I got a CS degree at the end of 2019 and moved straight into the workforce making 45k near where I went to school. You probably know that's an abysmal dev salary – I did too, but I had to get my foot in the door and didn't want to go work for the lizards. They made me promise to stay for two years before they brought me on, as I replaced someone who had only been there 7 months. Red flags? Yes. Still needed my first job though so I said sure.
My team made things unbearable. We had a product owner who had never had any sort of training for the job, and couldn't keep anything on track or on time… and he wasn't even the problem. The problem was the two other devs. The mid level dev on the team (hardly, I knew the stack and general programming a lot better than him) was rude to the point of shamelessly ripping ass behind me while we're “pair programming” where I was doing all of the work and he sat behind me on his phone. The senior dev was by far the worst. Abusive, cold, sarcastic, selfish – he made work hell. If I ever go to therapy I'm sure he'll be near the top of my list of things to sort out. Other problems including massive technical debt, generally terrible company culture, a policy to return to the office in August 2020, and I was looking for the door pretty quick.
I was eventually threatened by the CEO of the company when he heard the rumor I was looking to leave. He said to stop looking or he would fire me, so with my livelihood on the line I said “oh yeah sure, I'm done looking” and accepted the offer from company B two days later. Guess I didn't actually lie since I had already found my next job. Sooo glad I kept the recording from that encounter – I know other ex-employees of the company, and I look forward to sharing it with them when the time is right.
If they didn't make things so shitty, I never would have looked for better work. I'm now making 68k, which also isn't incredible, but it's a lot more relatively speaking. More importantly I get to WFH, and everyone is so great to work with I'm going to pop into the office occasionally to be personable. If things were this cozy at my first job, I might have just settled into the low salary, but they gave me the push to find something greater than them. I'm still going to push for higher and higher compensation because I have a CS degree ffs. But with other stuff going on in my life, it's a good job to have while I don't want to rock the boat.
Lastly, fuck you Marc. May your employee churn stay high, because you don't want to pay a developer sufficiently enough to work for you. Keep depending on unrepentant assholes who drive talent away from your teams, because they're giant information silos you can't empty. Keep showing people you're not fit to head up a place they want to work at, and to strive for something better.