The shittiest project I ever worked on (2013)
My shittiest project was a hostile takeover from another development team.<p>In the interview, the manager told me a bunch of BS that turned out to be completely false: that it was a new project, that lots of new development was expected, that there where performance challenges to be tackled.<p>When I got there, I found out on day one that the goal of the project was to take over the code base from an existing development team, with which the customer had lost trust because among other things they refused to use their new shitty trouble ticket system (which was awful), and instead insisted in using JIRA.<p>Also, they had a server running in Tomcat that they didn&#x27;t want to migrate to Websphere.<p>Turns out that we didn&#x27;t even have access to the code, until we accidentally found that the SVN repo was listed in an infrastructure powerpoint, and we did have a VPN connection set up.<p>We were at the taking over consulting firm offices and not at the customer, reverse engineering the existing 7-year-old codebase without any assistance from the development team, which didn&#x27;t even know that they were getting replaced.<p>After months of reverse engineering and producing useless documentation so that the client manager could say in some meeting that the system was well documented, we ended moving in and mostly doing production support instead of development.<p>Our managers were afraid that we broke something, so they did everything to make sure that we didn&#x27;t spend our time coding.<p>After a few months, I just asked out because it was not development work and this type of work was actually harming my career and even had my consulting manager actually shout to me on the phone and tell me that he would blacklist me at his company.<p>Software consulting is some of the shadiest businesses out there, beware.<p>The amount of lies that gets told to candidates just to get them signed at the dotted line to contracts without exit clauses (which was the case with me), the use of outdated job descriptions, the lack of information that you have about the actual job even if you ask a lot of questions in interviews, you really never know what you are getting into until day one.<p>Here is a tip from what I have learned: ask a ton of questions about what the job will actually be, if they answer evasively or strangely seem like they want to avoid the questions and move on to other aspects of the interview, that is a huge red flag.