Hey all, welcome to the first post of The Toxic Boss. The correct spelling was already taken… Anyways a bit about me and what this blog is about. I am a software developer and have been for the past 5.5 years (3 university and 2.5 in industry). I always loved the idea of becoming a software engineer; great money, fun job, work from anywhere and the ability to build anything out of thin air. In my first job I loved working on large software that is actually used by hundreds of thousands of people, unfortunately the job only had progression for the right faces and the goal posts for progression moved day in day out, after all everyones equal but some are more equal. So I opted to leave for green pastures…. I thought…
Around 1 year ago, I left my job for a better (but still low) position with a “revolutionary” financial company. I was told I would be rewriting an entire application, modernising it in React, but it turns out this was not true, instead I would be working full stack on an outdated poorly made application, this didn’t completely bother me however since I love to code regardless of the language or framework.
On day one, I entered the office and no one was there to meet me, turns out no one knew who I was, what team I was joining or that I was even starting. No one was in the office and I had no names, so I sat alone in an almost empty office. 30 minutes before the end of the workday I got a phone call where someone ran me through the job. Over the next few days I met my engineering team (online since we work from home), the team consisted of 3 developers, 2 of which where higher than me in role. This blog will become the lessons I have learned from working with the team and in tech altogether, I will not include any real names but I will give a completely honest view of what it has been like for me working in tech. This may not be everyones cup of tea and will consist of a lot of whinging, but it’s an outlet for me.
Meeting the big “Senior software engineering” boss man
Over the last year I have become quite good friends with most of the people I work with. As people they are great fun, but as people to work with a lot of them seem to be less than poor, don’t get me wrong everyone has many many strengths but at this company tech seems to be a deficient skill.
But what does that even mean?
Well, let’s get into the conversation that made me frustrated enough to start this blog. I reviewed the big boss mans pull request and noted many issues, such as not following (any) practices and severely flawed code, I also included many smaller nit-picky comments. Take the following Python code:
if not something == something_else:
pass
It’s a simple conditional block, essentially it says if not something is equal to something_else then pass. Very simple right?
But you may have noticed something quite odd, we are checking is not something == something_else. Why add a not at the beginning when we can use != ?. So I suggested this approach, the big boss man then proceeded to question what != is and why we would do it this way. I was absolutely dumbfounded, in my experience even the most beginner developers understood this. The big boss man then proceeded to ask another developer if he knew what this meant which of course the other developer did.
The big boss man then proceeded to say he will change it since it was understandable by other people, as his initial worry was that many other developers have never come across != since they are not experienced in front end development. Anyway we finally got the nit-pick resolved which resulted in the following code:
if something != something_else:
pass
I muted myself, took a step back and really began to evaluate my place as a developer, I could not believe someone with over 10 years experience (allegedly!) could lack such simple knowledge and create such a scene over something so miniscule. I understand not everyone has the same level of knowledge but this is not that. This is a lack of basic software fundamentals.
This is just one of many many stories… 🙃
The Toxic Boss 
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