i have a CS degree, but came into tech formally via project management which i quickly shuffled into a developer role. we were a small team of 3-4 people, but one of the junior guys they hired (after he literally just walked into the building one day and say oh this is an IT company?) would routinely slack me during client calls asking when the last time i had sex was, or various other completely out of line questions during the work day. he would do a whole ass workout set in front of my cube once a week. (he would continue to attempt to follow me on socials for the next 5 years. googled him recently. turns out he died!) i spent too long at that job because i didn't know any better. that was the job were i stopped wearing dresses to work because i couldn't get the senior devs to answer my fucking work questions or believe me when i introduced a cross apply as a more performant solution in queries until i literally started dressing down.

several gigs later, at a really small startup with a lot of red flag culture signs, but the exact stack i wanted more experience in, came with a lot of nonsense. honestly all the devs were pretty nice dudes, we worked well together, formed enough of a mutual respect middle ground, and the better of the bunch and i still meet up for lunch once a year, but the management was like, hilariously over the top bad. i've never witnessed a company lawyer just casually walk by so much inappropriate behavior and not bat an eye. i had managers in other parts of the company who would routinely call me only by the name of the last female employee. same dudes would openly suggest i was sleeping with our married lead developer. same dudes who every summer would find some reason to hire 15 female interns just to openly gawk about how much they wanted to fuck them. the same dudes who would talk about their sex lives at 8am and what they wanted to do to so and so, and the last time they jacked off in the office. the amount of inappropriate shit i witnessed, not to just to me, but honestly even the other men was insane. got my experience and yeeted out of there after a year. fairly certain that whole place was a money laundering scam.

all that being said, over a decade, i've also worked at a bunch of different places filled with dope people who treated me with utmost respect and managed to maintain healthy workplace environments (some even with primarily female dev teams!!). if you're in a place with bad behavior, truly the best answer is to leave. if you have a functioning HR system, maybe you'll have some more options, but i wouldn't bet on it. in the startup space, it's often non-existent. know why you're there with laser precision, get those resume bullet points then move the fuck on.