

Is it normal to work in a culture of conflict? - irishmanirl

I've worked for the same company for 4 years (online media - UK), started as a junior developer &#38; now lead a development team of 4. When I started I love the job, we where doing things "right", focused on engineering &#38; building stuff our users really appreciated.<p>However over the last two years, most of the staff have left, been let go or been replaced, the company has been  sold 3 times. The people working there now come from backgrounds completely unrelated to what they do &#38; don't really understand our products or users - the result of this is that our competitors have not all overtaken us, the company is in bad shape financially &#38; everyone is panicking, literally any idea that someone suggests - no matter how ill thought out &#38; negatively it impacts our users workflow within our products, I'm told it needs to be made live yesterday.<p>The IT people are hopeless, they are not qualified for their jobs - cannot setup backups, cron jobs or install updates / patches to our servers, yet have egos the size of the arctic circle - even the most simple request is met with cynicism &#38; emails to the boss detailing why we don't need it done, they only keep their jobs by being master actors - always appearing super busy.<p>The business people who "run" the software team have no technical background or understanding of what it takes to build software, worse they regularly admit they don't want to know either. As a result they create ideas &#38; project plans in closed rooms and then tell us that we have to implement their crazy ideas within even crazier timeframes e.g. build an entire image hosting website with payments &#38; social media integration in 4 days with just 2 developers and if their are major bugs upon go live - someone will be fired.<p>I've been repeatedly told to work weekends &#38; longer hours, even though I'm already working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. If I need any tools to do my job I've been told I have to buy them on my own dime.<p>We are forced to do major feature changes just hours before major releases &#38; when stuff inevitably goes wrong - its always my fault. Using any sort of automated testing, version control or taking time to think about how best to implement something is seen as time wasted, that could be used to build the lastest crazy idea from marketing.<p>Any attempt to put "structure" or a controlled process in place by the dev team immediately results in more cynicism &#38; questions why we are not doing "real work", told we are risking our jobs.<p>Because I've been here so long I'm wondering if I'm just whining or this is normal?
======
stonemetal
It sounds a bit on the extreme side of normal, but not to unusual for a non-
tech company trying to do development(Heck the Apple guys around here talk
about their 12+ work days). My first job out of college it wasn't unusual to
work 12hr days 7 days a week for a couple of months at a time running up to
major deadlines. On the other hand it isn't that hard to find non crap
companies that don't do that to people. So I would say not uncommon but not
normal.

