First company I worked for, overall it was a good experience, but at one point they promoted a consultant to project manager, and their planning skills were about as good as their people skills, which is to say, appalling.

We had a project update for a huge client, that required, for political BS reasons, that most of the team spend several weeks on-site, 300km away from home.
Go-live was approaching, and the plan was: migration starts Friday night, shortly after midnight (so actually, Saturday) once the client’s IT confirms DB is backed up. Expected duration: 5 hours.

- So, you expect me to work from midnight to 5am on Saturday? And when do we start working on Friday?

- 9am, of course.

- 9am!? So you actually planned a 20 hour work day? (Note: legal maximum here is 10 hours in a day, 40 a week)

- And we have to be there on Saturday 1pm to recheck everything is running smooth.

wtaf were they thinking?

During the company's Xmas event, we were off-site at a place that does events to do a team-building event followed by dinner party.

An error report came up, it wasn't a showstopper, but it was fairly serious, and the perfect excuse to sit out the BS improv team-building exercises that the powers that be thought would be a good idea to have.

Probably my favorite bug ever.

What's your worst experience with "not invented here syndrome"?

In the recent past I've been dealing with custom made JS datepickers, autocomplete boxes and various other widgets that were purpose made for some feature. Almost every single widget the app uses is built from scratch.

Now there are new features that need these widgets to behave differently, and needless to say, none were built with customisation or extendability in mind.

Hardly shocking, I know, but I'm the one that has to spend several hours to get these widgets to work for the new features instead of using some of the many open-source, tested, mature and customisable solutions that are out there.

Rails views are not meant to have a ton of logic, local variables and 3 or 4 levels of if/else nesting. That's what presenters, view models and assorted other patterns are for. Or helpers, if you really have to.

Yes, this codebase is so packed with legacy it still runs Rails 2.3, and there's no plans to upgrade it, but that's no excuse to keep writing code like it's 2008. MVC does not mean all code must fit in a model, a view or a controller, ffs.

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

Picture a small product team, the dev side of it has 1 tech lead, 1 recently promoted senior dev, 1 junior dev.

1 - Offer your tech lead a severance package
2 - Hire a mid-level and a junior dev
3 - Give the product lead role to someone in their mid-20s that has no tech or project management background
4 - ???

The next 6 months are going to be interesting ones...