I augmented this post from a Reddit comment that I made earlier today in /r/experiencedDevs; in case you’re a subscriber and this whole spiel sounds familiar, it’s the same story. It happened to me.
I would sooner be broken on the wheel than plagiarize something that actually reflects my experiences and memories. If you’re curious, yes, this company still appears to exist. A few of my LinkedIn contacts still reflect it as their employer, their glazed, lifeless eyes staring out of an inferno I knew all too well. Some of my former colleagues are still there. If you’re reading this now, let me know, and I’ll do what I can to help a fellow crab get out of that barrel.
This may sound like a rant. It may sound whiny. But it’s truly a benediction unto whatever spirit is guiding our souls through the cosmic void. I’m happy that I can look back at this experience and smile, still alive, thriving, and much less bothered than I was before. I think of the problems I used to deal with (for less money!) and I look at the newer, more complex issues I have to resolve with greater determination and joy.
And isn’t that what we all signed on for anyway?
Do you have a job you hate? Does your boss point the finger and shout like a petulant child? Are you asked to perform the impossible with no support from the place that claims it’s like a big family, with that work-hard-play-hard line of lies? You can take solace in the fact that you aren’t alone. You never were. That’s why we have labor laws these days.
Back before I was much of a dev and just getting started in the IT space, I worked at a small startup as the network/cloud/support/hardware guy. If this sounds like too many roles, even for a startup, that’s because it was. My boss was the CTO, namely because these responsibilities had been taken from him with my hiring. Maybe he had threatened to quit unless that stuff was taken off his plate, maybe he had threatened worse. And I can almost understand why he was such a mean dude. I worked for his boss too, and that guy wasn’t likable either.
That’s the first lesson I should have learned: meanness thrives with meanness, crap attracts crap. Crap turns what was formerly good into more crap. What do you call ten gallons of sewage mixed with ten gallons of 100% organic ice cream mixed with roasted Madagascar vanilla beans? Twenty gallons of sewage. You can’t unscramble the egg, but you might be able to escape the frying pan. Which is all you can do in such a rough situation.
The CTO was, to put it lightly, a negative Nancy. When the going got rough, he would dip out. When good things happened, he would hog the glory. When really bad things happened, he would point fingers and raise his voice. It was not a fun time. Once over lunch, a friend of mine who worked in the same building carefully told me that I looked like shit. I felt like shit too. Things broke constantly and according to local culture, it was always my fault. And I believed it. I ate it up.
Truth, I should’ve seen the signs earlier. I was woefully unequipped for the job, and so was everyone around me. This is a great way to learn, but a very bad way to work for forty hours every week. One of our devs stopped showing up two weeks into his hiring. Clearly, he saw beyond the twentieth-floor view, the glass meeting rooms, and the conspicuously missing OSHA informational posters. I was planning on getting married that year and wasn’t able to think past my next paycheck, but in retrospect, it’s something I should’ve considered as well.
The CEO/founder was insane too. He appeared to have spun up this company out of a mountain of family money as a means to show off the fact that he (sometimes) ran a startup to his other rich friends. To be clear: during your employment at this company, you did not work for the company. You worked for him.* Sometimes you would have to work for his other, mostly failed companies. When we went on those jobs, I felt like I was on acid. But sometimes you have to roll with the bizarre life you find yourself in and learn what you can while you’re still solvent.
But solvency has its limits. Eventually, a close family member of mine entered hospice. I told him I would need a week off in order to spend time with my dying relative. It was refused, and this was a bridge too far. I was so burnt out that I just stopped going into the office and worked remote for a week: in the era before COVID, this was hard to justify. When they fired me on the first day I came back, I didn’t even care. They tried to fight unemployment, but they lost that battle. There are definitely positives to recording PIPs and giving warnings before cutting people off, but nobody cared enough to cover that eventuality. Ultimately, this was better for me than for them.
Thankfully, I had been looking for jobs nonstop. I wanted out and I was going to get out. The market was good at this point in time, so I was able to make a horizontal move to a company that was better for my mental well-being, with a functional HR department, a real support system for newer hires, and a mission that aligned much better with my skills and interests. I worked there for two more years and then moved onto what eventually became my current role, after many expected and unexpected bumps in the road. Not all of it was comfortable, and no real sojourn is ever all feather beds and down pillows. We keep those at home for a reason.
It’s worth asking, why did I even agree to work in such an unstable, capricious, and downright mean environment? And why did I bother to stay? I would contend that there were several primary motivators.
One was that I was leaving a position that was even more stressful. Not to get bogged down into every difficult job that I’ve ever had, but even working in an office that makes you crazy is better than driving to a new city every week to go crazy. Experience and exposure are great, but stress will make you mad and eventually send you into an early grave. So even that rough business was an improvement.
On top of that, I was curious about working with new tech. While not quite the dawn of the cloud era, it was still mid-morning, and this organization did everything they could to keep things light and fast. Sometimes this is an excuse to not invest in what actually needs to be present; in this case, it was. I learned a lot, but I mostly learned not to trust leadership that throws the kitchen sink at you when anything (including the coffeemaker) breaks. Because you’ll never have time to fix it all.
A third factor was greed. I was decently well compensated, considering what I had been making in my last role. And beyond that, I was hoping (and somehow believing) that we’d get bought up by Google or Amazon and that I’d get rich. Did that mean I had any vested options? Or owned any element of the org whatsoever? Of course not! These were opium dreams that I was trying to manifest via pure power of will. This does not work. If you want material success, for your own sake, suffer not the magical thinker in your head to guide you down the wrong path. Illusions are compelling, but they’re also just that. You can’t drink a mirage in an ocean of sand.
I did mention earlier that the company was still extant. Most of the people I worked with have since left, including all the staff who was present at my unceremonious, blessed dumping. If I learned anything in the process, it’s that if something feels weird and people are acting weird, that’s probably because it is weird. But should you find yourself in such a rut, please don’t stop trying until you have a genuine reason not to. Chaos is instructive. You will learn things, and at the very least, when a future interviewer asks you about a time when you had to ‘deal with a tough client,’ you’ll have a killer story to tell.
Think of it as trying on clothes. Better yet, since this is a years-long commitment, trying on a wedding dress. Some might emphasize parts of your self that you aren’t proud of, but fashion (like programming) is a big, well-developed field, and there is indeed a lid for every pot, or at least one that fits to a level that you will probably accept. Experiments are expensive, but they’re worth trying on (and moving on, if it doesn’t become you).
One extremely funny detail:
* The CEO was a stickler for bizarre decorative decisions. He insisted that the WiFi emitter in the biggest conference room was not visible. Ultimately, that meant it had to be placed under a large and expensive and mostly metal table. This meant that WiFi was often not accessible in that room, which caused endless interruptions to my workflow when I had to go in and restart it multiple times. This probably pissed him off a lot, which in retrospect is fine by me.