The Dark Side Of Software Development That No One Talks About

It is odd that management claims there is a lack of qualified programmers out there when so many programmers are out of work and qualified. Me, I am told I am overqualified by companies begging the US government to raise the H1B Visa cap because there are not enough qualified programmers to hire. It is a form of bullying and a slap in the face of anyone qualified who wants to earn a decent wage and benefits but is called overqualified because of past salaries they had earned.

Working in an IT department other employees can abuse you, call you names, even physically attack you, and you cannot do anything about it. If you complain to your manager they write you up for 'communication problems'. The average non-IT employee cannot tell the difference between a Microsoft Windows bug or a bug in the custom software that is written and thinks you can fix a bug with Windows or Office, etc. When you tell them you don't have the source code to Windows or Office, they get mad at you. Management tells IT workers to lie to the other employees and tell them you are working on fixing Windows and Office bugs, which is basically lying.

I had my best friend kill himself on May 31, 1999 when he couldn't find a job and unemployment was running out. He was the best C++ programmer that I knew at the time. He worked at a Startup called Polygon that was mismanaged and abused their employees and then fired them all.

I did all I could to help him find a job, but nobody wanted to take a chance and hire him.

I had many friends I made working IT jobs end up killing themselves because they couldn't find work. Mostly Generation-Xers.

I got suicidal myself sometimes over how management had abused me and treated me. They didn't seem to think I was a human being, just some subhuman third class person they could treat like dirt. Had I worked at a company that treated me a different way I would not have gotten sick and ended up on disability from the stress.

I don't think we really disagree. I think that if conflict is avoided through saccharine niceness, eventually it will come out as vicious back-stabbing, and vice versa as you've noted. So the two apparent opposites actually go hand-in-hand, they feed each other. But when I say a middle ground I mean something like firm politeness. I don't believe that brutality paired with honesty is a middle ground; it's just an aggressive solution instead of a passive aggressive one.

I think when I say bad at reasoning, I really mean anything that at least partially involves a judgment call. A lot of the scientific process is deciding which experiments to do. Yes, an inability to process emotions is generally going to mean you're suited for working with logic, and as such might excel at proofs, programming, theoretical physics, stuff like that.

But the problem I've noticed is that people's careers often get derailed because of emotional issues: it could be because they're passive, they can't handle anger, they get stepped on or taken advantage of, they have grandiose dreams about their research, they become unwilling to admit they were wrong, etc.