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 tend to stay places where I like my coworkers too long, even though it’s pretty bad for my career. Sometimes you have to balance out the angst at slumming it at a lower pay/position than you should be versus not wanting to murder everybody around you (And also more explicitly senior roles put you in day-to-day contact with more dickheads by their nature.)
I’m going through that right now. But it’s my first job/internship and I need the experience.
Some of my workmates are cool but the other ones just spout conservative rhetoric occasionally. But I’m learning to deal with it
That’s usually why I quit jobs.
Plenty. I live in a fairly conservative part of California so many places I’ve worked at, I have to listen to bigotry in all forms all fucking day long from all the other guys around me.
My last job at a grocery/warehouse for restaurants.
Just about the bottom of the barrel scratching incompetent, stupid, unobservent, and lack of. Costumers too! You think owning your own business you would know? Oh, hahaha… no.
I heard one guy saying he’s going out of business because of us, I told him “no, because you’re to stupid to read a box or sign on what cups they are, ripping all th3 boxes and THEN come back because you get the wrong one.”
I can’t do costumer service unless it pays. I’m not smart, but HOLY SHIT. How am I struggling this hard and these morons live in a house or have a nice car. Like damn
I worked for German startup tech bros who decided to become freight logistics influencers. Fuck, those absolute cretins were the worst humans I’ve met maybe ever. I ended up on 100mg anti anxiety meds and I still hated it enough to end up quitting one random Thursday.
Some people are just destined to be soul suckers, and it’s like a virus - those who don’t jump ship end up catching the disease.
If you quit, can you recommend me to replace you? I’ll take any remote job, and I can put up with annoying coworkers.
I’m actually half serious. 7 YoE in web dev, mostly backend.
No one quits a job. Everyone quits a boss.
This saying has held true for me for decades.
I had one of the best bosses but still quit the job because the work/life balance was terrible.
I still meet up with my former boss occasionally.
Mostly, my experience agrees with this, but I did quit one of my longest jobs because I had a jealous coworker who kept talking about bringing a gun to work and shooting me.
I work with a guy that I find infuriating ….views on women’s behaviour and dress sense, unionisation, left out of projects that we don’t need to get involved in. I know what you mean, but I wouldn’t quit cause of him, point is, you have my sympathy.
Having a good team is such a blessing and by the same token a bad team can be incredibly toxic. The territorial pissing sounds like they need more feminine influences in this workspace.
Maybe it’s a regional thing? My coworkers are mostly in New York and my other jobs have all been in the South.
Could also just be the company’s culture itself.
Yeah, it’s this.
I manage projects and cancel as many meetings as I can. 1hr meetings get shortened and I prevent workers from getting added to management calls where possible.
People that want to be in meetings aren’t working.
At one job, I changed the default settings in everyone’s calendar to 45 minute meetings instead of an hour and it increased productivity like ten fold. Designers and developers need to have longer meetings sometimes but they don’t need a marketing person or an executive there.
That’s not necessarily true. I’ve asked to join meetings that were only tangentially related to my department so I knew what was being worked on so I could do my job effectively if they needed me.
But I’m usually working during most meetings.
I tried very hard to work and fit in at a job where the majority of the people did not share my own values, and were extremely vocal and abusive about it. Being singled out and literally screamed at in front of everyone for something that I had nothing to do with was the last straw. It was probably the worst job I have ever had. My mental health really suffered from that place.
I’ve got the closest thing to a software engineering job I’ve ever had and it’s similarly miserable. I have a coworker who I really like and mostly the rest are like you describe.
I can’t wait to get out of this role and back to having a more normal job. Nowhere near you, but I’ve worked a bunch of places in the US and none have been like this
Damn, I’ve been lucky. In my last three positions the vast majority of my coworkers (like 90+%) have been pleasant and easy to work with. And I like all the other developers I currently work with.
This isn’t helping to motivate me in applying my BSE degree I earned years ago lol. I’ve been pretty content with my current WFH job, even if it’s unrelated to software development. It sure does seem like there are many inflated egos in the industry and I’m not sure if I have the patience to navigate them. That’s not to say I’m better than they are, but goddamn the pissing contests in any arena get tiresome.
