Really should add a poll system for Forem... Might do that this weekend.
A bit of background, for the past year and a half, I've been working as a senior .Net full-stack developer at a company writing ERP software. All of it was remotely. Now it's apparently a problem...
A few months ago, I got a back injury which happened to coincide with my boss demanding that I have to drive to the office to work from there, instead of my home-office. Not a big deal in it's own (beyond the skyrocketing fuel prices), but I had a back injury, so I was medically booked off. And that's when the workplaces started to get REALLY toxic.
From non-stop pestering 'when will you be able to come to the office', to giving opinions on my doctor's treatment, to outright fabricating a paper trail, something just felt off about how they've been handling it.
They went so far as to send me an email, 'warning of code quality' after a merge and push, where their changes were broken, but they only tested it after I merged and pushed. Obviously I ran it first to test it, but JetBrain Rider hit the build-cache, so I had ran a stale build when I tested before pushing. I get a written warning, then a phone call, where he said I 'rely too much on AI' despite my colleagues sitting in the office dont even do their commits themselves, they fully operate through Claude... And that he 'hired a person, not an AI, Claude is $20'... That comment made my blood boil. I'm sure you all can agree, for someone to downplay 6 years of experience, let alone that you had built most of the core systems alone, being compared to a $20 subscription is rather insulting.
Now, he wants a 'meeting with management' to 'discuss my remote work and back injury'. Apparently Zoom doesnt exist to him, because he demanded it's either at a cafe, or my house! In what world is it appropriate for your boss to invite themself and core management staff to an employee's home? So I chose cafe.
All of this has been causing me stress, anxiety and I can feel the toll it's having on my body and mental health. So I ran the numbers... I have 5 months runway with the money in my pocket and I have a 2nd source of income doing tech support and SLAs for Doccit (automated accounting suite I built prior to working here). I have my own OPC and enough experience to start a solo business if I really had to. And I've been applying to jobs, even got an interview with Wasmer (fingers crossed tech eval goes well).
So my question to anyone who got this far, in my position, would you tell them to shove it? Cuz that's my plan for tomorrow. Hand in resignation and to tell him where he can shove his Claude subscription... When the clients I worked with directly, building out the systems they want to deploy across all their facilities (huge contract), ask them to add a feature, or make an edit, we'll see how far his Claude subscription gets him.
Question 2, anyone looking for a Senior Full-stack Developer, specializing in .Net, Rust and Fintech?
P.S. Just a theory, but I suspect the real purpose behind this harassment is due to them wanting to down-staff and he doesnt want to fire any of the puppy-dog eyed developers in the office staring at him... Much easier firing someone you dont see daily? Especially after the initial 'come to the office' motive being that it's when the rest of them first started using AI and had no clue how it worked, whereas I had already moved on from single agent to multi-agent orchestration, probably wanted me there to train them and potentially also to get their hands on my local model I use for most of my work... Again, just a theory.
Top comments (3)
Man, that "$20 Claude subscription" comment is an absolute joke.
People need to realize that an LLM is just a tool, not magic. Giving a raw $20 prompt-bot to office devs who don't even write their own commits is a fast track to disaster.
Without deterministic memory, AST context, and proper orchestration, LLMs don't "understand" engineering logic. The moment a non-trivial bug hits or a feature requires deep structural changes, a raw chat interface gets stuck in a hallucination loop. It will just start blindly rewriting the entire codebase and breaking existing logic because it has zero long-term context.
A prompt wrapper doesn't have 6 years of architecture decisions in its head, and it sure as hell won't save them when the ERP falls apart. The stale build-cache warning is just a cheap excuse from management to hide their own incompetence.
Let him click his $20 buttons for a month or two. When the system breaks and their "AI-powered" team has no clue how to trace the root cause, watch how fast reality hits him.
You’ve got 5 months of runway, your own product (Doccit), and Wasmer lined up. Protect your health and your back — hand in that resignation and let them test their $20 theory in production.
Good luck with Wasmer!
Consutar las leyes sobre Derecho Laboral de tu pais, y valorar. Animo. Gracias por el post.
Already did, they are being very particular with how they've been phrasing things, so they dont trigger any red flags for labor law.