You can count me in as one of the participants in the Great Resignation. I might be fucking up here because anyone who reads this and knows me will probably instantly recognise me and I haven’t yet moved into another position so I might be jeopardising my reference if word gets around. But fuck it. I will preface this cautionary tale by saying there were some great people at this company including some of the managers and senior engineers (you know who you are) who I still have tremendous respect for and always will. But this company has some serious ethical problems in the way it treats employees.
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 and a lot of other skilled talent left a company that was paying enough. The main reason that everyone left was the place was a complete head fk. Just as the article stated the incompetent had become entrenched and created bureaucratic process to stifle work. Since they could not do their jobs they created paperwork process, and made that their job while not getting any real work done. I spent two years trying to unwind the place and trying to inspire people to do their job. I got so frustrated that I offered to do other peoples work with my team if they would just stop the bureaucracy and stay out of my way. That just created political opponents who actively tried to set my team up for failure. After two years I realized that no amount of doing a good job was going to fix the issue and left (I was getting squeezed out by politics as well). The worst part is the few great developers who remained because of loyalty to me where summarily dismissed after my departure. They actually fired the best and the brightest for trying to make things better saying that they where playing politics. That experience taught me that if the environment is junk when you walk in, then walk out no amount of money is worth that headache.
I subscribe to that. I left my previous job just after two months because I was put into a chair as a developer and then ... nothing for two months. I literally got paid to do nothing.
Manager? Product Manager? Team leader? They were all pretending that newly hired people does not exist. But they went great lengths to poach me from a previous job, to do nothing? I am perplexed by this behavior until today. I have quit and set up my own company where I have less money but at least I am working on something.
Years ago I took a dev role at a very well known UK organisation, a prestigious brand supposedly good for the career. Their systems turned out to be smoke and mirrors of the most braindead kind. One and a half days in I'd seen enough and I quit. If you know, you know.
I've done the same, heated in the moment. Basically our two most senior devs quit, so a large burden shifted onto me, and I was suddenly the most tenured dev on our team, with knowledge of systems no one else had and could not even easily get since the others (and others before) had quit. But curiously they promoted the new guy instead of me. Ok fine... I told my boss, an arrogant VP at the company, that I should be paid x amount for my increased role and importance to the product. He got back to me 2 weeks later (took his time with this), and said sorry. Quit on the spot. They had to completely overhaul their roadmap and soon after that team folded, got absorbed into another, the VP got fired, and I got a sweet new gig. The execs were too thick headed and full of themselves to see that my quitting would cost them exponentially more money than a relatively modest salary increase based on my increased role. Not a single regret.
This happened to me. Uber-qualified graduate came in as a decision maker, fucked a load of stuff up, then left. Then the tenured devs gradually started leaving in revolt. Then the product died.
After 15yrs of aggressive, upward growth positions and three years of my own startup, I landed what seemed to be an awesome job at a Series A startup.
The company is completely mismanaged, overstaffed, on a collision course, and yet the best job I ever had. I'm not a crook - so I do put in an honest 40hrs to collect my modest 200k salary (modest given my experience.)
However, the company is so mismanaged by the C-Suite and so far gone there is no pressure to go beyond the 40hrs/week. The C-Suite is already destroying the firm, why bother plugging holes on a sinking ship on my spare time?
I enjoy the work, my co-workers, but really enjoy the free evenings and free weekends. Best experience of my life while it lasts. No longer have headaches. Have friends that I spend time with. Enjoy the outdoors.
I wish I could have the same at a company that was not mismanaged, because i'm sure it can happen. Our tech org is strong, just the MBAs in the CSuite cant seem to get out of our way.
My company was acquired by Medallia (they’re a survey company) who want to be seen as woke and hip but actually are just a massive corporation with all of the things that come with that - dead eyed middle management, no planning, reactionary software development. I’ve seen people get away with 2-3 hours a day as a software developer without recriminations because they’re terrified of losing developers because they can’t hire enough.
I still care about what I do and I couldn’t carry on working in such a depressing environment with others putting in about 25% of my effort daily so I left. I’ve no idea how anyone can work in an environment in which no one gives a shit about what they do...
I had worked at smaller shops, then took what I thought was going to be a next big step at a company who's mascot is a reptile. Friction EVERYWHERE. The TLDR was that I left after 5 months and that company was the most unhappy I've been in my career.
When I started, I had a single monitor machine that didn't have Visual Studio installed. I was told I'd have to wait till the next budget cycle for a second monitor. I didn't get Visual Studio installed for 3 WEEKS and no one seemed to care. I'm not sure why they thought it was fine for a six figure developer to basically be sitting idle for 3 weeks, but that attitude was basically the norm.
When I actually got coding, everything was road blocks. Policies and procedures everywhere. No one had time to explain anything. Everything had to be submitted through a ticketing system. It was just bad. Daily standups where I just made up BS because they'd barely given me anything to work on, and no one seemed to care.
The thing was that when I looked forward at my team lead, my manager, etc., who in theory would've been my next steps at the company I'd have to jump through ridiculous hoops just to get into those positions, and they all fundamentally had very little power. They were still at the bottom tier middle managers, and the BS policies, procedures, and technology decisions all got handed down from managers above them.
I couldn't deal with the environment, but from my coworkers who were there, I got the sense from them that they just accepted things. Progress was slow, jump through the hoops you're told to jump through, but by in large, it was steady well paying work that they could just check out at the end of the day. No harm in that, but it just felt like my career would just stagnate there, and I'd find it very hard to get out once I got comfortable with it. I planned on sticking around till 6 months, then looking. I wound up starting to reply back to recruiters earlier and was out in 5. Best decision I made was leaving.
Yep. I hate my job and I'm also making under $100k.
I can't even explain all the issues as it would be come a book. The condensed version (if you can believe it) is that I thought the company was good in the beginning, but the policies on paper were not the policies that they followed. I became an intermediate developer. Then I was picked for a development needed rating because I was the most junior person and you have to pick a low rating to balance out a higher rating for someone else. Then I filled the role of tech lead for a year and then senior developer the next. I didn't get a raise, promotion, or even the high rating. I was told by my team manager the year I was a tech lead that she wanted to give me the highest rating but politics prevented it. The year I was a senior developer they told me that if I wanted a promotion I would have to take a 13% increase in hours for a 7% raise - a rate cut. This is not consistent with the written policy. Then my manager said he was going to give me the highest rating that year but didn't because he thought I slacked off one month - the month I was on PTO for 2.5 weeks for my wedding and honeymoon and put in extra hours the other weeks to get stuff done. Then this obsure technology that I spent over 5 years becoming an expert on was outsourced, which when I was hired they said they don't do (and some political stuff behind the scenes forced a team switch). They also said they don't lay people off, and now they do that too.
I had to switch to another obscure technology. The hiring manager literally said she couldn't believe any internal people would actually apply to the position - big red flag, but I had no other options. The good news is they gave me a market adjustment in salary that was bigger than the raise I asked for on the prior team, which means I had been underpaid by about 10% for at least a couple years. The first year they were amazed with me quickly getting certifications, learning the new system, etc. The second year they gave me a very small bonus, which is bad news under a pay for performance structure. They gave me an average overall rating but a needs improvement for leadership. Now I am only an intermediate developer, but I was filling the ASC role along with my regular role. The ASC role is supposed to be for senior developers or higher, and I was getting excellent feedback in that role. The feedback my manager gave me is that I'm too slow in my developer role. Basically, they were point counting in that department even though the official policy doesn't allow it. When I left this team, my coworkers couldn't believe that I was only an intermediate and was basically forced to take a lateral (can't get promoted with a lower leadership score). This included a few tech leads from across the two departments and six teams that I worked with as an ASC. I found out they were cutting the budget in half, so I guess they wanted to push out the newer people so they could keep the more experienced ones.
Now I'm on a boring team and again being told I'm slow. That definitely makes things stressful since my wife and kid have both developed medical issues of the past year. Plus there's no growth opportunity on this team due to the constant context switching and the politics. I'm not the only one who noticed this since we had about 25% of the team leave for other opportunities. I'm close to it as well. Of course I got an off-track rating at mid year so now I have to try to get back to a good rating by year end so that another team will take me.
So for years I have been screwed over, hate my job, been bored, and am just miserable. With my experience in obscure tech and the medical needs of my family, I'm too much of a chickenshit to switch companies. I'll just wait until I get fired.
It's odd, because my first two dev jobs I had to be let go. First time was due to them needing someone of senior skill yet paying for a junior salary and let me go after just 3 weeks, and the other due to money running low and let me go after a year of working for them.
This taught me that businesses are out for themselves no matter how nice the people are. It then taught me that if I don't like somewhere, I will just outright look elsewhere and bail.
After being let go from my second workplace, I left my next one due to him promising me more money and then going back on it with another deal which sounded great, but actually sucked when I thought about it. He is a really nice guy, but such a shady businessman, so I looked elsewhere and then handed in my notice.
The workplace after that one wasn't any better, they wouldn't use GIT, worked on each site whilst live (no dev environment). I hated it, so I took a week off to search elsewhere, found something better and handed my notice in.
Also, I tried to push for better practices which the other devs loved, but my manager and boss just wouldn't listen and refused any of my input.
There's actually a guy in that workplace who is super nice, but has never been let down like I have so he feels he owes the company everything and won't leave. Whenever he tries, the boss will offer him more pay and then he stays. It's sad, because he deserves so much better. :(
Just last February I was let go from the best gig of my career, under similar circumstances. I knew that I was not hired specifically to help other devs, but it appeared to be appreciated and encouraged. Well, I guess not.
Last job was for an ~500 person Ad Agency. I worked mostly solo on all of my projects. There was other developers within the company, but they were treated as completely different departments -- guessing on purpose. The company as a whole was overly political. Lots of meetings, not a lot of actual work getting done. Plenty of people I know of that literally did nothing. In the 2 years I worked there I was never able to figure out who my supervisor was. After quitting, I was finally able to figure out who it was -- someone I never met, and didn't even know their name. I was overpaid and overqualified. Could have easily asked for a significant raise, and could have gotten away with doing significantly less work at the same time. Ultimately I quit because the work was boring and I spent too much time in meetings. Took a pay cut, but I couldn't be happier with the new job.
The workplace and managers made me so miserable I would drink every night and be sick every morning. Vomiting was routine.
Not only was it an awful workplace, but I was capable enough to work alone, and therefore did, so I had no colleagues to build strong comradery with.
We tried to hire myself a senior developer to mentor me and make me happy, but to put it simply, if you were capable of doing that you were simply overqualified for the company in the first place.
Imagine that, hiring your own boss...
Edit: I'm talking about 1 job because thats as many as I got through in this industry. All my applications are custom made, so after a couple dozen with no responses, I've kind of given up and have stopped looking.
Her story begins: She quits her presumably well paying job at Cisco because she finds it uninspiring. She drafts a strict list of requirements.
- No large companies.
- No homogeneous cultures.
- No arrogant young techbros.
- No stupid apps.
- No to being co-founder or first engineer.
- No offices more than 30 miles away.
Susan has a keen nose. She spots red flags immediately just by a single stroll through the office. This is a common occurrence for her. She never gets feedback after a phone screen or interview. How unhelpful! Except when she does get feedback. That feedback deserves to be criticized publicly. You hired someone you used to work with? You are a nepotist! Expecting someone to know Ruby when applying to a Ruby job is confusing. Code challenges are dumb. She also considers herself a mid-to-senior level engineer who shouldn't be subject to them. This is despite a practically non-existent track record of accomplishments on her resume. Anyways, life is hard when you have 100 interviews lined up, who has time for code challenges. Also you never get feedback on code challenges. Except when you do, then she will criticize that technical feedback in a public rant. Finally a job offer! But this startup wanted to pay her less than she made at Cisco. It was also less than the market rate for a Software Engineer in San Francisco. No attention is given to the possibility that Software Engineer is a broad category and what she does may be less valuable than someone else. She explains this to the CEO who refuses to budge. She specifically has no feedback on what any of these companies could do better. They are just stupid jerks. She concludes with a final message: Its not you, Its them!
This was perhaps the most entitled speech I've ever heard in my life.
I resigned from my current role because the office culture is terrible, and I hate being around pretty much all the people outside of the IT team.
I was offered 6 figures as a counter offer for the first time in my career, which I turned down.
That was last week. New Zealand (where I'm from) hasn't shut down yet, but everything is so bleak, and I'm regretting turning down the offer. I start working from home tomorrow for my final 2 weeks here, and I can't help but feel regret. Being in the office was the one thing I hated, and now we don't have to do that.
Whats worse is I emailed the new job asking if we're still going ahead with me starting, and there was no reply.
As someone that was made to sign a confidentiality agreement under duress and unfair pressure months after joining the company, with stipulations that basically say ANY work I do, regardless of industry or during the weekend, belong to the company. Even after I no longer work there up to one year, and ONLY if I bother to sign the attached clause that says I no longer work there.
I'm so glad that tomorrow I'll be handing in my two weeks notice especially at a critical time for the company. I'm also the most senior developer that everyone else comes to with questions regarding how the system works and how it can be improved. The original developers left for similar reasons.
What I'm trying to say is, if you think, as a business owner or employer that you can act against the best interests of your employees then you'll end up paying dearly for it one way or another.
I joined as their 3rd employee - as a junior developer to assist the current senior. When they saw how good I was, they sacked the senior. I was given a pay cut, ostensibly to keep the lights on, prettied-up with a new contact saying if after a year they were still in business I'd get my salary restored, but a major bonus if they reach profitability or were bought out within a year. Cue 12 months of being an idiot, regularly working weekends and all-nighters to add major features on little notice for meetings with potential customers and developers. New projects were piled on with no regard for workload or realistic deadlines. They needed a new DC, but rather than hire a sysadmin they passed it to me because I'd had experience on my CV.
By this point I'd lost sight of salary and bonus - I was working to try to avoid letting the team down by missing deadlines. As absurd as it sounds now, the atmosphere in the office made me feel I was part of something special, I was doing my part, and I was going to anything I could to keep up my part. I'd been hired part-time, but I worked full time, and then some, spurred on by my mis-placed sense of loyalty and necessity to cope with my workload. Then at the end of the year they said they couldn't afford to give me back the pay cut, and a couple of months later they announced they were going to be acquired - conveniently close to the year end to be a coincidence. I realised that I wasn't part of the team, I was just employee 3. I'd already started to suffer major burn-out / a bit of a breakdown, so I quit. That was years ago and I'm only just starting to get myself back together.
I blame myself entirely - I was naive and let myself be manipulated and used. By that point I was so deep into the "we're all in this together" that I couldn't see what was happening. But you're not in it together - there may be more honorable founders out there, but at the end of the day, you're working to line their pockets, and just because you've got a bit of paper saying they'll be nice doesn't mean they will. Trust no-one, get everything you're owed up front, and remember at all times that for you it's just a job.
Work to live, don't live to work.
(From a throwaway account for obvious reasons. Ahh, that's better ;) )
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.
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