I regret persuing Software Engineering as a career.

I am not sure how to grow. I graduated in 2020, been doing mobile(Android) development for last 5 years and after 2 switches, am stuck in a typical micromanaging toxic company with an average package and this is sucking the life out of me.

I don't feel excited about my domain. Earlier I had this twinkle in my eyes everyday I wake up, wanting to tackle the next big challange, explore the next unexplored area in tech. But now am in crisis

Firstly My domain(Android) itself is challenging. continuously evolving and people wanting to move to shiny stuff instead of what works. Wasn't technology the tool to fix problems? Why is it inventing problems?

2ndly when and where is one supposed to "live life"? i wake up at 6.30, leave for office at 7.30, reach office at 9.30, leave from office at 6 and reach home at 8.30 .

take 1 hour of dinner 1 hour of freshen up, and 6 hrs of sleep and poof! almost whole day is gone! why am i spending 20+ hours in a routine that isn't giving me any happiness?

I can't go to gym , I can't goto park to walk, I can't read a book, I can't make some side business/hobby, I can't play some ps game or go hang out with friends/family. is this normal?

Either am at an illusion that :
1. there are some companies that allow one to achieve all this with their remote work or
2. there are professions/business which allow this or
3. there are government job employees who love like this.

or everyone is doomed like me and we are all looking to die at early 50s. I sometimes think even a farmer is not that in pressure as us.

Lastly the work pressure to proof oneself every damn minute and the office politics. I just want to get out of this rat race

The latest and greatest bullshit at the workplace: when you're asked to be an 'ambassador'. This really just translates to: 'take on more work for free'.

Whenever management approaches you with 'honorable extra role', immediately ask how it's compensated and definitely don't do it for no extra benefits (a raise should be default).

Don't fall into the trap.

Ooooof. So I was booked off sick by my doctor not too long ago for a week and when I got back, I seem to have been removed as project lead with zero communication about this.

Talk about a fucking professional sabotage situation...

Glad I'm leaving as soon as I get a job offer.

Crocheted a hand puppet. Just because.

Plot twist: @dfox disabled comments to let us catch a break from @jestdotty’s ramblings under every single post.

How is MSSQL so popular? "Oh yeah, sometimes you have to use dynamic SQL because the compiler doesn't correctly detect the impact of DDL commands and rejects working code" god fucking what? Why does the compiler infer the future structure of tables after a DDL command if it can't do so reliably? In my world, if it becomes public knowledge that a compiler incorrectly infers something, the maintainer scrambles to remove the inference instead.

I also find it surreal that I have to disengage versioning on a table in order to be able to modify the version history. Like surely, there should be a mechanism to temporarily skip the hooks other than ALTERing the table into a regular unversioned database table and then ALTERing it back, rebuilding the versioning infrastructure from scratch. SQL is awful and MSSQL is doubly awful.

We have a bug.

I fixed it, then I said it was a super tricky bug, a race condition in the library code, and that I had to put on an issue and wait for their answer.

Boom, day off.

God I'm a genius.

Am I in a toxic work environment or not?

1. I suggested implementing some code guidelines for our team so we can all work the same way. Lead architect sends me a DM telling me to stop talking about it until after projectX is done because it might stress out other devs. Friday he talks about how important it is to use standardised tools and ways of doing things.
2. Spent a week working on a bug fix and they said solution is good, but then invalidated all of my work by DM-ing me saying it's unusable because i worked on wrong branch and he quickly fixed it over the weekend and I should just copy his (inefficient) code.
3. I ask him a basic question of what version the backend software is using and he doesn't even respond. I ask another team member who quickly helps me check. it would have taken 1 fucking integer to answer that question. i wanted to learn the backend stack, but not so much anymore.
4. Lead doesn't respond to project management software ticket mentions.
5. Lead randomly makes hotfixes to the QA server without prior notice so the backend randomly goes down at times during work hours and then my local copy of the front end stops working for no reason at all when I am trying to focus on bug fixes
6. UX/UI designer's screen designs look completely different than the actual app, so I spent weeks implementing a feature looking like his nice designs, then having to change it again, taking another week.
7. Generally poor comms
8. Leadership mentioned jobs are safe, then 2 months later retrenched a bunch of people.
9. People getting sick all of the time.
10. Nobody gives a shit about technical debt

What‘s the purpose of separating your code into "independent" modules if each module contains everything anyways?

dev communities can be the most toxic as well as the most welcoming at the same time.

just depends on what your timing is. You can get a bunch of links to help debug your issue or you can get told to "kill yourself".

You never know.

I meant to upload this Reddit post from r/TrueOffMyChest as an image, but apparently that feature is broken. So I transcribed it. This rant writes itself. It's absolutely discrimination and by consent of the state. This, plus age and viewpoint discrimination, is why I own and operate my own business. I refuse to be beholden to HR assclowns trying to virtue signal their way into their next promotion.

"So I did an experiment, I work in CS and decided to test what the gender bias is. So I took my CV And changed the name to a female name. I'd send it out with my real name, then a few days later (or few days before) with a female name.

Out of 100, my applications with a male name got 7 responses for interview.

Out of 100, my applications with a female name got 45 responses to interview

The female resume was 650% more likely to get a callback. And the resumes were identical.

So then I thought 'what about someone looking for working class jobs?' So I decided to focus on restaurants-servers, hosting, etc. Made a fake resume, and responded to craigslist ads with both male and female names. Sometimes the male went first, sometimes the female went first.

Out of 100, my applications with a male name got 10 responses to interview

Out of 100, my applications with a female name got 87 responses to interview

The female resume got 870% more responses."

Friday afternoon.
Boss: “Can we push this small fix before the weekend? It’s just a button color.”
Me: “Sure, what could possibly go wrong?”

Fast forward 20 minutes:

Whole CSS is missing
Login page is blank
Server panicked so hard it restarted itself
I’m now "that guy" who deploys on Friday

Moral of the story:
No fix is truly “small” on a Friday. :(

Still alive. Wrist’s been hurting lately so I’ve had to stop crocheting 😭

But I got into paint by numbers!

I noticed an increased usage of the word unalive, such as in "to un-alive someone" on youtube, spoken in the videos and written in the comments.

I suppose this is to avoid the word kill?

So we are at the stage of changing the language just to avoid using a bad word on a platform of hypersensitive woke snowflakes who will cancel you for saying a specific word regardless of the context it’s been used in?

Please tell me I‘m wrong. 😒

Monday - delivered feature1. Manager demands starting to work on new feature2. I start working on feature2.

Thursday - in late evening manager provides feedback from testing feature1 for which internal testing starts Monday.

Friday. I start investigating. Everything is fucking broken. Backend contract broken from BE side, UI broken by another team member's PR from FE side. Missing configuration from FE side that was not documented anywhere.

I start working on issues from my side, inform relevant parties and coordinate that they would make fixes on their side (ofc after getting a lot of pushback trying them to force me to write workarounds to work with their broken implementations)

My manager during the day: what was the reason for us being blocked now?

Me: broken BE, broken FE by another team member, missing undocumented configs. Too late (and incomplete) testing feedback. Having to switch to feature2 priorities before finishing everything with feature1. Basically all things out of my scope.

My manager: so just to clarify we are blocked from internal testing because YOU missed this? Why it wasnt caught sooner?

Me: due to 5 same reasons that I listed before, I can list more but would prefer focusing on getting things working today

Manager: Ok, as WE discussed let's focus on getting things working and discuss about improving this processes in the future.

Seriously it fucking sucks working in this bank as a mobile developer.

We are responsible for basically everything.

From scoping out work according to business requirements, documenting stuff, to creating/maintaining BE contracts and constantly double triple checking everyone else's work across the chain.

Actual mobile implementation or proper testing is like the last priority in this case. And yet we are the ones that take all the blame if we fail to meet arbitrary deadline.

Fucking hell. Im gonna start documenting all decisions of this retarded manager, I'm not gonna allow him to throw me under the bus due to failures caused by his own shitty decisions

In my company I now have 3 browsers.

Chrome for company stuff that only works in Chrome.

Safari for company stuff that only works in Edge or Safari.

And Firefox for actual work.

🤡

Management has reviewed DevOps which is already being shown to customers and wants to introduce a code coverage metric to show customers how good the code is. Code coverage now has to be 80% or higher across the board, it's been decided by management, and there is no discussion on this topic. The front-end presentation layer has minimal business logic and most of the code that exists is generated objects to shift data to the backend (which in turn mostly shifts it to a 3rd party API that does a lot of the business logic). I now have to write thousands of pointless tests while also being 85% billable to the client.
I think code coverage can be used as a tool, but should not be used as a metric to promote the product.
I suggested an automated e2e test might be better placed to prove that things are working, but have been told we're not going in that direction.
I'm close to writing a code coverage test that uses reflection to touch all of the code, catch all exceptions, and return a positive result.

They started measuring deleted and added lines of code as a metric for productivity at my company. I have heard it's been done in other companies among friends... WHO THE FUCK IS PUSHING FOR THIS!?
Like WHY EVEN DO THAT USELESS SHIT???

I work with a team of morons where they just keep overriding my code and business sending us mails saying this requirement hasn't been implemented so please done.

Those morons are just getting on my nerves

Your tasks are going slowly, let's have a meeting about it

My boss insists that we shouldn’t lock or password-protect a particular system because, in her words, remembering or write down a password is hard and email as a concept is confusing. I tried to explain if people who don't know what left versus right-clicking do have full admin access, it’s only a matter of time before something goes terriblely wrong. She listened but ultimately decided to keep everything open, confident that everyone would use it responsibly.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened, it never has been and never will be. The problems started, just as I feared, and now I’m stuck cleaning up the chaos, one issue at a time. I do have a backup and automation snapshots, but things got so tangled up that it will still be a hassle.
I tried soft lock so everyone could only access the section relevant to them. The reaction was immediate—they were confused and stressed, saying they’d be unable to do anything if it stayed that way. They didn’t get the idea that keeping them from touching certain things (that they shouldn't be touching in the first place) wasn’t the same as blocking their whole work. But since they’re all my superiors, I had no choice but to remove the restrictions and leave the system wide open again.

Nothing serious came out, just really annoying because something like this happens all the time.

Stack Overflow has really gone to shit. I had a bad experience with a recent Qt6/Python question, or really two questions both of which were closed and deleted!

I was just going to ignore it, but some recent talk on the Fediverse made me write up a full post about it:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

Want to know a sad story? I had a great idea for an internal application that would optimize a process in the company. My idea gets approved and.. guess what? Later it gets cancelled because Change Management didn't see a reason for me to get API rights on the company pipeline, which was what I needed to get my application going. I pitch my idea and they don't care and shut me down quickly because it's just another ticket they want to close asap.

Another guy in my company, openly incompetent but big buddies with the higher-ups gets his idea approved without effort. They open the doors for him and talk to Change Management to get him in. Then he's seen as Mr. Big Ideas while this guy doesn't even know how to use a terminal (I'm not joking). Even the girls admire him but he's a complete idiot who just smiles a lot.

It's whom you know, apparently. And bureaucracy is a piece of shit. So are cronyism and corruption.

Speed, quality, scope. Why managers dont understand that they can pick only two and expect all three?

Reading google revies of hospitals is one of my pet peeves. Like it is certainly not an indication to the hospitals quality. As there are mostly people reviewing who had a bad experience. Also a lot of hysterical people who are like: "Walked into the ER with minor headache. Was appalled at the wait time and left. Never going back there again. Worst service everrrr" or "The service woman at the front desk could neither give me a precise diagnosis nor where I had to go to get my second lobotomy."

I'm currently exporting the designs & the scrapped iterations i had to make for my job in the past 4 years.

My first boss wanted to have an iteration saved per design and have already multiple 'final' options available per design meeting.

Now my current boss is asking to export them all but the bulk export functionality is broken. Never realised I spend so much time designing this shit application. There are over 16.000 designs to be exported by hand.

They now want to get rid of this tool since nobody else will do designs.

Let's get ready for another rant. I work at a new company now which claims to be "fast paced" and startup-like culture. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen a place with more rules and bureaucracy when it comes to engineering.

By the looks of it, my manager seems to value process a lot more than actual outcome. Both my manager and another engineer in the team tend to nitpick over every line of code and will not approve anything until they believe it's absolutely perfect and up to their liking.

Every PR I create has to go through 5 cycles of review. On top of that, the comments that get added are rarely related to product impact, but rateher "let's rename this variable in a test file to this", "maybe we should have this many spaces in a config file". There's been actual cases where I had to go through different cycles and had my PR's blocked for days because of some minor comments about variable names and styling they "liked" more.

This is one of the main reasons why we lose critical time during the development of our features. There seems to be no sense of priorities or urgency. The other reason we keep losing time is because of the massive amount of team meetings we have. Our team has only 3 engineers. How many meetings can you possibly schedule in a day to "realign". We have technical meetings where it apparentely is necessary to all agree on every tiny detail, such as which types we're gonna use etc etc.

That's not all. Last week, weeks of my work was thrown out of the window, because it was slightly different from how "we" usually do it. Even though, I explained and motivated how my solution solved issues the other proposed solution did not, we ended up spending an additional two days reimplementing the same fixes more in line with "the rules".

I recently reviewed a coworker's PR pointing out actual functionality that was not working as expected. Real user impact...
I created an alternative solution that covered all cases, and sent it. It got basically ignored. Then we ended up having a meeting for hours with several engineers where they made me watch how they started fixing the same issues as I had already fixed.

Each week, I'm losing around 2-3 days of development time dealing with this nonsense. But then there's a deadline. Then the manager goes full-on wild and pushes everyone into overtime and will send you 700 messages a day in channels or privately to you if "you need help" and how things should be done.

I'm not looking forward to switching jobs again, but please tell me... how can I cope with this?

Thanks

Just heard that we don’t have testers anymore. There was already a low test capacity and now it’s full focus on clients and not on software building anymore.
Who needs testers any way right?
We need to just do everything right the first time!

Every day hour minute i have to work on these charts im getting more sad frustrated and annoyed.
I have a function which works perfectly in the mobile versie of the webapp. Copy paste it to the desktop, it’s not working. Something is wrong and i can’t get my head around it. Neither does AI.

Kendo is hell.

For fuck's sake, management is now asking us to provide data converted in % as to how genAI is actually making us more efficient as developers. How the fuck do you even measure that empirically?

It is already BS enough that they track how much we query these AI tools everyday in our development environments, but now they want genAI to produce most of the code templates in our SDK. It can barely produce a working regex or a working python script, let alone a small piece of code that won't stack overflow itself into oblivion. It sometimes takes more time to debug and refactor than to do it myself from scratch.

They ask for our professional opinion, we tell them, they don't give a fuck about it, proceed to think all is rainbows and unicorns, and still ask us the same moronic things as if they were the new messiah's on earth.

Don't get me wrong, genAI can be useful, but why the fuck does management think it will magically solve all our problems when they don't even understand how it works even on the surface.

The only thing that would make sense is a lot of them got money at stake in some AI investment sales pitch bullshit and they try to jam it up our collective throats because otherwise they will loose their investments like there is no tomorrow.

Fuck all of this, I just want to do engineering and build something useful to society. Is it too much to ask?