I was fired for causing a major bug
I blame the CEO of the company who asked me to implement a "last minute update" to our application, and not giving myself, or the rest of our team, any time to validate the code properly.
It should be the CEO's ass in the hot seat, but it's clear I was the scapegoat. This happened to me a few years ago, but the experience still sits with me.
At the time, I was a Jr. Dev, so I really didn't even have the competence, or experience, to be doing the work I was asked. But I still tried, and paid the price.
Luckily, my next employer didn't ask about it. They saw I was a solid programmer, and gave me the job I had for 5 years before going indie. Still, things could have taken a different turn for me...
This field is always evolving, and no one is an expert per se, even if they've been in the industry.
So - this goes out to anyone who's every introduced a crazy bug, or crashed their app, or just generally caused some type of error.
Anyone here have any horror stories to share?
I’m sorry that that happened to you, but honestly seems like it was good that you got away from that company!
At my previous company, a bunch of people came over from a big name FAANG company, they all received big title jumps from the move. They were fairly young and had lots to prove. Unfortunately it was easy to tell they cared a lot more about their own career growth and nothing about the existing culture at the company that I had enjoyed for 5 years.
The result was that the work culture became toxic as the new leadership would just push unreasonable deadlines on teams last minute and really just treated any problem as a “numbers game” of how many developers were needed to be thrown at it to complete it by a deadline.
Unsurprisingly, all of the best talent started leaving the company. Which also spurred me to leave sooner rather than later and focus on starting my own business.
Mistakes happen, it shouldn't have meant you were fired.. but probably best not to be at that company. Honestly that company should have failsafes before a bug makes it to a live product, so they really should have systems in place to avoid these things
Mistakes are what make us human. I've dropped many prod databases early in my career and also launched plenty features that were duds. When one person becomes the fall guy, it's a blessing in disguise that you can take on to your next opportunity where you might be treated like an actual human.
There's a reason why there are "blameless retrospectives". It's how we grow and learn in this constantly changing field. Everything can be figured out with enough reflection.
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I agree, besides from sites like blind and Glassdoor it’s pretty hard to know which companies have toxic work environments for software engineers.
I wonder how often what happened to this poster happens in the industry...