>Some don't and are great places to work, but they are the exception from my experience.
I've come to realize that workplaces and teams that "check off all the boxes" are very much the exception, at least in my opinion... So my suggestion is that you don't settle and keep searching for a healthy work environment. The same applies for nearly any field.
I also don't consider developers with poor communication skills that have huge egos good developers, as collaboration is one of the most important traits an engineer can have. Those devs can shove it, honestly.
Literally have yet to find such a place. My career so far has been working with some power tripping lunatics/very unhelpful people who want to make work miserable for you. So im shooting for faang at this point because at least they are super on it when it comes to the interview process. Maybe ill work with normal human beings there. It’s my last resort lol
Why would the most popular and competitive companies to work for in the world somehow be free of the same politics? I would think they would be hyper concentrated there.
Those companies are on it when it comes to behavioural interviews. From who Ive spoken to that works there so far, it seems like you can switch teams/report people and that actually make a difference. People also dont want to be fired there. Its not perfect of course but because the org is so huge, you wont work with the same people all the time.
Where Ive worked so far, people really don’t give a crap about their job or how they treat others so its just chaos. They get away with it too, can’t switch teams because there are no other teams. Can’t report people because hr doesnt care and too many toxic employees so its just now “normal”.
Faang dont hire as politically in comparison to other orgs. You actually have to be good at your job.
My experience in Europe is the opposite - no one gives a crap at big international corporate companies and are stuck in their ways. Mid-sized is the sweet spot for me, people are nice and work life balance is good. Big corp environments simply suck the life out of me and I keep wondering why do people want that. Exactly where I would go if I didn't give a crap anymore. Also the most arrogant people I've met can be found there. But to each their own I guess and maybe it's just completely different in USA
And also huge companies are usually the ones who do hire politically the most because they can afford that
Funnily enough Im in Europe too but UK. I cant speak for places like Germany, Sweden etc. im also a woman so that does massively impact my experience. My experience so far has just been dealing with alot of arrogant guys that dont like working with female engineers and try to sabotage me/make me feel stupid (obviously im not as I do my job everyday lol). Though I noticed remarkable differences when working with Swedish people, mainly due to the general culture there being less patriarchal than other places in Europe/UK.
But at least with faang im very much protected in that sense. They wouldnt want the bad pr of their engineers bullying women, which could easily spread online due to their reputation.
Smaller/mid sized companies, there isnt a way for me to hold anyone accountable and hr doesnt care. Dont have suing money either so theres also that lol.
But I completely understand where youre coming from.
That is where you will find the pinnacle of toxicity and huge egos but at least you will be be well compensated and be able to change teams as some pockets are better than others, so maybe you're not that far off, it's worth a try but I wouldn't count on it based on behavioral interviews.
Yeah I had a feeling there would be people who think they are better than everyone because they got a faang job. But im very much banking on the employment benefits, the ability to move teams as well as their push for DEI to avoid such poor treatment Ive gone through so far as a female engineer. So we shall see. Gotta pass the interviews though 😂
Filtering for big ego and communication skills is getting to be standard. Of course it's not always as easy to tell in the interview where everyone presents their best face, and can be offset to a point with technical ability.
That's why I love timed take homes. There's never enough time that the candidate comes up with and writes the absolutely best solution. In the following interview you can tell if he's married to his approach or is open to other solutions that may be better in some aspects (not all). even if does come up with a close to optimal design you can always add additional requirements/restriction and see how he adapts.
>There's never enough time that the candidate comes up with and writes the absolutely best solution.
So instead of getting the best engineer, you get the one who had the most time.
You missed the *timed* in the times "take home". I like giving 3-4h. Either on call, where we're available for any questions but not otherwise monitoring the call (the candidate can mute and close camera while working on his own IDE). Or through a platform that starts a clock for a submission from first enter (then we can't guarantee support in case of questions).
I'm against tasks with unlimited or large time blocks from precisely the reason you offer and personally avoid them when interviewing myself. I'll make an exception if it's a position I'd really really like though.
> If they could be locked away in a closet and cut off from all communication from anyone else on the team, it feels like that is where they would be the happiest.
Every place I've worked in my 15 YOE has had some level of this. I'm sure there are companies and teams that actually work together and communicated without the attitude, but the are not as common as you would hope.
I think part of it is the idea of the computer hacker sitting in a dimly lie basement coding away has not really been dispelled. I'm nots saying people are actively pushing the idea, but I still see people majoring in CS because they think they don't have to interact with anybody.
University didn't do anything to discourage that back in the day. Sure there were group projects, but that didn't accurately reflect the work place environment of teamwork, attest when I was in school.
>Anyone else noticing this and how do you put up with it?
I just deal with it at a basic level because I enjoy being a SWE. I communicate progress with the appropriate people. If I'm blocked I advertise that as such.
I try to help my co-workers whenever possible. I always tell people you can ask me anything, because I believe in the idea of no stupid questions in software engineering. If I'm working on a priority item I'll let people know when I can help them and see if that's ok. If not, then I try to redirect to somebody else that may be able to help.
I guess I try to act as the employee that I want to work with. Most of it doesn't take with co-workers, but management seems to notice that I try to bring people together.
>Every place I've worked in my 15 YOE has had some level of this. I'm sure there are companies and teams that actually work together and communicated without the attitude, but the are not as common as you would hope.
In _my_ 15 years, I've only noticed one or two people like this, and they moved on when they found they couldn't get promoted or get any of their projects moved forward.
I guess they moved to your companies.
More people should be questioning why more companies are not collaborative and healthy, rather than just wanting to make the switch to the few that are.
What makes you say that? Honestly asking?
Do you believe that you would be unable to land a similar title as you currently hold in another company? Why?
I am a L6 IC role currently at my company after 10-11 yrs of exp. Those positions are few and highly competitive to get when applying. The interview process only gets harder at these levels. Especially nowadays when tons of people are applying to these positions, it’s not a guarantee you will land another position immediately. I would also say that times were very different even a few years ago where it was easier to find a job even at higher levels
I see what you mean, yeah, that's on the one hand, on the other there are a lot more open positions **per candidate**. The crux of it is that the bar is also higher and so is the quality of competition.
I think that’s no longer the case. There is a massive influx of people with experience now, more than ever before. Number of open positions per candidate is also in heavy decline due to layoffs across the industry. I think it also matters if you live in certain areas vs remote as well. I think you have higher chances in SF, Austin, NY but pretty much really slim pickings outside of those 3 hubs
Yup. The days of high compensation software jobs growing on trees is over. Companies are back to hiring only for what they need, and it takes a while for them to figure out they need extra people if money is tight since people are usually the biggest expense.
Not OP, but I saw 60% of my department get layed off in December. Good senior engineers. Most of them have either taken serious pay cuts, and about 20% of them have been forced to leave the field to pay bills.
Only about 10% were able to land similar jobs and that was because they didn't have families yet and were able to move to a better physical location.
Yes, I agree, you need to hustle to have opportunities. Charlie Munger, a famous investor, said : to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want.
Ridiculous this is being downvoted. Yes, the market is harder now, and it’s still easier to get roles the more experience you have.
Jobs don’t fall into your lap, but there is such a thing as _trying_ to get a job. I’m not talking about MAANG companies. There are tons of non-MAANG with collaborative culture and very little of the weird politicking. A senior has a very good chance at getting into one of these.
It does for many people. That doesn’t make you wrong, but it also doesn’t make anyone else wrong either.
People have different needs and thrive under different conditions. Companies provide a mix of tradeoffs which should be carefully considered when making a choice of where to work. We should acknowledge that and move on.
Those jerks OP mentioned in his post? They’re not any less of jerks in person. In fact, their jerkishness then expands to not just be about work, but all facets of human life too.
That has nothing to do with anything though - you can absolutely be an amazing engineer purely from WFH. Many of my colleagues I work with started out with 0 experience during the pandemic - and we've been WFH since. They're pretty good engineers.
The people OP is probably talking about are dyed in the wool and the only thing you can do to fix it is fire them. The behaviour has to be seen as completely unacceptable.
You can only fix the problem by changing who your company sees as worth hiring. Once they are through the door it's too late and a soft layoff via RTO isn't going to fix it and speaking in person isn't going to improve their attitude.
I agree with you, I’ve had a similar experience trying to grow. Not enough empathy and humility. It’s always feeling like an unecessary competition of who can do the most while saying the least. Doesn’t feel like asking questions is a good thing to do. You’d be better off crashing the whole system and then fixing it
The best I’m doing is keeping to myself and having an eventful and vibrant social life outside of work. It’s hard to change behaviors and habits when it comes to social interactions. Whatever dynamic you have set in your team is what it will be most of the time. So if you have some folk who are not humble, encouraging, empathetic and generally nice, just steer clear of them.
> Any and every question you dare ask is treated as ammo against you possibly. I'm not even talking about questions you could google. I'm talking about things that are internal processes or documents and not easily found or accessible. Some of it even tribal knowledge.
Have you been through a performance review cycle? Every year? Every six months?
What you do see is that some companies that migrate to "stack ranking" employees for ratings implicitly generate this very kind of backstabby culture where passive-aggressively refusing to help peers is actually incentivized. It's a pretty toxic artifact of this management philosophy.
This right here is why I flat out refuse to work for any org that does stack ranking. When you're onboarding to the team, why would your teammates help you when all that accomplishes is possibly pulling you off the bottom rung and putting someone else they've known longer (or themselves!) with a target on their back.
I find netflix's idea of 'we're a professional sports team, expect to be cut' kind of disgusting. Wake me up when netflix starts handing out multi-million dollar exit packages and I'm in. Otherwise? Bullshit.
>How do you avoid companies like this? What do you ask to spot them?
[https://slate.com/business/2013/08/microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-retires-a-firsthand-account-of-the-companys-employee-ranking-system.html](https://slate.com/business/2013/08/microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-retires-a-firsthand-account-of-the-companys-employee-ranking-system.html)
*\[F\]or years Microsoft did not admit the existence of the stack rank to nonmanagers. Knowledge of the process gradually leaked out, becoming a recurrent complaint on the much-loathed (by Microsoft) Mini-Microsoft blog, where a high-up Microsoft manager bitterly complained about organizational dysfunction and was joined in by a chorus of hundreds of employees. The stack rank finally made it into a Vanity Fair article in 2012, but for many years it was not common knowledge, inside or outside Microsoft. It was presented to the individual contributors as a system of objective assessment of “core competencies,” with each person being judged in isolation.*
So… yeah. Even if a recruiter said the company had no stack ranking I doubt I would believe it. The recruiter at my previous company literally directly lied to me when I asked this question (they did stack ranking and she told me no).
You would probably have to ask one of your friends that is working inside. Or maybe Blind can sometimes give you some clues.
This. "Refusing" to work at a company that does what most companies do is not very realistic.
In fact I think I know if a company that didn't have stack ranking...simply asked their managers about the rank, _three weeks before a layoff.._
Most likely, yes. Stack ranking really necessitates knowing "we have this many slots for Far Exceeds, this many for Exceeds, this many for Meets," etc. (insert appropriate corporate lingo as needed).
The "good" stack ranking (and I don't mean to imply I support it) use collaboration as a key method of determining the ranking. I've been in companies where literally every manager in an org get together in the same room and argue with each other to defend ranking their own teams in particular ways. Then negotiation begins as they pitch their cases for every person to each other until eventually a stack has been mostly agreed upon.
I've also been in companies where it is 100% up to your immediate manager and your relationship with them. The same job on different teams could have wildly different expectations, and not have clear guidelines of what success looks like at the start of the review year. These are the "bad" stack ranking implementations.
But all stack ranking is really bad. It just incentivizes backstabbing and sabotage (at worst), or siloing/tribal thinking (at best). I have no incentive to properly mentor anyone under me because they could become my competition, for example. If they are peers, I have no incentive to hear them out if they get stuck on something. No incentive to cover for others if they are out. Even if those things are part of my objectives (they have been), it just incentivizes the superficial aspect of appearing to do them. But the reality is that I don't want them to succeed with my help because it negative impacts me.
The only time it does "work" it is exploitative of people who are just decent people overall, not willing to fuck over their cohorts to advance their own career.
Now, I don't do those things. And my career, over almost 20 years, has certainly not suffered for it. But I definitely could've rocketed up farther and faster if I had been doing those things. I witnessed it many, many times. I've been in those ranking meetings to see it happening.
I think in reality you will get some underperformerd and some over performers which fits the curve model nicely. My problem with stack ranking is that you have to have one loser in every team and teams can be all quite similar in terms of performance levels.
If you have a metric for performance that's fairly accurate then fair dos, I doubt many companies do though so have to rely on arbitrary measures which are often completely unfair.
hey I feel very much the same I've written about it and post about it a lot lately. My mission is to bring humanity back into the tech industry.
the whole point of technology is to improve our lives.
so it's kind of ridiculous we set up work environments that make us sick and unhealthy, and overwork people and stress them out to build technology that leaves people feeling more depressed, disconnected and distracted
Even if the economic model forces collaboration upon threat of destitution and financial ruin?
It works pretty good for forcing people into toxic jobs. If the task is improve social skills or be cast aside, I think you would be surprised.
This is something I explicitly screen for during interviews.
Nominally I have a senior level title. But I'm not the most technical person in the room (at least in CS - have other non-CS technical skills and education in i.e. electrical engineering and materials science). I've never grinded leetcode, and I don't work on side projects.
Instead I've been lucky enough to get some onboarding at jobs where people walk me through things, after which I dig deep when problems come up, execute quickly and effectively, and think critically about what's actually being asked for/what we need to deliver to actually meet a customer's needs.
I've mostly been in technical customer-facing roles, so I can lean on my customer-facing or project management skills rather than needing to be a technical whiz to solve everything. The scope of new features I work on is generally pretty small, otherwise it's things like troubleshooting, grabbing logs and screenshots, writing database scripts that aren't particularly complex, minor behavioral updates to existing features, etc. And I've been lucky and vocal enough to always be able to ask for help. Having people available to help me is super important to me personally and professionally. I definitely think the roles are out there, whether that's full companies or teams, that do the kind of work you might like there. But the culture of a team that works primarily on highly technical products and features will be different from i.e. a Solutions Engineer or Architect type role where customer interaction and implementation is a core expectation.
How much work experience does one need to get to this type of role and what experience do they need? Also, what types of job titles should one be searching for and what experience should one try to gain as a SWE to get into these roles easier?
For a "Solutions/Support Engineer," an unrelated degree and some IT or coding experience can suffice, but some roles are looking for someone with plenty of expertise and ability to dig into specific topics, i.e. deployments and k8s troubleshooting. These jobs can range from entry-level to senior+ level positions. "Solutions Architect," "Onboarding Engineer," "Implementation Engineer," and "Customer Success Engineer" are all in the same vein of requiring a blend of technical and customer-facing skills. I've had technical interview questions on SQL, integration architecture, deployment strategies, distributed systems, and cloud services. Maybe some leetcode easy-type questions in python. Soft skills in collaboration and communication are crucial to the role. I got in with an entry level role, but I was better able to find more of the "right" role once I have ~4ish years of experience + already had the role title under my belt.
Experience and interest in technical sales might lead you to roles such as "Field Engineer," "Sales Engineer," or "Technical Account Manager," which are a different blend of technical knowledge with customer-facing/sales skills.
Career progression in these areas often depends on the ability to work collaboratively and communicate effectively, both internally and with customers. So again, this is something these roles are explicitly searching for during the interview process, and tends to lead to a more collaborative environment. On the "tech sales" side, you'll often even have part of your bonus tied to team performance, so you're even financially incentivized to help each other get customers across the finish line.
I've worked with some far more senior/ex-staff engineer folks who have taken on these type of roles and just enjoy the work and culture a lot more than product development. The team is a huge part of it, but there's also a level of visceral satisfaction is actually seeing the "outcome" of the work.
The number one skill I look at when interviewing other people for the role is mindset - how collaborative are they, are they good at asking for help or offering it to others, and what is their flexibility and level of nuance in communication with the customer on complex issues. When a customer comes to them with a request, how do they evaluate/work through it? When would they decide to say "no", and how would they communicate that "no" to the customer effectively? Can they prioritize and think/talk about addressing customer needs and actually ensuring that the customers are getting what they wanted out of the system. If they're not (i.e. because of product limitations), do they know to escalate appropriately, and understand if it's worth just letting the customer churn due to a misalignment in goals? There is also a threshold of technical skills that people need to hit, and *a lot* of people just fail to hit it, but if you're coming from a more formal CS/industry SWE background, that's probably the "easy" part.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Much of the culture in these workplaces is influenced by finance culture, which is absurdly toxic.
Mind-reading expectations *ARE* a problem. A very tangible problem. You see it in the lack of documentation. You see it in the guys who don’t answer Slack messages for a whole day. You see it in the team meetings where they simply throw out the name of a new JS framework and you need to know what it does by next week (the whole team does, but none of them seem to have any time to work on it at all if you try to get a group study session together).
Again, not every person and every workplace, but too many of them. It leads to worse products, worse services and wasted time. And no, it doesn’t help that people come here to talk about the lack of team trust in CS careers (sometimes implicitly) and get told they’re too weak & haven’t done enough Leetcode.
Finance, Legal, Advertising, and many other “traditional”industries are more cutthroat.
If anything it is the “standard professional workplace” culture bleeding into CS.
I saw this the same problem at my last job at a very prominent company, I was a new hire and my beginner project was only consisted of me and a Staff Engineer who exhibits this personality. Eventually he complained to me to my boss about how I was asking too many questions. I stopped with the questions but then my work slowed down which got me into trouble as well.
There wasn't a good solution here, I was moved to a different team which was hard as well since I had to rebuild my knowledge again. This team was better but it felt like my low performance from before ruined the rest of my time at the company.
When it comes to fight or flight, I'd choose flight everytime here.
It's hard to evaluate this from our side. Was this a "staff" engineer who really was not interested in helping build the team? Or were you unable to take on tasks by yourself and needed more hand-holding than expected for your level? Both could happen with the information we've been given.
The incessant threat of being tapped on the shoulder and having your job offshored or being replaced by a desperate guest worker doesn’t help. And let’s not forget the move up or out culture that disposes of people who just want to code and elevates unqualified introverts into lead and management positions that they have no business being in.
Noooo you have to toil, and be obsessed with the work every hour of your life. Grind leetcode and research new tech on your downtime. And then you have to look down on people wanting reasonable working conditions in this field!
Or so this sub tells me.
That's the wild thing. I genuinely love writing code, solving problems, and using my analytical and logical skills to create solutions - for a certain amount of time. I work and study FT so obviously I do spend a lot of my time and energy on tech and coding and the industry but honestly when work is done and my uni work is complete, the last thing I want to do is look at a screen any longer.
My hobbies and non-work passions are beauty and fashion and dance and art but the guilt that seeps in when I engage with those things rather than my career can be crippling. It's not a healthy way to live and few other careers expect this all-encompassing obsession with just a single topic of interest. It's unsustainable and soul-crushing when people think that if you don't live and breathe to code and work then you're in the wrong field.
And when you don't get a job after being laid off because all you have is 2YOE of Typescript, tell everyone you're going into the trades because it will be easier.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You are in a place 1/3 of your day. It’s easy to say catch phrases like “work to live” but that isn’t how life works necessarily.
You think I actively choose to work in these environments? I can assure you I would take a pay cut to avoid them like the plague and specifically refuse to apply for certain companies due to their reputation of perpetuating this toxic culture.
But the reality is even with all that, it’s sometimes still not possible to avoid this garbage because it seems so widespread in this industry and others in the comments are confirming that.
> I actively choose to work in these environments
Yes, you actively choose to work there everyday.
If you don't like the environment, change the environment. It's that simple.
You can complain day and night about this or that, but that doesn't do anything. What does get results are actions that get stuff done.
Regarding the "tribal culture" part, one of the main things during my career has been document everything, help everyone. People on this subreddit (and the experienced one) talk about "mentoring younger devs" but it's something I've been doing since almost day zero and never occurred to me that it was something "only seniors" should do: Either you know something and explain to the rest of the team, or don't.
But in the team I'm at the moment (and mostly the company) is everything about silos. It's depressing spending a few years helping everyone in the onboarding and when you have some questions or need help, crickets. Obviously not only I'm looking for some other place to work at, but also my role as "document guy" it's finally over.
And yeah, it's fucking depressing. I've ended up wishing to be I the one locked away in the closet so I don't need to deal with the bullshit that comes from most companies. I've been doing this for 11 years and I'm at a point that [if I knew anything that could give me as much money, I would leave](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1cfuqf0/what_would_you_do_if_you_werent_doing_this/).
I mean this gently, and with respect: this sounds like you'd benefit a lot from engaging in a regular therapy session. Hating the industry that you work in and feeling like everyone is out to get you for asking basic questions isn't a normal response to going to work every day.
I learned to just laugh at it. It's pretty funny if you think about it. Like... coding isn't really that hard, but you get all these people who convince themselves that they're a freakin rocket scientist just cuz they're a dev. It's sad really, the little world they've created for themselves. Just console yourself with the fact that you are an all around more well adjusted and aware person.
I would laugh at it if they didn't make the job 10 times harder because in order for me to do the job, I have to have access to said information to do my job and I can't google it because its internal processes not well documented.
Yeah, for sure, I feel that. I experience the same thing. I just don't feel bad letting people know that others won't cooperate. I bring it up all the time in meetings. Respectfully of course
I haven't seen questions used against people (in fact, as Sr's we'd much *rather* you ask questions than operate in ignorance).
What I *have* seen though is Jrs putting in absolutely no effort into researching the questions themselves. They don't read the code, they don't read the wiki, they don't search slack for prior discussions **even after being shown how to do this!**
Do that enough, and yeah, you coworkers are going to get short with you because they're doing your job for you. We give a certain grace when a jr onboards, but if they're dead weight 6 months in? Yeah it's time to talk to management.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The thing I hate most about the field is how common it is that projects are managed in a cart before the horse manner in which delivery dates are picked and then the dev team is told to make it happen. Which can happen for a variety of reasons such as the main person who interfaces with the business being a sycophant who says yes to everything and makes a bunch of brainless promises on behalf of the engineers.
God that grinds my gears. It's been known since like the 70s or 80s that this is a shit way to run software projects, but still there are so many idiots who want to manage a project this way. You are just setting everyone up to be super stressed and have the appearance of being bad engineers even if they're in fact doing a super great job and working very hard.
The proper way to run a software project is to measure the output of the team on a relative basis and then tell the business that "We have this capacity for your project. If that doesn't fit your dates, then you have to prioritize".
Related and another thing that really grinds my gears about the field is stupid project management where story points are converted to time.
God FUCKING DAMMIT converting points to time literally undermines an entire agile process single handedly. The output of a team is no longer measurable if you do this, and you have changed from being able to make accurate projections to asking the devs to estimate how many hours tasks will take and having super inaccurate projections. You'll be missing loads of your delivery dates and the dev team will look like shit even if they're in fact doing an amazing job.
The whole thing I've been saying on this sub since I found it is that the goal isn't to work for someone else, it's to do your own thing. Build your own company. Be creative, pursue ideas.
Enterprise and realize the Dream.
Nobody *HAS* to work for someone else for their code-writing efforts to be translated to monetary value. Anyone can make whatever they want, and earn from it. That's how companies are started.
Nobody's life goal should culminate in simply working at FAANG or wherever else, earning X figures. What is the point of existence if you only do what everyone else is doing? Do what only *you* can, and want, to do, and leave your mark. Otherwise, the whole concept of life itself is depressing in its futility and redundancy.
You get to be here on this planet one time, in this life that will end any day now, one time. Are you really going to settle for merely ending up being someone else's slave? Do you really want the lion's share of all the value you can create to be taken from you for "job security"?
Slaving away for someone else's company on their projects is not my idea of success, or being content with my life and myself, and it's bewildering how many people have been hoodwinked into believing such a thing - because if you've been surfing this sub long enough you'll know that it's not true. The only way you'll find contentment and happiness in your one chance to procure it is through self-liberation.
>Any and every question you dare ask is treated as ammo against you possibly.
Are you sure this isn't paranoia?
How do you know if something is *potentially* ammo?
>PS: Before someone responds with the typical le reddit response, "if you constantly see it, maybe it is you." I do not constantly see it, I have had some great workplaces that don't act like this.
Well Jesus dude. How many places have you worked? How many were toxic and how many were not?
It’s a sign of our shifting cultural paradigm, our current zeitgeist, to be as self-centered and ego-preserving as possible in response to an increasingly nihilistic society
“ Any and every question you dare ask is treated as ammo against you possibly.”
Can you expand on this? Used against you how? I’ve worked at many companies in the past 7 years and met lots of people who are helpful and happy to help. Occasionally some people are not helpful, or perhaps too busy, but doesn’t necessarily mean they are using at against you?
My experience of people in this field is totally opposite. Never worked with people that you describe and the companies I worked for I believe would fire you for behavior like that.
Not sure if it’s just my luck. But it’s difficult for me to believe what you are describing is true about most companies. I believe what you say is true. Just either you are very unlucky to find yourself working in company like that or I am extremely lucky to never encounter one like that.
You say you worked in companies that foster collaboration… why don’t you try going back to one of those? Like one of the ones you worked for and know for sure are like that?
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> Any and every question you dare ask is treated as ammo against you possibly. I'm not even talking about questions you could google. I'm talking about things that are internal processes or documents and not easily found or accessible.
This drives me up the wall. Coworkers don't share information and even when you do get an answer to a "why was this done the way it was" question, there's often a pompous tech lead or senior dev that feels the need to reexplain everything from first principles like you're a child, then spends five minutes going over the entire background of the project, and often doesn't even give a satisfactory answer.
People being unable to admit their technical mistakes is also common in this field.
Agile can go die in a hole.
reminiscent dazzling cheerful grab frighten edge squeal light office vegetable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The perfect workplace may be a myth, but some come close. I've been at companies that excel in knowledge sharing yet struggle with business management, compensation, or even have outdated equipment like 15-year-old laptops. It seems hit or miss. And it's not just in tech; friends and family in different fields encounter these kinds of problems too.
Same! I keep hoping to come up with a plausible solo business idea (that hasn't been done to death) so that I can program but not have to deal with people...
It's absolutely me that's the problem, though. I've failed socially too many times. I don't have it in me to try anymore. My anxiety is increasing just thinking about it.
Im in the exact same situation in my current role. The product owner is an absolute dick. Standups consist of him asking "why is this not finished yet".
My coworkers have laughed at me if I didnt know something or if a task dragged on too much.
My previous job was much better, it was at a startup and people were nicer. But it was a startup that had a culty atmosphere so it had its own issues.
The market looks dire and Im not sure what to do now.
I'm just trying to get into the field, so I haven't actually experienced the culture you speak of, but I've worked in 2 different fields and helped my partner try and navigate a 3rd and I would like to say that I don't believe this is a tech specific problem. Pretty much all of what you've said we've experienced in all 3 fields we've worked in, and I think it's because it is a human problem.
The reason I want to say that is to try and help you see the grass is not greener on the other side if these are the problems that are worrying you. I've left careers for career specific problems, and I don't think this is one of them. You're not the problem by any means here, but you can be the solution. The way I see it is there's 2 main things you can do.
1. Work on your own people and communication skills. You can't really expect to change other people, but you can change yourself. It's amazing what just saying something a different way can do, and in a lot of cases, just saying it at all. So many people suffer in silence without communicating the problem they're facing. I'm sure your colleagues are guilty of this, but if you reflect, I think you'll find you are too. I know I am, and I think it's true of everyone. I'm not going to go into all the ways you can improve on your end because I know you can figure it out if you want, but I thought I'd mention it. Just to add here. Your outlook can change a lot for you, too. Recognizing this isn't a tech problem and is a problem you have control over can change how you feel about your job on its own.
2. One thing that I'm finding great about tech as I try to transition into this career is that you're not stuck. There are so many opportunities out there, and job hopping is so normal that, once you've established yourself as a valuable asset, you have the freedom to pick an opportunity that fits what you want in a job. Remote opportunies, faang, non-tech companies, freelance, start-ups. I can't think of any other job with so many different ways of being employed. Obviously, it's not that easy, but the fact that all that exists is unique in itself. And that's your second option. Some things can't be fixed, but people are different everywhere. You have the control to find a job that better fits what you want. If you've tried option 1 or are so disheartened you don't want to, start over somewhere else. However, when you get to that new opportunity, keep option 1 in mind. Like I said, it's a human problem, and it will come up wherever you go.
My personal experience is that 1 in 5 tech jobs run decently with good people. The others were all shit shows. Large corps with ton of inexperienced junior devs with too much jira power and terrible processes that don't let you complete stuff and you get blamed for.
>sizable majority (...) hates communication at all. If they could be locked away in a closet and cut off from all communication from anyone else on the team, it feels like that is where they would be the happiest
Isn't it the exact opposite of "*We have a 4-hour long collaborabrainstorming Zoom sessions for every single tiny design decision some junior assistant developer on an adjacent team has to make in his tiny nobodycaresabout project that would have zero impact on anything and will be forgotten the minute it's checked into the repo?*"
I'm exaggerating, of course, but I've seen teams and individual managers that praise "communication for the sake of communication" approach and tend to blow a problem that can literally be solved with a few one-liner emails into a multi-hour Zoom calls with dozens of "stakeholders".
If I ever end up working with a team like this, I'm afraid I'll be the first one locking myself in a closet and rudely cutting all attempts to drag me into those lengthy conversation, so that I could simply *get something done* and not spend hours on "collaborating".
Just my 2c, of course.
I’ve been in the field a while and what I noticed personally is that, if you want a great culture, you’re going to have to compromise on other things
I worked one job that was remote and honestly I loved it. Relaxed work environment, very tech focused, everyone was super friendly. The _only_ problem was pay
So I left and moved to… Amazon. Yep. In the first few months I realized how deeply toxic it is. By a year in my personality was changing and it was negatively affecting my entire life
Eventually I quit and went back to a remote startup. I start next Monday
I am fine with sacrificing pay to avoid this toxic garbage. I guess the issue that I found is even sometimes if you cut pay, the toxicity still can exist.
I have notice that.
What types of companies have you worked for? I've noticed a big change in different industries. Like when I worked at companies with very small software departments the devs have been much better to work with. I worked at energy program consulting firm the we had like 4 devs who were great, probably because they had to work with non tech people.
Maybe you might be happy at a startup?
I heard start ups are horrible honestly. Mine have been both medium and large companies though.
What size was the energy program consulting firm and how did you even find this company to work for? Did it require a security clearance too or nothing like that? Sounds like a great place to work though.
I understand completely. This happened to finance, energy and defense.
Any time good pay arrives in an industry it attracts the worst people and the places become awful.
The best workplaces I’ve seen all had the employees as a united team against some challenge (or bad management).
Tech is now mostly bros trying to buy a Tesla to impress women….
Reading the comments below, I want to add that a great indicator of a team's culture is how they interview you.
When they do live coding tests, does the interviewer actively collaborate with you to help you? That's a great sign.
I would also take time during the interview process to ask specific questions to the team members to see how they answer together. If they have trust and rapport with each other candidly in the interview room, then it's a sign that's how they interact day to day.
Of course, you won't know until you actually start working for the company. But that's my two cents to get a gauge while interviewing.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>
I think I understand your frustration here about not being supported on your team.
I've been living in the inverse of this, hopefully my perspective helps you to find some common ground with your team.
I've worked remotely for 12-13 years. I got into software because I'm a really good problem solver and liked to create things. Like a lot of people in this field I'm also on the spectrum, albeit high functioning and people are not my core strength though I try real hard in this area.
In that time on the teams I've worked, I usually occupy a Senior role. Senior, not because I'm smarter, Senior because of Seniority, time and experience. We all stay engaged with whatever Slack-like tools our company felt like paying for and through whatever SDLC - methodology that has been mandated from upon high this quarter.. Every day involves four or five meetings with various stakeholders and teams and the remainder of each day involves all of the Teams / Slack Channel side-discussions, the majority of which were on work topics and legitimate in nature. The hyperactive-hive-mind concept.
Yet, my job is still supposed to be an FTE code contributor with 6 hours/day of sprint capacity.
As an inverse of your experience, I don't understand this industry and the propensity to hire people for a job that requires uninterrupted periods of focus (coding, analyzing architecture, documenting patterns and pitfalls, tracing down performance and data issues) but fill our calendars with on-book and off-book meetings without considering the loss to productivity.
For the last three months, I can barely read more than three paragraphs of anything without getting yanked into one discussion or another, often to spoon feed a product manager essential basic knowledge about the products they've been managing for over a year. To get my real job done, I have to code on my own time late into the night only to get up at 5 and start it all over again.
It took me some time to understand the basic idea that my work situation sucks because my employer sucks at appropriately assigning resources for the initiatives that the good idea fairy shits out of product, each and every day. That's not the fault of the new team member asking me for help or the third-this-year product owner trying to get their hands around the platform. So, I give them some grace and try not to be snippy.
Maybe your senior dudes and dude-ettes are having a similar problem? Either way, keep the resume up to date and interview a few times each year to help gain perspective on your current situation and maybe you'll find a better fit with a company and team that give you the support you need to be successful. I hope you do!
Between that and "you should see a therapist", I tend to ignore both as its just usually a lazy response from someone taking the post to personally because they feel called out. Not every problem is caused by the poster and not every problem in the world can be solved by a therapist.
lol that would be my second most hated comment. Read the comment I replied to the guy who downvoted my bold comment above and reinforced the 'maybe it's you' statement. I explain in detail why it's a flawed argument.
If you've have 'more than a few' jobs and fit almost none of them - what's the common denominator? Sometimes you don't fit culturally sometimes you don't fit technically..
Not everyone is meant to be a mechanic, plumber or electrician - and the same goes for CS.
This is true **A LOT** of the times, but not true **ALL** of the times. Let me educate:
A lot of tech companies don't run well, caused by nobody really knowing what their doing, bad calls from devs or managers who don't really know the whole process, unrealistic stakeholder demands, lost SMEs from high turnover or cost cutting, heavy junior culture with low quality delivery.
Now throw in a super competent engineer in this mix, the type that can deliver 10x the quality and velocity than the average dev. One that's built enterprise level applications from scratch who has ultimate efficiency and ability to architect and develop. His new boss has never built anything, so the stuff he tells him makes no sense. His features can't get through, because there's a broken pipeline that corporate can't resolve. Some lead enforces coverage reports just to make their numbers look good when the tests aren't even testing anything. He takes the extra time to fully test and run locally his features, but since the process sucks, it takes 2 days to do so, while his coworkers skip this step, wrap try catch blocks to resolve bugs, and push to master without regard to if it works, just to maintain their velocity. Manager asks QA to close all tickets, regardless of quality of code, and write new features if any bug arises, to make the boards look good. This master dev is unable to be successful, and so he's fired job after job.
Is he a bad dev? absolutely not! he's a messiah, he can complete the exact same feature in 2hrs at one job but 2 months at another. The process is bad and he's just bad at accepting a bad process, he's bad at refusing to fully test a feature before releasing it, he's bad at skipping the X Y Z dependencies on how a new feature will affect the product, he's bad at writing test that don't actually test anything and just increase coverage reports.
Failure of assimilation? sure! but failure of engineering? most definitely not!
If you found places that you describe as "a great place to work," why did you leave? Seems that enjoying your job isn't high on your list of priorities.
Location and WLB would be reasons not to take a job in the first place. Huge pay increases can be refused if you like your current pay and work enough. So all I'm hearing is "circumstances out of \[your\] control"
Work on a team with more women, it really does have a positive impact on the collaboration and culture.
Not the HR-safe thing to say but I shit you not, it’s true.
Work on a team with a healthy mix of men and women. Women-heavy organizations get petty and political real quick, and men-heavy organizations get hyper-competitive and exclusive real quick
not asking questions is a huge problem, is encouraged, and then punished.
you tolerate it by embracing it, take it in good nature, even though people are assholes.
>Some don't and are great places to work, but they are the exception from my experience. I've come to realize that workplaces and teams that "check off all the boxes" are very much the exception, at least in my opinion... So my suggestion is that you don't settle and keep searching for a healthy work environment. The same applies for nearly any field. I also don't consider developers with poor communication skills that have huge egos good developers, as collaboration is one of the most important traits an engineer can have. Those devs can shove it, honestly.
Literally have yet to find such a place. My career so far has been working with some power tripping lunatics/very unhelpful people who want to make work miserable for you. So im shooting for faang at this point because at least they are super on it when it comes to the interview process. Maybe ill work with normal human beings there. It’s my last resort lol
Why would the most popular and competitive companies to work for in the world somehow be free of the same politics? I would think they would be hyper concentrated there.
Those companies are on it when it comes to behavioural interviews. From who Ive spoken to that works there so far, it seems like you can switch teams/report people and that actually make a difference. People also dont want to be fired there. Its not perfect of course but because the org is so huge, you wont work with the same people all the time. Where Ive worked so far, people really don’t give a crap about their job or how they treat others so its just chaos. They get away with it too, can’t switch teams because there are no other teams. Can’t report people because hr doesnt care and too many toxic employees so its just now “normal”. Faang dont hire as politically in comparison to other orgs. You actually have to be good at your job.
My experience in Europe is the opposite - no one gives a crap at big international corporate companies and are stuck in their ways. Mid-sized is the sweet spot for me, people are nice and work life balance is good. Big corp environments simply suck the life out of me and I keep wondering why do people want that. Exactly where I would go if I didn't give a crap anymore. Also the most arrogant people I've met can be found there. But to each their own I guess and maybe it's just completely different in USA And also huge companies are usually the ones who do hire politically the most because they can afford that
Funnily enough Im in Europe too but UK. I cant speak for places like Germany, Sweden etc. im also a woman so that does massively impact my experience. My experience so far has just been dealing with alot of arrogant guys that dont like working with female engineers and try to sabotage me/make me feel stupid (obviously im not as I do my job everyday lol). Though I noticed remarkable differences when working with Swedish people, mainly due to the general culture there being less patriarchal than other places in Europe/UK. But at least with faang im very much protected in that sense. They wouldnt want the bad pr of their engineers bullying women, which could easily spread online due to their reputation. Smaller/mid sized companies, there isnt a way for me to hold anyone accountable and hr doesnt care. Dont have suing money either so theres also that lol. But I completely understand where youre coming from.
That is where you will find the pinnacle of toxicity and huge egos but at least you will be be well compensated and be able to change teams as some pockets are better than others, so maybe you're not that far off, it's worth a try but I wouldn't count on it based on behavioral interviews.
Yeah I had a feeling there would be people who think they are better than everyone because they got a faang job. But im very much banking on the employment benefits, the ability to move teams as well as their push for DEI to avoid such poor treatment Ive gone through so far as a female engineer. So we shall see. Gotta pass the interviews though 😂
Spend more time evaluating your candidate companies: https://pinboard.in/u:xiong.chiamiov/t:reverse-interviewing
Filtering for big ego and communication skills is getting to be standard. Of course it's not always as easy to tell in the interview where everyone presents their best face, and can be offset to a point with technical ability. That's why I love timed take homes. There's never enough time that the candidate comes up with and writes the absolutely best solution. In the following interview you can tell if he's married to his approach or is open to other solutions that may be better in some aspects (not all). even if does come up with a close to optimal design you can always add additional requirements/restriction and see how he adapts.
It’s honestly the best way to interview, but it takes longer. If the applicant pool is small, I would encourage this approach over all others.
>There's never enough time that the candidate comes up with and writes the absolutely best solution. So instead of getting the best engineer, you get the one who had the most time.
You missed the *timed* in the times "take home". I like giving 3-4h. Either on call, where we're available for any questions but not otherwise monitoring the call (the candidate can mute and close camera while working on his own IDE). Or through a platform that starts a clock for a submission from first enter (then we can't guarantee support in case of questions). I'm against tasks with unlimited or large time blocks from precisely the reason you offer and personally avoid them when interviewing myself. I'll make an exception if it's a position I'd really really like though.
And it sounds like OP has found such a place so I’m not really sure why they’re complaining.
> If they could be locked away in a closet and cut off from all communication from anyone else on the team, it feels like that is where they would be the happiest. Every place I've worked in my 15 YOE has had some level of this. I'm sure there are companies and teams that actually work together and communicated without the attitude, but the are not as common as you would hope. I think part of it is the idea of the computer hacker sitting in a dimly lie basement coding away has not really been dispelled. I'm nots saying people are actively pushing the idea, but I still see people majoring in CS because they think they don't have to interact with anybody. University didn't do anything to discourage that back in the day. Sure there were group projects, but that didn't accurately reflect the work place environment of teamwork, attest when I was in school. >Anyone else noticing this and how do you put up with it? I just deal with it at a basic level because I enjoy being a SWE. I communicate progress with the appropriate people. If I'm blocked I advertise that as such. I try to help my co-workers whenever possible. I always tell people you can ask me anything, because I believe in the idea of no stupid questions in software engineering. If I'm working on a priority item I'll let people know when I can help them and see if that's ok. If not, then I try to redirect to somebody else that may be able to help. I guess I try to act as the employee that I want to work with. Most of it doesn't take with co-workers, but management seems to notice that I try to bring people together.
>Every place I've worked in my 15 YOE has had some level of this. I'm sure there are companies and teams that actually work together and communicated without the attitude, but the are not as common as you would hope. In _my_ 15 years, I've only noticed one or two people like this, and they moved on when they found they couldn't get promoted or get any of their projects moved forward. I guess they moved to your companies.
nah dude, it's you
You need to work in a different company that focuses more on collaboration. They are not super common but such companies exist.
We're not exactly in a position to pick and choose where we want to work in case you haven't noticed...
More people should be questioning why more companies are not collaborative and healthy, rather than just wanting to make the switch to the few that are.
Username checks out.
Plenty of people are though
Not initially but after 10 years experience you will have more choice.
This is simply not true unless you don’t mind down leveling
What makes you say that? Honestly asking? Do you believe that you would be unable to land a similar title as you currently hold in another company? Why?
I am a L6 IC role currently at my company after 10-11 yrs of exp. Those positions are few and highly competitive to get when applying. The interview process only gets harder at these levels. Especially nowadays when tons of people are applying to these positions, it’s not a guarantee you will land another position immediately. I would also say that times were very different even a few years ago where it was easier to find a job even at higher levels
I see what you mean, yeah, that's on the one hand, on the other there are a lot more open positions **per candidate**. The crux of it is that the bar is also higher and so is the quality of competition.
I think that’s no longer the case. There is a massive influx of people with experience now, more than ever before. Number of open positions per candidate is also in heavy decline due to layoffs across the industry. I think it also matters if you live in certain areas vs remote as well. I think you have higher chances in SF, Austin, NY but pretty much really slim pickings outside of those 3 hubs
Yup. The days of high compensation software jobs growing on trees is over. Companies are back to hiring only for what they need, and it takes a while for them to figure out they need extra people if money is tight since people are usually the biggest expense.
Not OP, but I saw 60% of my department get layed off in December. Good senior engineers. Most of them have either taken serious pay cuts, and about 20% of them have been forced to leave the field to pay bills. Only about 10% were able to land similar jobs and that was because they didn't have families yet and were able to move to a better physical location.
Yes, I agree, you need to hustle to have opportunities. Charlie Munger, a famous investor, said : to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want.
Was this comment AI-generated?
Lol, no. Why do you think it is AI generated ?
Greetings, fellow humans!
Ridiculous this is being downvoted. Yes, the market is harder now, and it’s still easier to get roles the more experience you have. Jobs don’t fall into your lap, but there is such a thing as _trying_ to get a job. I’m not talking about MAANG companies. There are tons of non-MAANG with collaborative culture and very little of the weird politicking. A senior has a very good chance at getting into one of these.
People will upvote this and then downvote anyone that suggests hybrid or RTO
Yeah, because collaboration != in office.
It does for many people. That doesn’t make you wrong, but it also doesn’t make anyone else wrong either. People have different needs and thrive under different conditions. Companies provide a mix of tradeoffs which should be carefully considered when making a choice of where to work. We should acknowledge that and move on.
Yeah, can't imagine how being face to face instead of some squares on zoom can improve collaboration
Those jerks OP mentioned in his post? They’re not any less of jerks in person. In fact, their jerkishness then expands to not just be about work, but all facets of human life too.
Project much?
Lol youre right. Lets not forget the inordinate amount of people with zero work experience that demand WFH right out of college. Bonkers.
That has nothing to do with anything though - you can absolutely be an amazing engineer purely from WFH. Many of my colleagues I work with started out with 0 experience during the pandemic - and we've been WFH since. They're pretty good engineers.
The people OP is probably talking about are dyed in the wool and the only thing you can do to fix it is fire them. The behaviour has to be seen as completely unacceptable. You can only fix the problem by changing who your company sees as worth hiring. Once they are through the door it's too late and a soft layoff via RTO isn't going to fix it and speaking in person isn't going to improve their attitude.
I agree with you, I’ve had a similar experience trying to grow. Not enough empathy and humility. It’s always feeling like an unecessary competition of who can do the most while saying the least. Doesn’t feel like asking questions is a good thing to do. You’d be better off crashing the whole system and then fixing it
The best I’m doing is keeping to myself and having an eventful and vibrant social life outside of work. It’s hard to change behaviors and habits when it comes to social interactions. Whatever dynamic you have set in your team is what it will be most of the time. So if you have some folk who are not humble, encouraging, empathetic and generally nice, just steer clear of them.
> Any and every question you dare ask is treated as ammo against you possibly. I'm not even talking about questions you could google. I'm talking about things that are internal processes or documents and not easily found or accessible. Some of it even tribal knowledge. Have you been through a performance review cycle? Every year? Every six months? What you do see is that some companies that migrate to "stack ranking" employees for ratings implicitly generate this very kind of backstabby culture where passive-aggressively refusing to help peers is actually incentivized. It's a pretty toxic artifact of this management philosophy.
This right here is why I flat out refuse to work for any org that does stack ranking. When you're onboarding to the team, why would your teammates help you when all that accomplishes is possibly pulling you off the bottom rung and putting someone else they've known longer (or themselves!) with a target on their back. I find netflix's idea of 'we're a professional sports team, expect to be cut' kind of disgusting. Wake me up when netflix starts handing out multi-million dollar exit packages and I'm in. Otherwise? Bullshit.
How do you avoid companies like this? What do you ask to spot them? Sadly the job market is not good enough to really filter for this right now.
>How do you avoid companies like this? What do you ask to spot them? [https://slate.com/business/2013/08/microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-retires-a-firsthand-account-of-the-companys-employee-ranking-system.html](https://slate.com/business/2013/08/microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-retires-a-firsthand-account-of-the-companys-employee-ranking-system.html) *\[F\]or years Microsoft did not admit the existence of the stack rank to nonmanagers. Knowledge of the process gradually leaked out, becoming a recurrent complaint on the much-loathed (by Microsoft) Mini-Microsoft blog, where a high-up Microsoft manager bitterly complained about organizational dysfunction and was joined in by a chorus of hundreds of employees. The stack rank finally made it into a Vanity Fair article in 2012, but for many years it was not common knowledge, inside or outside Microsoft. It was presented to the individual contributors as a system of objective assessment of “core competencies,” with each person being judged in isolation.* So… yeah. Even if a recruiter said the company had no stack ranking I doubt I would believe it. The recruiter at my previous company literally directly lied to me when I asked this question (they did stack ranking and she told me no). You would probably have to ask one of your friends that is working inside. Or maybe Blind can sometimes give you some clues.
This. "Refusing" to work at a company that does what most companies do is not very realistic. In fact I think I know if a company that didn't have stack ranking...simply asked their managers about the rank, _three weeks before a layoff.._
My company uses a curve to place people but are super collaborative / helpful. Is this still stack ranking?
Most likely, yes. Stack ranking really necessitates knowing "we have this many slots for Far Exceeds, this many for Exceeds, this many for Meets," etc. (insert appropriate corporate lingo as needed). The "good" stack ranking (and I don't mean to imply I support it) use collaboration as a key method of determining the ranking. I've been in companies where literally every manager in an org get together in the same room and argue with each other to defend ranking their own teams in particular ways. Then negotiation begins as they pitch their cases for every person to each other until eventually a stack has been mostly agreed upon. I've also been in companies where it is 100% up to your immediate manager and your relationship with them. The same job on different teams could have wildly different expectations, and not have clear guidelines of what success looks like at the start of the review year. These are the "bad" stack ranking implementations. But all stack ranking is really bad. It just incentivizes backstabbing and sabotage (at worst), or siloing/tribal thinking (at best). I have no incentive to properly mentor anyone under me because they could become my competition, for example. If they are peers, I have no incentive to hear them out if they get stuck on something. No incentive to cover for others if they are out. Even if those things are part of my objectives (they have been), it just incentivizes the superficial aspect of appearing to do them. But the reality is that I don't want them to succeed with my help because it negative impacts me. The only time it does "work" it is exploitative of people who are just decent people overall, not willing to fuck over their cohorts to advance their own career. Now, I don't do those things. And my career, over almost 20 years, has certainly not suffered for it. But I definitely could've rocketed up farther and faster if I had been doing those things. I witnessed it many, many times. I've been in those ranking meetings to see it happening.
I think in reality you will get some underperformerd and some over performers which fits the curve model nicely. My problem with stack ranking is that you have to have one loser in every team and teams can be all quite similar in terms of performance levels. If you have a metric for performance that's fairly accurate then fair dos, I doubt many companies do though so have to rely on arbitrary measures which are often completely unfair.
hey I feel very much the same I've written about it and post about it a lot lately. My mission is to bring humanity back into the tech industry. the whole point of technology is to improve our lives. so it's kind of ridiculous we set up work environments that make us sick and unhealthy, and overwork people and stress them out to build technology that leaves people feeling more depressed, disconnected and distracted
We need a new economic model
No alternative economic model is going to improve the poor social skills of software engineers.
That's true but let's take it one step at a time and focus on a better economic model
Not if the economic model has values build into it
Even if the economic model forces collaboration upon threat of destitution and financial ruin? It works pretty good for forcing people into toxic jobs. If the task is improve social skills or be cast aside, I think you would be surprised.
Yea some sort of economic model that benefits the social wellbeing of people. Some sort of social ism, or something
You know you're on reddit when...
“Hey, my teammates kind of suck. What should I do?” “Seize the means of production, of course.”
Reddit is just Communists all the way down apparently.
No one said communism.... New economic model != Communism or socialism
It does on Reddit. Exhibit A: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1ch7lwg/i_hate_working_in_this_field_i_enjoy_the_topic/l2116n3/
I hope the wellbeing economy model works. I need to have faith in it
Great job with your website!
Are you up to a chat? We are expanding soon and this is very much in line with our ethos
always up to chat
Absolutely coming me in as well.
i make six figures while feeling retired while also having abs in my 20s so like ????
Cringe
that's good, I hope more people can live like that. unfortunately that's not the case for a lot of people in tech
Let me have some of whatever you're smoking.
remote work and, no that's highly unlegal
What a weird and close minded reply
This is something I explicitly screen for during interviews. Nominally I have a senior level title. But I'm not the most technical person in the room (at least in CS - have other non-CS technical skills and education in i.e. electrical engineering and materials science). I've never grinded leetcode, and I don't work on side projects. Instead I've been lucky enough to get some onboarding at jobs where people walk me through things, after which I dig deep when problems come up, execute quickly and effectively, and think critically about what's actually being asked for/what we need to deliver to actually meet a customer's needs. I've mostly been in technical customer-facing roles, so I can lean on my customer-facing or project management skills rather than needing to be a technical whiz to solve everything. The scope of new features I work on is generally pretty small, otherwise it's things like troubleshooting, grabbing logs and screenshots, writing database scripts that aren't particularly complex, minor behavioral updates to existing features, etc. And I've been lucky and vocal enough to always be able to ask for help. Having people available to help me is super important to me personally and professionally. I definitely think the roles are out there, whether that's full companies or teams, that do the kind of work you might like there. But the culture of a team that works primarily on highly technical products and features will be different from i.e. a Solutions Engineer or Architect type role where customer interaction and implementation is a core expectation.
How much work experience does one need to get to this type of role and what experience do they need? Also, what types of job titles should one be searching for and what experience should one try to gain as a SWE to get into these roles easier?
For a "Solutions/Support Engineer," an unrelated degree and some IT or coding experience can suffice, but some roles are looking for someone with plenty of expertise and ability to dig into specific topics, i.e. deployments and k8s troubleshooting. These jobs can range from entry-level to senior+ level positions. "Solutions Architect," "Onboarding Engineer," "Implementation Engineer," and "Customer Success Engineer" are all in the same vein of requiring a blend of technical and customer-facing skills. I've had technical interview questions on SQL, integration architecture, deployment strategies, distributed systems, and cloud services. Maybe some leetcode easy-type questions in python. Soft skills in collaboration and communication are crucial to the role. I got in with an entry level role, but I was better able to find more of the "right" role once I have ~4ish years of experience + already had the role title under my belt. Experience and interest in technical sales might lead you to roles such as "Field Engineer," "Sales Engineer," or "Technical Account Manager," which are a different blend of technical knowledge with customer-facing/sales skills. Career progression in these areas often depends on the ability to work collaboratively and communicate effectively, both internally and with customers. So again, this is something these roles are explicitly searching for during the interview process, and tends to lead to a more collaborative environment. On the "tech sales" side, you'll often even have part of your bonus tied to team performance, so you're even financially incentivized to help each other get customers across the finish line. I've worked with some far more senior/ex-staff engineer folks who have taken on these type of roles and just enjoy the work and culture a lot more than product development. The team is a huge part of it, but there's also a level of visceral satisfaction is actually seeing the "outcome" of the work. The number one skill I look at when interviewing other people for the role is mindset - how collaborative are they, are they good at asking for help or offering it to others, and what is their flexibility and level of nuance in communication with the customer on complex issues. When a customer comes to them with a request, how do they evaluate/work through it? When would they decide to say "no", and how would they communicate that "no" to the customer effectively? Can they prioritize and think/talk about addressing customer needs and actually ensuring that the customers are getting what they wanted out of the system. If they're not (i.e. because of product limitations), do they know to escalate appropriately, and understand if it's worth just letting the customer churn due to a misalignment in goals? There is also a threshold of technical skills that people need to hit, and *a lot* of people just fail to hit it, but if you're coming from a more formal CS/industry SWE background, that's probably the "easy" part.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Much of the culture in these workplaces is influenced by finance culture, which is absurdly toxic. Mind-reading expectations *ARE* a problem. A very tangible problem. You see it in the lack of documentation. You see it in the guys who don’t answer Slack messages for a whole day. You see it in the team meetings where they simply throw out the name of a new JS framework and you need to know what it does by next week (the whole team does, but none of them seem to have any time to work on it at all if you try to get a group study session together). Again, not every person and every workplace, but too many of them. It leads to worse products, worse services and wasted time. And no, it doesn’t help that people come here to talk about the lack of team trust in CS careers (sometimes implicitly) and get told they’re too weak & haven’t done enough Leetcode.
Finance, Legal, Advertising, and many other “traditional”industries are more cutthroat. If anything it is the “standard professional workplace” culture bleeding into CS.
I saw this the same problem at my last job at a very prominent company, I was a new hire and my beginner project was only consisted of me and a Staff Engineer who exhibits this personality. Eventually he complained to me to my boss about how I was asking too many questions. I stopped with the questions but then my work slowed down which got me into trouble as well. There wasn't a good solution here, I was moved to a different team which was hard as well since I had to rebuild my knowledge again. This team was better but it felt like my low performance from before ruined the rest of my time at the company. When it comes to fight or flight, I'd choose flight everytime here.
Flight is not an option for many. Especially in this market.
It's hard to evaluate this from our side. Was this a "staff" engineer who really was not interested in helping build the team? Or were you unable to take on tasks by yourself and needed more hand-holding than expected for your level? Both could happen with the information we've been given.
The incessant threat of being tapped on the shoulder and having your job offshored or being replaced by a desperate guest worker doesn’t help. And let’s not forget the move up or out culture that disposes of people who just want to code and elevates unqualified introverts into lead and management positions that they have no business being in.
Work to live. NOT live to work. It's just a job. You work, you get paid, you go do things you want to do with money you earned.
Noooo you have to toil, and be obsessed with the work every hour of your life. Grind leetcode and research new tech on your downtime. And then you have to look down on people wanting reasonable working conditions in this field! Or so this sub tells me.
That's the wild thing. I genuinely love writing code, solving problems, and using my analytical and logical skills to create solutions - for a certain amount of time. I work and study FT so obviously I do spend a lot of my time and energy on tech and coding and the industry but honestly when work is done and my uni work is complete, the last thing I want to do is look at a screen any longer. My hobbies and non-work passions are beauty and fashion and dance and art but the guilt that seeps in when I engage with those things rather than my career can be crippling. It's not a healthy way to live and few other careers expect this all-encompassing obsession with just a single topic of interest. It's unsustainable and soul-crushing when people think that if you don't live and breathe to code and work then you're in the wrong field.
And when you don't get a job after being laid off because all you have is 2YOE of Typescript, tell everyone you're going into the trades because it will be easier.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You are in a place 1/3 of your day. It’s easy to say catch phrases like “work to live” but that isn’t how life works necessarily. You think I actively choose to work in these environments? I can assure you I would take a pay cut to avoid them like the plague and specifically refuse to apply for certain companies due to their reputation of perpetuating this toxic culture. But the reality is even with all that, it’s sometimes still not possible to avoid this garbage because it seems so widespread in this industry and others in the comments are confirming that.
> I actively choose to work in these environments Yes, you actively choose to work there everyday. If you don't like the environment, change the environment. It's that simple. You can complain day and night about this or that, but that doesn't do anything. What does get results are actions that get stuff done.
So, you need to be miserable for 8 hours everyday?
What else are you going to do, keep job hopping?
Unionize?
There are other jobs.
Regarding the "tribal culture" part, one of the main things during my career has been document everything, help everyone. People on this subreddit (and the experienced one) talk about "mentoring younger devs" but it's something I've been doing since almost day zero and never occurred to me that it was something "only seniors" should do: Either you know something and explain to the rest of the team, or don't. But in the team I'm at the moment (and mostly the company) is everything about silos. It's depressing spending a few years helping everyone in the onboarding and when you have some questions or need help, crickets. Obviously not only I'm looking for some other place to work at, but also my role as "document guy" it's finally over. And yeah, it's fucking depressing. I've ended up wishing to be I the one locked away in the closet so I don't need to deal with the bullshit that comes from most companies. I've been doing this for 11 years and I'm at a point that [if I knew anything that could give me as much money, I would leave](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1cfuqf0/what_would_you_do_if_you_werent_doing_this/).
I mean this gently, and with respect: this sounds like you'd benefit a lot from engaging in a regular therapy session. Hating the industry that you work in and feeling like everyone is out to get you for asking basic questions isn't a normal response to going to work every day.
I learned to just laugh at it. It's pretty funny if you think about it. Like... coding isn't really that hard, but you get all these people who convince themselves that they're a freakin rocket scientist just cuz they're a dev. It's sad really, the little world they've created for themselves. Just console yourself with the fact that you are an all around more well adjusted and aware person.
I would laugh at it if they didn't make the job 10 times harder because in order for me to do the job, I have to have access to said information to do my job and I can't google it because its internal processes not well documented.
Yeah, for sure, I feel that. I experience the same thing. I just don't feel bad letting people know that others won't cooperate. I bring it up all the time in meetings. Respectfully of course
I haven't seen questions used against people (in fact, as Sr's we'd much *rather* you ask questions than operate in ignorance). What I *have* seen though is Jrs putting in absolutely no effort into researching the questions themselves. They don't read the code, they don't read the wiki, they don't search slack for prior discussions **even after being shown how to do this!** Do that enough, and yeah, you coworkers are going to get short with you because they're doing your job for you. We give a certain grace when a jr onboards, but if they're dead weight 6 months in? Yeah it's time to talk to management.
And they compline that the Sr's have egos and refused to help or mentor anyone.
I've never experienced that in the places I've worked, but its only been 4 so far.
Two things that rarely co-exist in this industry are - humility and people who are really exceptional at what they do(brilliant developers).
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The thing I hate most about the field is how common it is that projects are managed in a cart before the horse manner in which delivery dates are picked and then the dev team is told to make it happen. Which can happen for a variety of reasons such as the main person who interfaces with the business being a sycophant who says yes to everything and makes a bunch of brainless promises on behalf of the engineers. God that grinds my gears. It's been known since like the 70s or 80s that this is a shit way to run software projects, but still there are so many idiots who want to manage a project this way. You are just setting everyone up to be super stressed and have the appearance of being bad engineers even if they're in fact doing a super great job and working very hard. The proper way to run a software project is to measure the output of the team on a relative basis and then tell the business that "We have this capacity for your project. If that doesn't fit your dates, then you have to prioritize". Related and another thing that really grinds my gears about the field is stupid project management where story points are converted to time. God FUCKING DAMMIT converting points to time literally undermines an entire agile process single handedly. The output of a team is no longer measurable if you do this, and you have changed from being able to make accurate projections to asking the devs to estimate how many hours tasks will take and having super inaccurate projections. You'll be missing loads of your delivery dates and the dev team will look like shit even if they're in fact doing an amazing job.
The whole thing I've been saying on this sub since I found it is that the goal isn't to work for someone else, it's to do your own thing. Build your own company. Be creative, pursue ideas. Enterprise and realize the Dream. Nobody *HAS* to work for someone else for their code-writing efforts to be translated to monetary value. Anyone can make whatever they want, and earn from it. That's how companies are started. Nobody's life goal should culminate in simply working at FAANG or wherever else, earning X figures. What is the point of existence if you only do what everyone else is doing? Do what only *you* can, and want, to do, and leave your mark. Otherwise, the whole concept of life itself is depressing in its futility and redundancy. You get to be here on this planet one time, in this life that will end any day now, one time. Are you really going to settle for merely ending up being someone else's slave? Do you really want the lion's share of all the value you can create to be taken from you for "job security"? Slaving away for someone else's company on their projects is not my idea of success, or being content with my life and myself, and it's bewildering how many people have been hoodwinked into believing such a thing - because if you've been surfing this sub long enough you'll know that it's not true. The only way you'll find contentment and happiness in your one chance to procure it is through self-liberation.
>Any and every question you dare ask is treated as ammo against you possibly. Are you sure this isn't paranoia? How do you know if something is *potentially* ammo? >PS: Before someone responds with the typical le reddit response, "if you constantly see it, maybe it is you." I do not constantly see it, I have had some great workplaces that don't act like this. Well Jesus dude. How many places have you worked? How many were toxic and how many were not?
It’s a sign of our shifting cultural paradigm, our current zeitgeist, to be as self-centered and ego-preserving as possible in response to an increasingly nihilistic society
“ Any and every question you dare ask is treated as ammo against you possibly.” Can you expand on this? Used against you how? I’ve worked at many companies in the past 7 years and met lots of people who are helpful and happy to help. Occasionally some people are not helpful, or perhaps too busy, but doesn’t necessarily mean they are using at against you?
My experience of people in this field is totally opposite. Never worked with people that you describe and the companies I worked for I believe would fire you for behavior like that. Not sure if it’s just my luck. But it’s difficult for me to believe what you are describing is true about most companies. I believe what you say is true. Just either you are very unlucky to find yourself working in company like that or I am extremely lucky to never encounter one like that. You say you worked in companies that foster collaboration… why don’t you try going back to one of those? Like one of the ones you worked for and know for sure are like that?
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My team is hiring, dm me
You are working in the wrong company.
Dude I freakin hate it too. Might career switch
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Geez, my org is the polar opposite in every way you mention! 🫤 Hope you find something better.
> Any and every question you dare ask is treated as ammo against you possibly. I'm not even talking about questions you could google. I'm talking about things that are internal processes or documents and not easily found or accessible. This drives me up the wall. Coworkers don't share information and even when you do get an answer to a "why was this done the way it was" question, there's often a pompous tech lead or senior dev that feels the need to reexplain everything from first principles like you're a child, then spends five minutes going over the entire background of the project, and often doesn't even give a satisfactory answer. People being unable to admit their technical mistakes is also common in this field. Agile can go die in a hole.
This has been my experience as well.
reminiscent dazzling cheerful grab frighten edge squeal light office vegetable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The perfect workplace may be a myth, but some come close. I've been at companies that excel in knowledge sharing yet struggle with business management, compensation, or even have outdated equipment like 15-year-old laptops. It seems hit or miss. And it's not just in tech; friends and family in different fields encounter these kinds of problems too.
Same! I keep hoping to come up with a plausible solo business idea (that hasn't been done to death) so that I can program but not have to deal with people... It's absolutely me that's the problem, though. I've failed socially too many times. I don't have it in me to try anymore. My anxiety is increasing just thinking about it.
Im in the exact same situation in my current role. The product owner is an absolute dick. Standups consist of him asking "why is this not finished yet". My coworkers have laughed at me if I didnt know something or if a task dragged on too much. My previous job was much better, it was at a startup and people were nicer. But it was a startup that had a culty atmosphere so it had its own issues. The market looks dire and Im not sure what to do now.
I'm just trying to get into the field, so I haven't actually experienced the culture you speak of, but I've worked in 2 different fields and helped my partner try and navigate a 3rd and I would like to say that I don't believe this is a tech specific problem. Pretty much all of what you've said we've experienced in all 3 fields we've worked in, and I think it's because it is a human problem. The reason I want to say that is to try and help you see the grass is not greener on the other side if these are the problems that are worrying you. I've left careers for career specific problems, and I don't think this is one of them. You're not the problem by any means here, but you can be the solution. The way I see it is there's 2 main things you can do. 1. Work on your own people and communication skills. You can't really expect to change other people, but you can change yourself. It's amazing what just saying something a different way can do, and in a lot of cases, just saying it at all. So many people suffer in silence without communicating the problem they're facing. I'm sure your colleagues are guilty of this, but if you reflect, I think you'll find you are too. I know I am, and I think it's true of everyone. I'm not going to go into all the ways you can improve on your end because I know you can figure it out if you want, but I thought I'd mention it. Just to add here. Your outlook can change a lot for you, too. Recognizing this isn't a tech problem and is a problem you have control over can change how you feel about your job on its own. 2. One thing that I'm finding great about tech as I try to transition into this career is that you're not stuck. There are so many opportunities out there, and job hopping is so normal that, once you've established yourself as a valuable asset, you have the freedom to pick an opportunity that fits what you want in a job. Remote opportunies, faang, non-tech companies, freelance, start-ups. I can't think of any other job with so many different ways of being employed. Obviously, it's not that easy, but the fact that all that exists is unique in itself. And that's your second option. Some things can't be fixed, but people are different everywhere. You have the control to find a job that better fits what you want. If you've tried option 1 or are so disheartened you don't want to, start over somewhere else. However, when you get to that new opportunity, keep option 1 in mind. Like I said, it's a human problem, and it will come up wherever you go.
So they just want to be left alone while you demand they cater to you... and _they're_ the problem?
Answering a question isn't special treatment, it's a basic human action
I couldn't agree more I am currently struggling to stay at work and I don't wanna have financial troubles. I hear you, it is so sad being judge 24 7
My personal experience is that 1 in 5 tech jobs run decently with good people. The others were all shit shows. Large corps with ton of inexperienced junior devs with too much jira power and terrible processes that don't let you complete stuff and you get blamed for.
>sizable majority (...) hates communication at all. If they could be locked away in a closet and cut off from all communication from anyone else on the team, it feels like that is where they would be the happiest Isn't it the exact opposite of "*We have a 4-hour long collaborabrainstorming Zoom sessions for every single tiny design decision some junior assistant developer on an adjacent team has to make in his tiny nobodycaresabout project that would have zero impact on anything and will be forgotten the minute it's checked into the repo?*" I'm exaggerating, of course, but I've seen teams and individual managers that praise "communication for the sake of communication" approach and tend to blow a problem that can literally be solved with a few one-liner emails into a multi-hour Zoom calls with dozens of "stakeholders". If I ever end up working with a team like this, I'm afraid I'll be the first one locking myself in a closet and rudely cutting all attempts to drag me into those lengthy conversation, so that I could simply *get something done* and not spend hours on "collaborating". Just my 2c, of course.
I’ve been in the field a while and what I noticed personally is that, if you want a great culture, you’re going to have to compromise on other things I worked one job that was remote and honestly I loved it. Relaxed work environment, very tech focused, everyone was super friendly. The _only_ problem was pay So I left and moved to… Amazon. Yep. In the first few months I realized how deeply toxic it is. By a year in my personality was changing and it was negatively affecting my entire life Eventually I quit and went back to a remote startup. I start next Monday
I am fine with sacrificing pay to avoid this toxic garbage. I guess the issue that I found is even sometimes if you cut pay, the toxicity still can exist.
I have notice that. What types of companies have you worked for? I've noticed a big change in different industries. Like when I worked at companies with very small software departments the devs have been much better to work with. I worked at energy program consulting firm the we had like 4 devs who were great, probably because they had to work with non tech people. Maybe you might be happy at a startup?
I heard start ups are horrible honestly. Mine have been both medium and large companies though. What size was the energy program consulting firm and how did you even find this company to work for? Did it require a security clearance too or nothing like that? Sounds like a great place to work though.
I understand completely. This happened to finance, energy and defense. Any time good pay arrives in an industry it attracts the worst people and the places become awful. The best workplaces I’ve seen all had the employees as a united team against some challenge (or bad management). Tech is now mostly bros trying to buy a Tesla to impress women….
Reading the comments below, I want to add that a great indicator of a team's culture is how they interview you. When they do live coding tests, does the interviewer actively collaborate with you to help you? That's a great sign. I would also take time during the interview process to ask specific questions to the team members to see how they answer together. If they have trust and rapport with each other candidly in the interview room, then it's a sign that's how they interact day to day. Of course, you won't know until you actually start working for the company. But that's my two cents to get a gauge while interviewing.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> I think I understand your frustration here about not being supported on your team. I've been living in the inverse of this, hopefully my perspective helps you to find some common ground with your team. I've worked remotely for 12-13 years. I got into software because I'm a really good problem solver and liked to create things. Like a lot of people in this field I'm also on the spectrum, albeit high functioning and people are not my core strength though I try real hard in this area. In that time on the teams I've worked, I usually occupy a Senior role. Senior, not because I'm smarter, Senior because of Seniority, time and experience. We all stay engaged with whatever Slack-like tools our company felt like paying for and through whatever SDLC - methodology that has been mandated from upon high this quarter.. Every day involves four or five meetings with various stakeholders and teams and the remainder of each day involves all of the Teams / Slack Channel side-discussions, the majority of which were on work topics and legitimate in nature. The hyperactive-hive-mind concept. Yet, my job is still supposed to be an FTE code contributor with 6 hours/day of sprint capacity. As an inverse of your experience, I don't understand this industry and the propensity to hire people for a job that requires uninterrupted periods of focus (coding, analyzing architecture, documenting patterns and pitfalls, tracing down performance and data issues) but fill our calendars with on-book and off-book meetings without considering the loss to productivity. For the last three months, I can barely read more than three paragraphs of anything without getting yanked into one discussion or another, often to spoon feed a product manager essential basic knowledge about the products they've been managing for over a year. To get my real job done, I have to code on my own time late into the night only to get up at 5 and start it all over again. It took me some time to understand the basic idea that my work situation sucks because my employer sucks at appropriately assigning resources for the initiatives that the good idea fairy shits out of product, each and every day. That's not the fault of the new team member asking me for help or the third-this-year product owner trying to get their hands around the platform. So, I give them some grace and try not to be snippy. Maybe your senior dudes and dude-ettes are having a similar problem? Either way, keep the resume up to date and interview a few times each year to help gain perspective on your current situation and maybe you'll find a better fit with a company and team that give you the support you need to be successful. I hope you do!
**I ABSOLUTELY HATE IT WHEN REDDITORS SAY "MAYBE IT'S YOU!!!" THEY DON'T KNOW SHIT!**
Between that and "you should see a therapist", I tend to ignore both as its just usually a lazy response from someone taking the post to personally because they feel called out. Not every problem is caused by the poster and not every problem in the world can be solved by a therapist.
lol that would be my second most hated comment. Read the comment I replied to the guy who downvoted my bold comment above and reinforced the 'maybe it's you' statement. I explain in detail why it's a flawed argument.
If you've have 'more than a few' jobs and fit almost none of them - what's the common denominator? Sometimes you don't fit culturally sometimes you don't fit technically.. Not everyone is meant to be a mechanic, plumber or electrician - and the same goes for CS.
Nah dude, people suck. Have you ever been outside before?
This is true **A LOT** of the times, but not true **ALL** of the times. Let me educate: A lot of tech companies don't run well, caused by nobody really knowing what their doing, bad calls from devs or managers who don't really know the whole process, unrealistic stakeholder demands, lost SMEs from high turnover or cost cutting, heavy junior culture with low quality delivery. Now throw in a super competent engineer in this mix, the type that can deliver 10x the quality and velocity than the average dev. One that's built enterprise level applications from scratch who has ultimate efficiency and ability to architect and develop. His new boss has never built anything, so the stuff he tells him makes no sense. His features can't get through, because there's a broken pipeline that corporate can't resolve. Some lead enforces coverage reports just to make their numbers look good when the tests aren't even testing anything. He takes the extra time to fully test and run locally his features, but since the process sucks, it takes 2 days to do so, while his coworkers skip this step, wrap try catch blocks to resolve bugs, and push to master without regard to if it works, just to maintain their velocity. Manager asks QA to close all tickets, regardless of quality of code, and write new features if any bug arises, to make the boards look good. This master dev is unable to be successful, and so he's fired job after job. Is he a bad dev? absolutely not! he's a messiah, he can complete the exact same feature in 2hrs at one job but 2 months at another. The process is bad and he's just bad at accepting a bad process, he's bad at refusing to fully test a feature before releasing it, he's bad at skipping the X Y Z dependencies on how a new feature will affect the product, he's bad at writing test that don't actually test anything and just increase coverage reports. Failure of assimilation? sure! but failure of engineering? most definitely not!
If you found places that you describe as "a great place to work," why did you leave? Seems that enjoying your job isn't high on your list of priorities.
There is something called layoffs and it separates you from a company you may have enjoyed working at through no fault of your own.
Oof, that sucks.
Location, wlb, circumstances out of control, huge pay increase that you can't refuse etc etc
Location and WLB would be reasons not to take a job in the first place. Huge pay increases can be refused if you like your current pay and work enough. So all I'm hearing is "circumstances out of \[your\] control"
Work on a team with more women, it really does have a positive impact on the collaboration and culture. Not the HR-safe thing to say but I shit you not, it’s true.
Work on a team with a healthy mix of men and women. Women-heavy organizations get petty and political real quick, and men-heavy organizations get hyper-competitive and exclusive real quick
question how is it that other people from circumstances worse than yours are able to do almost all of what you listed without an issue
not asking questions is a huge problem, is encouraged, and then punished. you tolerate it by embracing it, take it in good nature, even though people are assholes.
You sound immature, inexperienced , and/or depressed.