I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Inside the dev community there’s a lot of pent up anger and frustration pointed at bad bosses and companies that only look out for themselves. We see it in massive layoffs and PR moves that reveal the company as being completely detached from reality.
I’m frustrated by these companies, but I’m also frustrated by my own willingness to deflect responsibility from myself and towards the ivory tower. There’s an eagerness in parts of the community to claim as much of a salary (or even multiple salaries…) while simultaneously believing that someone else is in charge of making sure they are doing worthwhile work.
At times, this makes me wonder, are we the baddies?
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--JoZp_wu9--/f_auto/v1718212834/ugc/content_5c3ce1cb-154d-4e3c-8369-c778fc850414" alt="download">
I think this is true for each of us to some degree and worth some reflection. This doesn’t give bad companies or leaders a pass but instead turns over the control of our fate to ourselves.
Let’s create the world we want to live in and give more than we take.
Is this a trend you are also seeing? How much of a problem is this really?

Dedicated to developers who want to learn and share how they git gud at their craft 🦾. Is there a mindset you think is currently hurting developers growth? What tools do you love? 

The Dev Craft

Inside the dev community, there is frustration towards bad bosses and companies that only prioritize themselves. Developers also question their own responsibility and wonder if they are part of the problem. It's important to reflect on this and take control of our own fate.

Are we also the baddies?

<blockquote>
There’s an eagerness in parts of the community to claim as much of a salary (or even multiple salaries…) while simultaneously believing that someone else is in charge of making sure they are doing worthwhile work.
</blockquote>
Do you mean trying to be paid the best salary for a software engineering position to execute someone else’s vision? That’s called a job market. If you flip this logic, most companies out there are trying to get their vision executed by paying the least amount possible for the work, given the necessary qualities.
You’re not a “baddie” for wanting a competitive salary or expecting people to have a clear vision of what they want you to do.

Here’s the deal. Whenever you take a job, you need to treat it like you are a 1099. It doesn’t matter if you are an employee or not, you are there to serve to the best of your ability through the duration of your service, until either your time is too constrained and you need to drop the client, or the client no longer needs your services. That’s it. Remember that workplace benefits like PTO, 401k matches, health care, and life insurance have virtually no value. A job is just a job. Employers may not like this sentiment, but it’s the bed they made and the bed they have to sleep in.

reddit has made pandering towards victimhood really cool.
people also noticed its a powerful semantic weapon, politically and otherwise, so deflecting responsibility becomes par for the course on the road to victimhood, or at least the perception of it.

I hopped away from a few Softwre Engineering jobs myself due to horrific work enviroments.
In the first company in which I started as a junior developer the team leaders, project managers and stakeholders thought that checking the development progress of an agile team frequently (on several levels!) was a good idea. Not to mention the weekly 4 hours meeting of the whole department (which our softare dev department really had nothing to do with). Within the following 2-3 years the backlog had more than 900 tickets with ~50% of them tracking critical bugs) the software became incredibly unstable and laggy that the product itself was considered useless by the customers. So the team leaders and bosses were adding more meetings to investigate how all this could happen. When there was a particularly bad rollout we also had additional escalation meetings.
In my 4th year I tracked the amount of hours spent in meetings and it was at ~70-80% of my work time. At that point I realized I had to take care of myself and my skill set as a developer and had to move on.
The second company I joined started OK as I had to implement a few nasty tickets that weren’t touched by the seniors for a few years and so the new guy could prove he’s worth the investment. I succeeded and were assigned to work on the main product as well. However, after a few months, the 1st/2nd level support guy started to take a day off every now and then, so they asked me to help out since - as they said it’s good to build up knowledge around the product which I thought was OK for me to do). But as time passed that support guy became sick more frequently, sometimes even for whole weeks and I got stuck on this role without any chance to actually learn the intricates of the software which further crippled my ability to contribute to the progress and also in my value as a software engineer.
So I jumped to a third company where my time and value was actually put to good use. The management does a decent job there and I was very glad that they treat their employees decently and fairly.
About this posts topic:
I don’t think employees have that much power to shape the landscapes of a company; for example where consultants have too much power so they may dictate the next actions of the development team or where the bosses decide that the rookie has to do a role he did not apply to (even if it was supposed to be just for a temporary period of time).
Some companies have a workers’ council but not every company. And even if there is one - bosses or PMs don’t like trouble in their departments so it’s usually it’s backlashing to the employee in one form or another.
So in the end why annoy yourself with trouble?
In my opinion it was never worth it. For senior developers the market you have specialized knowledge in is huge and you can easily apply to other companies that are even willing to pay better salaries.
Whenever I left a company with big deficits (e.g. in the management) there were - at least in my experience - a couple of other developers leaving the company as well.
So after that I’m pretty sure the bosses/PMs/stakeholders had reflected on that and hopefully made better choices with the next flush of developers.
If not, well, a company can only afford to lose that many employees every couple of years before their customers will notice a degrading product or service.