4 ms·

I probably shouldn't post this but what the heck. I quit on the spot twice when a company was dickish. Once I had a friend, previous co-worker, that would vis

I probably shouldn't post this but what the heck. I quit on the spot twice when a company was dickish. Once I had a friend, previous co-worker, that would visit. He'd come into my office and we'd play games (this was a game company). This had happened about once every month or 2 for a year or so. One time I had to go to the restroom. I came back and he was gone. The new boss had escorted him out of the office. I quit on the spot. Saw that boss at a trade show years later. He apologized. Another time a boss at a company that was flex and who and never missed a deadline decided it doesn't going to be flex anymore for the next project. I was late one day 45 minutes and he got in my face. I brought up that I'd been an hour and a half early the previous day. He didn't care. Claimed if I worked at "The Gap" I'd have been fired. It was like "this isn't the Gap, I'm not an hourly employee". Arguments escalated, I quit. Apparently he then laid now the law for the remaining employees with strict hours and strict lunch hours and that you were not to leave the building outside those hours and threatening to doc people's pay if they were late. Of course he probably didn't realized that's probably illegal, at least in the USA. If you dock salaries employees by hours worked they become non-exempt meaning by not letting them choose their hours they are effectively hourly employees that have to be paid by the hour and paid overtime. At least in the USA. Of course IANAL but that's my reading of the law. I'm not really happy with the way I handled things and it's a life long work in progress to not get heated but I am proud that I didn't take shit and moved on from those situations when I did.

kelukelugames 11y ago
Kudos to boss#1 for apologizing. I hope he mellowed out.
67726e 11y ago
To be honest, at this point in time if you are a good software engineer you really have no need to put up with toxic bullshit at work. I left a job back in January. The type of startup that likes to prey on youthful ignorance. The kind of place that will repeatedly remind you that you are exempt from overtime but shove added unrelated duties and obligations and make you use a time clock. When I was faced with my capitulate or quit situation I didn't hesitate to quit and tell them just how shitty they treat folks. I had a new job that afternoon. Don't be afraid to stick up for yourself. This is a golden age for developers. Learn your worth and don't ask, demand it. To do anything less is doing yourself a great disservice.
scarmig 11y ago
First boss doesn't seem that bad, actually. Made a mistake, obviously, but he was new and maybe just getting his footing, and having an unaccompanied outsider inside the office is frowned upon by virtually all companies. The second manager sounds like a particularly unique combination of dickish and clueless.
- Pyxl101 11y ago
  > First boss doesn't seem that bad, actually. Made a mistake, obviously, but he was new and maybe just getting his footing, and having an unaccompanied outsider inside the office is frowned upon by virtually all companies. He could have stayed with the outsider ("escorted" them) until the employee came back from the restroom. That's what I would do if I found a random person in my work building who had a visitor's badge and claimed to be there escorted by an employee.
- 67726e 11y ago
  Obviously everyone has a different experience, but in my experience one would expect either a heads up and/or a debriefing afterwards. Having disappearing coworkers is no good for morale.
- ashurbanipal 11y ago
  FLSA is not a joke anymore. Especially for a big company or one that has aspirations of becoming big.
MCRed 11y ago
Look, you did the right things, both times. Most people spend too much time putting up with BS or even rationalizing that it isn't BS they are putting up with (a lot of people at Amazon are doing this right now.) Work on your temper if you want. But if you can be fired on the spot, you can quit on the spot. And you should. Every engineer should have their terms, and if the terms are violated, quit. If you join a company that is flex-- changing it to not flex is changing the terms of employement! Companies change your manager all the time, but how are you supposed to evaluate a company work environment if you can't count on the manager you interviewed being your manager when you get hired... but they think nothing of it because they think you're just a replaceable cog. Allow them some flexibility, but don't give into this idea that it's a foregone conclusion that you have no say in your work environment. Quitting on the spot sends a message. But that doesn't matter- they will rationalize. They aren't interested in learnign- and they won't learn from one person leaving.
MCRed 11y ago
In 2014 I worked for a company where the whole team quit. From Summer to fall they built a team who built a product. By february all of them had quit or been fired, except for one programmer (and me who had just been hired.) Did the company learn from this? no. We built a new team, built a new product, and by february of the next year we had all quit. They are now on their third team. Nothings changed . Management complains about how hard it is to find good employees though. They're terrible managers, and they just can't figure it out. Because its inconceivable to them.
- Pyxl101 11y ago
  What company was that?
- pacala 11y ago
  Where on earth do they find money to pay the wages for each wave of employees? Are their shareholders blind?
  - MCRed 11y ago
    Well, they pay less money when people leave, and one of their approaches to "solve" the "problem" of people leaving is to get increasingly junior and inexperienced people. The team now is made up mostly of people whose programming experience is a 6 week boot camp designed to take non programmers and teach them how to program... led by two people who seem to be also-rans who never learned anything after the java boom of the 1990s. Continuos integration? Why would we need that? They aren't a startup- they are a subdivision of a much larger company, and that's the source of the problem- that larger company has no technical capability, or care, and the management is... incompetent, to say the least.
    - Bahamut 11y ago
      I once worked for a startup that did this - pretty much fired a lot of the competent engineers, or they quit. A lot of engineers complained about the ungodly hours many had to put in for unrealistic deadlines that were pushed down by sales. Supposedly the executives heard about the complaints that their best engineers were ready to walk out, and promised to change the way things were run - I got word recently that they were still continuing the same overpromising, which led to unsurprising unstable backend & frontend issues of various degrees. One product manager described it to me as setting everyone up for failure. I'm increasingly convinced that it is the sign of bad leadership, and people with no business being in management or an executive position.
orthoganol 11y ago
I've done the same, heated in the moment. Basically our two most senior devs quit, so a large burden shifted onto me, and I was suddenly the most tenured dev on our team, with knowledge of systems no one else had and could not even easily get since the others (and others before) had quit. But curiously they promoted the new guy instead of me. Ok fine... I told my boss, an arrogant VP at the company, that I should be paid x amount for my increased role and importance to the product. He got back to me 2 weeks later (took his time with this), and said sorry. Quit on the spot. They had to completely overhaul their roadmap and soon after that team folded, got absorbed into another, the VP got fired, and I got a sweet new gig. The execs were too thick headed and full of themselves to see that my quitting would cost them exponentially more money than a relatively modest salary increase based on my increased role. Not a single regret.
- danielweber 11y ago
  I've never thought "I left that job too early." I have often thought I left too late. One job in particular I should have called their bullshit was when the CEO had one (in a long line of) hissy fit and said he was quitting in a month's time. I was trying to keep the company together, but what I -- the senior developer and the sole maintainer of the company's one revenue-generating product -- should have done was send out an email saying "I am taking a leave of absence and will reporting back to work in one time, after the CEO has left. The new CEO is welcome to contact me about an earlier return time." Because that probably might have actually gotten the CEO out, instead of him running the company into the ground for slow-motion over the next 8 years. (I had a significant ownership stake.) Oh, he stuck around after threatening to quit. It was his only management technique besides yelling.
  - jqm 11y ago
    I've never thought "I left that job too early." I have often thought I left too late. Yep. Me too. Thanks for distilling something I have often thought.
- carrotleads 11y ago
  the fact that they chose to decline your request shows that many execs are so used to people putting up with BS... I bet this exec team doesn't make the same mistake again but many will, cause very rarely do SDE ask for a raise. Even then it's after they have put up with lots of BS and are used to status quo that they rarely ever quit.
kelukelugames 11y ago
I'm in the middle of writing a 1,500 word article about the toxic work environment I left. Wish I could finish earlier so it could be topical.

kelukelugames 11y ago

Kudos to boss#1 for apologizing. I hope he mellowed out.

67726e 11y ago

To be honest, at this point in time if you are a good software engineer you really have no need to put up with toxic bullshit at work. I left a job back in January. The type of startup that likes to prey on youthful ignorance. The kind of place that will repeatedly remind you that you are exempt from overtime but shove added unrelated duties and obligations and make you use a time clock. When I was faced with my capitulate or quit situation I didn't hesitate to quit and tell them just how shitty they treat folks. I had a new job that afternoon. Don't be afraid to stick up for yourself. This is a golden age for developers. Learn your worth and don't ask, demand it. To do anything less is doing yourself a great disservice.

scarmig 11y ago

First boss doesn't seem that bad, actually. Made a mistake, obviously, but he was new and maybe just getting his footing, and having an unaccompanied outsider inside the office is frowned upon by virtually all companies. The second manager sounds like a particularly unique combination of dickish and clueless.

Pyxl101 11y ago
> First boss doesn't seem that bad, actually. Made a mistake, obviously, but he was new and maybe just getting his footing, and having an unaccompanied outsider inside the office is frowned upon by virtually all companies. He could have stayed with the outsider ("escorted" them) until the employee came back from the restroom. That's what I would do if I found a random person in my work building who had a visitor's badge and claimed to be there escorted by an employee.
67726e 11y ago
Obviously everyone has a different experience, but in my experience one would expect either a heads up and/or a debriefing afterwards. Having disappearing coworkers is no good for morale.
ashurbanipal 11y ago
FLSA is not a joke anymore. Especially for a big company or one that has aspirations of becoming big.

MCRed 11y ago

Look, you did the right things, both times. Most people spend too much time putting up with BS or even rationalizing that it isn't BS they are putting up with (a lot of people at Amazon are doing this right now.) Work on your temper if you want. But if you can be fired on the spot, you can quit on the spot. And you should. Every engineer should have their terms, and if the terms are violated, quit. If you join a company that is flex-- changing it to not flex is changing the terms of employement! Companies change your manager all the time, but how are you supposed to evaluate a company work environment if you can't count on the manager you interviewed being your manager when you get hired... but they think nothing of it because they think you're just a replaceable cog. Allow them some flexibility, but don't give into this idea that it's a foregone conclusion that you have no say in your work environment. Quitting on the spot sends a message. But that doesn't matter- they will rationalize. They aren't interested in learnign- and they won't learn from one person leaving.

MCRed 11y ago

In 2014 I worked for a company where the whole team quit. From Summer to fall they built a team who built a product. By february all of them had quit or been fired, except for one programmer (and me who had just been hired.) Did the company learn from this? no. We built a new team, built a new product, and by february of the next year we had all quit. They are now on their third team. Nothings changed . Management complains about how hard it is to find good employees though. They're terrible managers, and they just can't figure it out. Because its inconceivable to them.

Pyxl101 11y ago
What company was that?
pacala 11y ago
Where on earth do they find money to pay the wages for each wave of employees? Are their shareholders blind?
- MCRed 11y ago
  Well, they pay less money when people leave, and one of their approaches to "solve" the "problem" of people leaving is to get increasingly junior and inexperienced people. The team now is made up mostly of people whose programming experience is a 6 week boot camp designed to take non programmers and teach them how to program... led by two people who seem to be also-rans who never learned anything after the java boom of the 1990s. Continuos integration? Why would we need that? They aren't a startup- they are a subdivision of a much larger company, and that's the source of the problem- that larger company has no technical capability, or care, and the management is... incompetent, to say the least.
  - Bahamut 11y ago
    I once worked for a startup that did this - pretty much fired a lot of the competent engineers, or they quit. A lot of engineers complained about the ungodly hours many had to put in for unrealistic deadlines that were pushed down by sales. Supposedly the executives heard about the complaints that their best engineers were ready to walk out, and promised to change the way things were run - I got word recently that they were still continuing the same overpromising, which led to unsurprising unstable backend & frontend issues of various degrees. One product manager described it to me as setting everyone up for failure. I'm increasingly convinced that it is the sign of bad leadership, and people with no business being in management or an executive position.

orthoganol 11y ago

I've done the same, heated in the moment. Basically our two most senior devs quit, so a large burden shifted onto me, and I was suddenly the most tenured dev on our team, with knowledge of systems no one else had and could not even easily get since the others (and others before) had quit. But curiously they promoted the new guy instead of me. Ok fine... I told my boss, an arrogant VP at the company, that I should be paid x amount for my increased role and importance to the product. He got back to me 2 weeks later (took his time with this), and said sorry. Quit on the spot. They had to completely overhaul their roadmap and soon after that team folded, got absorbed into another, the VP got fired, and I got a sweet new gig. The execs were too thick headed and full of themselves to see that my quitting would cost them exponentially more money than a relatively modest salary increase based on my increased role. Not a single regret.

danielweber 11y ago
I've never thought "I left that job too early." I have often thought I left too late. One job in particular I should have called their bullshit was when the CEO had one (in a long line of) hissy fit and said he was quitting in a month's time. I was trying to keep the company together, but what I -- the senior developer and the sole maintainer of the company's one revenue-generating product -- should have done was send out an email saying "I am taking a leave of absence and will reporting back to work in one time, after the CEO has left. The new CEO is welcome to contact me about an earlier return time." Because that probably might have actually gotten the CEO out, instead of him running the company into the ground for slow-motion over the next 8 years. (I had a significant ownership stake.) Oh, he stuck around after threatening to quit. It was his only management technique besides yelling.
- jqm 11y ago
  I've never thought "I left that job too early." I have often thought I left too late. Yep. Me too. Thanks for distilling something I have often thought.
carrotleads 11y ago
the fact that they chose to decline your request shows that many execs are so used to people putting up with BS... I bet this exec team doesn't make the same mistake again but many will, cause very rarely do SDE ask for a raise. Even then it's after they have put up with lots of BS and are used to status quo that they rarely ever quit.

kelukelugames 11y ago

I'm in the middle of writing a 1,500 word article about the toxic work environment I left. Wish I could finish earlier so it could be topical.