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Thank you for sharing. I can relate. This is my first “real” full time job, and I’ve now been there 10 years with little to show for it, and not for lack of tr

Thank you for sharing. I can relate. This is my first “real” full time job, and I’ve now been there 10 years with little to show for it, and not for lack of trying. Software engineer for a small company, report directly to the owners. Repeatedly, I pour my heart and soul into a project that I believe in, only for ownership to trash the project for superficial reasons. I’ll do small things and get overly patronizing praise, and then when I try to initiate or lead something bigger, they crush it with passive aggressive, belittling remarks. They mostly just want me doing grunt work, despite my desire to do larger, “force multiplier” type work. Work that my coworkers and customers are asking for. My self esteem is terrible and I haven’t left for fear that I won’t be able to “make it” anywhere else, paralyzed by the fear of ending up unemployed. I’m angry that I have a 10 year career full of ambition that went absolutely nowhere, I want to leave, but it’s scary. Your story gave me a great boost of encouragement to start seriously planning my exit.

dwaltrip 4y ago
You can find something better. 100%
d4mi3n 4y ago
Thank you for sharing, I've gone through similar and can absolutely relate. I'm curious—do these business owners you work for have any software or management experience in tech? I've sometimes seen managers do this when they don't know what to do with an employee or don't know what career progression for an employee looks like. This doesn't at all justify shitty behavior, but I've found it useful to identify motivations behind bad interactions as a way to avoid things that could lead to them in the future.
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  The owners are both engineers, primarily back end, while I do both front and back end. I suspect they are partially motivated (as other commenters suggested) by not changing too much of what they themselves built personally. Partially out of a fear of change, but also partially out of a “if we find ourselves without employees and need to run the whole show on our own again, we can’t have a bunch of code we don’t understand” fear. Which I understand. But fact is, we have customers and internal users who are overworked and have needs. Needs that we aren’t meeting because we never deliver the “right” solution in full, in part because so many parts of the system just seem unofficially “off limits”. I’ve offered many times to start a regular engineering training and sharing session where I can help make others aware of how I’ve been building things and how they can help maintain them, to try to make everyone more comfortable with the front end, but that also has met the same friction as my projects.
programmarchy 4y ago
> when I try to initiate or lead something bigger, they crush it with passive aggressive, belittling remarks If you don’t mind me asking, how do you typically respond to those remarks? Not trying to excuse their rude behavior or saying you shouldn’t move on to greener pastures, but if you let people “get away with” passive aggressive behavior, then it’s bound to happen again elsewhere. Leadership is always tested in ways like this and it’d be wise to learn how to respond in a constructive way, rather than letting it crush you. To play devil’s advocate, if you can’t handle some glancing criticism, how can people trust you to carry a large initiative to fruition?
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  That’s a fair question. I honestly haven’t “fought” for my projects probably as much as I should. Some of this is a result to how their criticisms are shared. Often, they will initially softly praise my efforts (“that’s a good idea, but we need to discuss it more before going live with it”). Then, time passes, we put out other fires, other ideas for unrelated projects get discussed. Often throughout, the problem that my (now on hold) project attempts to solve will come up multiple times. At some point, I remind them that I have a potential solution ready to go, but we still need to discuss it before going live, as they requested. I get a “yes we will, soon” response once or twice, until finally they mention something superficially wrong and easily fixed about it (“the order of the form items need to be switched around” or “we should add a summary screen” type trivialities) and is then used as a reason why, instead of spending a day finishing the project up, we should instead focus our time on x, y, or z (none of which are even actionable projects yet). At which point I cave. Every once in a while I get irritated to the point of blurting out something snarky when the problem presents itself (“you know, we could be done with problems like these if we had implemented my idea”) only for me to follow it up with some joke to smooth it over and not sound so bitter. I’m sure there’s a better way for me to fight for these projects, and I hope as I become more inclined to leave, I’ll have more backbone to try them out and commit to it.
throwawaymaths 4y ago
Before you exit, have you actually told your bosses in no uncertain words what the hell is going on? It sounds like this is a breakdown of effective communication and assumptions about what people want in their career and what they need. If you haven't explicitly aired these specific complaints I think you should at least give them a chance, which for you, could also give yourself the fastest path to build something you could show off, instead of having to start over at a new company where there will be a lot of unknowns. If you have already done that, I'll show myself out.
- switchbak 4y ago
  I was in a similar position once. I was working at a green tech startup, took about a 5x pay cut to work there, but it was something I was passionate about. They had me working on low value BS, internationalization of an old product, etc. Just wasting my time. I don't think they had any idea of my capabilities (despite lots of proof of that). When I finally said "I really want to be challenged here, I'm super capable, and I want to drive forward on meaningful work", I got no response, and shortly thereafter was laid off. Funny place. I then took another high paying job that assumed I was capable and pushed me hard - much better! Sometimes you're just wading into interpersonal dynamics and low trust environments. If it's consistently weird, there really is just one choice: find a place that's doing hard work and will value your contributions. Life is too short to waste it with contributions to those who don't value them.
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    Yeah (in the US, depending on state) plus when you get paid off you get severance, maybe even unemployment. At least you know where you stand. If the bosses are truly assholes, you know where they are. I think it's entirely possible in many cases they just don't realize what they are doing. In another situation they might be truly wanting interchangeable low value programmer, so tell them it's not a good fit anymore, I'll help you hire my replacement, please leave me a good letter of recommendation on the way out, and you get that.
Consultant32452 4y ago
I'm sorry you feel this way and I hope things get better for you. You didn't ask for advice, but I'd like to offer some. I recommend, at least once per year, putting your resume out on the market and trying to get at least one interview. Don't consider it as part of a plan to leave your current job, consider it practicing the skill of job seeking. You will get tons of useful knowledge performing this task. First, you don't feel need/urgency, because you're not planning to leave your current job, so significantly reduced interview anxiety. Second, you get better at the skill of interviewing. Third, you get a better picture of what the potential employers in your area are hiring for (skills, etc.). And last but not least, you really find out what the market is offering to determine if you're being compensated fairly. What's the worst that could happen? Someone convinces you to take a better job for more money?
no_butterscotch 4y ago
> My self esteem is terrible and I haven’t left for fear that I won’t be able to “make it” anywhere else, paralyzed by the fear of ending up unemployed. > I’m angry that I have a 10 year career full of ambition that went absolutely nowhere, I want to leave, but it’s scary. > Your story gave me a great boost of encouragement to start seriously planning my exit. I worked for a shit software company in the midwest for a few years after graduating. I also felt scared I wouldn't be able to make it. I eventually landed a job in SF and learned my value as an engineer. But I suspect a lot of people have similar stories to this.
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  Very encouraging to hear!
jeppine 4y ago
Unfortunately, I feel that this is quite common in small businesses. I put in the same 10 years that you did, and would constantly propose large improvements to the owners. They were almost always shot down, and just result in me having to deal with the same problems. Most of the time, I feel that it is just the owner’s fear of losing control of some part of their business. Sometimes it’s just fear of change. I decided to go into a different career path entirely and am working for myself now. It has helped my mental state incredibly. I know it is scary, but sometimes you just have to take the leap. Best of luck with your plans.
- adra 4y ago
  I mean, I don't blame the owner entirely. Maybe they're perfectly happy with what they have. If someone really knows their business well, maybe it isn't worth putting effort behind a brand new thing that customers couldn't give two flips for. If you aren't seeking new customers, there isn't a strong business appetite to innovate unless customers are complaining. If you're too eager for customers, you're probably putting too much emphasis on thin product feature checklists to sell sell sell! Somewhere in the middle is where I think the sweet spot is, and org that isn't comfortable with its market share but unwilling to throw caution to the wind in order to make every sale. That isn't exciting? Great, then find a company that better fits what you want in your career. Job/employment isn't always a good fit for what you're looking to fulfill in your career, and those are perfect opportunities to leave.
SoftTalker 4y ago
> Repeatedly, I pour my heart and soul into a project that I believe in, only for ownership to trash the project for superficial reasons. This has happened to me over and over and I've seen it happen to others. It's not always obvious but sometimes business changes. Markets change, customer demands change, regulations change, competitors change. Strategies that made sense suddenly don't anymore. All the work that has been done is a sunk cost. You can't get it back, and if nobody wants the product anymore or it's not going to provide value, you just cut it off. It sucks, but think about it, if you've been with the company 10 years and presumably they have been in business longer than that, they can't be complete idiots. Most small tech companies don't make it 10 years, or even close. Maybe the owners are assholes, but they are doing something right. One thing that has helped is that I don't put my "heart and soul" into work projects anymore. I come in, work on the project in a professional, high-quality fashion, and go home at the end of the day. I get paid, and we're even. I've tried to make my relationship with work emotionless. It's a job. If you treat it like something deeply personal it's much more likely that you're going to end up angry or offended or taking business decisions by the owners as personal attacks.
- csomar 4y ago
  > Maybe the owners are assholes, but they are doing something right. Sometimes they are assholes and they are doing it wrong but it can work for a long time because there is still a market and no one want or can compete. Say you own the only restaurant on top of a hill. There can only be one, as the space is limited, so it's only you. There will always be some customers are people enjoy the top of the hill view despite your shitty food. The owner of such an establishment can exist for longer than you can remain sane. It's why lots of shitty businesses and bosses exist. These guys are immune, but a nice boss/business can die if the market changes.
j33zusjuice 4y ago
The act of planning will make you feel better. Once you start believing that you have options, the stress reduces tremendously. There’s a site called interviewing.io or something like that (I have no articulation, I stumbled on it a couple weeks ago), and you can pay $100 or something to have an hour and a half interview with some FAANG engineer on whatever topics you want. The point is that there are resources all over the place to help get you out of your rut, even if you don’t have a good support system. And if a site like interviewing exists, there have got to be other resources that help with your specific issues. But at some point, you must take action. It’s hard as hell, I know. I’ve tried to kill myself five times (turns out I’m horrible at suicide!), and a lot of my issues stemmed from a fucked up relationship with work and money, and that had a massive impact on my view of self. I grew up in a household where I felt I had to perform exceptionally well to be lovable (I was worthless beyond my output; if this resonates with anyone, look into “performance based love”), and I took that into work with me, and tech is awfully hard to be perfect in, and it’s impossible to be the “best” at it, so now I’m never good enough. Eventually the walls start closing in on me, and I feel like I need to escape, but I’m terrible, so there’s no way out. I have to live in this confined and uncomfortable space because that’s what worthless people like me do. Every time I get to this point, I find the same solution: look for doors instead of focusing on the walls. Very hard to do, and even harder to keep on doing when you’ve been rejected a dozen times, but eventually a door will open, and you’ll be better off.
- lukan 4y ago
  "turns out I’m horrible at suicide!" Ouch, I am not sure if you meant it like this, but please don't take it as more proof of how you failed. You did not. Your remaining desire to live was just stronger, otherwise you surely would be dead. So please live this life, because you want to, not because you have to. All the best! Edit: And screw those performance based love idiots, they didn't know better and you had no alternative, but now you can find people who know better.
  - bityard 4y ago
    I do believe it was meant to be taken as a joke.
heywherelogingo 4y ago
Ten years? If you can stick it out in that environment for that long then you have the backbone to handle all sorts of things - move on! When I'm in a horrid environment I dig deep to last just two years. I ran from my last place after one year, and lasting that long took some serious effort.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yeah I mean, my longest & average tenures are in the 4-5 years range. All of those were at least pretty good jobs the first 2 years. I can't imagine staying on somewhere I dislike so much for 3, 5.. 10 years.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> Repeatedly, I pour my heart and soul into a project that I believe in, only for ownership to trash the project for superficial reasons. You deserve better! Don't let your passion for a project blind you to the fact that you have better options, to make better money, have better opportunity... and - by far - most importantly, to get treated the way you deserve!
mandeepj 4y ago
> They mostly just want me doing grunt work, despite my desire to do larger, “force multiplier” type work. Work that my coworkers and customers are asking for. Is it possible for you to only share "grunt" work with owners and talk about "force multiplier" only with who "gets it" ?
nuancebydefault 4y ago
I compare finding a new job with dating. It is scary to do the first view interviews/dates but each one gets easier. Do one every week or 2 weeks and in a few months you are a pro. Don't care about anybody noticing that you are very busy / up to something. The current employer doesn't care for you anyway. The act of searching/taking your faith in your own hands will feel liberating, I promise. Jobs are different, even when they have a similar description. Who you work for and the company culture makes all the difference. If you end up in a wrong place, don't worry and switch again, that time with some interviewing mileage under the belt.
jwmoz 4y ago
Over 10 years how much have your wages increased?
whstl 4y ago
Wow. I can sympathize, as I had the exact same thing happen with me. From “doing grunt work” down to having them “crush it with passive aggressive, belittling remarks” I actually laid out a plan to fix the automatic builds that were broken for months (and I had to them all manually), and the company owner completely rejected it and laughed me out of the room, only for me to turn around and have him do it himself. Virtually every great idea anyone had was co-opted by him, including another guy before my time who wrote us a complete iOS app in his free time, only to have the code completely scrapped and rewritten from scratch, again by the business owner. About your 10 years experience: it is still 10 years experience. Go and get another job. Go interview. It sucks and it’s tiring but there's no risk involved if you keep your current job. With 10 years of experience I'm sure you’ll get something better.
taskforcegemini 4y ago
I have never regretted quitting a job even though I never left because of a better offer. of course this depends heavily on expectations one has on their next checkpoint, and on their own lifestyle. my recommendation would be: don't go into it exhausted and make sure to have enough monetary backup resources

dwaltrip 4y ago

You can find something better. 100%

d4mi3n 4y ago

Thank you for sharing, I've gone through similar and can absolutely relate. I'm curious—do these business owners you work for have any software or management experience in tech? I've sometimes seen managers do this when they don't know what to do with an employee or don't know what career progression for an employee looks like. This doesn't at all justify shitty behavior, but I've found it useful to identify motivations behind bad interactions as a way to avoid things that could lead to them in the future.

kiawe_fire 4y ago
The owners are both engineers, primarily back end, while I do both front and back end. I suspect they are partially motivated (as other commenters suggested) by not changing too much of what they themselves built personally. Partially out of a fear of change, but also partially out of a “if we find ourselves without employees and need to run the whole show on our own again, we can’t have a bunch of code we don’t understand” fear. Which I understand. But fact is, we have customers and internal users who are overworked and have needs. Needs that we aren’t meeting because we never deliver the “right” solution in full, in part because so many parts of the system just seem unofficially “off limits”. I’ve offered many times to start a regular engineering training and sharing session where I can help make others aware of how I’ve been building things and how they can help maintain them, to try to make everyone more comfortable with the front end, but that also has met the same friction as my projects.

programmarchy 4y ago

> when I try to initiate or lead something bigger, they crush it with passive aggressive, belittling remarks If you don’t mind me asking, how do you typically respond to those remarks? Not trying to excuse their rude behavior or saying you shouldn’t move on to greener pastures, but if you let people “get away with” passive aggressive behavior, then it’s bound to happen again elsewhere. Leadership is always tested in ways like this and it’d be wise to learn how to respond in a constructive way, rather than letting it crush you. To play devil’s advocate, if you can’t handle some glancing criticism, how can people trust you to carry a large initiative to fruition?

kiawe_fire 4y ago
That’s a fair question. I honestly haven’t “fought” for my projects probably as much as I should. Some of this is a result to how their criticisms are shared. Often, they will initially softly praise my efforts (“that’s a good idea, but we need to discuss it more before going live with it”). Then, time passes, we put out other fires, other ideas for unrelated projects get discussed. Often throughout, the problem that my (now on hold) project attempts to solve will come up multiple times. At some point, I remind them that I have a potential solution ready to go, but we still need to discuss it before going live, as they requested. I get a “yes we will, soon” response once or twice, until finally they mention something superficially wrong and easily fixed about it (“the order of the form items need to be switched around” or “we should add a summary screen” type trivialities) and is then used as a reason why, instead of spending a day finishing the project up, we should instead focus our time on x, y, or z (none of which are even actionable projects yet). At which point I cave. Every once in a while I get irritated to the point of blurting out something snarky when the problem presents itself (“you know, we could be done with problems like these if we had implemented my idea”) only for me to follow it up with some joke to smooth it over and not sound so bitter. I’m sure there’s a better way for me to fight for these projects, and I hope as I become more inclined to leave, I’ll have more backbone to try them out and commit to it.

throwawaymaths 4y ago

Before you exit, have you actually told your bosses in no uncertain words what the hell is going on? It sounds like this is a breakdown of effective communication and assumptions about what people want in their career and what they need. If you haven't explicitly aired these specific complaints I think you should at least give them a chance, which for you, could also give yourself the fastest path to build something you could show off, instead of having to start over at a new company where there will be a lot of unknowns. If you have already done that, I'll show myself out.

switchbak 4y ago
I was in a similar position once. I was working at a green tech startup, took about a 5x pay cut to work there, but it was something I was passionate about. They had me working on low value BS, internationalization of an old product, etc. Just wasting my time. I don't think they had any idea of my capabilities (despite lots of proof of that). When I finally said "I really want to be challenged here, I'm super capable, and I want to drive forward on meaningful work", I got no response, and shortly thereafter was laid off. Funny place. I then took another high paying job that assumed I was capable and pushed me hard - much better! Sometimes you're just wading into interpersonal dynamics and low trust environments. If it's consistently weird, there really is just one choice: find a place that's doing hard work and will value your contributions. Life is too short to waste it with contributions to those who don't value them.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  Yeah (in the US, depending on state) plus when you get paid off you get severance, maybe even unemployment. At least you know where you stand. If the bosses are truly assholes, you know where they are. I think it's entirely possible in many cases they just don't realize what they are doing. In another situation they might be truly wanting interchangeable low value programmer, so tell them it's not a good fit anymore, I'll help you hire my replacement, please leave me a good letter of recommendation on the way out, and you get that.

Consultant32452 4y ago

I'm sorry you feel this way and I hope things get better for you. You didn't ask for advice, but I'd like to offer some. I recommend, at least once per year, putting your resume out on the market and trying to get at least one interview. Don't consider it as part of a plan to leave your current job, consider it practicing the skill of job seeking. You will get tons of useful knowledge performing this task. First, you don't feel need/urgency, because you're not planning to leave your current job, so significantly reduced interview anxiety. Second, you get better at the skill of interviewing. Third, you get a better picture of what the potential employers in your area are hiring for (skills, etc.). And last but not least, you really find out what the market is offering to determine if you're being compensated fairly. What's the worst that could happen? Someone convinces you to take a better job for more money?

no_butterscotch 4y ago

> My self esteem is terrible and I haven’t left for fear that I won’t be able to “make it” anywhere else, paralyzed by the fear of ending up unemployed. > I’m angry that I have a 10 year career full of ambition that went absolutely nowhere, I want to leave, but it’s scary. > Your story gave me a great boost of encouragement to start seriously planning my exit. I worked for a shit software company in the midwest for a few years after graduating. I also felt scared I wouldn't be able to make it. I eventually landed a job in SF and learned my value as an engineer. But I suspect a lot of people have similar stories to this.

kiawe_fire 4y ago
Very encouraging to hear!

jeppine 4y ago

Unfortunately, I feel that this is quite common in small businesses. I put in the same 10 years that you did, and would constantly propose large improvements to the owners. They were almost always shot down, and just result in me having to deal with the same problems. Most of the time, I feel that it is just the owner’s fear of losing control of some part of their business. Sometimes it’s just fear of change. I decided to go into a different career path entirely and am working for myself now. It has helped my mental state incredibly. I know it is scary, but sometimes you just have to take the leap. Best of luck with your plans.

adra 4y ago
I mean, I don't blame the owner entirely. Maybe they're perfectly happy with what they have. If someone really knows their business well, maybe it isn't worth putting effort behind a brand new thing that customers couldn't give two flips for. If you aren't seeking new customers, there isn't a strong business appetite to innovate unless customers are complaining. If you're too eager for customers, you're probably putting too much emphasis on thin product feature checklists to sell sell sell! Somewhere in the middle is where I think the sweet spot is, and org that isn't comfortable with its market share but unwilling to throw caution to the wind in order to make every sale. That isn't exciting? Great, then find a company that better fits what you want in your career. Job/employment isn't always a good fit for what you're looking to fulfill in your career, and those are perfect opportunities to leave.

SoftTalker 4y ago

> Repeatedly, I pour my heart and soul into a project that I believe in, only for ownership to trash the project for superficial reasons. This has happened to me over and over and I've seen it happen to others. It's not always obvious but sometimes business changes. Markets change, customer demands change, regulations change, competitors change. Strategies that made sense suddenly don't anymore. All the work that has been done is a sunk cost. You can't get it back, and if nobody wants the product anymore or it's not going to provide value, you just cut it off. It sucks, but think about it, if you've been with the company 10 years and presumably they have been in business longer than that, they can't be complete idiots. Most small tech companies don't make it 10 years, or even close. Maybe the owners are assholes, but they are doing something right. One thing that has helped is that I don't put my "heart and soul" into work projects anymore. I come in, work on the project in a professional, high-quality fashion, and go home at the end of the day. I get paid, and we're even. I've tried to make my relationship with work emotionless. It's a job. If you treat it like something deeply personal it's much more likely that you're going to end up angry or offended or taking business decisions by the owners as personal attacks.

csomar 4y ago
> Maybe the owners are assholes, but they are doing something right. Sometimes they are assholes and they are doing it wrong but it can work for a long time because there is still a market and no one want or can compete. Say you own the only restaurant on top of a hill. There can only be one, as the space is limited, so it's only you. There will always be some customers are people enjoy the top of the hill view despite your shitty food. The owner of such an establishment can exist for longer than you can remain sane. It's why lots of shitty businesses and bosses exist. These guys are immune, but a nice boss/business can die if the market changes.

j33zusjuice 4y ago

The act of planning will make you feel better. Once you start believing that you have options, the stress reduces tremendously. There’s a site called interviewing.io or something like that (I have no articulation, I stumbled on it a couple weeks ago), and you can pay $100 or something to have an hour and a half interview with some FAANG engineer on whatever topics you want. The point is that there are resources all over the place to help get you out of your rut, even if you don’t have a good support system. And if a site like interviewing exists, there have got to be other resources that help with your specific issues. But at some point, you must take action. It’s hard as hell, I know. I’ve tried to kill myself five times (turns out I’m horrible at suicide!), and a lot of my issues stemmed from a fucked up relationship with work and money, and that had a massive impact on my view of self. I grew up in a household where I felt I had to perform exceptionally well to be lovable (I was worthless beyond my output; if this resonates with anyone, look into “performance based love”), and I took that into work with me, and tech is awfully hard to be perfect in, and it’s impossible to be the “best” at it, so now I’m never good enough. Eventually the walls start closing in on me, and I feel like I need to escape, but I’m terrible, so there’s no way out. I have to live in this confined and uncomfortable space because that’s what worthless people like me do. Every time I get to this point, I find the same solution: look for doors instead of focusing on the walls. Very hard to do, and even harder to keep on doing when you’ve been rejected a dozen times, but eventually a door will open, and you’ll be better off.

lukan 4y ago
"turns out I’m horrible at suicide!" Ouch, I am not sure if you meant it like this, but please don't take it as more proof of how you failed. You did not. Your remaining desire to live was just stronger, otherwise you surely would be dead. So please live this life, because you want to, not because you have to. All the best! Edit: And screw those performance based love idiots, they didn't know better and you had no alternative, but now you can find people who know better.
- bityard 4y ago
  I do believe it was meant to be taken as a joke.

heywherelogingo 4y ago

Ten years? If you can stick it out in that environment for that long then you have the backbone to handle all sorts of things - move on! When I'm in a horrid environment I dig deep to last just two years. I ran from my last place after one year, and lasting that long took some serious effort.

steveBK123 4y ago
Yeah I mean, my longest & average tenures are in the 4-5 years range. All of those were at least pretty good jobs the first 2 years. I can't imagine staying on somewhere I dislike so much for 3, 5.. 10 years.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> Repeatedly, I pour my heart and soul into a project that I believe in, only for ownership to trash the project for superficial reasons. You deserve better! Don't let your passion for a project blind you to the fact that you have better options, to make better money, have better opportunity... and - by far - most importantly, to get treated the way you deserve!

mandeepj 4y ago

> They mostly just want me doing grunt work, despite my desire to do larger, “force multiplier” type work. Work that my coworkers and customers are asking for. Is it possible for you to only share "grunt" work with owners and talk about "force multiplier" only with who "gets it" ?

nuancebydefault 4y ago

I compare finding a new job with dating. It is scary to do the first view interviews/dates but each one gets easier. Do one every week or 2 weeks and in a few months you are a pro. Don't care about anybody noticing that you are very busy / up to something. The current employer doesn't care for you anyway. The act of searching/taking your faith in your own hands will feel liberating, I promise. Jobs are different, even when they have a similar description. Who you work for and the company culture makes all the difference. If you end up in a wrong place, don't worry and switch again, that time with some interviewing mileage under the belt.

jwmoz 4y ago

Over 10 years how much have your wages increased?

whstl 4y ago

Wow. I can sympathize, as I had the exact same thing happen with me. From “doing grunt work” down to having them “crush it with passive aggressive, belittling remarks” I actually laid out a plan to fix the automatic builds that were broken for months (and I had to them all manually), and the company owner completely rejected it and laughed me out of the room, only for me to turn around and have him do it himself. Virtually every great idea anyone had was co-opted by him, including another guy before my time who wrote us a complete iOS app in his free time, only to have the code completely scrapped and rewritten from scratch, again by the business owner. About your 10 years experience: it is still 10 years experience. Go and get another job. Go interview. It sucks and it’s tiring but there's no risk involved if you keep your current job. With 10 years of experience I'm sure you’ll get something better.

taskforcegemini 4y ago

I have never regretted quitting a job even though I never left because of a better offer. of course this depends heavily on expectations one has on their next checkpoint, and on their own lifestyle. my recommendation would be: don't go into it exhausted and make sure to have enough monetary backup resources