Developers, Being Treated Poorly? You Are Not Alone
Working on a high profile tech team and project. We had the most brilliant and insufferable devops engineer I&#x27;ve ever met. I don&#x27;t mean just your standard grump overworked sys admin. This guy was a treasure.<p>1) Previously all engineers had 20% time and would work on personal projects. We had a ton of extra servers lying around and it was fairly simple to provision some space to work on an  idea. His first week he went to the CTO and had 20% time axed and demanded that all provisioning go directly through him and all physical servers be nuked from orbit.<p>2) They got him a personal secretary. He routinely had her go 5 blocks to get him gummy bears, buy him a waffle iron and make him waffles in the office, and routinely made sexist comments.<p>3) Op sec. We would have media come by the office once in a while so this guy instituted a policy of &quot;security through shame&quot; If you didn&#x27;t have 2factor auth on your email he would send you snide comments. If you didn&#x27;t use full disk encryption you had to go to a mandatory course on personal security. If you left your laptop unlocked at your desk to go the bathroom it was prank emails and screwing with your settings. On the 3rd time he would confiscate your laptop and lock it in a personal safe he had under his desk for the day.<p>4) This guy would use our internal channels and slack to shame anyone non-technical. One time the personal assistant to a VP in another department accidentally posted a listing asking if anyone had a bed for sale to the channel for asking about restaurants in the area. 24hours of shame where he got the entire tech team to participate emailing everyone in the company if they had any food shaped furniture for sale. Apparently she broke down crying and had to go home for the day.<p>5) Despite the fact that we had no QA team this guy refused to deploy hotfixes even for critical launches. You got one day a week to launch code. You got one chance. If there was anything wrong it was, &quot;roll back and try next week.&quot; Unless of course the issue was you needed a CDN cache clear or there was something wrong with the build. Then you could email him (directly after the deployment) and have him refuse to respond or believe you for about an hour before he would actually do anything.<p>I could go on. this guy was a king turd.