I work an office job, as a programmer for a fairly large company in my little Canadian city. Been here almost 5 years. It’s be decent for the most part. Ok yearly raises (could be a lot better) , one decent in year raise, permanent work from home, great benefits, etc. But all of that has changed in the last several months.
Where it all really began was about a year ago, we were just starting a massive project to rewrite our entire application in a brand new tech stack. My lead told me that she wanted me to be the go-to guy on the team, as I had just assisted on another project, rewriting an application in the same tech stack. She also told me that she wanted me to have some ownership over some section of the application, didn’t care what it was, just something I could say is mine, and that way in the future, if there was ever anything that needed to change with it, I could be the guy to work on it (Keep this in mind, this is super important).
Not through any choice of my own, I ended up building the most complex piece of the application. It was the hardest thing I have ever built, and I built it all by myself. I’m not exaggerating when I say it took over 7 months to get data through this flow without any errors. To the day, it is the most complex piece of code I have ever written, as well as the largest piece of code. To this day, I never got any real praise for this, just complaints about how long it took (for reference, I am also the most junior member of this team).
We finally got this application launched, and things began to quiet down as we approached the holidays, and approached our yearly reviews. I was looking forward to this, as I hoped that maybe this would be the year that my team lead would finally get me the promotion she kept talking about.
I was wrong.
She once again changed the goal posts, so that I would need to wait another year. At this point I was annoyed, but not angry.
Then I found out the truth.
Through help from another friend, I learned that the role that I have been in for the last 5 years no longer exists in the company. They decided to phase it out. The role that I’ve been trying to get to for years now is WHAT THEY NOW HIRE PEOPLE STARTING AT. I had friends from college who started here years after me, already starting from a higher point. I have friends who started at the same time as me (who even told me they haven’t done nearly as much work as I have at this company), that are on track to be promoted all the way up to senior.
Now we get to the part where my team leaves me out of everything. I’m not allowed to attend any important meeting about future plans for the app(no reason given), I’m the last to find out about anything new of important. Hell, I was forgotten to be included on the invitation for the celebration of the product launch. The real kick in the nuts though, remember I how I have “ownership” over a section of our application? Well, that doesn’t matter, because we have a massive new project, only touching that functionality, and I’m not allowed to work on it.
And now, to rub salt in the wound:
My team is incredibly understaffed. When I joined on, we had over 10 people on our core team. Now we are down to 3. And one of them is going on Paternal leave / Vacation for 2 months, from the end of July to the end of August. So no one can take time off while he’s gone. They only told me this after the other guy booked all his time off. If I want to take any time off this summer, it has to all be in June, or the 9 days left in July that neither of them have off.
So I’m done. Fuck this team. Fuck this company. Fuck this job. You had a great employee, and now I’m gonna give the bare minimum. It will get me the same raise at the end of the year anyway