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Search - "smoke break"
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After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:
Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.
There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.
Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.
What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.
Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?
Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE
This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest6 -
Biggest distraction while working?
Management.
-> Get ticket to work on. Put an estimate and start working.
-> Management Guy #1: Hey could u please look into... this and that?
-> Management Guy #2: Hey could u please update me on (Old ticket that was fixed and updated on Jira but they would rather ask me in person).
-> Management Guy #3: Do you want to come outside for a smoke break, I know our last one was about half an hour ago but still, just 5 mins won't hurt your day.
-> Co-worker: Hey could you help with this task I am working on? I swear it won't take more than 5 mins. (It takes about an hour).
-> Miss my deadline for the ticket and get flamed for it by manager.
Okay, I didn't mean to say anything about co-workers as a distraction. It's very minimal.6 -
Down a non-technical rabbit hole yesterday:
- watch a cat bury his poop during smoke break
- google "why do cats bury their poop"
- click a link to the Felidae family
- get interested in the differences between puma's, cheetahs and tigers
- read up on the whole genealogy in detail
- spend an hour looking up the endangered status of Felidae
- close work laptop
"Nuff for today"8 -
I was taking some Ms certification courses a while back just for the pieces of paper since I didn't have a college degree. I took their entrance exam and apparently scored in te top 3% so I knew it was going to be a breeze.
I started out sitting near the front of the classroom, but I never really paid attention to the teacher, I worked through the practice book during lectures. This apparently distracted the class because they would come to me for help rather than raise their hand or ask the teacher.
Eventually he pulled me aside on a smoke break and asked what I was doing in his classroom if I already knew what I was doing. I explained the situation and he just laughed. But he did ask me to sit in the back corner quietly and allow him to teach the rest of the class. And I could do my thing until the certification exams. -
The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.
Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.
Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.
A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).
This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.
Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:
1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.
2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).
3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.
4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.
5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.
He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.
Here are some shitty stuff he has done:
1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.
2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.
3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.
4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.
One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.
While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.
Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.
I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.
Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.
Thanks for reading this far!5 -
Ah demonstration day. The day when everything that does not need to break, will break. The day when you give birth to the nastiest "temporary" quick fixes. I need a smoke and a coffee, gonna be a long day.1
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Go for a smoke break, sleep, or take rest of the day off depending on how "stuck" you are. Always seem to work.
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Designer: These form elements should not be textboxes; they should be dropdown menu's.
Me: No problem. Done.
Designer: Could you make X the only selectable option in field A and Y the only selectable option in field B?
Me: I sure can.
Me: Implements a dropdown menu with only one option, knowing that asking questions would label me as "difficult" and "technical". Uploads to production, decides to take a smoke break.
My coping mechanism: Maybe you should also add an Animator to the IK targets on your character controller in Unity instead of depending on a slerped IK weight value.4 -
Our "agile" process uses one-month long sprints, ending on the last day of the month with a demo. (I'll rant some other time about non-consistent iteration lengths.)
Our sprint ends today (Monday). What was the most logical time to introduce changes that affect the architecture and break every single build? How about 4PM last Friday?
We're still waiting on the build breaker to show up while trying to figure out what the heck we can cobble together and run to show that we actually did something in the last month.2 -
Yesterday morning I was working on importing records to a Shopify store. A few thousand records in their API starting returning status code 420 with the message "Unavailable Shop", same for the admin panel.
I called support and they created a ticket but it's been almost 24 hours and our shops API and admin panel are still on a smoke break apperently. -
At work me and my colleagues take almost regular smoke breaks out in the balcony. I was a smoker before but I'm afraid my habit has escalated during past few months. Now that I have taken few days off to study for my exams I can't study well. I can't smoke at home. And I can't go outside that much, it's raining by the way. I think I should quit. But right now I'm doomed.5