[richfnelson]

I left a web dev job about a month ago. I liked a lot about the company. It was a three-man dev team at an e-commerce startup and we ran a Rails/Angular webapp. The founders were great and the culture fit my personality very well.

I left the company after ~6 months because I did not get along well with one of the other developers. We had extreme communication problems and they were causing unnecessary stress.

I like to talk to people and joke around with my coworkers. This individual did not seem to have the same desire. On the company’s general slack channel, almost everyone would get in on the socializing, with /giphys and jokes and whatnot… everyone except this one developer. They never, ever said a single thing on slack that was not business-related. They never even said anything out loud that was not business related.

This communication style caused a lot of issues during code review. I would spend time creating, testing, and QA’ing a feature, and then code review would take at least three times as long as development. I’d get code comments on GitHub that said things like “I wouldn’t do it this way” or “I don’t like the use of a directive in this case. Read this: https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive”. Now, in most cases, changes to the code probably were necessary. However, I felt the tone of the comments was unnecessarily inflammatory, bordering on outright insulting.

I told my supervisor that I thought the code review communication could be improved and he agreed that the code review process seemed to be taking too long. He decided that I should get code reviews before the feature was complete, at whatever I determined was a good point to pause development for a code review. This led to an even longer development cycle. I felt as though this developer pegged me as unskilled, and thus found every excuse they could to tear my code apart. On several occasions while refactoring, I would move code snippets that were written by this developer into a new method or file. GitHub would regard these snippets as if I had written them. The developer would comment on this code that _they themselves had originally written_ and come up with a reason as to why it should be refactored or I’m not using the most efficient method, etc. It got to the point where I wouldn’t even know how to start working on a project. I realized it didn’t really matter. I could write the best code of all time and my co-worker would find a reason why it should all be thrown out. So I just started writing garbage that I took no pride in because it was going to get ripped to shreds anyway. Round after round of code comments until the code would look exactly as if this other developer had written it themselves. It was demoralizing, to say the least.

I really wanted to succeed with this company and had I been in any other department I believe I would have. I got along very well with everyone else there. Within a month of putting myself on the job market I found a new position that paid more and has a dev team with no assholes. I am much happier.

[et-al]

I don't know the whole story, and I don't mean to trivialize your bad experience, but this section jumped out:

> I like to talk to people and joke around with my coworkers. This individual did not seem to have the same desire. On the company’s general slack channel, almost everyone would get in on the socializing, with /giphys and jokes and whatnot… everyone except this one developer. They never, ever said a single thing on slack that was not business-related. They never even said anything out loud that was not business related.

On a more general note, we should caution not to ostracize individuals just because they don't fit in with the prevailing culture. Yes, having people with the same sense of humor is great (I regularly add ridiculous ASCII art to commit messages). It smooths over the more difficult times, but this emphasis on cultural fit is one of the more delicate points in tech right now and why Silicon Valley has this stigma of "brogramming" (puke).

And again, I wasn't there, and the person could've been an asshole of epic proportions, but the lead in gave the impression on focusing on their difference instead of the qualities of their assho--n/m. You get my point. I'm glad things ultimately worked out, and hope they continue to do so.

/steps off soapbox

[richfnelson]

I don't need someone I can playfully punch in the arm and tell a knock-knock joke to. I don't care if someone puts their head down and gets their work done without saying a word. But if we're going to be reviewing one another's code, I do need someone I can speak with openly and candidly. That was painfully difficult with this particular individual.

[et-al]

Gotcha, thanks for clarifying the situation.

[shivaodin]

This is one of most common reasons to leave a job; unfortunately no one will acknowledge or admit it.

I wanted to succeed in my previous company and built rapport with my manager and other team mates. We had a reorg, and another developer from another vertical joined our team. He was not interested in coding and would not code review any code. I called him out once during a pairing session but he went defensive. He took up minor task and passed the buck around. At any rate, to my dismay he was promoted as our manager in a few months. Needless to say he would retort to berating me and other team members.

I left the job without trying to burn bridges. On the last day, he called me out during the standup and "hoped he would get hard working team members in the future"

Almost all of my team mates left the job or have moved to other teams.

[jdubs]

It's amazing how some manager's words can have such an impact on a team.

[TurboHaskal]

That moment after a senior or technical lead is ripping a piece of code to pieces for about half an hour while you keep your best poker face, then git blaming the file to show him he's actually the author.

Had it last week and it was priceless.

[threesixandnine]

I want to hire that boring and unpolite dev.

[richfnelson]

They would work quite well on their own. But if the position requires communication between team members, I think they would be toxic. My manager acknowledged this reality during my exit interview. I was the third person added to a team of two, so the manager had not seen this individual interact with other devs before my presence.