Work/Life/LAW Balance

[winner3]

This type of post is probably better suited for the life-vent channel in the Discord server, I think. I would post it there if I felt like I could find the time to sit down and post all this in one go, and then have a discussion about it. I would post it there if I could work up the courage to and if I wasn't afraid of receiving verbal abuse for voicing my thoughts, but I'll try revisit that later in this passage. For now, I experience challenges that make it hard for me to be of service to the community on a day-to-day basis, so I thought posting about it on the forums would make it accessible without being buried by other discourse and without getting insulting or hateful messages from a select few who see me being active online as an invitation to come at me a certain way. This community is a safe space for people to voice concerns. I hope it can be a safe space for me to voice my experiences and to talk about how they affect my participation in the community and my ability to try to do admin things. I hope that insight into this helps someone. I hope it helps me to jot this stuff down.

Some of you know this already, but I am a senior software developer for, as of this writing, a Fortune 100 company. I've worked my way up from newbie to junior/mid-level to senior level, all at this one place over the course of the last 7 years or so. For the most part, it has been great. I made friends with the best boss I've had in my professional career. I've learned quite a lot and, while I detest corporate culture, I actually liked my job for the first 5 to 5 and a half years.

A year and a half ago, things were set in motion to change all that. I could write a dissertation about the entire play-by-play, but the short version is that, prior to going on a vacation, I was asked if I would be willing to transfer to a new team. I was asked this by my boss's boss, a guy at the VP level. If you're not in the corporate line of work, the guy who asked me this was one level below an EVP (executive vice president, which is one level below board members/COO's/CFO's/etc). I expressly told this man that I'd consider it, but I would want to have a conversation about it first. Then I went on vacation to Japan for a few weeks, and when I came back, that transfer had been made in my absence, without my input or consent. I tried to make the most of it at the time. The company was going through a turbulent time, and it still is. I've survived, I think, 4-5 mass layoffs in my time working there. At least 2-3 of these waves of layoffs were big enough to make the news in the US. Each of them brought morale down quite heavily. I expected to be laid off around this time because they transferred me to a new team, and then two months later, they transferred me again to the team I've now been working on for the past year and a half. I'm actually still kind of expecting to be laid off, more on that later. This team they moved me to was a bunch of random senior devs that they mashed together from other teams that had been disbanded via layoffs. If you were on a team of 7 and they laid off 5 people, the remaining two might have ended up on the same team I'm currently on. The team was Frankenstein'd together, and so began some very turbulent work quarters.

Unlike any experience I've ever had before, the workload this past year has truly been a roulette wheel. I could be asked to do three weeks' worth of work in three days. I could be asked to figure out how the team is going to incorporate technology I've never heard of and lay out a roadmap for how we'll use it in the coming years, and they might ask me to finish that roadmap in a day. I could be asked why I'm doing so much work. I could be asked why I'm doing too little work. I could get assigned a "small" task that ends up ballooning into enough work for the entire business quarter (while still having to do the rest of the work I was assigned for said quarter). I could be asked to meet with someone, only to have said "someone" push our meeting back three weeks and then blame me for the meeting not happening. I could be asked to do work over the weekends. All of these things have happened to me in the past year. And what's more, my current manager, the person they made me start reporting to after I was moved across teams, hates me. I was skeptical at first. Anyone would be when they get a new boss, right? This person has known of me for at least a few years. We've worked on adjacent teams multiple times before. When she got promoted, she chose to go the managerial route. I wanted to strictly stick to software dev, so I stayed in engineering. At first, I thought maybe we just needed to meet a few more times, get to know one another. But each subsequent one-on-one meeting, which she insisted we both be on camera for, only confirmed my read on the situation. My current manager's gut reaction to any problem posed is to figure out how she can blame me for it, and I'm not exaggerating. She's berated me multiple times because she feels I'm not working at the level a senior engineer should be working at. This happened for months over the course of the past year at every regularly scheduled one-on-one meeting I have with her. I've been looking for another job for the past 6-8 months or so because of it.

Although my manager has a very low opinion of me, and although I've been bracing myself for months and preparing to get laid off, I'm actually still employed, and I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. I didn't wake up one day and suddenly become bad at my job. I've been at the company for more than half a decade. My manager doesn't know what I do on a day-to-day basis because she doesn't actually work on the same team as me. If that sounds odd, it's because it is. As part of the layoffs and restructures, I now have a manager who doesn't work on my team and only loosely knows what my team does. My boss both has her own dedicated team and manages stragglers on other teams she only barely works with. She doesn't know what I do or what my contributions are, which makes her dislike of me in a professional setting all the more perplexing. I've done corporate work in America my whole adult life. I know when the writing is on the wall. It doesn't take much to be let go, especially these days with the economy and the state of the world being what it is. It's hard out there. And yet, despite one of the very few people with leverage over me wanting me gone, I'm somehow still here, still employed at a job I'd really rather not be at. If you're not from the States, it might seem like the obvious answer is to just get another job. And believe me, I've been looking for about 9 months now. The job market in tech, the job market everywhere, really, is the worst it's been in decades and the worst I've seen in my entire life. A decade ago, as a fresh-faced college grad with no experience, I used to get more emails, calls, and replies to job applications than I get right now as a senior software dev with 9 years of experience. I cannot stress enough how abysmal today's job market is across the board, and how difficult it is to get hired. Which is all the more reason I should probably hold onto my current role until I manage to find something new that's also remote and offers a similar salary.

I still don't know for sure by whose grace it is that I haven't been laid off yet. I know for a fact that the negative feedback from my manager comes from input from people on my team, likely my product manager. Perhaps I owe my employment to someone else who is providing positive feedback. I'd like to think that I’m still at my job on my own merits. My direct manager might have it out for me, but in my time working under her, I've never missed a deadline. My code has never caused an outage or a problem in a live app or service. My manager's manager didn't go to the other two senior devs on my team to train the newly hired junior devs. He instead appointed me, probably because I'm more personable and better at teaching than my coworkers are. If you're as cynical about corporate life as I am, then you would think they were just having me train my replacements, and I thought the same until this past Friday. The company chose not to renew the contracts for the two juniors they made me waste time teaching.

I know I've ranted at length already about all the negative work experiences, but there are two in particular I want to highlight as the last straws that made me want to commit to leaving. The first was an order from the top brass. They demanded that all developers obtain at least 2 certifications: Google, Kubernetes, or a third option that I can't remember at the moment. Here's the certification page they directed us to for google. I mention google specifically because the costs for certification exams for kubernetes and the other option start, at bare minimum, $300. And you can see where I'm going with this. In typical corporate-America fashion, I was given no written confirmation about being reimbursed for the cost of taking these exams or for the cost of buying study materials. I was given no time off to study for them or to take these certification exams. I was told that "any certifications from these guys will do". And I was given a 9-month time span to obtain them between March of 2025 and the end of the year. This all stacks on top of the other negative working conditions this same job has been forcing on me. But it doesn't end there. I wasn't going to pay $300 to possibly fail an exam and have to retake it. So I went to the google page I linked above. The cheapest option there was a certification exam billed for $30. So I took it, earned the certification, brought it in, and I was told "not that one". The next cheapest cert/exam is $100, and it only goes up from there. Again, the mandate was to get two of these certifications. I'm pretty sure the way they forced this on myself and other staff is illegal in many developed nations and just about any place that cares about worker's rights. When I turn in these certificates, I'll file a complaint with EEO or some other labor bureau. Nothing will come from it but it's the best I can do.

The second and final straw for me is a standard practice at my workplace: the year-end review. This sounds straightforward. But about 3-4 years back, they changed the form to force employees to write passages on how they "embodied company values". There are questions like "how did you inspire trust in your colleagues and in our consumer base?" and "how did you join forces with your colleagues this year?". Things that remind me why I have such passionate disdain for corporate culture and red tape. This year-end review was something I used to submit three-sentence replies for with each question. After all, my former manager worked extremely closely with me. He didn't need a recap of every last detail of what I worked on throughout the year because he was there for all of it. But this time around, I have a manager who both doesn't know anything about my work and doesn't like me. Naturally, she asked me to include in this review pretty much every single thing I've worked on all year. Thus, this year-end review, which is usually a short exercise in appeasing the board members who want each and every employee to embody "company values", became a comprehensive 5000-word essay explaining why I shouldn't be laid off. And that does wonders for work ethic and morale. I can't wait to do this again next year. This post echoes my feelings on this corporate practice.

Both these last straws are things I've worked on very recently, and they tie into my activity at LAW this year. Obviously, my availability has been impacted quite a bit. Between finding time for job interviews and the poor working conditions, it became exceedingly hard for me to find the time, let alone the motivation to try to do stuff for LAW. It's not like I haven't tried at all, of course, but I'm sure it's understandable that it's been pretty hard. I'd like to revisit an experience I had that made it harder.

A few weeks ago, I woke up on a Saturday morning after a pretty difficult Friday. The night before, I had taken two of the certification exams from the page I linked above. I spent about $260 on them. I passed one and failed the other. I also submitted the year-end review I mentioned. After waking up, I got a DM with an inquiry from a user. I serviced the request as soon as I was able, and after doing so, I was immediately met with accusations and verbal abuse. I'm not going to post screenshots or anything, but I want to be clear. This wasn't someone simply voicing their concerns. This wasn't a dialogue. This wasn't someone trying to get the bigger picture or the complete story on a sticky situation. This was someone asking me for something, getting it, and then feeling they had enough information to go "you ignored/mistreated this person/these persons (insert insult and passive-aggressive remarks here)". I was pretty out of it that morning; I would hope understandably so. Therefore, I kind of apologized and moved on. It wasn't until the evening that I was in a position to actually dig into these accusations and find proof that they were false that I revisited the conversation. But it didn't hit me until later that this was the sort of conversation that should never happen to begin with. And the worst part is, it wasn't an isolated incident. This sort of thing has happened to me before with this person and with a few others. And it's happened a lot over the years with a select few users. To some degree, some folks believe that verbal abuse (not criticism, not suggestions, but berating, insulting, and abuse) towards moderators is okay, and that's really not cool. I think it needs to stop. Stopping it will bother some people, but I can't keep going like this.

There will be people who will take the previous paragraph to mean that I think moderators and staff are above reproach and that it's not okay to voice concerns or criticisms, and of course, that's not at all what I'm saying. The message here is that if someone in the community cannot attack problems without attacking people- especially without attacking staff, then they shouldn't be speaking out at all. There are definitely a lot of things that could be improved at LAW. But if you're asking me, the single biggest obstacle between making things more hospitable, more spiffy, more fun, and more engaging is the belief some users have that "holding moderators accountable" means a free license to spout slander in public and to berate with verbal abuse in private. This type of speech might help some folks get things off their chest, but the act of bashing other people, especially staff, has literally never helped anyone. It has only hurt LAW. Nothing makes me walk me close the discord app or log off my computer faster than remembering how I get publicly slandered in a discord server I haven't engaged in regularly for 2 years, or remembering how a user approached me in a DM eager to get a compromising screenshot of my convo with them, or remembering how someone DM'd me for hours with a tone and insults that for sure would be get them disciplined in just about any other online community.

LAW started off as a passion project, and it very much still is. LAW staff (discord moderators, event organizers, etc.) deserve just as much courtesy and decency as anyone else. I would argue they deserve more grace because of their willingness to volunteer their time and services to the community. I don't get paid to be anyone's punching bag. In fact, I actually lose money. There are no ads on this website. Your clicks on this forum do not net me any profit. The web hosting service and domain name together cost me over 150 USD a year. There are cheaper packages, but I pay for this tier because the user base is so big now that lower tiers do not accommodate us. Using a lower tier like I used to would lead to the website crashing hundreds of times a day because so many people visit and use the forums. I am every bit as invested in this community emotionally as I am financially. So when a lot of the people who leap at a chance to publicly criticize or slander are also some of the very same people who insult me or make bad faith assumptions about me in private, I hope it's understandable how that makes me feel particularly unsafe, unwelcome, and demotivated. If you're asking me, this negativity is the single biggest obstacle towards some of the progress and changes some folks want to see. I can't tell you how many times I've laid out a road map for and started working on cool ideas for LAW, just to be quit altogether or get sent into a spiral because someone thought it would be cool to pull me aside on Discord and lay into me for a few hours about how much they hate me or hate something at LAW. And then I'll come back to said roadmap a week later, and the same thing will happen again.

I've said it a lot, but this wall of text is not about constructive criticism or well-intentioned folks voicing their concerns. Even if you wanted to play devil's advocate, even if you assume every bad thing you've ever heard about me was completely true, the fact is that LAW was never a democracy. There is no three-strike system. There is no trial by jury. If I wanted to wipe everything tomorrow and make this a forum about which state has the best pizza (it's New York by a landslide, and it's not even close), I could. And I would have every right to do so. I don't answer to a platform like proboards or forumotion. If I decide something needs to change or if I believe an offense is grave enough, I can just take action. This is not a threat, nor is it me trying to call out anyone in particular. This is me trying to get across the fact that if you only engage with LAW to complain about LAW, or if you only engage with me or talk about me to complain about me in ways that are not constructive, then I'd rather not engage with you. And if you do this often enough or consistently enough, then I'd rather you just not engage with LAW in general. If I need to choose between continuing to distance myself from LAW or distancing dedicated detractors from LAW, then going forward, I'm going to choose the latter.

I want very badly to be fair and kind, even to people who don't like me. We have rules and pastimes that have, for the most part, given us a platform to form a very cool userbase. But as life gets tougher, as the pressure ramps up for me irl, there are going to be times moving forward where I just won't have the time, the bandwidth, or the resources to continue enduring aggression from some folks like I have been for years. There are going to be times when I will need to choose self-preservation for my own sake and for the sake of progress at LAW. There are going to be times when I no longer choose kindness, not because I don't want to, but because I no longer have the free time to sit down and play therapist or serve as a whipping boy for people who are more interested in attacking me or others than they are in finding resolutions.

What does that all mean? I'm not sure. In this moment, I don't know what I'm going to do about it exactly because I have some more immediate concerns. If my bosses return from their holiday vacations and discover that I have only 1 of the 2 certifications my job asked for, I'll probably get laid off, and if I'm unlucky in finding another job, I won't be able to pay for the webhosting, and the forum will cease to exist. So, I'm going to go study, and I'm going to pass that certification exam, hopefully in the next two or three days, because getting these certs means keeping my job and keeping LAW going. After I take care of that, I'm going to try to make some strides here. I won't be able to improve or fix everything in a day. I'm going to do my best to make changes one day at a time. And I'm going to hope that I won't have people kicking my door in to yell at me for doing so.