Tell us about a time you worked for an overbearing organization/management— or perhaps a time you brought it on yourself.
When have you been most over-extended in your dev career?
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Top comments (46)
I had a client as a freelancer that kept changing the scope of a project. This was when I was still in college, so I was also overloaded with class projects and my own side development projects.
Worked 2 all-nighters to finish the project, which still ended up being not what they wanted, and worst of all I did not get paid for the 3 months of work.
Obviously it was my fault in not setting up a contract and requesting half payment up front. Lesson learned the hard way 😅
I had a similar situation that led to me not working with the client anymore. I delivered the product, working great, looking snappy.
His issue wasn't scope creep though. He complained constantly about pixels being in the wrong places, and wanted it exactly to spec. I had to explain to him that while webdev tools are great, the detail he was after would cost a lot more.
He at one point asked me what HTML is 😆
Ah that's the worst! Is it just me or are the pickiest clients also the ones who balk over paying the most?
I've learned that same lesson about taking payment up front from my husband's construction business. It must just be universal to contracting work.
Yes, this seems to be true even when companies are "big" and price is smaller. There are ways to mitigate the risk though, like retainer (never fixed price, because scope is never fixed), pay per phase, higher price (this will discourage those who dont want to pay for quality in the first place).
Yikes. I got myself into similar situations when I was freelancing early in my career. Learned a lot of valuable lessons about getting paid!
I started at a new job working on a pilot for a financial institution with a company who had never done anything that complicated before. Within weeks the owner of the company was screaming at us about how over budget we were. For something that had never been done before.
I stuck around (because it was interesting work!) and wound up being involved in the beta for the pilot. Again, doing something that had never been done before. The lead left for a month to get married and I was left trying to get this project into production. When he returned, he decided the project was now mine, wouldn't take over again, and quit shortly after.
Fast forward six months. I am put in charge of the final iteration of this project and given a team. Because I am trained as a programmer/systems analyst I end up doing all of the back and forth with the BA's instead of the PM, I am testing new tech ahead of my team then assigning tasks, I am pulling my own weight with coding, and four months in I've already banked all of the overtime I'm allowed and start getting it paid out.
Kudos to my team! We worked weekends, 12-16 hour days, whatever it took to get this project to completion. I bought so many bowls of pho for my coworkers and the boss gave us Starbux cards loaded with $200 at a time for our team. The client sent us a fruit bouquet to help prevent colds when we were in the final stretch. My original estimate turned out to be accurate and it cost nearly half a million dollars to create. I have never worked so hard or so focussed before in my life. Somewhere in my GitHub history, there is a stretch of 60 days in a row where I pushed code and not little snippets.
I hope I never get a project like this again. XD It was very satisfying to complete but it also took complete advantage of my mental health.
FYI? We started this project in mid-April and it went live sometime in October/November/December of that same year. (Sorry, I don't remember exactly when it launched. My brain was mush by that time and my memories are mostly blurs.)
this is a great story
Yeah, trading health to increase chance of the projects success is a very very very bad deal. I learned that the hard way this year.
It was the time I worked in a startup as the only "tech guy". I was literally living in the office back then, working about 10 - 12 hours a day for about a year in order to deliver two MVPs.
To maintain my health I would do intermittent fasting and meditated for 30 min a day. I learned so many things about software development and UI/UX design, but I was also really lonely — I would sometimes walk outside just to see other people to stay sane LoL.
I don't regret it but I would never do that again.
I was most over-extended when I was working full time and trying to get a new job.
For 5 months I constantly worked nights and weekends to either apply for jobs or keep up with my day job. And it seemed like every place I applied to had a 9 step interview process and a big coding project. 😵
I was a little under qualified and not in a position to be picky at the time, but in hindsight if a company's willing to work you like a dog for an interview they'll do the same once you're an employee. Lesson learned.
That’s actually a good point!
Many company’s want you to do a lot of work only for the interviews which is almost impossible having a full time job
When i was working for a branding / web development project for a truck company client, i remember me trying to stay awake in front of the computer and going for a burrito and coffee at 3 am to my nearest 7-eleven. That lasted only for three days. (the overbearing amount of work). Thanks God.
Also around three months ago, while working on a UI for a dashboard system for another client, something like that happened again, i actually got hospitalized on this one, during breakfast my wife noticed my face was pale green and i almost fainted. The doctor said i was dehydrated (i think i was drinking to much coffee, which in turn made me want to go to the bathroom often). Both costumers are very happy. But at the time my wife was not at all.
Haha that's the real test of work life balance.
Ha!
Probably during my previous job as a management accountant, during month-end and quarter-end closing (6 days of very intensive and exhausting work). No stress during this transition year, while studying development and working during my projects.
I signed on as a senior dev for the first time in order to build a competitive alternative to a major product another company bought another company just to have in the first place. I had to do it in short order to win deals and stop attrition. It was just me on the project without QA and... I pulled it off! Quality was abysmal and my assumption was that the directive to go fast and build big things came with an expectation of bugs, but ... it did not. Communicating expectations is important!
I had some months of 60-80 hour weeks near the beginning of the decade, pitching and prototyping an integrated customer communications solution while simultaneously trying to keep a 10-12 person dev team operational, staffed, and shielded from an outsourcing-happy management chain.
Don't work in advertising.
For me, college was 100% the most overworked I've been.
We had a term we nicknamed the "Semester from Hell", which basically involved a lot of all-nighters in our dedicated computer lab. And by a lot, I mean 3/7 days a week.
The other days I just worked until 3am at home.
During my Coop semester the year after I was so broken down and burned out I could barely concentrate. It was baddddd.
Working from 9AM to 12 ~ 3 AM from Monday to Friday for 3 months in a row. That wasn't good to my mental health, luckily this didn't happen again since then.
Why I did work so much? I work at an Electoral Institution here where I live and in those day we were in election process. Just remembering those days makes me feel bad 😢
So I use to be a game developer. I can probably stop the explanation there...
I did work for a now-defunct studio where the CEO expected engineering to stay until 4 am on a Saturday without any notice. Everyone was exempt. I was the producer on the project and refused to keep the team for those types of hours.
That resulted in a 3 am call while I was driving home with my wife. Where he drunkenly chewed me out. The VP of the company called the next day to apologize for his behavior. Long story short, I gave notice the following day. I was just married and new in my career.
Little did I know I would spend the next 14 months unemployed and never end up back in the game industry. I had several years of experience at the time and even worked on some very large AAA titles in high valued roles.
Now I build websites. The same thing I have been doing since I was 13. All my years of student debt to get into the game industry, and my career ruined because of this man's drunken tirade.
This was a long time ago, but you don't forget how you were treated.
Had similar story, but much quicker resolved and less dramatic.
Im web dev, and when i was young, one dude got promoted to be IT chief in an agency and apparently he thought this company is one in a million and he can do whatever he wants to.
Friday, 5:30 PM, im leaving home, he tell me to stay longer to finish something.
I say, nope, i have plans.
He said if i leave now i can "bring papers" on monday. I dont know what this meant because i had no contract or anything (way to avoid taxes by companies, since im not an employee, there is no health plan, insurance, etc.).
Anyway, i came back monday, told them i quit in 2 weeks, just to finish ongoing project and introduce someone else. Then i had like 6 talks so that everybody have a shot on keeping me in the company, but this toxic behavior was too much.
People are not company property.
Definitely during my career change into software development. I was working as a program coordinator for a nonprofit at the time. I was hired as the second paid staff, and my boss left for another position 4 months into my role. For the next 6 months I was the only paid staff, and the volunteer leadership for the org insisted that they had posted the job for a new director, though I knew that wasn't the truth (there was no trace of any activity on our Indeed account or anywhere else within our web presence). Eventually we did hire someone and she was great, but she was also completely fed up with the organization and quit shortly after I left.
While I wasn't verbally abused or anything like some of the replies here, those 6 months that I was the interim director were terrible. I still received the same low compensation, but had to handle and answer for every facet of the org's operations. This also meant 2 to 3 12-14 hour days every week. I was also trying to learn to code at the same time, which meant that I'd wake up every morning at 4 am, code for several hours before work, and often come home and code late into the night as well. I can't even imagine how someone with multiple jobs and children trying to make ends meet can make it work.
Anyway, I was only at that job for a year and it was well worth it because I managed to learn enough to land me my first full-time dev job in the process, and since then things have been great! Even the high-stress times at my current job don't really compare.
In my first year of career, where I just started as a RoR developer. I found myself working from morning 9 to night 9 in office, and even at home I used to learn/understand/discuss/post in stackoverflow about the code that I have been working on.
Come to think of it, that is the worst thing I did to myself. I should have asked for a project manager, when there were not any. The client used to come to the developers directly and express his anger about why the project is going so slow.
Apparently the CTO promised the whole e-commerce project to be done in 2 weeks, but in retrospect, it was done in 6 months. With the engineers being fresh grads and requirements kept on adding. At this current situation, I am in with 4+ years experience, I would have made a promise like 2-3 months. But certainly not 2 weeks.
I got back pain
I resorted to smoking at least 3-4 cigarettes a day. While I smoked a little in college as a recreational thing. But it was not a habit in college. But it became a habit after I joined work professionally.
I was not mentally well, I used to get irritated and was not nice with colleagues. I used to cry sometimes in the night for no reason or some other reasons which can be coped with if I did not have stress at work.
I did not have any life other than work.
While the whole experience of working in this company made me better as a developer and land a job at double the pay. I just wish sometimes, it need not be done that way. I should just relaxed a little and maybe should have gotten the double pay after 2 years instead of one year since I was just 22 at that point in time.
Now I just work 10 - 5 or 6. I don't do work after office unless it's a prod issue. I am going to the gym 2-3 times a week and quit smoking. I wish someone was there to guide me better.
I took a job for a startup once. I could stop there and most would understand 😁
We had funding enough for three devs, a project manager, and an IT guy. The product was completely viable, but it was in the advertising space, which is insanely crowded. Our first major partner was another startup, though I questioned it's viability. Our second partner was going to be the gold.
The first failed, and the second just went AWOL. We were left with doing random webdev jobs to survive. Soon I was the only employee, and worked all hours.
I didn't mind though, because I have this burning passion for code. Even did side gigs during all of this.
One day, paycheck didn't post. I draw a hard line there 😋
Yikes, this is dipping into some dark times.
Looking back, I was overworked most of the time at my previous job. We were not accurately staffed for the amount of work that came in. Plus, our busy season almost doubled our number of tickets without any additional staffing. Plus. So. Many. Meetings. Plus, oh yeah, we're changing all of these systems and you now have mandatory training. But at least there's pizza?
I was in that role for 5+ years and was burnt out professionally. The day-to-day drama meant I was exhausted at the end of the day and didn't feel up like doing much else. I felt like I was in a loop of wanting to do something new, but not being able to do at work, and being too exhausted to do it on my own time.
That's not normal!
Being on the other side (accurately staffed, supportive culture, better work/life manager and my coworkers and boss are rad) makes me realize how bad it was.