Being forced to use a particular OS, hardware or programming language? Working remotely? Certain company structure?
- 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.