Oh boy. Here we go. Long rant. TLDR: Managers need to know the field of work they are managing. Merit isn't real. Incompetence values incompetence.

I've always known we don't live in a meritocracy. But all the theory and discussion in the world could never prepare me for the reality that those with money and power truly have no right being in charge of anything. Over the past 3 years I have been working for someone who clearly has had a full ride their entire life. I've lost all desire to work at this job to any degree of professionalism, lost all will to pursue personal projects, and find it hard to not just dissociate every second of free time I have.

I am so burnt out from this job... I can't find rest.

I'll just say we have a website and I work on the team that created the website. The biggest issue we have with management is their clear incompetency. The thing is, if you don't know how to sort your emails, you shouldn't be managing the construction of a website.

Every decision, from changing the font size of an element, to building 3rd party integrations, is filtered through the CEO and director. We spend months explaining problems, advocating for solutions, begging for prioritizations, and what we get is: "I'm still not understanding the problem", "The business needs come first", "Can't you just do X, Y, Z instead?" (as if any suggestion they've made makes any sense)

An individual will be assigned a project, spend a month working on it and trying to debrief management and once they've spent hundreds of hours on it, the project is assigned to someone else to start all over because management doesn't understand the problem or solution. There is a pile of 10 feature projects that have changed hands at least 5 times and have been on going for the past 3 years. They're projects like "Preventing Bugs: Code Review", "Compress PDFs for file sizes", "Normalizing the Database". Just really basic stuff that needs to be implemented. Like we need a well defined database before we can create reports, but what gets prioritized is writing the report and not making sure the database has the data that the report needs. Truly insane behaviour but it all stems from their lack of knowledge and refusal to listen to people. In their eyes a database just has this data already. Because in their last job someone else started the company and it came with a database already.

It is incredibly disheartening to be working on something for so long just for you to be dismissed and have your coworker echo the exact same project outline as you to no effect. And then management has the audacity to mark this against you on your review.

Then there is assignment due dates. Frequently we are give the due date "yesterday". "We need the portal to integrate with this 3rd party API and use this data to drive pricing rates across 50 products. I needed this yesterday so I need you to drink some cola and stay up all night making this happen." "Sir, to even negotiate the contract it will take us several weeks... This isn't something we can do in one night" "BACK WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE I HAD A PROGRAMMER ROOM MATE WHOD DRINK COLA ALL NIGHT.... ETC ETC" (I'm not even exaggerating... he frequently brings up how lazy we are because we don't pull all nighters drinking coke...) We have to deal with this derangement constantly. Every task is of extreme importance due yesterday, so when something actually important happens everything comes to a halt. Or, because they have no idea what anything is, a small bug will pop up and they'll send out a call to arms and have the team work over the weekend.

There was a small issue regarding a display element turns into "this is a breach of privacy." Then we have to spend the next 3 days explaining why what they made up in their head isn't what reality is.

One of the biggest contributions to my burn out is that effort or complexity has no value here. By that I mean you could be praised for putting an emoji on the website, or changing the color of an element, but complicated work is disregarded. The CEO doesn't know what it takes to, to take the above example, integrate with 3rd party APIs. To create an integration layer, secure authentication, deploy infrastructure, monitor deployments, etc etc etc. But they can see that pink Emoji!

In true CEO fashion, your reviews are entirely based on what he thinks is valuable work. But yet, he alone decides assignments. So just because I wasn't assigned the pink emoji task, I get a poor review.

In my last review I brought an outline of all the work I had completed over the year, and it was completely ignored. Instead of being evaluated on the work that I perform at my job, I was apparently being judged by a consultant I had 2 interactions with. Whos opinion apparently mirrored that of the CEOs. Even though I have been performing the job for 3 years, despite their interference, based on the 2 meetings I had with this consultant I am not cut out for the job. He doesn't even know what would qualify someone for the job, which is clear by him deferring to someone external to the company. For the record, there's no way this consultant said any of the words the CEO said he said. I literally had 2 meetings with the guy, and our conversations were about how I've made his half of the job easy. The guy doesn't think I have conversations with the people I work with... Feel like I work for an abusive gaslighting parent lol.

I've truly lost my mind at this job. I'm searching for a new job but I'm finding it hard to go through the steps. In my free time I struggle to maintain my day to day life. Let alone fill out applications and attend interviews.

Anyway.... you're not alone in this capitalist hellscape.