As of this moment I've been blocked for two months and haven't written a single line of code. The project I've been assigned to has over 200 engineers, with tech leads who have completely overengineered very bad solutions(including a single sql table that holds all data with foreign keys that point to itself before there were any ui/ux designs) that we have to build features on and implement including completely rewriting dotnet core and react languages themselves. My question is it possible to find a job with 200k+ pay, a non-abusive environment, and competent developers on a team you have to work with and support? I've been doing this for over 10 years now and sure would enjoy settling down with a company who has developers with good design pattern culture, and takes responsibility and autonomy over their own work should something of theirs slipping in that stops the shared branches from building. My history of pain.... Qualcomm: My first job out of college is where I worked with a bunch of pointer fingers who liked to blame each other code breaking builds that the finger pointers inserted themselves. It was a "meat grinder" where we all worked till 2am and were severely underpaid with about 99% of the team being from India who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. When me and my senior staff engineer asked the director another team "when your team pushes a bug in the code that we find, who's responsibility is it to fix that bug", and the director said "it's your responsibility". After 5 years of being blamed for being forced to use other peoples bad code that wouldn't build, I had had enough and I finally left for another job, my next job I did 8x less work, was paid 2x as much and moved to a cost of living 3x cheaper. Things were going very well and the company kept telling me what a great job I was doing and sending me gifts every 2 weeks to a month. Then the government came after my wages with garnishments over a scandal with government employees that led me to 4 years of unemployment, loosing everything, and a fight using congress to finally get the government employees to stop. I never got justice for the damage that was done to my career, credit scores, and my life. And before you suggest I should sue them, you should know I've already spoken to lawyers and they said you can't sue the government because the have sovereign immunity. But at least I was able to start over at the age of 37... Lockheed Martin(67k salary): After graduating as the top 5% of my class in a 6 month full stack coding bootcamp(to get up to date with modern tech stacks), I immediately got employed with lockheed martin. On my first day my manager handed me a stack of 100 papers of a project scope, and ask me how many hours it would take to finish... 15? 20? 30?. I told him I would need time to go through it. There wasn't even any ui/ux designs, the requirements were mostly fuzzy, no use cases, and tons of legacy knowledge I was expected to already know from people who have been in working relationship for over 20 years there. So I asked my co-worker if this was normal and if he could explain some of the legacy stuff and help me out with what is the average estimate expectancy for things like this. My co-worker said 300 hours. My manager danced like a monkey throwing things around and cursing and screaming and then finally calmed down. I was in shock. The next day I was handed the header page designs from ui/ux which had a hamburger slide down, and responsive expectancies, a search, and some user account functionality dropdown. It took me 5 minutes to complete the header using react and css. I showed it to my manager and he said "looks good, how long did it take you". I told him 5 minutes, and he literally threw me up against the wall got in my face and yelled(cursing) at me for being incompetent and telling me it shouldn't have taken me more than 15 seconds. I was afraid for my life. I came to find out later that most of my co-workers couldn't code and were frauds and were hired either by diversity hires or through nepotism of my manager and they would use all those project time hours they were wasting to squeeze good developers and look to them to be used as scape goats. A startup of around 10 people: Things were great at first, good people, the pay was higher than lockheed martin(95k salary), the CEO is a really good guy. Very empathetic and caring. The ui/ux designer(also product manager) was a very outgoing fun guy to have around. Many of us went to the movies all the time and joked around all day. Probably one of the best teams I was ever on. But the customer we had was a bit abusive and it started leaking into our projects with scope creep due to a lack of research required by state laws on their end and ended up into lots of crunch times. On top of it, I saw the inflation wave coming the second a certain someone was elected, and knew I needed a higher salary. So after 9 months, A friend who also escaped lockheed martin offered me to come where he worked at which is where I am now... Motorola Solutions: When I first started, I noticed there wasn't any project documentation anywhere. Mostly the way things were done was by hand-me-down knowledge between co-workers. The project itself was the worst spaghetti code I had ever seen. It was a single repository written in angular v1, react, python, nodejs, dotnet core, java, powershell scripts, and no database(just json files for the data). The project was so simple and could have been written just in react and dotnet core(for calculating large decimal values) alone. I asked how in the world it got like this and I was told over 100 developers had their hands in it that either left the company or left the team. In my first week, the lead developer left the company to go work at a bank. My had a personal friend who was a contractor for the company who nobody would work with because he had serious attitude issues. Being the nice guy I was, my manager decided to assign him to work with me in a re-do on the project. It wasn't even 1 day passed until the guy was screaming at me for using separation of concern patterns and not throwing all the code into 1 file. My manager had it in for me ever since I basically was his friends last chance to stay with the company. My manager put me on a team of over 200(at 86 now) people, and a failing project where not a single figma design or code had been written yet. The tech lead who took over the project was a hit-n-run architect who stuffed everything into a single table inside a sql database, and lashed out at anyone who spoke on the project at all. After forcing all the developers into a corner with bad code and bad design, we are all left picking up the pieces meanwhile being blocked by even more people who don't know what they are doing pushing in build breaking commits everyday forcing us to go through new hacking procedures everyday just to get a local environment up and running. I don't know what to do at this point other than look for another job. But I'm getting really tired of bad experiences. I'm hoping for some guidance to not end up with teams who are... incompetent, abusive, slanderous, woke-cultured, underpaid, and dumping bad code on other developers. I just want to work with people who know what they are doing, everyone has autonomy over their own work, is fairly paid, and have positive attitude when working with each other. Am I asking for too much here? If not, I would appreciate any guidance on how I can end up in a place like this.
You are working at companies where software is not the main product. Instead, you might consider āpureā software companies (e.g., any of the big name Silicon Valley tech companies), or at least hardware companies that care a lot about software (e.g., Apple). The software is rarely perfect, but the culture is more amenable to the attributes you mention seeking.
I was thinking of Microsoft or Google next, but my friend who just got laid off from a faang company is having a real hard time getting hired even though he passed all the interviews. Seems pretty difficult to get it right now to faang from what I have been reading.
Yeah, itās a tough market in tech right now for sure. The best you can do is be interview ready so you can interview and try to break into your target companies when the hiring environment improves.
You need to constantly be interviewing and look harder. Honestly, the answer is to job hop a lot early in your career to find what youāre looking for and stay for as long as it makes sense to stay. Even then, there will usually be trade offs and pros and cons with jobs. Unfortunately right now it is harder to job hop and explore, but it is possible to find something that meets most of your criteriaā¦ just might take a little longer.
I see, thanks for the advice. Yeah with all the layoffs happening right now, I'm sure it's pretty tough. But I'm staying current with Udemy courses and continuing to work on personal projects daily to ensure my skills don't fade away. Maybe I'll wait till the market picks up again before going on the job hopping spree. But I seriously need to switch now as I don't see my department letting the bad people go and our entire department will get let go before that happens. Basically I don't feel safe in my current position. It's a tough situation.