I once worked at an ad-tech company and had a bad start from the get go. I was led to believe I'd mostly be working in the browser, and that I'd have the opportunity to help lead the charge with introducing React into their stack. My day-to-day ended up being mostly writing data ingestion for a Hadoop cluster—which I had never done before and wasn't mentioned during the interview process.
Sales wanted to onboard everyone, saying "yeah we can handle this data format" and it was our job to make it so. They also promised timelines that put my entire team in constant overtime, and held us personally responsible if deadlines slipped. "This is all Carl's fault" was said once when they didn't know I was in the room. I was expected to be on call, and was one awoken at 3am because a client's site was broken. Somebody had deployed the previous day without manually busting the cache, and Cloudflare had only just begun serving the new—broken—assets.
My last straw was when, shortly after being told I was one of the most experienced developers on the team, I was pulled aside and told they wanted to put me on a performance improvement plan (a PIP). It would have meant focusing exclusively on the drudgery, with no time granted to make improvements to process or infrastructure. I was told "sign the PIP or clear out your desk," and I walked out about an hour later with all my stuff.
Another story: I was brought in to help lead a "v2" total rewrite from scratch of an app. Early on, I brought up that it's often dangerous to work in total isolation from the rest of the codebase, but assumed they had scoped it out and determined it would be the correct option.
As I got to know my manager, I realized that this was absolutely not the case. It was a classic case of buzzword-driven development. Yeah, they used Docker—but local builds took 45 minutes and the resulting images were 2GB, for a bog-standard Rails app. They were using React, but with 6 separate, page-specific bundles, each weighing in at 5-6MB. They were in-process of adding Kafka and serverless, adding "microservices" and "event-based architecture" to the list of buzzwords in use. My "v2" rewrite was scaled back into "1 new feature crammed into the existing app" shortly after I joined.
They'd been limping along for months, hopping from silver bullet to silver bullet, wondering why nothing was helping. In the 4 months I worked there, I don't think we had a week without a multi-hour total outage of the app. In those 4 months, my manager began requiring that we rigidly take the top ticket from the task tracker, work it to completion, and use a Slack bot to ping him if we ceased making progress for 15 minutes.
My title was "Senior Frontend Developer," but I was being asked to do database administration and Rails. I handed in my resignation, citing my totally reworked responsibilities and lack of independence, and my Slack access was cut before I could say goodbye to my coworkers.
By cutting lose such work toxicity which usually leads to undue, unnecessary stress from your life, you sure have added a few days if not weeks to your life span.
Them cutting you off slack before you could say goodbye reminds me an employer who wouldn't give me a work laptop (although promised).
Decided to quit just 2 months in. Employer wanted to follow me to my house to ensure I've deleted work related stuff from my personal computer.
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I once worked at an ad-tech company and had a bad start from the get go. I was led to believe I'd mostly be working in the browser, and that I'd have the opportunity to help lead the charge with introducing React into their stack. My day-to-day ended up being mostly writing data ingestion for a Hadoop cluster—which I had never done before and wasn't mentioned during the interview process.
Sales wanted to onboard everyone, saying "yeah we can handle this data format" and it was our job to make it so. They also promised timelines that put my entire team in constant overtime, and held us personally responsible if deadlines slipped. "This is all Carl's fault" was said once when they didn't know I was in the room. I was expected to be on call, and was one awoken at 3am because a client's site was broken. Somebody had deployed the previous day without manually busting the cache, and Cloudflare had only just begun serving the new—broken—assets.
My last straw was when, shortly after being told I was one of the most experienced developers on the team, I was pulled aside and told they wanted to put me on a performance improvement plan (a PIP). It would have meant focusing exclusively on the drudgery, with no time granted to make improvements to process or infrastructure. I was told "sign the PIP or clear out your desk," and I walked out about an hour later with all my stuff.
Another story: I was brought in to help lead a "v2" total rewrite from scratch of an app. Early on, I brought up that it's often dangerous to work in total isolation from the rest of the codebase, but assumed they had scoped it out and determined it would be the correct option.
As I got to know my manager, I realized that this was absolutely not the case. It was a classic case of buzzword-driven development. Yeah, they used Docker—but local builds took 45 minutes and the resulting images were 2GB, for a bog-standard Rails app. They were using React, but with 6 separate, page-specific bundles, each weighing in at 5-6MB. They were in-process of adding Kafka and serverless, adding "microservices" and "event-based architecture" to the list of buzzwords in use. My "v2" rewrite was scaled back into "1 new feature crammed into the existing app" shortly after I joined.
They'd been limping along for months, hopping from silver bullet to silver bullet, wondering why nothing was helping. In the 4 months I worked there, I don't think we had a week without a multi-hour total outage of the app. In those 4 months, my manager began requiring that we rigidly take the top ticket from the task tracker, work it to completion, and use a Slack bot to ping him if we ceased making progress for 15 minutes.
My title was "Senior Frontend Developer," but I was being asked to do database administration and Rails. I handed in my resignation, citing my totally reworked responsibilities and lack of independence, and my Slack access was cut before I could say goodbye to my coworkers.
😱
By cutting lose such work toxicity which usually leads to undue, unnecessary stress from your life, you sure have added a few days if not weeks to your life span.
Them cutting you off slack before you could say goodbye reminds me an employer who wouldn't give me a work laptop (although promised).
Decided to quit just 2 months in. Employer wanted to follow me to my house to ensure I've deleted work related stuff from my personal computer.