My Toughest Job Yet: A Story of Mismanagement

I’ve been a Java programmer for over four years since I graduated from university. I’ve worked my way up from being a total beginner to a solid mid-level developer. I was at my first company for two years, then my second for another two, and now I’m at my third. My first two jobs were okay, but both times there was just something I couldn’t tolerate, so I ended up leaving. But this new job? It has been the toughest one by far, mostly because the management is a complete mess.

Our company is overall a contractor, so we just do projects for other companies or colleges, which puts us in a reactive role, making us dependent on our clients’ schedule.

To make things worse, most of our clients are in the military. That comes with a ton of security rules that make everything a huge pain. For example, project materials like documents and source code cannot be transferred over the internet. Instead, they must be moved using physical media like CDs, which requires us to manually copy files between computers.

On top of that, My boss often takes on new projects without properly assessing the impact on our team’s capacity. He doesn’t even make sure he understands what the client really wants. And get this—some of our clients have no idea what they want until we build an initial prototype for them!

So, of course, we’re always behind schedule. To catch up, the manager just hires a bunch of junior programmers. But they don’t have much experience, so the code they write is a disaster, and it becomes almost impossible to finish the project in time.

And finally, The division of labor among our employees is unreasonable. I was hired to do backend and algorithm development, But I spend most of my time doing totally different stuff, like installing systems or writing endless, pointless documents. It feels like such a waste because I’m not even doing the job I was hired for or using the skills I’m actually good at.