There are a lot of ways to have bad culture, and coding is sometimes the least of your concerns here. But in this case I'm interested in the worst coding culture you've been a part of: Where it was really hard to build good software for reasons that were engrained in the company's culture (deadlines, testing practices, vision issues, etc.)
I'm very curious to hear some stories!
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My first real software developer job. I was assigned as the only front end developer to a project with 2 backends.
It was a remote job but it paid more than i had ever earned at that point (1 year experience) and i had worked with the owners in my first job. But thats is another story.
I thought it was a smart idea to accept another remote position plus keep my current full time job. I had never worked from sun down to sun rise until them.
Compounded was the fact that i have never . used angular js in a production environment so it was tough ramping up to new things as well as work remotely and with git.
Long story shorty i quit my easiest job and got laid off from both remote positions as i couldnt meet deadlines.
The experience taught me what burn out is and what good and bad code was.
My other remote job was hell as well cause the senior developer thought he knew best and wanted to over engineer everything. 90% of the time he berated my code and decided to do it himself.
We didnt even bother working on CRUD till it was a couple days to show investors :) all because we wanted to get the code to a perfect place. We all got fired and it was a relief to me honestly.
I learnt alot of things from my former senior dev, like what not to do as well was where to draw the line with engineering as well as how to mentor junior devs.
I have a much better job now and i chuckle when people say they are stressed
I'm currently working at a place with 1 tech lead and a recently hired intern/jr dev.
We manage multiple company systems and handle all new projects thrown at us. We all are "full stack" developers, meaning we take on multiple jobs to save the company money from hiring other devs.
I'm tasked with creating an application in a new environment, language, framework and data model, all the while learning more about our company systems and preparing for new projects coming our way.
Creating the new application was fine. It's pretty much done, but I've been holding off completing it and turning it in because I'm worried that might make them split their attention and think we can multi task and throw us across these projects...
It's already happened to me before. It was extremely stressful. By itself, it's fine, but it's the future maintenance and inevitable continual addtions and working in my off time to keep up with multiple projects and learning them both since there's basically only two developers managing everything in this company.
I had to call off sick the past couple days because I'm burnt out, exhausted from all the stress and lack of sleep. But man this break and made me realize how stressed and exhausted I was, and I don't like it one bit. It's making me rethink my future with this company.
This is quite possibly the best advice I've seen with pseudo compilers, also written in pseudo code.
my previous company
git? nope.
framework? nope.
send an employee for training? nope.
code review? nope.
code testing?
a little bitnope.anything client ask to do? yes
My previous job was a very toxic environment. Everyone was so scared to screw up that there was never any innovation - be a cog, you cog! If something would go wrong, the leaders immediately flocked to "WHO HAS DONE THIS", rather than "ok, something's happened, let's figure out how to fix it, and how to help prevent it from happening again."
Very frustrating - I stayed there about two years, and was able to help bring a few concepts in like automatic builds, and unit testing. In the end though, it was not worth the stress, so I found something better!
Mine might not be the worst compared to what you guys have here, but I have worked at the agency where they never hired a full time developer before me.
It was super cool in the start where I could be part of all the process from prototyping till website launch. But it got crazy when I used to work 6-7 different projects in a day and always with As soon as you can deadline. I never had extra time to experiment something new in the project. I felt that this could not take me anywhere in my career and switched the company.
No code deployments outside of the two week cycle, no matter how trivial.
All code deployments to be actioned by a support centre in Bangalore, 9 hours ahead of local time for the development team.
They needed accounts set up for all of them with exactly the correct privileges and no more.
None of them had any knowledge of or training in the technology being used – they were literally typing from a script.
If the response to what they typed didn't exactly match what the deployment script said, best case was you got a phone call at 2am to debug. Worst case was you'd have to debug it on the daily 9am-10am mandatory morning phone call chaired by the data center VP, with an audience to 20-30.
Dev-ops it was not.
Old post, but wanted to comment.
I worked for an all distributed agency, sounds great right? WRONG. While the team was full of wildly talented people, the owners of the company had no clear purpose which manifested itself into severe micro-management.
There was basically no on-boarding period at all, except I was expected to read their docs which were scattered all over the place, and some random help from a PM when he had a moment to spare.
By the end of the first week I was solely in charge of 11 different sites. I barely had any idea who the client contacts were and often had to have video chats with them talking about legacy issues. One of the clients was even mad that I suddenly appeared out of nowhere with no warning.
To my surprise too, the clients were involved in every step of the workflow process from the point my code was pushed up to my remote branch. I remember thinking, "Why in the Sam hell is the client making comments on my Pull Request?" I had never seen that before... EVER.
There was not one inch to budge as a Developer. It was their way or the highway! Despite the clients not really having a technical background, and since I was new, seeing all this back and forth made them pretty nervous.
So basically I would get maybe 1 hour to Develop a feature, and if I went over that time, by god you had to drop everything and ask the client for permission to work another hour. That could take anywhere from 1-2 hours to respond which were non-billable. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
It was probably the most counterproductive business model I had ever seen. Needless to say I didnt' last there too long, and I seriously wonder if they will last either!
In the last (small) game development company where I worked, I was invited to a one-one meeting with my boss where I was pressured into not writing and publishing FOSS during my free time on weekends "because it is not helping the company to get an advantage over the other companies".
Note: The code I wrote had nothing to do with what the company does.
I work in a research lab where we need sometimes to build small apps like a proof of concept. Well on any given day you may receive an email from the lab director for a meeting which during he tells you there is this project on XXXX do it using technology YYYY and it doesn't matter if you know that technology or you think it's not suitable for the project and it doesn't really matter if you think this project will work or not. I mean you are expected to just do it, shut up and keep your opinions to yourself.
I feel like this lab is based on dictatorship.