Today, a project I was working on with a team for about 7-8 months got canceled abruptly. I was part of a team that was making a website version of an existing mobile app the company owned, hitting the same backend as the mobilie app and shit. Nobody was using the app, so management decided to pull the plug.
Flashback to earlier this year. I was part of a team that was working on a marketing thingy for financial advisors that connects to our bread and butter app. After about a year of adding features to the thingy and refactoring horrendous code, our team was about to start working on a big addition to the thing. We got as far as setting up the environments for the microservices when management decided to cancel all future development on the marketing thingy and everyone on the team was moved to different teams.
Before all that, I was part of a team that was working on a single page application meant to fit into our bread and butter financial planning app to make the experience of interacting with some existing stuff less shitty. I don’t remember how long that went on for, but the plug got pulled on that before any of that UI could make it to production. Most of my coworkers quit.
In my somewhat over 4 year career as a professional code monkey, the only code I’ve written for my employer that has reached development have been small tweaks and refactors to software that no longer receives new features.
The original sin of my company (besides the obvious one of being a capitalist enterprise) is that all of our software is made at the behest of the financial advisors, with minimal to no input from the end users.
I know some other users here are programmers and probably understand some of what I’m talking about. I figured this vent would be interesting and discussion provoking. Fuck, I have a few other things about the company I could talk about that people might find interesting. It’s a fintech company after all, and I’m sure the ML website is gonna be full of people who understand finance capital’s role in imperialism.
Luckily I haven’t had an experience like that yet, but that sounds really exhausting. When you’re working for that kind of company, you should probably just do as little work as you can without being fired (even more so than for less shit employers)
The past few months there was enough of a developer to story ratio per sprint that we could pair on shit and pick up for each other’s slack when needed. However, one of the devs said that management might spring some tight deadline shit on us that none of us have experience working on.
According to that dev, management came to the team one day and said they had to implement a single sign on for a vendor within 3 months. Bear in mind that there was already a team that specializes in authentication, but they were too busy to get it done on the stupid deadline, so they forced it on his team instead. The devs protested vociferously, but none of it mattered. Most of the devs quit and my coworker and one other dev buckled down and did it. They received no thanks for it. Within less than a year, and my coworker only heard this in a passing conversation, the company had dropped the vender that he made the SSO for and switched back to the old vender. The icing on the cake? The company had never dropped the old vender in the first place.
Wow, just utter scum