's I've worked for. Working while I was coughing my lungs out when I had COVID. Working during my holiday because it was finally a fun feature to develop. Working in lunch breaks because people would call me all the time (remote there are no boundaries)
I left that company on a good note, started actually healthy as the new company actually understands flex working. However as I gained responsibly more meetings started to appear also causing rushed lunches no more walks of sport activities. Than I was lead in a project and because of some personal circumstances (death in the family) that was running long. Again started to work overtime trying to catch up.
I need to stop doing this. Caring is fine but I just give to much when I feel responsible. Good thing is that my current company actually wants to help me with this.1 -
Heh promotion? I only get fake promotion..
For two years, I was doing so many *free* overtime, manager is a big liar, he said that it will he considered on the yearly evaluation.. cool, the thing is there is no evaluation at all, just lying and lying.
Few months ago I took a vacation of 1 month (I am expatriate so I get one vacation per year, my home town is too far..) I talked to tye manager about salary taise and he said absolutely we will talk after I get back..
He called me during my vacation to do some urgent (as always) work, I worked about 5 days, and for free.
After I get back to work, he was angry about my *attitude* that I wasn't available more time.. oh and there was no fucking raise. always lying..
In this country, if you're an expatriate so you can travel outside the country without the validation of the employer (yeah like that) and the notes period is about 3 months, what makes very hard to find another job, no one will wait for 3 months, unless you vanish during a vacation.
So, why didn't I gave my resignation? well, life is hard when you have unemployed wife and a little baby, and the pay is, let's say OK comparing to costs here.
I am charged to learn and work with another language and framework, and when I asked for a raise they said no, so I will stop working in this language and let's see..
The problem is that other employees in thus company are literally bitches, they don't say no to anything, so I am the special guy here who does not a blowjob..
So, what do I do? I am hunting for a new job since a while but no luck.4 -
On the roof of my friends house. On new years eve.
The party was too noisy for me to hear the client over the phone, so I was milling around the appertment until I no longer heard the noise.
Sat down, took laptop from backpack, solved issue, wished client a Happy New Year.
Packed in laptop. Stood up, realised I had somehow wandered out of the appartment and up onto the roof.
Sat down again. Vertigo.
Opened the laptop again, sending the client the bill at 500% overtime rate.
At least the fireworks were pretty.2 -
I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.
But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.
And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.
People treat me like the adult that I am.
I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.
I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen. -
Our team (devs and QAs) have been doing a series of overtime work.
So, the company has provided us a place to sleep. Everyday, we would go to work at 10AM and then return to our place to rest at 12 midnight (sometimes at 2AM).
We've been doing this for a week now and we'll resume again tomorrow.
I already feel exhausted, and I was thinking of resigning after all of this mess was over.
However, I am having second thoughts. Since this is my first job, I have no point of comparison.
Perhaps a series of overtime like this one is normal? Is this type of work environment to be expected when being a developer? Or am I selling my self short and there are better options out there? What do you devs think?12 -
Product owner and scrum master prioritized a not important user story. We are just new to the assigned team without proper turn over, KT, vague user story(one sentence) and no time to prepare our local environments. Then after sprint 1 the client wants a demo by next month but the PO and SM had prioritized the wrong user story so now they are pressuring the developers on finishing fast the other correct important user story. They mismanaged it and now they say the development was slow thus blaming us?! WTF. We hit the deadline of the first user story with unpaid overtimes.
The other PO was always asking us on how to fast track the development lol.
I'll tell them all their faults in the next meeting. As usual we are just high paid corporate slaves with golden hand cuffs trying to escape the rat race.5 -
So... concerning the rant on here: https://devrant.com/rants/4299469/...
I'm making my comment as a separate rant because the thread from the original rant was too long and also slowly deviated outside context.
"Why has the rate of female developers reduced overtime?".
Here is my take:
It's natural and I'll explain why I think so...
During my computer science school days we had seventy two (72) males compared to just twelve females (12) in class. The girls could compete in theoretical grounds but when it comes to real coding they were no where near.
This boils down to the passion for programming as a real world subject. In programming you feel rewarded when you "fix a bug" and you're filled with pride when you "learn a new language". This reminds us of the scientific research of boys being more attached to reward engaging activities, most times for bragging rights while for the girls they'd prefer compassionate activities where they can easily be noticed, but unfortunately enough in programming "you only notice yourself".
We can clearly see the mode of career options in our world today...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interfering with people (Compassionate reward)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Front desk officer... Female populated
* Support personnel... Female populated
* Nurse... Female populated
* Flight attendant... Female populated
* Childcare workers... Female populated
* Preschool/KG Teachers... Female populated
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interfering with things (Intrinsic reward)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Engineer... Male populated
* Electrician... Male populated
* Welder... Male populated
* Carpenter... Male populated
* Programmer... Male populated
From the list you'd notice females prefer jobs that are compassionate in reward, require minimal physical activities and also able to make them easily recognisable.
On the other list, male populated jobs are intrinsic in reward, physically inclined, working more with things than with people.
Now seeing the clearer picture, we could sincerely say this is nature at its finest because we have here a balance. Females are kid bearers and we shouldn't be surprised that they are more compassionate to people than with things. Males have more pride than compassion which is needed to protect a family and this indirectly affects their choice of selection.
In reality...
Females are more attracted to Males with pride.
Males are more attracted to Females with compassion.
I would say, it's all the doings of nature affecting our unconscious career options while we seek to find our purpose in life.29 -
I've been trying for the last 3 months to land my first development job. I have a good (over 3 years) amount of experience, but no industry experience and no degree. So it's been a uphill battle. Currently working at a call center making garbage and most of my time and energy is invested into this. Currently am not mobile so most of my money is being geared towards that. It's just frustrating to see all these over glorified job postings that ask so much for just entry levels. I haven't even gotten a damn interview, I feel like in houston it's either you have a degree or you are not even considered for just a fucking interview. If I can get at least one they will be able to see my drive, persistence and skills that have been developed overtime. And fuck recruiters, have been interfacing with them over linkedin and not one of them seemed eager (initially yes) to land me an interview. Most of these fucks don't even fucking understand the technology or buzzwords that are on the job posting. If I were a recruiter I would at least put a little research into what the different technologies are so the process will seem less abstract. The tech will have more meaning and maybe I would be able to get a better success rate with clients if I knew what was really required of them. Not just looking at xyz and seeing if client has experience with them, but really see if they know what they are; that way I will have more confidence sending them into an interview. But of course that's not how it works. "Oh yeah Java and javascript are very similar"... get the fuck out of here.13
-
Asked to do overtime so I do. Everyone has gone home and now it's time for me to go home, so I go to leave the office to find the gate padlocked. I'm stuck. There is a side gate for cars that has a security code but I have no idea what that code is. So I end up waiting around and stalk the cleaners car out of the gate 'sigh'.5
-
I'm on hourly rate and there are no more overtime for us in my company.
It's overtime if I work more than 40 hours a week. I guess I am off at 16:00 even if our servers are burning. How did you month go?1 -
Last day of our current Indian offshore dev. Talked with her about an issue we had, being aware that it was about her closing time.
She actually offered to put in additional time. Asked her not to do that, I'd figure things out with her successor, and asked her to enjoy her well-deserved long Indian weekend.
Me to my PM: we're chaotic, but we aren't assholes. He smiled. :)8 -
Working hours basically never end.
Pair that with a very tight schedule and you have the perfect recipe for working from 9AM until 1:30AM everyday including weekends (what are those again?)3 -
So I'm in a scenario I'm uncomfortable, need some encouragement from fellow devRanters. (Looong post)
I've been working at this startup for about 10mths (since I graduated). They have been really good to me since the start, and overlooked some fuck ups I did at first.
But now I've been way more experienced , picked it up really quick. And I've basically redesigned several of their admin solutions and data products. Also, I'm basically their entire data analysis team now. I do backend (node, PHP, MySQL) and analysis for them (stats, deep learning, python, big data packaging for clients).
But seeing as I've moved in their company, and have been consulted on several major decisions, as well as built a really good relationship with some of their clients. I still haven't seen a raise, moreover I've been told that I'm expected to work from 8am to 5:30pm (9.5hrs no overtime pay). Which really pisses me off, since I know I'm worth more than what I'm paid (about 40k a year).
My brother (who's also a dev) suggested to tell them that I'm not happy at work due to this. And quit if they don't react well.
How should i bring this up? Should I really quit? This is all new grounds.6 -
I feel like shit for arguing against my boss who tried to force me into overtime without pay…
I get that I did it for my own good, but I still feel annoyed af for having to do it in the first point. I hate arguing about stuff but this needed to be done, asking to work for free after your employee already gave you an extra hour for free is just… being greedy assholes.
And yet I feel discomfort. I hate so much this situation.2 -
What is it about clients that provokes them to ask about the same feature every day? No, it’s not fucking done yet, I don’t have a team of devs under me who work overtime to finish it overnight. It’s not going to get done any faster if you keep fucking bothering me about it.
-
This project is just a complete clusterfuck... But nvm. We had to integrate a third party service pushing data into our system. Btw the service wasnt even working correctly. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Its friday around lunch time. Message appears "what is the status of the integration?" Yeah havent started working on it. Last info was service is not stable. I doubt that this will be done this week. Next message from PO: "We will all push hard to get this done today and deploy to prod." Why? Because this dumbasses said to the customer this will be deployed eod. And by we you mean the devs once again doing overtime. Has this shit stopped? No. Like for the last two weeks its like we promised the customer xyz to be deployed tomorrow. Not a single dev was asked how long it takes to add this3
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First thing is quite simply no overtime, I never EVER work overtime, you get my 8/9 hours a day, where I do work and that is it.
However, as dev's our minds never really shut off from 'coding' so if there are any bugs or complex issues, those most often get resolved when I am out for my run or cycle. -
The 3 stages of spontaneous overtime:
1. Resentment:
Fuck this job and fuck everyone.
2. Acceptance:
I guess it's not their fault, I'll just have to crack on..
3. Resentment... -
Yes, i do overtime. But not to get extra pay. I do overtime to finish projects early so i can get enough time on weekend to spend it with my loved ones.
No sudo code help you feel better if you are sick. Spend time with one you love and care about. -
During the interview I was told that overtime will be paid. I'm working on a project which requires a lot of overtime so we can meet deadline. I was told that there is no budget for overtime.
I have also done 50 hours of overtime so that means 50 hours of overtime will not be paid to me.9 -
The company I'm contracted to have just realised they're a tad behind with product delivery after the Development Manager and his second in command left. Leaving two contractors and one junior member of staff to deal with the backlash of "wtf is going on with x product why is it not delivered?".
Company: "Ok we're going to need to do overtime, you guys will be willing to work overtime on weekend and nights, right?"
Me: "What's the rate?"
Company: "It's day rate is that going to be an issue?"
Me: *mutes phone to pmsl*
Company: "We're all up against it so we all have to help out"
Me: "Not interested in a day rate for overtime, thanks"
Company: "Your holiday you have booked in two weeks time, can it be moved?"
Me: *laughs* "No I won't be cancelling my holiday to work"
Company: *salty as fuck now* "Well the question needed to be asked"
Me: "I'm not cancelling a holiday I have paid for to make up for a lack of planning"
I come in the office today and Mr Company has fucked off on a three week holiday!1 -
To my boss who thinks is ok to message somebody:
- On his/her day off
- On Saturday
- On a Sunday morning
Of course all was related to business as usual stuff no real emergency stuff nor that would have impacted anyone waiting till Monday morning.
Of course no overtime nor on call here and been blamed due my ‘flexible’ schedule (read arriving at 09:15 rather say 09:00) but of course out of office hours work or having to deal with hot projects no one was able to deliver does not count...
Talking of true leadership10 -
At a salary of $11/hour, no overtime, is a junior web developer with no previous experience and no personal project undervalued?25
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Fucking fucks that look over your fucking shoulder and tattle on you to fucking management, instead of having a pair and talking to me about it. Apparently checking a phone is a no no.. I'm on overtime this week and I have this stupid kindergarten horseshit to deal with.. FUCKING FUCKERS1
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Life of an tech lead.
Hire a candidate with little to no experience in relevant technology - > train said resource - > resource becomes productive - > plan enhancements as work load can be shared. - > resource switches projects or firm - > goto step 1 and overtime to complete enhancements. FML1 -
"We follow the AGILE methodology."
A fancy way to say :
- We mostly work on tight deadlines.
- We will come with last second changes.
- We have little/no overtime payement policies.
- We will ask you to do basically anything even if you said explicitly that you don't know how to do it.2 -
Just delivered most difficult project I had so far, despite all issues managed to deliver (on time). Had help from team but some colleagues only contributed with "I'll tell X and Y to do it".
Told my manager it was really hard for me and sometimes I had to work some hours in the weekends, once even entire weekend with no extra pay, just to meet deadlines.
My manager just told me in my performance review that I didn't deliver on time and compared me to the UX designer that delivers Figma designs on time for like 8 projects and never has to work overtime. I guess dev work is the same as Figma design around here.
Then manager proceeded to tell me that he wants what's best for me.
Safe to say no raise this year.6 -
As a frelancer: Many fucking meetings, last minute request, clients/bosses thinking days last 10 hours and no way to prove overtime other than work. Sometimes, you are even punished with less money for being efficient.
Be an asshole, sign a contract with a budget, get paid start and end, respect yourself more than you respect your clients. Clients are assholes until proven otherwise.3 -
## Reasonable answers needed ##
If you always work free and forced overtime, and you didn't get any salary raise fir a while. and then you asked to learn and work with new language and framework you didn't work with it before, you would prove yourself and learn it or you would ask for a raise first (or you simply you won't work do it)?
Context: fucked up market, no other job founded. and father.12 -
!rant
Long time no rant..
Although work is way too much and stressful, things are actually not too bad at all..back to the office (voluntary), got back into to a routine, got a raise way below what it should be, lots of "off the books" overtime that I'll never be able to compensate, but.. still not to bad at all.. feeling better than I have for the last couple of years.. 👌 -
I have been asked to submit an explanation since i didnt complete the work on friday as well as not using saturday to complete it .
I only got into this particular project after the working hours which was 6 pm and worked until 9 pm on friday. Extra 3 hours was for the some apis for pdf generation and mail. ( i do front and back according to situation).
I was too tired from multitasking all weekdays..
(no overtime pay. I work like atleast 9-10hrs regulary without including lunch )
.The remaining work is frontend arrangements. Yeah forgot one things. 2 months salary pending.
I need some judgements12 -
Hey guys,
I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.
Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.
Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.
However there are some cons:
My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.
Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.
Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?
They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.
All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"
What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.
On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.
Any thoughts?6 -
When you spend the whole fucking day waiting for a colleague to finish something that is blocking the whole team.
He finally finishes at 5:30pm and goes to home.
I just left work at 9pm.
He's a nice guy but gosh he can be slow sometimes.5 -
So I'm assigned once again to fix a new someone else created and that seems to be the case whenever there's an issue...
Boss just assigns it to whoever is most likely to be able to investigate it... which is basically me. Other than the little time I can use to develop stuff, I'm usually cleaning up other people's messes.
And these other people are to busy working on new crap to properly explain how their existing code/processes/changes works.
And well the fact that anything breaks in production (that's not due to upstream one off issues) whoever does not think he needs to take responsibility for it.
So everyone else and especially me has to spend time understanding the shit they wrote and fixing it for them.
How do I tell my boss this nicely that we need clearly definitely ownership and whenever a component blows up in prod, the guy that wrote the code fixes it no matter what? Thereby incentivizing him to not write shit code in the first place and be more proactive in making sure it doesn't in the first place since he knows otherwise he's doing overtime to fix it?
Is it just me or is there really no such thing as a dev job where something doesn't blow up due to poorly tested and designed code every other day?3 -
It's pretty hard to work with relatives in the family. They expect too much from you. More overtime work, no or less pay, demands are somewhat unrealistic because they want their project on top priority and the list goes on. 🤔1
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Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :
Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):
1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india
Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):
1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it
2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech
3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.
4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.
4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him
5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster
Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?3 -
Whenever I see the name @CoffeeBoy come up I think to myself:
-Umm hey I think we just ran out of coffee,
-Aw shit and we are working overtime till we finish.
-Are you thinking what I'm thinking ?
-Are you thinking about how good it would be to be a cat.
-Uuh no why do you want to be a cat ?
-Well duuh cat's sleep all day. It's great !
-They also live for only 15 years so I would think in total you will sleep more than cats do.
-You like to ruin things for me don't you.
-I call it productive refactoring. But getting back on topic. I hear we have a new intern ?
-Yeah, that's Jim over there.
-Well lets tell him to get us coffee.
-Oh yeah that's a good idea, because interns already have the bare minimum of expectations from their life anyways !
-Hey Jim, yeah you Jimmie buddy can you get us a few cups of coffee we really need those to stay functioning right now.
-Yeah sure, what do you need.
-George drinks cappuccino, you can get me whatever. Thanks man here is the money. Buy yourself a cup too it's on me.
-Oh thanks.
*Jim walks out of the room*
30 minutes has passed...
-Dude where is Jim at ? It shouldn't be that hard to get 3 cups of coffee from just a few blocks away.
-I hope he didn't get robbed or something he has MY money on him.
*22 minutes ago, jim walks out of the coffee shop carrying the 3 cups securely held under his arm *
-I thought he was just gonna use me as an errand boy or a coffee boy to be exact in this case. But it's nice of him to also pay for my cup. Maybe they are not such bad--
His sentence got cut off by the sudden impact with a metal surface at high velocity. He got hit by a car while he was crossing the street, too deep in thought to notice the speeding car in time.
After hitting Jim the car suddenly come to a halt with a screech noise from it's tires.
But it was too late the impact shattered his lower spine. Leaving a blodied body on the ground. Coffee from the smashed cups merged with his blood. Little did anyone know that day would be the birth of a new hero.
He,he,he he is the COFFEE BOY,
Fighting the evil villain Sleep Deprivation day and night, but mostly night. And his sidekick Mugatron always covering for Coffee Boy !!! -
Do you ever feel your job is too demanding compared to other software engineering jobs?
I've worked in two companies for now.
First company, Kotlin microservices and we had QAs, didn't have to write a lot of tech specs and no post mortem or on call at all (not yet atleast), it was just talk to PO, he tells the business requirement, we work together to make tickets, no legacy code so was easy to know what to do for tech, no monolith to handle or anything, much easier, just code and meetings.
Current job is meetings with PO telling you what he wants, have to write a full on tech spec and also know business requirements and product knowledge as the current PO doesn't know anything about how the products work, writing huge tech specs, communicating on requests sent my clients on slack, pretty much always firefighting, the system is so fragile and legacy, coding is actually less its mostly spending hours finding out how this shittt legacy flows work (no docs) , PO pretty much does fuck all, just wants meetings and wants us to do very very stupid tedious low impacts projects. This bundled with oncall and onpoint and the absolute sheer amount of incidents our team is involved in (on average we have 4 a week LOL, varying size but they're all very annoying) and the overtime oncall benefit is so bad too, if you do get paged out of hours, you just get that hour back during work hours. In other companies like friends, you get paid for the whole time you're oncall, whether you get paged or not. I can't go out anywhere on weekends or anywhere at all during on call in case I get paged, which happens a lot. Its a cluster of a mess. This bundled with manager stoll not wanting to promote me to IC3 despite all I've done so far.
My question is, is this more normal than I think it is? Is this just how crap our career can be? Mind you I'm in the UK so not getting those mind boggling US wages sadly either. Have US colleagues in same team doing same job but obviously getting more11 -
Remember the option on mobile browser that says “View as Desktop”. Today that sh*t no longer works on most modern websites. Now I am wondering what in the freaking c*ck s*cking html has changed overtime!5
-
anyone else having a project and getting behind schedule and working overtime and still not getting it done?
no? it's okay, i know it's only me so dumb :(6 -
Have to work over the weekend because the marketing department 4 weeks behind schedule on a task I need in order to finish mine. They just finished today (Friday). My deadline is on Monday. 😭 No sleep for me.
The weekend overtime pays pretty good though 🤔 -
Most of my team works on a per-hour basis, I work on a fixed, monthly wage. They don't get it. If I work overtime, the customer gets billed, I don't get paid. No, I don't like working overtime.
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