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.
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.
Or: 5 reasons why I left my last job. It was a toxic environment where the management didn't trust the employees (taking away personal laptops, then iphones; requiring time-sheets; installed website-blocking software; etc.)
Hiring was also emphasized on finding the cheapest developers as possible, preferably ones without experience because they specifically wanted developers they could "train" to their backwards coding practices. And this was a startup with only 12 people total.
After three years of trying to hire new developers, they still only had the original people that started the company because the cheap devs they tried to hire never were any good (how surprising). And those devs had been working at the company for so long that they're scared to leave for a better job.
/end rant.
Wish they'd read this article and change their tactics.
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.
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.
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.
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...
First job I left to go back to college, but quite honestly I had checked out of that place and hated the team I was on. Was a pretty large networking company, spent all my time writing RFPs and vendor specs, zero time writing software.
Next one was a cheap tech startup that worked by recruiting people for peanuts, including hiring cab drivers doing night courses in IT, and placing them in telcos looking for business analysts for multiples of what they were actually getting paid. Hated the cheapness, left after a few months.
Then it was a FAANG company, which looked after it's people really well, but the frickin politics really grind you down, left there after a few years after my team got shuffled around on a whim from some exec.
Last role was a utility company, and it was a total mess internally. Vested interests, complete underfunding of the data processing systems, and major consulting firms scamming them for millions a year to produce meaningless reports. Impossible to make an impact, or even bring things up to code... For example, there was zero version control on software, zero! Things were tested on production. I stayed there far too long, should have left the first day, like a few hires actually did.
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 forgot to mention the reason why I left the company about four months after I started. They laid off about half of the developers and told them that they could take their computers as payment instead of their final paycheck if they wanted to. I considered the situation and realized that I might end up not being paid for my time if they were that bad off. I quit the next day and the company went under a couple weeks later.
The first company I worked at had a great team in all departments until we got a new head of technology. Immediately all new projects went to outsource teams, some occasionally good and others bad, so much so that we (existing devs) began to “run out” of work. Eventually they tried to replace all the devs but me, the junior, and use me as the US based engineer for customer calls and maintaining legacy products. I said no and left on good terms with everyone but the new head who didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to stay.
Within 6 months the new head was gone, the legacy code hadn’t been up kept and no new products had made full releases (of a planned 4-5). I did some maintenance and rewriting/launching one of the products I had originally started on as the only dev until they could hire someone else, but it did cost them 3x what they were previously paying me.
I joined my current employer for their mission to provide mobile phones in local languages in India. Its a real contribution that helps user on the ground, but I quit after working for them for about eight months, after I realized that not only the localization was more of a marketing point, and that no real work on localization had happened in last two years, but also that people within the company were least bothered about the end product, and more about their own responsibilities. Everyone worked in silos, and management didn't give a damn about it. I am switching sides, and going from a pure server side role to a server side cum embedded systems role to try to change something in the electricity wastage problem.
So to sum up, my current job was taken because company had a mission. I quit it because they didn't stand by that mission in their day to day working. And I joined my next company due to their mission.
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.
I’ve been doing this for 8 years and I have the unfortunate pattern of quitting my job after a year or two because it goes to hell.
One job had us logging our time in two different places- we needed to log exactly what we were working on and for how long. For example, I would have to keep track of and report that I spent “1.5 hours on ticket 72926” or “2 hours on code review”. I left for a higher-paying job.
One job was a startup that was recently bought out, and the new ownership was tightening the belt. The culture/environment got worse and worse and I started getting pain in my mouse hand/wrist by mid afternoon. I was moved to a project working with tech I wasn’t very familiar with (management knew this) and hit with a PIP so I dragged the PIP out knowing the last guy on a PIP was on it for 6 months before he was canned. I quit on month 6, and that was right before Covid hit so I had a little sabbatical for a few months. Ended up getting a higher-paying job.
When I was at Allstate I worked with an actual sociopath who made everyone’s lives more difficult. He did that thing sociopaths do where they sabotage others and I was effectively demoted to some bullshit grunt work. He was eventually fired when management figured out he wasn’t qualified to be a software engineer. Anyway I left for a higher-paying job.
I love writing code, but loathe everything else. Especially the people. I’m all for being a team player, but that phrase doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody, and managers seem to think it means “do whatever I say”.
Extremely underpaid ($11.50/hr as their lead dev and no benefits) to some place where my salary was doubled with benefits.
No advancement past what I had obtained. Wasn't going anywhere. I did stay there for three years though. Lots of experience that made it so I could easily turn down offers now.
I gave them a month notice to find someone before I left. They didn't find anyone until a month after I left.
I had several reasons for leaving my last company, but this was one of them. We had no QA, no IT, no ops. We just had devs doing everything. It might not even have been that bad if we were fairly compensated, but we were all making 3/4 market value in terms of pure salary, no insurance, and no equity to make up for it.
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.)
I had pretty much automated a past job and when I quit to try to become a software engineer, they asked me for advice for hiring my replacement (what they should be looking for, etc.). I told them not to hire anyone and that I had hardly been doing anything for months. They hired someone to replace me anyway.
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.
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