What's the fastest you've left a team/company before? Why?
Posted by Herrowgayboi@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 52 comments
Some guy recently joined within our org under a different Manager. He was absolutely killing it, but within 2months, he put in his notice and leaving this Friday to who knows where.
Chatting with him, he left cause this manager was micromanaging him and the projects just weren't what was discussed during the interview. Seeing how bad the market has been, I thought he would have an offer in hand, but nope. Needless to say, I was quite shocked.
With that said, what is the fastest you've left a team/company? Why?
photo-funk@reddit
When I was told the following by my team lead all within the same week:
“The only good developer is a ‘black hole developer’… requirements and complications go in, and working solutions come out.”
“If you want to get promoted, you need to be like Allan” (Allan worked 80 hour weeks and hadn’t seen his own children in 9 months)
“You need to know, I have personally talked to everyone you know here at the company and I have made it clear that you are not a good performer… they all agree with me and you have a lot of work to do if you want to succeed here. Hate is a strong word… but it’s not far off from how people feel about you.”
“No one wants to hear new ideas from a young guy. You have to realize, everyone here is very senior, they know more than you do. They don’t need your ideas, you’re here to do what they say and maybe when you’re older, you can voice a thing or two, but not before then.”
Yeah, I started my exit plan… and fast!
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
lol. Before engineering I worked in psych and my boss told me “no one likes you, they wanted me to anonymously tell you they find you annoying and don’t want you to talk to them anymore”. I asked a close friend that I went to IHOP with once a week. She had said that to every manager apparently.
TangerineSorry8463@reddit
What is the point you are making with this?
ItsOkILoveYouMYbb@reddit
That people lie to make you think things are bad when they're not
TangerineSorry8463@reddit
So the friend worked in your workplace before?
Guess that's what the missing puzzle was
grumpy_autist@reddit
Citibank vibes.
Anders_142536@reddit
Holy shit, the third one is heavy.
noir_lord@reddit
I’d have noped out on the spot with any of those but particularly the third one.
grimonce@reddit
Not everyone is a financial slave.
wskttn@reddit
Great job! We’re all so proud of you!
ma11achy@reddit
18 Months - I know I lasted longer than I should have and was eventually made redundant, happiest I've ever been.
Joined as a Software Dev back in 2007, ended up being asked to login to phones every day and take calls from customers. Was given a "quota" of 5 to 7 cases per day to solve from our support system, while also debugging a huge Java EJB code base, while also attending "Priority one" support calls.
I used to get given out to for being 10 mins late, even though I stayed late. Was given out to almost daily by my "other" manager who was based in India as to why my number of support cases were not the same as yesterday. For reference, a support case could be "change my password" or "debug, fix, test and deploy a new patch to the huge codebase". Local manager was an idiot who used to complain about how the cups were arranged on the sink draining board.
Oh, and we used to have to fill the tea kettle from the toilet washbasin.
kkam384@reddit
3 days. Came in and on day 1 was asked to setup application locally. They mentioned that it isn't documented and folks who knew how to set it up had all left, so wanted me to figure it out and document it for both local and production.
Day 2, only person who had been there for longer than 3 months gave notice.
Day 3, so many red flags, I gave notice and went back to previous role.
ings0c@reddit
I can’t believe I stayed this long but 6 months…
When I started, there was no laptop for me, or desktop. I was asked to share a desktop with the person who started on the same day as me.
NBD, I thought. Mistakes happen.
It took 4 weeks for them to do anything about it.
The project was a complete clusterfuck. It was a pretty large React/Redux app that had been written by a Java dev with no prior experience of front-end, but enough confidence in their own abilities that they decided not to follow any of the best practices….
For anyone familiar with redux, they had decided mapStateToProps wasn’t good enough (this was quite a few years back), and decide to roll their own. But, instead of having one reducer per slice of state, any reducer could write to any part of the state, in any order, and did.
Piecing together exactly which bit of the code was responsible for a state change was damn near impossible.
There was an enormous test suite of entirely snapshot tests. The devs just made their change, and habitually regenerated the snapshot without even looking to make the tests pass.
The entire team was just dead inside. Everyone was doing the bare minimum just to collect a pay check. Having lunch with them was excruciating because no one spoke. I tried and quickly learned not to.
One star, would not repeat.
martinbean@reddit
A week.
It was a freelance gig. I was hired to start a greenfield build. Turned up on first day and manager says they’re still ironing out a few things, but would I mind having a look at something else in the meantime as they’d just had a developer leave. Reluctantly said yes, agreed a day rate (as the initial project I’d agreed to do at a fixed rate). Well, this other project turned out to be a rat’s nest of JavaScript that I could tell the other developer had rushed before leaving. Fixing one issue just caused an issue, so they’d ask me to fix that; I’d fix it and something else would go wrong. I’m trying to untangle code in a code base I’ve not had any time to get familiar with. This goes on, and the project manager then starts getting shitty with me, saying “your code is buggy”. I’m sorry, my code? You mean the code I inherited that your developer wrote?
This goes on for the week. I get to Friday and then call a meeting with the manager. I give him my invoice and tell him either I start the project I was hired for on Monday, or I’ll consider this engagement complete, as I wasn’t there to pick up the slack because they had staff depart and then get blamed for their shitty code. Asked outright if the project would be ready to go on the Monday and they couldn’t look me in the eye nor say “yes”, so left it at that. We both knew they’d pretty much gone, “Let’s get a freelancer in under the guise of a new project, but then have them plug the gap we have in the team.”
I wouldn’t have minded if they were just honest and upfront with their needs. But to do this donkey-and-carrot act, just let a bad taste in my mouth.
grumpy_autist@reddit
What's the point of having "fuck you" money if you never say "fuck you"?
Designer_Holiday3284@reddit
1 month, my first international job, and I also left without another job to go to.
Small Startup, the founder was the only programmer. The code was a fucking whole mess and soon enough she began to have a horrible aggressive communication with me.
Don't allow people to abuse you.
Shogobg@reddit
I had similar experience - my first “real” job and even though it was bad, I was going to stay. Until, one day, the owner started being more abusive than usual - i left on the spot.
BigJimKen@reddit
I maintain it should be legal to knock out one manager per year lol
WanderingSimpleFish@reddit
8 days.
After 1st day I knew it wasn’t right. After 4 days of talking to other recruiters I spoke to my previous boss and went back there the following week. My last morning I just handed my ID and left promptly. That job is not on my resume.
The lead devs were belittling the juniors and various other toxic comments. Shocking behaviour. The codebase was horrific and I found PII in their staging environment.
Recruiters still message me to see if I want to work there, but when I confirm is it ‘that’ company and it is. I decline and after I’ve told them why, they acknowledge they are aware of it.
GloomyMasterpiece669@reddit
2 weeks, I was a team lead
I had to log every hour of my day and associate it to a pre-set list of tasks and objectives on 3 separate systems. The naming was inconsistent and you would get told off if you messed up.
Some were complex, but written super simply (“Send a new event to billing service when account is closed”). Management, with no technical experience, would get upset… “why have you logged a whole day on this one task?! This should be simple!”.
Twice weekly half-day backlog grooming for the entire engineering team.
Asking me the day before to travel 3 hours to head office for an overnight stay, and saying they were disappointed I couldn’t do it.
Mandated breaks at specific times of day. If slack was inactive outside of it you would get a message.
They were in middle of forcing all engineers across the business to use one particular type of laptop and locking it down to high heavens. It was well under spec.
Asking the departing team lead why they were actually leaving was nail in coffin.
I could literally feel my soul dying. Best notice I ever gave!
Careful-Combination7@reddit
What did the former team leader say?
GloomyMasterpiece669@reddit
The soon to be former team lead was part of a business that was acquired. Once acquired he was thrusted into everything I’ve described and couldn’t defend it to his team so quit.
mailed@reddit
That first bit about logging hours and getting told off sounds familiar. I stayed at a place like that for nearly 7 years because imposter syndrome told me I couldn't do any better. Never again.
Szinek@reddit
3 weeks, they expected me to estimate tasks in my first week, and if it took me more time than that, they wouldn't pay me for any second spend over the estimation. :)
Rockztar@reddit
It's scary that such a psychopathic system even gets put into effect in the first place. That would be illegal as hell in my country at least.
ClayDenton@reddit
lol then I'd be giving really inflated estimations
CapnNuclearAwesome@reddit
That'll take at least five years, boss
woopsix@reddit
2 months. The product was a very basic product, literrally it could have been 15 rest endpoints.
Instead it was 2 projects, graphql in each, CQRS with Axon in each service for ~200 events per day.
Their biggest problem was an engineer, their first engineer. Brilliant guy but wrote unbelievably complex FP code without a need. He was trying to emulate scala's abilities with Kotlin which resulted in a big pile of unnecessary code that only he understood
ThrobbingMaggot@reddit
9 months. PA was toxic. Senior was refactoring and breaking functional code. Unit tests were failing and always left in that state. Should have followed my gut about red flags and left much earlier
panrug@reddit
2 weeks. The manager was literally standing behind me watching how fast I type. I had a 32 hr/week contract but I had to work like 60 hr/week (they said maybe some part of the overtime I could use as vacation later). My best friend died around that time and I asked for a half day off to attend his funeral and they declined. I quit and went anyways.
WaitingForTheClouds@reddit
2 days. First day was general onboarding, second I met my immediate superior I'd be working closely with, third day I went straight to HR. The guy was a cunt that thought bragging about beating his wife would make for a good first impression. It sucked because I really needed a job and didn't have anything else lined up so the following weeks were stressful, better than being in the same room as that dude tho.
Zealousideal_Cup4896@reddit
About 4 hours. Got hired to manage the transition of a number of intranet servers running windows to a more reliable, actual server Unix platform. I went through hr my first morning got my id tag was assigned a cube went to go meet with the manager who had hired me and discovered they had changed their mind. They were keeping the non server windows machines and were going to make me in charge of admin for them. Thank you for a lovely morning but that is not what I was hired for and I think I’d rather sweep floors. Got a paycheck for one days salary with social security taken out and everything.
compu_musicologist@reddit
2 months, the job was not what I had been told it would be and something better came along.
leeliop@reddit
7 months. People were nice but the code base was the most horrible thing I have seen in my life. About 30 custom tools that were all incompatible with each other, editing hex in notepad before using some horrendous spreadsheet-type "no code" solution which was a nightmare. Rest of the suite was by a vendor who hated us but we paid them millions to make more layers of garbage. Then deep in there somewhere was some c++ 98 when you needed to actually code. R&D also contributed by developing "innovations" in matlab and gave us the files to figure out
alyinwonderland22@reddit
6 weeks.
I remember laughing with my boyfriend at the time at this guy's LinkedIn photo, that I thought he looked evil. At the time I didn't believe in evil.
My direct manager, an extremely intelligent man, seated me within arm's reach at his desk in the bull pen. He exclusively made eye contact with me during team stand ups. During our first lunch out he treated me like I was his therapist and spilled his entire life history and trauma to me after inviting me to a hockey game with just him that night. He was horrifically ill with a cold that day. I declined that invitation and all future "social" invitations. That night I went home and told my boyfriend I had to leave the job because my manager was a psycho, but we decided I'd try to stick it out, because that was the rational thing to do.
I started to come into the office very early (we had flexible hours) to avoid him (he was usually in late). He would ask me to go chat with him in the boardroom when I was getting ready to leave and keep me there for an hour + talking mostly about his personal interests. I started to say no to these conversations and he would look enraged, then tell me that he needed to talk about something work related so that I still couldn't leave on time. I was insecure at the time about my work performance and desperately wanted positive validation.
He would monologue for so long and so intensely that I couldn't politely interject, and couldn't help but zone out, which had the bizarre effect of disarming my normal mental and emotional defenses. I started to act out of learned helplessness, which is not something I've ever experienced before.
My boyfriend at the time's mom was an HR consultant and she finally sat me down and told me I absolutely had to get out of there. I wasn't sleeping or eating. I would go home and take baths continuously because being in the presence of this man made me feel disgusting. She encouraged me to go to HR despite his lack of concretely problematic behavior.
When I left I was terrified and shaking. I told HR what was going on but he had never "officially" crossed a line, and I didn't try to make it sound like he had. I just wanted them to know what had happened in case it happened to someone else. I was one of two women in engineering positions at this mid sized engineering company.
I spent months having panic attacks at home, unable to work. Eventually started my own consulting business and rebounded, but burned through all of my savings in the aftermath. The most telling sign during the interview was that I could almost physically feel him pushing at my mental and emotional boundaries. I'm now pretty sure the guy was a sociopath, deftly manipulating me emotionally and mentally. He had major issues with his mom (that he shared with me on my first day at the job) and seemed to be looking for a replacement mother figure to punish in lieu of his real mother.
If someone gives you a strong gut feeling that they are evil or have evil intentions, trust your gut and get out. I've never, ever encountered someone like that before or since, and I pray I never do again.
iamiamwhoami@reddit
One day. Took an offer that I didn't really want to take because I needed a job out of school. Half way through my first day I got an offer from a company I did want to work at. I hope it was a lesson to HR that pressuring candidates to accept offers quickly isn't in their best interests.
SpeakingSoftwareShow@reddit
6 months. One of my first jobs, I was put on a critical project as a hail-mary, and told if we met certain conditions I'd be given a 50% bonus at my 6 month review. Worked 12-16 hour days to make it happen, and we exceed conditions by a long shot.
Come to my 6 month review and was told by the skip-level that company policy is that they don't give bonuses in the first 12 months, and that they'd make it up to me next year if I kept up the great performance. Sat down at my desk, emailed them a resignation letter, left that laptop at IT and then went home.
Later found out the project was shuttered because no one internal could do the work I was doing, manager was fired due to lying, and they couldn't justify having to hire both a dev and manager again.
6 months of great work literally just wiped from the world like it never happened🤣
IHaarlem@reddit
6 weeks. Started interviewing at a major company in my field, that sort of died off and I needed a job. Took one that was 5 minutes from my house, turned out to be a horrible web app made with spaghetti JavaScript and node code. Everything mashed together, no separation of concerns, features and custom functions for different clients was all done with flags. Mind numbing to get running locally or debug.
After 6 weeks at this place, 4 months since first interview at the the original company I'd been interviewing with, they came back was 66% higher than the spaghetti code shop. Printed a resignation, signed it, and quit effective immediately
TheBigKingy@reddit
About 2 hours, I accepted a contract with another company but didn't want to tell the current company until I had signed, the timing just worked out that way
Hot-Recording-1915@reddit
I’m working in a new company for 3 months and I think about leaving every day because the environment is horrible. The problem is I work on a visa in the EU so it’s not that simple
sound_px@reddit
4 days 🙃I didn't get access to project's codebase in 3 days. Also, had replace laptop OS from Windows to Ubuntu by myself, because project didn't work in Windows. The project's documentation was in English or Finnish, time logging was required in project and company, only tech lead and juniors in team, technical lead split tasks into sub-tasks by himself, many front-ends with different versions of Angular.js and Angular, and Java v8 back-end. The company used gamification to collect points which could be exchanged to gear, which still would be owned by company, there was a need to "fight" for parking spot 🙃So, I decided just leave, find more focused project with less bureaucracy and corporate bs.
notmyrealfarkhandle@reddit
I left after 4 months. I joined a company after the startup I really liked working for ran out of money (too many literal bounced paychecks), and then they got funded again and I went back. It was probably not the most professional move but I was early in my career and didn’t know better. It was financially beneficial, I went back at double my previous salary (and no more bounced checks).
mailed@reddit
I dunno man. Sounds like you did the right thing. I would leave after exactly 1 bounced paycheck
metaconcept@reddit
5 months. I was a junior programmer. This was a small family company with a staff turnover of about a year and they only hired juniors.
CEO asked me to write a timesheet system. Then he left for 3 weeks. When he came back, he forced me to demo what I (hadn't) made to the whole company, during which he swore at me for not finishing a timesheet system. At the time I didn't know what a timesheet was.
BertRenolds@reddit
Maybe a month? I got bait and switched. I had been given a starting bonus so I stood my ground and pushed for a team transfer. Figured they'd fire me or do something everyone wanted as that team also didn't like me. Sorry for asking for documentation on anything?
Been with my current team 2.5 years.
mailed@reddit
6 months. I was somehow promoted from mid level to lead consultant in my first 2 weeks with no prior consulting experience. I was working 60+ hour weeks including on weekends. I got offered a principal consultant promotion a week after my wife and I found out a baby was on the way. I found a new job immediately
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
11 months. I was being sexually harassed by my boss (he was hired maybe 6 months after me). But I was trying to hit a year. At around 10 months he cursed me out for 20 minutes in a meeting for refusing to teach the DBA he hired SQL. That was for whatever reason the final straw. It was my second job ever in tech and I was the only engineer working on the entire website.
Right after that meeting I emailed a recruiter that I’d been in touch with since getting my first job in tech and told him I would take any job he could find me if he could get me an offer asap. A week later I had an offer with a promotion and a substantial raise. I stayed about a month because there was a huge conference the CEO needed to go to and I didn’t want to give notice before the conference and panic him.
compubomb@reddit
Nah, when people leave this quick, he was already getting hunted by other companies, he had a few in the bag and picked the one that paid him immediately, so he joined, collected his paycheck until the one he really wanted came up, and then say Seeya, gave you a useful excuse to feel like the org sucks. It might actually suck, but there were a few in the bag, he just picked the one he liked better.
GlobalScreen2223@reddit
I wish I did that, I wanted to give my current company a fair chance
SoulSkrix@reddit
5 months. Not what was advertised, working language not what was advertised, company going through a merger, manager made a mistake when ordering hardware and so I didn’t have my own laptop for 4 months, the final straw was a colleague being racist to me after having a drink at a conference and telling me I don’t belong in that company.
Mother company was appalled at earlier issues and then told me “nah it’s okay you just have misunderstood their intentions” when the racist part came up. Didn’t want to get to the stage of my 3 months notice by hitting the 6 month mark.
gojukebox@reddit
3 weeks @ F500.
Initially I turned it down but they needed someone senior for a brand new team. There were 3 project managers(!) and blatant infighting. Also I dislike Java
yohwolf@reddit
The worst job I’ve ever had in my life lasted 9 months, but I should’ve left 3 months in. Thinking back to it, I should’ve left without caring that I didn’t have a job lined up.
It was bad mainly because of toxic management, and horrible planning. I should’ve left sooner.