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.

Boss get angry when I asked about my unpaid overtime that I worked 10 months ago !

LoL

I was told there's gonna be:
- good salaries
- informal company setups with benefits
- lots of jobs available
- non-dev people look at you in amazement
- get to work on really interesting stuff

What I'm actually doing:
- carrying a team of people in uni because you're the only one who knows how to code
- deal with shitty uncommented legacy code at work
- be reminded that if you don't do something super-sophisticated you're easily replaceable
- spend unpaid overtime hours because you're the only one at your job that is on the issue (I see a pattern of being alone in a problem here)
- requestion all my career decisions
- cry and be stressed
- hate every minute of work, yet be stuck in it because it's a source of income that is flexible enough for me to be able to study full-time

So dunno man, I'm still waiting on what I've been told, people say there's lotsa money and satisfaction waiting for me after grinding through 5 years of high education, it'd better be worth it

Once worked for a guy who lectured me in front of the whole office because I didn't continued work at home after I stayed 3h unpaid overtime at the office.
I quit soon after that.

#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"

So today I had a discussion with my manager that I have been working unpaid overtime everyday (close to 5 hours overtime). She responds with saying that I am quite young (24) and these are my golden years of learning and I should be working overtime for atleast 10 years of my life during the start of my career to learn stuff because I will regret it later. Idk how am I supposed to react to that. She maybe correct, and I do work overtime sometimes out of my own interest but this is getting way too much and pushing it. any suggestions about how do I deal with such a manager?

Unli unpaid overtime and work on weekends 💀

DISCLAIMER: I swear to god this is true. This is a completely unfabricated anecdote.

Soon we are moving to a new office space, and my department have been delegated the responsibility of moving all of the computers from the old work space to the new one. I was a little confused at first, because I'm a software developer, not a removalist.
It gets better.

We just had a meeting the other day, and my manager had advised us that we were to be moving the machines on a Saturday. I confirmed whether we were being paid overtime, simply because I had never worked a Saturday before. My manager replied (this is paraphrased but ultimately accurate) - "It's unpaid. Because you get paid a salary, you're expected to do unpaid overtime here and there. We have christmas parties and nights out, all of which come out of the companies pocket. Not all companies do this, so it's only fair you give back".

I honestly couldn't believe it. I was being asked to spend basically the majority of my day off moving computers from one site to another, for free, purely because it's "expected". Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

Long story short, I went home and started updating my resume.

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.

Saw a job opening that had under the duties: “Willing to put in extra effort…”. What is that supposed to mean? X job should take Y effort, and an appropriate amount of compensation for that effort. Why does the job require “extra” effort? I read that as; tons of unpaid overtime. Hard pass.

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)

Fucking love unpaid overtime every week! Please give me more! I am definitely doing fine mentally...

Unpaid overtime. Nuf said.

Hey guys.
Sorry for the absence.
So... Lately I've been working in shifts, doing extra hours and stuff... And today, Saturday I went to work for nothing... My boss fucked me just to make me go to work, when there isn't much work to be done...
Btw, I have a burn out for more than two years because I had to work and study and sleep for 4 hours a night, for months.... (check my profile for more info).

Today I had enough
Almost got killed while driving... felt asleep.
I'm saturated.
Monday I'll talk to the owner of the company
and If I don't like what I ear I'm making several complaints:
- One for the organization that protects workers
- One for the work court (we have that In Portugal)
- And one criminal complaint... After all they fucked my health, my life and are putting my life in danger just because...

Lets see how it goes...
Better part... If I make any of the complaints above they can't fire me, make me work overtime or in unpaid shifts...
Oh, and someone else also made a complaint recently... Governement oficials spent two days this week checking the company accounts and calling workers for confidencial intervews...
So, I guess It's the perfect time to drop the bomb on them.

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.

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 DBA

Seriously what's wrong with the market right now, this is basically what some job ads said. They were even from the same company

Frontend job ad: are you a rainbow rockstar developer who just loves to code OwO(unpaid overtime) [buzzwords...]

Embedded systems job ad:
Serious job description
Required experience in c/c++
Other non bs stuff

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.

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.

If I were to do-over, I would:

- Know that the world is MUCH bigger then even the largest city in the most populous country, and I get to pick where I'm going. So I'm going where the grass is green and bosses are not allowed to physically assault their employees, thank you very much.
- Do not care for missing or useless requirements, and only deliver the PoC. the requirements will all change the very second a client, BA or boss look at the PoC, anyway. Let them come.
- know that companies will replace you and do not need you, just as you do not need them. fuck their needs and live your own life. If they ask for overnight unpaid overtime, leave immediately and laugh all the way home.

Hello,

Wondering if anyone can give me some advice regarding stress management.
I am a sys admin of a continually amount of growing servers (now at over 130) and I do coding when I am not busy being screamed at by users. The stress is coming from the workload, but also the way that the workplace is running. The manager left, and now I am handling all his shit, and my own shit as well, and all his accounts have been handed over to me (accounts being clients here). The other IT guy who is supposed to help out with the server admin just finds other work to occupy himself, and I am losing my mind. There is literally an insurmountable amount of work that needs to be done, and it just cannot be done in the time that is allocated in the working hours. I am working overtime, unpaid overtime by the way, until 9/10PM at night to try and get through everything (*cannot apply updates and work on the app server while the users are live) and I am just starting to lose grip. I am taking my stress home with me (not taking it out on anyone), but I am not sleeping, not eating properly and even starting to dream about possible ideas to fault resolution when I sleep. I find that I am constantly tired, and it feels like a world is about to cave in on me. There is literally too much work to be done in too little time, and although I am more than capable of doing it (and will get it done, or the director will physically assualt me and accuse me of being useless, again) I feel that the struggle is just a bit too much.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to "wind down" or to "let go" just for a few minutes a day at least, so that I don't feel like I am on the job 24/7.

Thanks.

Hi, everyone!

I was struggling to write this rant (it's been a while since I've posted anything here) and was trying to put in enough details, but it was getting too long and heavy, so I thought I should try to keep it concise.
I get frequent headaches and feel physically and mentally exhausted all the time. Here's a little list of what I think lead to all this -
- Leading a team for the first time
- Not-so-great junior teammates
- Working with backend for the first time (doing it on top of my frontend work)
- Long working hours (unpaid overtime)
- Being underpaid (for all the things I now have to do)
So, I overworked myself (and still fell short in delivering my sprint goals) and after some time, considering all of the above things, I decided that the best course of action would be to give my notice and take a break for a month or two.

I talked to my boss about my struggles and my intention to leave, and after some discussion, he basically said that the difficult part of the project was over and things would get smoother from the next sprint, and so I should stay on and discuss on the matter again after the sprint. That sprint has passed now and I have still somewhat struggled to work each day with diminishing motivation.
I'm not sure if this is the right time to leave, and I just don't have enough energy to look for another job and go for interviews. So, I guess it is a bit of risk not having something lined up before I quit my (first ever) job, but I think I shouldn't have much difficulty finding something for myself.
At this moment, I don't know what to do, but maybe, if things continue to be dour, I may hand in my notice soon.

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.

I currently don't work over 40 hours a week. When I come to work, everyone else is setup in the "war room," however my monitor and laptop are still at my desk (it's quieter with everyone out in the war room).

I have a good work/life balance, and I'm not alone. One of the other employees also refuses to work over 40 hours or on weekends. He has a PhD and teaches classes on the side. We both did at least participate in a Sunday all-day work session to get something to production.

What I'm worried about is resentment. I have taken zero vacation and was going to bank all my time, then in January take it all at once. I was going to ask for 3 weeks of unpaid on top of that so I could get a month and a half off to go south for the winter.

Even though my output has been really good while I've been working, I have a fear of resentment from others who do put in the extra time. We're all salary and none of them get paid overtime except for a one-time bonus for that Sunday I mentioned.

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?

Accepting to work at a place that requires "extra hours worked as required" with any form of overtime being unpaid.

Thankfully I enjoy the people I work with so it's not all doom and gloom.
(I'd need to, having worked an extra hour and a half today [Monday])

So this month I had to do two major features which required unexpected refactors and I had to handle unexpected edge cases all over the place. Since I work in another timezone and time was of essence, I was kinda working around the clock to complete refactors as fast as possible because it was "important and critical". I have 7 other devs in my team but only half of the team are actually competent and even less are motivated to push through. Most of the team prefer to sit on low hanging fruit tasks and cant even get that fucking right.

So that resulted in me doing at least 100 hours of overtime this month. Best part all I got for pulling it off was a thank you slack message from teamlead and got assigned even more work: to lead a new initiative which seems to be even bigger clusterfuck...

So today I had a sitdown with my manager and I asked for 3 paid days off and told him that I did 50-60 hours of overtime. He okayed it as long as my teamlead was happy.

So I created a chat, adder manager and teamlead to it and explained my situation. That Im feeling burned out, I need 3 days off and combined with the weekend that should allow me to finally relax.

My fucking teamlead told me that these days are mine and he cant take them away from me. But then he started guilt tripping me that no one else will be working on the new initiative these days so we will have a very tight timeframe to deliver this (only until August).

Instead of having at least a drop of empathy that fucker tried to guilt trip me for taking days off for fucking unpaid overtime. What a motherfucker. Best part is Ive talked with manager and we actually have until end of August to deliver the new initiative, so fucker teamlead is gashlighting me with false sense of urgency.

I guess a hard lesson learnt here. Waiting for my fucking raise to be approved for the past 6 weeks (asked for a 43% bump which is on the way since I got very strong positive feedback).

So Im done. I proved myself, will get the salary of which I only dreamed about few months ago. Not putting any overtime anymore. If something is very urgent, borrow fucking decent devs from another team. Or replace half of our useless team with just one new decent dev. I bet our producticity would increase at least by 50%.

Its not my fuckint fault that 2-3 people are pulling the weight of 8 people team. Its not my responsibility to mentor retards while crunching under immense pressure just because current processes are dysfunctional. Fuck it. Hard lesson learned. If you want overtime, compensate with extra days off or pay. Putting my 7-8 hours in daily and Im not responding to your bullshit slack messages or emails after work. I dont give a fuck that you work in another timezone and my late responses might result in stuff getting done postponed by a few days or a week. Figure it out.

I had my first client meeting today.
Now I understand the pain of dealing with clients rather than doing work.
I don't relish the fact I had to stay an extra 2 hours either.