21–30 of 71 posts
- They make team members compete with each other
- creating false narratives about peoples career progress
- people don’t want to share key and useful information even with team members
- false promises of verbally giving you a project and taking it away
- invalidating impact of a project because you don’t fit the narrative for a promotion just yet
- people get credit for work they didn’t do etc
— Arent you coming today? You are late.
— I was at the office until 2:00 am yesterday, Im coming late today.
— It doesnt matter, you should be here, now!
(some fruitless quick discussion)
— Ok, I quit.
Got on a grad program in the fall of 2020. First ever dev job. Height of pandemic. Company makes all devs work on site despite it clearly being feasible for us to work from home because half the developers are contractors living in Eastern Europe. Literally 100s of devs in the same room. It’s clearly a breach of the covid rules but whatever, its my first dev job, I’ve got my foot in the door to a better life, don’t rock the boat.
Graduated grad program after 2 and a half months to become “Junior Developer” on £23k/year. Got minor promotion four months later after a bunch of pissed off devs leave after getting low balled in pay review. My official job title is now “Developer“. I’m leading a team of devs and doing scrum master duties because they’ve also just fired all the dedicated project managers. Despite these extra responsibilities, I’m apparently still a junior developer because “they’ve just done away with the junior title for this pay band but it was previously one of the junior pay bands”. I am being paid a whole extra £3k for my troubles for a grand total of £26k. Ok, whatever, it’s my first dev job, foot in the door and all that.
A few months later the company then hires some devs with more experience and allocated a few of them to my team. They’re getting paid significantly more than me. I should have demanded a pay rise there and then or quit but didn’t. Again, first dev job and needed the money. I’ve got debts to pay after having been stuck in dead end minimum wage jobs for years. Oh and by the way, it’s now autumn 2021 and the pandemic restrictions have been lifted. At which point the company issues all devs with laptops and tells us we can work from home. You could really not make this shit up.
Over the next three months, I lead the team in building a feature that automated away the biggest reported user pain point and that was considered by other devs to be a very difficult technical challenge. We achieved this in just three months and a couple of days ahead of schedule. We also did this in the face of a lot of aggravation and deception from the business department product owners that even caught the attention and wrath of some of our higher level IT managers for being so out of order.
In the next four months, I then went on to single handedly rewrite the feature, improving its performance to under a second in benchmarks (was previously 18 seconds) whilst simultaneously extending the functionality of the feature to cover pretty much all realistic scenarios. Amongst other achievements, I also spotted improvements in our DevOps flow that had been missed by senior engineers and which improved our build speeds by over 3 minutes.
During this time period, the war in Ukraine starts. All of those Eastern European contractors I mentioned earlier? Every single one of them fired within days of the war starting. Many of them were from Ukraine.
Salary review comes around. My offer? £30k. A whole £4k more than the previous year. With 10% inflation taken into account, a real terms pay increase of £1400. This salary would still have been less than what they were paying other devs on my team over the past year not to mention the same devs were also due a pay rise themselves later that year. Apparently I was meant to be grateful because it was a 15% increase. Please bear in mind that this was not a small or medium enterprise struggling for money. This was an international privately owned company worth over a billion pounds and opening new stores every month.
Enough was enough. I told them it was a disrespectful offer and that they left me no option but to quit. I had my perms revoked that evening and had to email my official resignation letter the next day from my personal email account. I sent my laptop back through the post as the only other option was to leave it with security at the gates. I was put on gardening leave for a month and that was that. I didn’t get to say goodbye in person to any of my colleagues with whom I had spent the last 18 months of my life working with.
I started working on an iOS app for a month or so after this but my head was not in the right space and I needed a break. I took a couple of months off to enjoy life again and I’m now grinding my way through the neetcode 150 whilst reading “cracking the coding interview” and “system design interview”. I don’t know what company I’ll end up at next, but one thing is for certain: I will not work for abysmal wages ever again.
I've been setting up massively complicated sending rules for a webshop in health care products so that it selects the correct carrier for the products in a client's cart. This webshop has own stock, but also does drop shipping and depending on what products are in the cart, different carriers should be selected during checkout. Then they also have discounts / free shipping for some products, but not for all, and some…
General lack of competence/direction. We spent over half a year building something with no users being allowed to use it, and, unsurprisingly, it did not do what it was supposed to. Product org's idea? Let's do it again, without talking to the users until 6 months later. The entire dev team bailed within a month. The PM still works there, 5 years later.
- I took a job at a start up for a slightly lower salary than a market rate, because they were doing stuff I was hoping to improve on and they offered shares in the company as a part of package (which if added the value to the salary, it would actually be very nice). The work was great, but month after month there was always an issue with sorting out the shares (government's EMI scheme). 18 months later I felt that they started recycling old excuses and company was growing rapidly, so I had this feeling that they just found a fool and are playing games. After yet another excuse I handed in my notice. I don't regret it, because I quickly found much much better paying gig, where my gained experience was very useful.
Got a call from my manager: — Arent you coming today? You are late. — I was at the office until 2:00 am yesterday, Im coming late today. — It doesnt matter, you should be here, now! (some fruitless quick discussion) — Ok, I quit.
Every dev had to just suck it up and cope, while still delivering their own work. I went to the director (boss' boss' boss) and told him how much productivity is being left on the table. He said he was completely aware, and felt like this was a perfect project for someone to take up in a grass-roots manner (i.e. 120% time).
2. Under-leveled on hire (i accepted it, so that's on me), then promotion held hostage to deliver larger things, with ever expanding scope of the promotion rubric.