Thought I’ll share my story on dealing with corporate greatness.
I am software engineer and was working for a startup in London for past 4 years. I was mainly working solo for the platform I was responsible for and while I had my ups and downs I did pretty well considering other companies have 10+ devs for same scale of code base. Notice I’m not saying same amount of workload as I don’t think I ever worked more than 3-4x of one normal workload.
I honestly can say I had put my sweat and blood into the work I did and was fairly proud of it as company made most of its revenue through apps I was working on. However every time I asked for a raise or better work equipment as my laptop was holding me back they found every reason why not.
I was starting to get fed up with never ending work and their inability to hire any helping hand as a teammate. Literally took them 6 months to hire a single dev. And then they usually left 3 months later.
Finally about month before my contract was due for expiration they hired some executives friend who was now a product manager. He came in swinging. Didn’t like most of the stuff we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Long story short in one of the planning meetings when me and one other dev disagreed with his suggestion he straight up told me “your app is crashing so you shouldn’t have opinions!”. I immediately checked if the app is actually crashing and nope. No reports, no stats indicated a wide spread crash. I was dumbfounded on why he needed to call me out in front of all the team on something that is a lie.
Here comes the part that make this r/prorevenge worthy post. I received a job offer that doubled my salary by end of the week said meeting took place. I submitted my “not intending to extend my contract” next Monday and sent them into a proper panic mode. My direct boss got mad as hell and said it’s the worse thing I could’ve done.
My new team, while have its issues as well, has far better environment, but I will never overwork myself again. Will keep my output little above the next guy so if there’s layoffs someone else is laid off first to give me heads up that I need to resign and look for another job.