It became clear very quickly that the two founders who brought me in wouldn't embrace any change that didn't come from them, and they had a total fear of empowering anyone else to make executive decisions - even about their own team members; I constantly found my guys being assigned to firefighting for other teams without my knowledge, so workload planning and scheduling knowledge sharing periods was impossible - we had information silos all over the place and if someone went on vacation they would often be called or emailed frequently because they were the only ones who knew about a specific part of a project or system. I wasn't allowed to attend support review meetings with the customers - the Directors went alone and told me what had been agreed, and they constantly dealt directly with one of my guys (the company 'guru'), assigning him work and making it impossible for me to grab his time so he could share his skills with the rest of the team - I highlighted it as a serious business risk that this guy was the only person who knew some of the tricks with some of our internal and customer infrastructures, and that he wasn't encouraged to document or share his knowledge, but they dismissed my concerns.

When we had that Friday afternoon talk after 9 months of trying to bring in some best practices and semblance of organisation, I left the office for the last time with a sense of great relief that I was out of the clusterfuck.

It only took me a few weeks to find a much better role and I hope things work out for you too.

Edit: Looking back at what I wrote, it might be that the OPs circumstances just offered the opportunity for a bit of a personal rant, which was not the intention. My main point was based on the fact (not explained at all by me in my post) that when I met the two Directors (twice), prior to joining, the setup and opportunity for me looked very positive, and I was convinced I was going to be empowered to fulfil the role. Things turned out very differently, and I clearly did not fit in with the company culture the founders wanted to both leave and stick with simultaneously (it was their comfort zone, and although they knew is was not the best was to run a business, they ultimately couldn't leave it). Moral: Shit happens, despite due dilligence, but that doesn't make it right.

Spent two years completely remaking the product I was tasked to work on, while the two other engineers on my team, both a level above me, cheered me on and didn’t do much.

I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted again this cycle.

It’s been very strange to see the fruits of my labor benefit the org while feeling totally unrecognized outside of my team.

Now dealing with massive burn out for the first time in my career. Not sure what to do. I make sure to put out fires and do the bare minimum to keep up the product momentum, but I have no love for the org and just don’t think I’m cut out for the politics games.

Six months later: review time. My boss tells me that he was monumentally impressed with the dedication, perseverance, and capability I demonstrated throughout the year, especially on the aforementioned product. And, as a result, he was very proud to give me...a 3% raise. I was deeply offended, and that was the beginning of the end for me there. I quit a few months later. I hear that layoffs have been rampant since I departed, which makes me feel a little better.

Anyway, long story short: fuck those guys. Polish your resume and tell them you're doing it.

The sales guy didn't produce, survived a couple rounds of the Board getting anxious, and then he got canned.

At that point, we were already redoing the marketing materials ad nauseum. The Board was bringing in various consultants, and the engineering staff was even getting pared down (a year and a couple million bucks in).

Then, the marketing guy quit, probably just before he got fired (that was me). Then, the CEO got axed a couple weeks later.

That experience is one of the big reasons I write code today, instead of focusing on marketing. It sucks being in a position where you know you are getting blamed for the failure of the product (at least partially), but you're not sure what you can do to make it better, or if it's your fault at all.

It's more clear cut in programming if your code or your product sucks.

No company will say thanks for wrecking your personal life and ending up burned out.

It is still perfectly possible to climb the career ladder without overtime and doing extra tasks for no extra pay etc.

Time is a persons most valuable asset and the companies know that. Do not waste it on repetitive monkey tasks which are the result of multiple product development failures covered up by incompetent managers. There is not much to learn in these places. These are for people with sub average ambitions, fair enough.

Your point with the hr would be funny if it weren't so sad and real. Anyone who was ever subject to such will immediately understand why concentration camps have happened. Never trust HR beyond rota planning and perhaps payroll. They are the ones posting these ridiculous developer job adverts, we have all seen them.

Another SaaS Sales job: My sales were fine, highest in our department, new director came in, i didnt really want to be there anymore, invited the whole department out for burritos, execpt for the unlucky 10 of us whobwere prompty canned by HR lol. This was a blessing in disguise transitioned into software development after.

Being able to correct code on other teams if we’re blocked with a pull request, versus having no idea who owns the code and being actively stonewalled and ignored by people at the old place. Having documentation and business requirements written up vs being given source code and the old developer rage quit. Having a competent BA who is competent enough to read code vs having a BA whose job is literally only to ask me to update my tickets and badger me to write up the requirements to hide their own incompetence. Having good conversations about the tech we use vs feeling gaslit when mentioning a potential solution to a technical problem and having nobody respond or make eye contact.

Realizing that everyone who had been there a long time had the personality of a whipped dog. My coworker had letters from his wife encouraging him letting him know he could do it if he just worked hard! Which I suppose worked until the entire dev team got fired a year after I did.

I was really scared after leaving a great job and moving to that terrible one that I’d made a terrible mistake and most dev shops were just awful. Maybe they are but I’m glad I stayed where I am, I got an offer to make way more but I’m 100% sure I’d be laid off now due to covid-19 if I’d jumped ship. Based on my companies response to Coronavirus I think I might stick around for a long time.

I had to be talked out of quitting a couple of times. I think they might have been better letting me quit the first time, and getting a replacement who didn't have so much ego affecting their work.

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.

The fundamental issue is that optimizing things, paying down tech debt, maintenance, etc just don’t get nearly the same fanfare as new features or product launches. I don’t blame people, because the latter is flashier, and more understood by nontechnical folks in the business.

For people like me who work behind the scenes, you need a trusted manager who understands the importance of your work and will go to bat for you, and/or you need to regularly publicize your accomplishments in a measurable, easily understood way. For me, that means posting a tidbit in Slack whenever I make a noteworthy change.

I wish my sort of work was respected inline with its business impact, but alas, it’s harder to measure or communicate things like “developer time saved” vs “feature X bumped sales by y%.”

Even though my title, salary, and perks were still the same, it was a de-facto demotion. Important parts of my compensation (involvement, agency, sense of ownership, diversity in work effort) were just inadvertently phased out as the company I helped grow was big enough to support product managers who could do just the most rewarding parts of my job but not actually code or anything.

I think (hope) there are things that one can do to guard against this from happening, and just being aware of this phenomenon is valuable.