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    • Culture where you're scared to criticize stuff, because people get angry when you're telling them the truth or even just the elephant in the room. Echo chamber instead of idea lab.
    • Management constantly making decisions such that no one decision made ever gets totally implemented, but the loose ends just stack up.
    • Management not involving engineers in the and assuming that engineers are incapable of understanding how the business works, let alone contribute valuable ideas to how it might work better.
    • Too many layers of hierarchy, competitive, macho male-dominated, title-driven, ego-driven culture where people are fighting they're way up the totem pole instead of working cooperatively together to create a great experience for their users.
    • Companies where silly little things that should be doable in hours costs weeks or months or where nothing gets done quickly, because too many people need to sign off on it.
    • Mission statement that is bogus and you know that it really is all about money, growth and status. I like companies that are truly trying to adding value to the world, however small that change may be. I am just not interested in your algorithmic trading, crypto non-sense, optimizing ad revenue or getting people to waste more of their time or money with endless bull crap.
    • Having to constantly fight to get the time to refactor, test, rethink, work on build/development/observability tooling instead of working on feature after feature endlessly. If I say something needs work I have good reasons for it that I am willing to explain, but do not assume that I like to waste time gold plating code because I am a autistic perfectionist with OCD with no sense for what the business is trying to do.
    • Constant bogus deadlines that seem to come from nowhere and are only meant to keep the pressure on the engineers. I work hard and this kind of pressure only means we're going to go fast in the short run and extremely slow in the long run, because nothing gets finished properly.
    • Running the server side on Windows. I want to be able to debug issues in depth when they arise.
    • Using the Go programming language. I am not going back to 80's programming and checking for nil all day long, just to see my program segment fault in production anyway. (and yes, I am talking from experience here)
    • Only remote companies. I get too lonely at some point and all the best cooperative ideas I've ever had in my career where born at the whiteboard with colleagues. This is just me though.

  • I'm extremely open to tech stacks and specific industries, though I would die happy if I never had to touch another line of TCL. Go to hell TCL, and take your upvar nonsense with you.

    I'm currently between jobs and planning a career shift into a software engineer manager role, so I have been thinking about this quite a bit. A job I would leave - which is really leaving a manager/team, not a company - would rate poorly on these, which I'm polishing into a new "what type of position are you looking for?" answer:

    • A team that works cooperatively, as we accomplish more together than in competition. Everyone should strive to be world class at their roles, as being around that is critical for learning from each other.
    • An environment where clear and open communication is encouraged, including whatever anyone is struggling with.
    • Work that takes on difficult problems and strives to work through them with the highest standards.
    • A position that enables me to grow down my desired career path, which as of this writing means reporting to a software manager who is willing to delegate project management tasks and eventually people management as well.

    Something I wouldn't reveal during an interview, though critically important, is a work environment that I can arrange such that it best enables me, and not be boxed in by someone else's conceived ideas of how software engineers should act or work. I've felt like a square peg in a round hole my entire life. Turns out it's a concrete objective fact (ADHD). I am so goddamn tired of feeling bad or apologizing for things that are actually just the scaffolding that I need to survive.

  • Every engineering job I've left has been because of bad leadership.

    The first, they hired a lead with no business being a lead. Not only was I much stronger from a technical perspective even though I had only been doing it professionally for about 3 years, but I was a better leader to the rest of the team as well. I had been sort of filling in in the interim before they were hired. They were let go not too long after I left.

    The second, they hired an EM. I had been asked to work on setting up the code base for replatforming our web app and begin migrating pieces of it over. I was basically doing this on my own and working with timelines that I had given to leadership and providing weekly updates. This EM started micro-managing everything. This not only slowed my progress to a crawl, it was demotivating and stressful. They were let go not too long after I left.

    My current position, I was moved to a new team during a company reorganization. The EM on this team is completely psychotic. Micro-managing to a degree that I've never seen before. They're convinced that what we do Agile SCRUM, but we take in large projects each quarter, plan and scope them at the beginning, and then spend the rest of the quarter executing on them. When I or the team make suggestions that align better with agile, we're gaslit and told our ideas "are waterfall not agile".

    We usually don't take on projects that go longer than a quarter. The project that I'm on currently is bleeding into Q4. I warned about this from the very beginning, but the result was just more gaslighting, that I took too long on planning. I would have left, but the job market isn't as friendly to hopping around as it was previously. Thankfully, I'll be switching teams once this project is over.

    Overall, all of these places had their problems beyond leadership. These are things that I can tolerate however, and with good leadership, can work towards improving. Once leadership turns to shit, it's time to gtfo.

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