UPDATE: Reading Hacker News comments it is apparent to me that I have not explained my position and intention very well. Please allow me to clarify - I do not resent the people involved in these moments, if anything, I thought those encounters were good learning experience for me, as I know there are things I would do and say differently so others around me won’t feel I’ve been too harsh on them. I did not share these moments to complain, but to raise the awareness that kinder communication styles might be better received.

As a software professional who’s been in the industry long enough to have accumulated quite a few battle scars, I tend not to think back about the unpleasant, unfair and sometimes bizarre moments that make me feel depressed or angry. If there is one thing I learnt over the years, it’s to let go and move on.

Despite the effort in staying positive, I still believe it is valuable to share these moments. If you work in software and feel like you are being treated poorly, you are definitely not alone. By openly sharing these moments, I am hoping more people will start taking notice, and perhaps will lend a hand or a shoulder when a colleague is in need of support.

So, I’d like to share a few moments that have happened in my career, in no particular order. There are a few of these moments that I still find hard to swallow, but most of them I simply chuckle whenever I think about them. ;)

One morning I came to work, noticed a few server alerts that required attention. This was pre AWS and the whole Devops automation movement days so I needed to log onto the server. For some reason my access was revoked so I had to log into the hosting dashboard to reset the root password. The senior dev on the team turned up, and when asked about my access, casually told me: “oh you did something on the servers the other day, so I removed your access.”

CTO asked me to help building a new mission critical PHP and MySQL service, upon discovering an existing service already built on Ruby and MongoDB by three very senior developers and consultants, CTO said the reason for the rebuild was because “ActiveRecord is too slow.” Let me remind you that the initial Ruby solution was built using MongoDB. At the time the company had about 30-40 experienced Ruby developers, and only 2 junior to mid level PHP developers who were specifically hired to build the PHP/MySQL service which turned out to be a disaster.

As the team lead who was responsible for evaluating performance and setting salary, I was told by one of my team members that they had gotten a pay rise. Surprised, I asked one of the founders of the company who is non-technical what was going on, during the conversation I discovered another pay rise was given to one other member of my team - all without consulting or even informing me.

Excited to have had my overseas conference talk proposal accepted, I asked the new head of our department who had joined our company for only a month or two for travel approval. Fully expected a pad on the back, I was surprised to have been told that I cannot go, with the reason being “it is just not a good time”.

One of our servers needed to be rebuilt, so trying to be a team player and help, I started installing some basic packages. The senior dev on the team turned to me, straight faced and enunciated in a deep and cold voice: “don’t touch anything on it, this is my server!”

The new development manager walked into our meeting, pulled me out, guided me to another meeting room where the new CTO was waiting. The new CTO opened with “so it’s time for us to go separate ways”, and implied the reason being something that I could definitely have pushed for unfair dismissal. Trying to be professional, I walked back into my original meeting, but the new development manager quickly pulled me out and said “you need to go right now”. He then stood behind me, saw me formatted my work laptop, then literally escorted me out of the office. The new development manager and CTO soon drove the company to the ground and left the country.

After submitting the salary increases for the all my direct reports, I was delighted that the CEO was happy with them all. Given I have had no pay increases in over one and half years I asked for a modest pay increase for myself. I was told “no, we have to discuss this after your project delivery.” My direct reports and I were in the same delivery team.

It was near the end of the working day, around 5pm, as the person coordinating the developer recruitment in our area I ping’ed our Slack channel with a lighthearted message to encourage our developers to start reviewing some code tests from job candidates if they’re free. One person replied: “My end of day activity is doing the stuff I should have been doing all day instead of the other things that came up.”

One day I got really really sick - difficult to walk or even stand still, dizzy and having fever. Upon informing one of the founders, I was told to come into the office, even though there was no urgent tasks need to be done. Reluctantly obliged, I came into the office, went out for lunch with colleagues but I was so sick I could not eat anything and can barely sit straight. I then went home, and was sick for the rest of the week…

My manager, who was the general manager, wanted to fire two of my developers. His tactic for firing the senior developer was to make the senior developer role redundant and offering the dev a junior developer role instead.

I was tasked to investigate setting up a Cassandra database cluster. Upon discovering certain network limitations, I approached the then head of network operations, when asked about the inability to access the Cassandra cluster, he replied confidently that “it works”. Later on I discovered that he successfully telnet’ed to the ports and declared it “working”.

The head of HR who is female and a big advocate for workplace diversity walked into my exit interview. The opening line was “Ordinarily I only do exit interviews with female employees…”

New to the big corporation environment, after asking around a few people and could not figure out how to provision an iPad for my team (but knowing some other teams do have company iPads), in an email reply by the head of enterprise IT: “Hey Gents, Fred has escalated this through multiple channels today. Awesome effort on his behalf, to seems like he didn’t like our response.” To which a colleague had to gently remind him that it wasn’t my fault there was no documented process for provisioning hardware.

After having some discussions on our MySQL database, the dev who had recently joined my team all of a sudden raised his voice in an extremely arrogant and dismissive tone: “you clearly don’t understand this feature, do you?”

A senior software architect who I used to respect walked close by in a meetup. We worked for the same company a while back so I smiled, said hi and was about to start a conversation, he quickly cut me off with “I need to get a drink” without looking at me and wondered off.

The general manager who is non-technical, asked me to investigate options to uplift our ageing bespoke ecommerce solution. Upon delivering my findings, I was told that “your findings are biased.” Later it was clear to me that he wanted confirmation of his agenda from the technical perspective and his mind had already been made on the approach we should take.

A new big shot executive joined the company as our new CTO. He had no agile background and our company was transforming and pushing for a lot of agile principles at the time. Two weeks into his new appointment, the new CTO published an internal document titled “Controlled Chaos”. After reading the document everyone immediately realised that he was describing waterfall. The document was shared as a Google Doc and was open for comments, so people started asking hard questions. Weeks later, many of us who were vocal about his document were let go.

There you are, these were my moments. What were yours? Care to share? :)