I’m a software engineer, The conditions of my job are actually pretty sweet: I get to work remote from a medium CoL city, I get paid well, my schedule is flexible so I don’t have to be chained to my desk all day. The stuff I code is pretty boring but it’s not the worst thing in the world.
The thing I can’t stand is my coworkers: so many people I’ve met in this industry are money-obsessed ladder-climbing yuppies. Some of my coworkers are honest to god land lords. I dread having conversations with anyone in project management. These people are territorial and become upset whenever they’re not included in some meeting. If one product manager gets added to a call, I hear about it from the other PMs. A good day for me is when I have 8 straight hours of coding to do and I don’t speak to a single soul at work.
I am not anti-social. I have worked at other companies where my coworkers were really cool and I enjoyed talking with them. I like to take my laptop and work at the dog park and talk to other people. Maybe it’s a regional thing? My coworkers are mostly in New York and my other jobs have all been in the South.
I’m a Product Owner, and my job literally is to participate in meetings, so that my engineers don’t have to. You want to talk to one of them? Sorry, you have to talk to me, and I’ll talk to them on their own time.
In the past, however, there was one time I almost quit. We had an engineering lead with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Good with Javascript, which made him think he was an expert in everything, from c# to aws, and especially in system architecture. He could sell himself and his work really well, though, so the management always took his word for gospel. Got two developers, who had the audacity to tell him how stupid his architecture was, fired. Tried to get me fired, and it turned into a competition of who can outlast whom. Eventually it became too much for me, so I started interviewing elsewhere, when suddenly he was reassigned elsewhere within the company. I decided to stay mainly due to career growth (and to pay my mortgage), and I hear that he’s been doing his usual mess in his new position, while my team is now far happier and more productive.
Good for you. Managers that protect their people and their people’s time are worth their weight in gold.
I have heard, and I think this came out of Google, that managers can be separated into two groups: shit funnels and shit umbrellas.
The shit funnel takes all the shit that is coming down from above comma and redirects it onto the people below.
The shit umbrella protects all the workers below from the shit that is falling from about. I was lucky enough to have an umbrella manager in one of my previous jobs.