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)

Cannot understand those who are frustrated with it.
Sure, one can feel frustration when some project is not going as they were supposed to go, but that is life for ya, boi.

Without wanting to offend anyone it feels like devs who complain so much either do not actively search for a solution and learn shit properly and cry their soul out afterwards or they do search, but cannot find anything.
Patience is the solution. Do not let yourself fall down and stay strong.
Even if it takes a lot of willpower, retries, inner pain, patience and non-sleepy nights, you will and can do it. I believe in you.

My whole life was basically a psychological disaster.
I have had and still have depression and a lot of short frustrations from time to time, too, but I do not cry it out loud.
My high school is fucked up. In every single aspect. I am doing all-nighters almost every day. With maybe half an hour of sleep to get school projects done on time.
I cannot just say "fuck you. I am not gonna do this shit" to school, because that would affect my grades in a negative way. Same thing applies to you, as an employee, too. But at least you do not need to be afraid of getting bad grades.
Bad grades->not getting the desired degree->bad chance of finding a job
In your case:
Bad communication with boss->bad connection->bad chance of finding a job

But is that really so?
I do not think so. Nonetheless, you still can have a good chance of finding a job, if you have proven yourself to others in a great way. Everyone has bad times. Even with their bosses. That's normal. Being bad with someone does not make yourself bad in general.

The job world will still accept you, but school won't accept you again. Whenever I feel like the burnout is about to catch me, I take an immediate break and go outside. Take a walk in the sunset. Go to the forest. Run with music playing loudly. Swim. And other things like watching the stars in the silence of the night.

To finally come to an end here...
Do not make yourself feel bad that quickly and try to endure the pain. This is going to make you a better and stronger person.
If you cannot do it anymore (hitting the borders of burnout), take your time and do whatever makes you happy and treat yourself.
Life is not all about work. Were you born to be a worker? No. Were you born to be a slave of others? No.
What is holding you then? Let go of all the stress (for a minute). You are free.

You are a great person.
Do not forget that.

If you just stay calm and focus on building, you'll eventually come across things you've always wanted to learn, but didn't really see the purpose of it, this applied to everything in life.

For example, today was the first time I needed to use generics in my app, this is something I've always wanted to learn but didn't truly understand it. I've read docs and watched videos online, but still didn't see the benefit of learning generics.

However, once I needed it, I realized why it is relevant, and thus created stronger memory muscles.

Let's break this down:
- You learn more if the thing you need has a purpose.

- Information is simply data, once you apply it, information turns to knowledge.

And this my fellow dev friends is what you get paid for, not information, but knowledge.

And what is knowledge? - experience.

How do you force yourself to work at night?

No matter how much I try my body is stronger than my brain. I can't keep my eyes focused after 00:00 and I have to sleep. I know people who stay up and keep developing in all-nighter.

How do you this?

all they want is to lure you to a feed and let you scroll through it forever. TikTok will even scroll for you. Your right hand is for holding a phone, your left hand is for cramming junk food into yourself, your head is for feeling acute guilt. After junk food is no more, you make yourself puke, wipe your eyes and go on a compulsive shopping spree to fix your self-esteem. All paid for with your credit card, of course. As if you were able to afford the whole ordeal in the first place. Then, go to your local bar and get wasted.

Never explore yourself. Never stay with yourself one on one, without an algorithm taking the pain away through the screen, all at the expense of making it stronger in the long run, because that’s how addiction works. Never talk to yourself, never ask where did certain feelings come from.

Without pain, there is no motivation to change. And you shouldn’t change. You. Must. Drive. The. Economy. Die early, of heart attack because of junk food, or by suicide because all that mental strain and misery. Never retire. We shouldn’t pay you a penny back.

Now switch back from devRant to Instagram. Now.

I see everyday people crying and also I read many Rants and many comments about frustrating codes, incomprehansive and bad analysis given by functionals and clients... am I the only one who wants to "beat" them and wants to code again and again and wants to accomplish the job anyway?

So Saturday I was doing mildly athletic (basically just moving my body) and I started to have a headache inside my head. Every time my heart rate increased I could feel my headache getting stronger in my skull. I don't know if I have ever had a migraine before. Someone told me it could be a migraine. I took an aspirin in case there was a clot and some other pain reliever. Well, it still hurt this way on Sunday and in the morning on Monday. I setup doctor appointment for later this week. Now it acts like it might be going away. So it won't hurt when I go see the doctor maybe. The only reason I wanted to see the doctor was because it stayed for almost 3 days. If it doesn't stay maybe there is no issue?

I wonder if my walks I take during the day will trigger this. I have heard food dyes can cause issues. Someone at work brought in candy with dyes in it. But I have not made great effort to remove dyes from my diet. So I dunno. Can you get migraines later in life? It always seemed like either you had them or you didn't.