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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Literally pulling an all-nighter helping to fix a major system calamity while afterwards not receiving due credits (credits went to the boss' nephew and some other colleague, nepotism to the max). Crazy episode and definitely not worth it.
I used to work several back to back 300+h/mo months on a regular basis every time there was another "crisis" in a project because some idiot manager promised more than they should've, typically about 12-14h/day for 6-7 days a week.
It was stupid, the results were awful, and the pay wasn't good enough anyway. People need to not be proud of such things and find a better job when their managers treat them like that.
Nowadays I put a lot of effort into trying to not overwork myself so every hour I do work, I am at peak performance. I deliver much better value for the time and money spent, and when there's a crisis I can stretch a bit.
The worst was when one of the managers hung out at the office "to join us" and all they had to do to spend their time was browse Facebook and Youtube, yet they had to be there to piss the rest of us off.
I am a Japanese and Japan used to be a society where people voluntary or coercively worked overtime. The situation, however, thanks to shortage of IT engineers got improved. In my case, i work remotely, in fact i am in Shenzhen now. Just one condition, you got to study cutting edge techs such as AI, blockchain, Flutter Firebase, GCP and Chinese;-)
I am currenlty working as a full-time programmer at a relatively new company, the problem is that I as contracted to work as programmer but I do a lot besides programming, I reworked the entire data center infrastructure, deployed a full private cloud environment based on OpenStack, migrated services, deployed new services and developed some tool that spams many platforms, train new employees and help the NOC since their current leader is a complete imconpetent the is wonly thhere because he's the owner's friend.
My current job allowed me to learn a lot besides full stack programming but it feels like a nightmare now.
Currently looking for a full-time remote opportunity, if someone could help I would be very grateful. :)
I can't pinpoint a specific timeframe when it happened, but some period in my last job made it so that when I finally left it last fall I was paid out more than three months in leftover vacation days and overtime. I'm still struggling with the effects on my mental and physical health. Hindsight, I wish I had quit sooner.
The most overworked I've ever been physically was when I was still an apprentice at a datacenter facility. Because of mismanagement there was a situation that required the 'evacuation' of a part of the datacenter within 72h. That meant scheduling, planing and moving roughly fifty customer-owned server-racks with the least amount of downtime possible. Did I mention that it was me (just to remind you, an apprentice) and a coworker? That's it. Luckily we were able to utilize the help of an electrician we had friendly ties with, so at least the electrical wiring was something we did not have to take care of. Still.
I don't remember exactly how much, or how little, I slept, but in those 72h it was probably less than eight hours. By the end of it my coworker and I didn't even make it home, we slept in the office for an hour first.
I learned a lot in those three days, not just knowledge-wise, but about my own limits, about working as a team under immense pressure, and that if I ever reach a role that involves "management" that I'll never let my people experience the same thing.
Also I'm not ever doing such a thing again, I'd rather quit.
Some time ago when I worked for freelance and have a fresh, new daily job. I underestimate a freelance project and because of the deadline, I worked for almost all days, sleeping for 4 hours per day or less each day. After a week I have been so exhausted, stressed and anxious, I took day off and re-design my work-life balance.
When selected for the first Hackathon of my student life.
Hackathon Name: Hack Off v2.0 2019
Project Link: github.com/mohit355/HACKOFF-V2.0
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.
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.