Corporate software dev gig in the Bay Area. Was like a 10 minute commute by bike from my house. All but 2-3 of us on a team of 30 or so were H1B, all from the

Corporate software dev gig in the Bay Area. Was like a 10 minute commute by bike from my house. All but 2-3 of us on a team of 30 or so were H1B, all from the same village in India. Many of them appeared to have little more than some passing familiarity with software. Instead of working at their desks, they would all crowd into a conference room for a day long quasi-meeting all day, every day. A spot at the actual table was primo, most had their laptop in their lap all day 'coding'. This team barely produced anything, and when they did it wasn't even close to what was asked for. Decisions were debated in this room for hours that should have been made in minutes. First, the director of this group was fired, then they went through 2 CTO's in 2 years, each re-organizing everything. Bar none the least productive shop I've ever seen. All management knew how to do was insist on more hours in hopes of getting something useful. Working conditions were so bad the girl who sat next to me jumped to her death in front on the San Leandro Bart train one morning after getting yelled at again for yet another failed deliverable. I took the job because they wanted help migrating some apps from an old proprietary stack to Java and I'd done this many times before. However, if you weren't from that village, you were not to be trusted. Finally, they moved the whole team to another office 20 minutes away but I stayed at the office close to my house. I just gave up and enjoyed a few months of doing nothing, going for long bike rides in the hills in Oakland during the work day before moving on. I think I stumbled into some kind of fraud where they were just giving jobs to people they knew without any qualifications without any intention of building software. It was truly bizarre.