I’ve been at my current job for 10 months. I’ve had three instances where I proposed a solution implementation to a problem, was denied, built the implementation I was told to build, had it break, and then told to build it the way I initially proposed (without any credit to the fact that I initially suggested it, of course).
I had a manager for 5 months, was without a manager for 5 months, and now have a new manager.
I checked out a few months back and haven’t been able to motivate myself to work at all. I would quit but I’m locked in for a year with golden handcuffs and don’t want to repay my starting bonus. I can’t wait to quit this shit job.
(This isn’t even half of the shit I’ve gone through since starting here, but only the most relevant pieces to the topic at hand. I could go on and on.)
One of my favorite bosses got summarily fired for getting tired of the grift and telling a customer we were still in analysis on something that the founders wanted them to think was well underway. This wasn’t the first time and our code was on the way to intractable due to layers of expediencies.
When a bunch of us quit 18 months later, we had stuck around for 6 months for a bonus that worked out to about 7-8 weeks’ pay. As we sat around having a beer down the road, I asked if it was worth it to stay the extra six months. Almost 3/4 said no.
I have to add my vote to the "quit sooner rather than later" column. Several years ago I worked in a similarly dysfunctional environment (also in a monopoly position in their industry): terrible code, terrible development processes, you name it. I was tempted to quit after a month but gritted my teeth and tried to change things as best I could. I quit after nine months there because I realized that I was a) getting nowhere with higher mismanagement b) waking up angry because I was having dreams about the technical arguments I'd have the next day. Leaving that place was I think one of the best career decisions I have ever made. Epilogue: I nearly doubled my salary at my next gig, which also was nicer to work at. Life is too short to endure a shitty job. Good luck!
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.
Was hired to do a difficult job, when the job was completed the management moved me to another team, with a new manager. The new manager was/is incompetent, and cared only about hitting their personal KPI's and taking credit for any team success. They refused to listen to senior engineers advice (new manager was a mid level engineer internally promoted to management when someone else left and always knew better). All of my advice was ignored, the end result of which was massive technical debt and inefficiencies across the board.
I managed to last about a year before I could take it no longer.
I quit two weeks before head office canned the entire project and fired half the studio.
After spending most of my time in small and medium-sized companies, I joined a large software shop last spring. I ended up being staffed on the maintenance of a hopeless legacy module on which real, visible accomplishment isn't possible: many of the APIs aren't documented, the architecture is incomprehensible, and simple changes take weeks. The code's in such a damaged state that I'm lucky to commit 40 lines of code per week. (I'm used to 100 LoC/day being an "off day", and I prefer the green field pace.)
I've spent the past 3 months looking for something else within the company, even though transfers before 18 months are frowned upon. First, I talked to my boss and told him that maintenance coding isn't what I'm good at and that while I'm willing to do it, I shouldn't be evaluated based on it, as I won't be great in my job until I can get some green-field new-invention work. Second, I started looking for transfer opportunities, especially in machine learning and AI (which are what I did before this). That process is ongoing. Third, if all that fails... then it's time to look for another job, as much as I hate the thought of leaving an otherwise great company at 5 months.
What I'm doing right now does not tap any of my talents; it's matched almost exactly to my weaknesses. I know it was unintentional and random, but I feel like I've been set up to fail.
Performance reviews came in recently. I knew my performance was mediocre and didn't expect great reviews, but I expected my boss to take care of things and give me a good enough rating that I could transfer when the time comes. It turns out I got shat on. A certain percentage of people had to get smacked and I guess I fell under the bar. I thought my boss would give me a high enough rating to keep things intact, but apparently not.
I know I can do great things at this company if I get to a greener field, but now my position's really damaged. I got a bad review, and this company (despite its virtues) has the mean-spirited practice of making performance reviews visible in the transfer process, plus I'm on a dead-end maintenance project where real accomplishment isn't possible so whether I "recover" is merely a matter of whether I appear to be making enough "effort", and I'd rather not bet my career on someone's opinion (I prefer actually accomplishing things).
I'm not especially bitter or resentful. Mistaken allocations happen all the time. I just don't want to waste any more time being a square peg in a round hole. I'll work on a dead-end, boring legacy project for a year, but to work on a dead-end project and get shitty reviews is too much.
Should I (a) spend 12 hours in the office as a way of sucking up, thereby establishing "good attitude" and then ask for an upgrade in project allocation as a favor, (b) aggressively begin networking internally in the hope of finding someone with the courage to overlook my damaged track record and "early" transfer, or (c) just get another job as soon as I can?
My last company was so dysfunctional, that this would happen on a weekly basis. I would get an assignment for some new feature the boss wanted. Within a week or two, there would be some kind of managers meeting and the new feature would be cancelled. In the beginning, I would get pissed and feel like my work was wasted, but then I turned it around and used it to my advantage.
It got to the point where I would only actually do enough to show the boss that I was working on it. I only stayed there because it gave me the opportunity to get paid and work on my own projects/business ideas.
This lasted around 3 years. The company eventually ran out of money because the boss couldn't ever decide on anything and would change his business strategy on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis. I think he was bi-polar, but I'm not 100% sure. To think, he was making 10 million/year at one point..
I actually wish I could find another company that is like this, so I can fund my next startup.
In 2014 I worked for a company where the whole team quit. From Summer to fall they built a team who built a product. By february all of them had quit or been fired, except for one programmer (and me who had just been hired.)
Did the company learn from this? no.
We built a new team, built a new product, and by february of the next year we had all quit.
They are now on their third team.
Nothings changed .
Management complains about how hard it is to find good employees though.
They're terrible managers, and they just can't figure it out. Because its inconceivable to them.
In my first job I was 'on the bench' literally ALL the time, from October 2008 to when I quit mid 2009. It was a strategy consulting job (at one of the famous 3) and I was assigned on a bank bailout project that kept being delayed.
It is hugely depressing as you are doing nothing productive yet you can never plan to have the next x months available to do a project on your own.
What most bugged me down was the BS busywork, which kept coming as the office was small enough for people to know I was on the ever delayed project. If I could do it again I would just go skiing fulltime and tell them to fire me or staff me, but I was an extremely ambitious 22 year old and stuck in a role that is generally considered at least a 2 year commitment.
I finally quit 9 months in, with my "mentoring partner" reassuring me the project really would start in 2 weeks. Literally 20 minutes before he had said that there had been an email from HR that it was delayed again. The idiot just didn't care. When I asked him to explain how the company had not wasted my time over the past 9 months and why I should trust their promises going forward, he went all office politics on me saying that this was an evaluation only I could make. That was the last insult to my intelligence that I tolerated from that company.
I'm still extremely angry over it, as I was doing everything right. I had a ton of savings in index funds already and had it all planned out to work hard and retire extremely early. When I quit I was so depressed that I did not even fight for the extra 3 months of severance, which I'd have gotten if I had let them fire me officially. I also didn't stay another 3 months so I could take unemployment benefits. The bit of money in the company pension plan was also lost as it had a 12 month vesting schedule. Basically, here was a guy who had been top of class all his life and with a savvy personal finance plan, so broken from 9 months of soul destroying nothingness that he quit without any backup what so ever.
It took me 3 years to get over it. Literally, for 2 years and 4 months I sat at home reading stuff. It was only when I was almost 26 and completely broke that I applied for a startup incubator, got in, and got back on track somewhat. Now that that company failed, the rational thing would be to apply for a rails developer job. I found some rails shops that I like, but I just can't get myself to press "send" on the application email. I don't think I will ever trust anyone enough to work for them fulltime.
If you're still reading this at this point, take away one lesson: Do not hire ambitious, talented people if you don't know FOR SURE you can give them meaningful work. Better to remain friends with a talented person who is now working for somebody else than to employ him and turn him into an enemy for life. (Because yes, I will have my revenge and it will be fucking brutal. Legal, but oh so brutal.)
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.
I was fresh out of university and I took a job doing software with a company who only had one developer overseeing me.
He was extremely rude to me, and extremely strict with me, getting angry if I showed up 5 minutes late or took even one extra minute for lunch. At my three month review his feedback was very negative and he clearly wanted to get rid of me but his bosses convinced him (and me) to agree to one more month of probation. I raised some of my issues with how he was treating me, so we drew up some revised expectations for both of us, then both of us signed them.
The very next day he pulled me over to his desk. I had designed a three column layout for a page he'd assigned me to build. I had left-aligned the text in the header columns. He wanted them center aligned. He communicated this to me by highlighting the text, slamming his mouse on the desk and shouting "does this look good to you!?". It would have taken me thirty seconds to fix at most, but he was furious about it.
I walked away from him, into my manager's office, and quit on the spot.
The real cherry on top of this story is they were only paying me $13 an hour.
Not my usual account for obvious reasons, but - I'm on my way out because of the company, not my manager. My current manager is decent, and my previous one was the reason I came to work for this company.
The thing that's driving me out is the company's lack of direction. They talk of innovation, but their actions demonstrate that they're more concerned with maintaining the status quo with incremental improvements to aging products.
I've spent about 70% of my few years here working on new products that never saw the light of day. That's disheartening. Fool me twice... time to go.
Quit earlier. I stuck around in a screwed up project until I couldn't stand talking to anyone else involved, I would have been way better off if I'd committed to leaving about four months earlier than I did - when I could see that the fundamental requirements and plans were being faked for management, and everyone else was OK with that. By the time I did leave I was having actual nightmares about work.
My first job out of college was like this. My manager knew I had no work and had no particular interest in letting me take on anything I proposed or found. I ended up quitting a few months in because (on top of a few other issues) I found it way too soul-destroying to have nothing to do.
I was in a similar spot. I was asked by my whole team to take over as manager, and while
I didn’t really want to, everyone was miserable and I couldn’t let that go on.
Ultimately, after a year, I decided to step back into a normal software engineer role after getting the team pointed in the right direction and getting someone else lined up to handle the management.
Here are some things that led to me stepping down or that I noticed along the way.
My biggest issue was with communication. There were some people on the team who were dying for feedback on how they could do better, but I wasn’t in the habit of looking for those thing when someone was doing well, so I never had a good answer. I was never good at giving praise or any kind. I would also put off the hard conversations and bad news never gets better with age. This made issues (generally minor ones) go on longer than they should have or turn into bigger ones.
I tend to hold myself to an impossible standard and didn’t think it was fair to hold others to it. Part of me knew that as a manager, delegating work, that there would be mistakes and I had to accept that. However, I would let way too much slide and lowered the bar more than I should have. I thought I was being nice, but all it did was stop the team from getting better. I don’t think anyone outside the team noticed, my boss and other leaders in the company would always give us outstanding feedback, but I always knew things could be better. When I was just a guy in the team it was easy for me to throw out things or nit pick, but it felt different as “the boss”. Thankfully, a lot of the stuff was already pretty well tuned from my previous nit picking or various templates and systems I setup. When I think about it, every time I nit picked something, but acknowledged I was just being picky, everyone on the team always wanted to fix it and make it right. They liked that I did that stuff, but I stopped to avoid feeling like a micro manager.
When I told the team I was stepping down, they were all pretty upset and told me they wanted me to stay in the role, but it was stressing me out too much. I don’t know that anyone else noticed all the stuff above, but it weighed on me a lot.
I left a job I had started immediately after college and had been at just under 3 years. We built and sold software. I figured I needed to branch out and not get stuck at one company.
Left and went to a company that sold insurance (i.e. not software). My boss was a psychopath and expected everyone to be in the office 8-12 and 1-5. No exception.
I lasted 5 months before I scheduled a resignation email to send at 5:30PM on a Friday, telling them I wouldn’t be at work on Monday. Went back to the first company and stayed another 9 years. Just resigned from that company last week (really unhappy with post-acquisition re-org) with nothing lined up. We’ll see if regret follows…
This just happened to me. 3 weeks in I realized the code base needs to be re-written because there was way too much technical debt. I should have quit then, but I decided to give it try. 6 months later, I hand in my two weeks notice.
* I was hired as a commodity, not a person, and treated as one.
* Management beyond my immediate supervisor had a fantasy about our working situation that colored their every decision, and no effort by front-line personnel could lead them to reality.
* My company had a failing business model, and thought they could squeeze the difference between expectation and reality out of the people doing the actual work that supported that model.
* Immediate supervisors thought loyalty meant not questioning.
* Evaluations were based on arbitrary criteria that had little to do with actual job success.
* My manager's response to pointing any of this out was "You should be grateful you have a job at all."
In a week I will be starting a new job at a small, but successful startup that appears to be the exact opposite of my previous job. I feel really sorry for the (quite talented) people who are still there, and I am grateful to that company for teaching me what kind of job not to take.
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.
I had a manager for 5 months, was without a manager for 5 months, and now have a new manager.
I checked out a few months back and haven’t been able to motivate myself to work at all. I would quit but I’m locked in for a year with golden handcuffs and don’t want to repay my starting bonus. I can’t wait to quit this shit job.
(This isn’t even half of the shit I’ve gone through since starting here, but only the most relevant pieces to the topic at hand. I could go on and on.)
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