Programming

Return to office mandate

Abuse. Don't take it. Know your worth.

If they required me to work in office (at minimum, they would need to pay me 30k more, 5-10k just to make up for gas and wear and tear on my car, 10k+ for the commute time, and 10k+ for the inconvenience, stress, clothes, eating out more for lunch, dealing with traffic, etc.)

Also, if my leadership was abusive and/or demanded prioritizing work over family and health.

I don't have the highest paid job in the world, but we're comfortable and I'm pretty happy with my company right now. Those are the things that would make me start looking elsewhere.

1. In office - COVID taught us remote works best for me, there's no going back
2. Pay - don't pay/offer enough or give a raise at least equivalent to inflation --> 👋
3. Micro-management / bad management -👋
4. Force windows or mac onto me - first I push back, but I will quit if push comes to shove

Return to office has made me quit.

Return to the office. Forced to use Windows again

Using war metaphors

Requering blind loyalty

Requering acceptance of any task

Disregard for labor contracts

Dumb management

There are so many reasons to leave a job. I can only say why I left jobs or rejected job offers in the past:

• Left a bullshit job. I was bored.
• Left a job because I didn't like where I had to live.
• Left a job because the company was unraveling. It went under within a year.
• Let a job because of incompetent management and crappy code.
• Rejected an offer because the place felt like a morgue.
• Rejected an offer because the hiring manager's boss acted like a entitled asshole.
• Rejected an offer because the work spaces for developers were even worse than open plan.

Toxic managers or coworkers

pay/benefits don't trickle down
shit trickles down

what I've learned is that 2 week notices only gives time for corporations to replace you with another unsuspecting victim so I'm just gonna run as soon as I can tell my work environment is toxic

these toxic workplaces can crumble for all I care

Active remote surveillance, no one?

• Culture where you're scared to criticize stuff, because people get angry when you're telling them the truth or even just the elephant in the room. Echo chamber instead of idea lab.
• Management constantly making decisions such that no one decision made ever gets totally implemented, but the loose ends just stack up.
• Management not involving engineers in the and assuming that engineers are incapable of understanding how the business works, let alone contribute valuable ideas to how it might work better.
• Too many layers of hierarchy, competitive, macho male-dominated, title-driven, ego-driven culture where people are fighting they're way up the totem pole instead of working cooperatively together to create a great experience for their users.
• Companies where silly little things that should be doable in hours costs weeks or months or where nothing gets done quickly, because too many people need to sign off on it.
• Mission statement that is bogus and you know that it really is all about money, growth and status. I like companies that are truly trying to adding value to the world, however small that change may be. I am just not interested in your algorithmic trading, crypto non-sense, optimizing ad revenue or getting people to waste more of their time or money with endless bull crap.
• Having to constantly fight to get the time to refactor, test, rethink, work on build/development/observability tooling instead of working on feature after feature endlessly. If I say something needs work I have good reasons for it that I am willing to explain, but do not assume that I like to waste time gold plating code because I am a autistic perfectionist with OCD with no sense for what the business is trying to do.
• Constant bogus deadlines that seem to come from nowhere and are only meant to keep the pressure on the engineers. I work hard and this kind of pressure only means we're going to go fast in the short run and extremely slow in the long run, because nothing gets finished properly.
• Running the server side on Windows. I want to be able to debug issues in depth when they arise.
• Using the Go programming language. I am not going back to 80's programming and checking for nil all day long, just to see my program segment fault in production anyway. (and yes, I am talking from experience here)
• Only remote companies. I get too lonely at some point and all the best cooperative ideas I've ever had in my career where born at the whiteboard with colleagues. This is just me though.

When feeling unappreciated/disrespected.

I'm extremely open to tech stacks and specific industries, though I would die happy if I never had to touch another line of TCL. Go to hell TCL, and take your upvar nonsense with you.

I'm currently between jobs and planning a career shift into a software engineer manager role, so I have been thinking about this quite a bit. A job I would leave - which is really leaving a manager/team, not a company - would rate poorly on these, which I'm polishing into a new "what type of position are you looking for?" answer:

• A team that works cooperatively, as we accomplish more together than in competition. Everyone should strive to be world class at their roles, as being around that is critical for learning from each other.
• An environment where clear and open communication is encouraged, including whatever anyone is struggling with.
• Work that takes on difficult problems and strives to work through them with the highest standards.
• A position that enables me to grow down my desired career path, which as of this writing means reporting to a software manager who is willing to delegate project management tasks and eventually people management as well.

Something I wouldn't reveal during an interview, though critically important, is a work environment that I can arrange such that it best enables me, and not be boxed in by someone else's conceived ideas of how software engineers should act or work. I've felt like a square peg in a round hole my entire life. Turns out it's a concrete objective fact (ADHD). I am so goddamn tired of feeling bad or apologizing for things that are actually just the scaffolding that I need to survive.

Every engineering job I've left has been because of bad leadership.

The first, they hired a lead with no business being a lead. Not only was I much stronger from a technical perspective even though I had only been doing it professionally for about 3 years, but I was a better leader to the rest of the team as well. I had been sort of filling in in the interim before they were hired. They were let go not too long after I left.

The second, they hired an EM. I had been asked to work on setting up the code base for replatforming our web app and begin migrating pieces of it over. I was basically doing this on my own and working with timelines that I had given to leadership and providing weekly updates. This EM started micro-managing everything. This not only slowed my progress to a crawl, it was demotivating and stressful. They were let go not too long after I left.

My current position, I was moved to a new team during a company reorganization. The EM on this team is completely psychotic. Micro-managing to a degree that I've never seen before. They're convinced that what we do Agile SCRUM, but we take in large projects each quarter, plan and scope them at the beginning, and then spend the rest of the quarter executing on them. When I or the team make suggestions that align better with agile, we're gaslit and told our ideas "are waterfall not agile".

We usually don't take on projects that go longer than a quarter. The project that I'm on currently is bleeding into Q4. I warned about this from the very beginning, but the result was just more gaslighting, that I took too long on planning. I would have left, but the job market isn't as friendly to hopping around as it was previously. Thankfully, I'll be switching teams once this project is over.

Overall, all of these places had their problems beyond leadership. These are things that I can tolerate however, and with good leadership, can work towards improving. Once leadership turns to shit, it's time to gtfo.

At my previous company, they started forcing us to go back to the office, first once per week, then at least 8 days per month. I hated it but I could take it. Then, they said they had to replace our workstations with an SOE Laptop (some standard hardware and software configuration that is usually completely locked down, and you need to open a ticket to install anything). I hated this more, but I could still take it.

The last straw that made me quit was that my boss forced me to work on a project using a dead technology only because there was no one else that could do it. But I had absolutely zero experience with that technology. I was the only one who knew how to build a good user interface, so that's why the task fell on my lap.

I usually check in with myself:

• Am I growing in my career?
• Am I happy with my current workplace: people, culture, flexibility?
• Am I valued to the company, i.e. my opinions are considered and regarded to some certain?

If one or two of these conditions failed, I would consider moving. After all, if I went to a workplace and I didn't find any joy or recognition, the paycheck wouldn't make me stay.

I worry that some rocket magician with an MBA will decide we can just use FreeCAD and stop paying for these silly Solidworks or Autodesk licenses.

I will quit if I don't feel happy anymore, which most likely because of people. If colleagues I like are all gone, I probably go somewhere else.

Sometimes it might be the salary which causes people to leave.

@onlinepersona Left because of crappy management and no perspective as a not-that-junior-anymore developer.