Which conditions would make reject or quit your job?

• abuse in the US workplace is (generally) not openly visible in ways you expect
• and yet, sexual abuse is still extremely prevalent in all industries
• US companies can impose a MASSIVE chilling effect just by having your healthcare tied to your employment
• mental abuse can be subtle (a form of psychological warfare) with something as simple as “we’re like a family here” or “you wouldn’t want to let down the team, would you?”
• the first episode of Zom 100 gave a really good example of how far the mental abuse can escalate – between overwork, lack of sleep, verbal abuse, bad diet, you no longer have time to step back and think, you become completely dependent on someone else telling you what to do, you no longer have the strength of will to even contemplate saying “No”

I would consider what my company is doing right now as board line abuse. They've done two rounds of layoffs this year, but the amount of work as not been reduced in the slightest. So everyone is overworked and scared of saying anything in case there is another round of layoffs. Of course this is also having a ripple affect where long-term hardworking employees are jumping ship.

I currently have a backlog that is four years long. That was when I had a team working for me. Now I'm the only person on the team and not a week goes by when I don't get ask what the status of XYZ is. Or have 2-3 more "high priority" things added to my backlog.

Harassment from toxic managers who abuse employees verbally (insults, etc.) It happens a lot sadly.

I was an admin at a company that was borderline psychopathic. Yeah, tons of abuse at all levels. No progression unless you were a member of the executive teams family or married to one of them. Completely dysfunctional workplace.

Return to office.

Cost of living in the US is 40-46% higher than Italy, and we do not have benefits like free or low cost Healthcare like they have in Italy. My wife's maximum out of pocket costs on her work sponsored insurance is almost 10k a year just for in-network services. If she has to go out of network for anything, her max is 18k for those services (which is in addition to the in-network pool). God forbid something terrible would happen, we could be liable for up to 28k in a calendar year just for her medical needs. We're pregnant right now trying to save 30k just so that we're covered for any medical expenses that will come up. My insurance is better than hers, but far from free.

Moreover, education is not free in the US. My tuition and books for my community college where I did the first two years of my degree (to save money) cost over 6k annually and the tuition at the state school where I finished the last two years of my degree was 10k annually. It would have been double that for both if I had gone to a school out of state.

I know I sound spoiled by comparison talking about needing such a big raise to even consider going back to the office. But it's not a 1:1 comparison, is my point. That being said, I definitely am spoiled in comparison your SE's in Italy and other European counties. Even with your lower cost of living and benefits all citizens enjoy, software engineers are underpaid there, imo. The work we do is highly skilled and lucrative. When put to good use and done correctly, it increases efficiency, bringing in more revenue while lowering costs, and it can create new streams of revenue as well. They should be compensated accordingly.

Edit: Oh, also just want to add that I just had to replace my car recently and we bought a, 6 year old, used, low-trim model minivan and that thing cost 25k after negotiating it down from 27k. And no way to take public transport to my company's nearest office from my home, and it's a 40 minute drive each direction for me is non-rush hour traffic. Would likely be double that each way if I had to make it in there for a 9-5. Just for some context on the cost of a vehicle and transport here right now.

Every job I've had as a developer, I've had a Linux box for development. Some I've also had a Windows laptop for specialty hardware vendor programs / portability, and some I've also had a MacBook from which to work.

I'm not going to whinge just because I don't get to use all of my personally preferred platforms, but if my employer ever denied me the necessary equipment or insisted upon the objectively wrong technology for a project - in any way - I'd simply leave if they refused to listen, since I'm not going down on a sinking ship.

I could choose on all my jobs. I'm doing linux since so long, I don't even wanna hear of windows.

Salaried jobs in my spectrum do exist 😄 Even in France they do too 😉

Never heard of it, but it looks aweful

Thankfully, we migrated to git entirely right before I joined the company

War metaphors real examples:

Literally calling your employees your soldiers, calling starting positions as trenches, brainwashing your employees to a us versus the world mentality, ex-employees are 'dead' or 'on a suicidal path', etc.

Business is not war anyone who think it is has never saw what a single rifle bullet does to human flesh. Freaking psychos.

Task was being discussed, I raised valid concerns, they listened, agreed to the concerns and said 'yeah we still want you to do it'. I say I won't do this. They push harder. I left on the spot. Notice was on director desk the next day. I suspect management wanted me to take on a botched task so to have something negative over me. There may of may not have some level of nepotism there.

but I do use the period to hand off as much as possible to those who I don't want to set up to fail.

If there's nobody to hand things off to, I just slack off and use it as free money until my next gig.

both are totally fair opinions/decisions

personally I've been in too many toxic companies that I couldn't stomach staying even a day within the company

Absolutely delicious, thank you for asking. I've been very fortunate and had a lot of help.

Me too. I got a MacBook for testing Safari, but sometimes I take it to meetings because it's easier than extricating my usual machine from its dock (which unplugs the Ethernet cable so all my SSH sessions die along with anything running in them). But as somebody who likes having things in full screen (it bothers me if I can see the desktop peeking through), I get very annoyed needing to scroll through every app I've got open until I stumble across the one I want every time I have to switch context.

Because real manufacturing draws scrutiny, and these companies are audited regularly enough to make licensing fees palletable.

Maybe. I guess I hate the idea behind Jira more than Jira itself. I call it middle management driven Agile.

Also doesn't help that Jira (and Confluence) were fucking slow for a long while. Nobody wants to use slow software as an integral part of the dev chain.

Anything simple. I'm using Linear at my current job, which is fine. I've used Trello in the past, also fine. Best experience so far was using the GitLab issue tracker, but it as not a product team so YMMV.

I read about the term "silent quitting": quitting without any prior warning, just handing in the resignation without a chance to remedy the situation.

Here's the thing - finding the next job took me effort. I'm not wasting that because the boss suddenly realized they can do better. They needed to figure that out before I took the effort to find my next gig.

And I expect the same now that I'm the boss. I do a one on one meeting with each of my direct reports like clockwork, and I ask probing questions about work conditions, career trajectory, and work/life balance.

It's not their job to make sure I know if they're satisfied with their job. It's my job.

Their job is to do all the other amazing things they do to make me look like an amazing boss.

Is salary the most important factor for you?

My employees have taught me that salary is the least important thing - right up until the moment when it becomes the most important thing. No one knows when that will be: surprise car repair, medical bill, whatever.

People tend to figure out their market value. I've never successfully retained a significantly underpaid professional over the long term. Of course, I do always get a healthy discount on the talent I hire. People value a great boss a lot. But having a great manager doesn't fix a leaking roof, so that discount amount has to be an amount they feel great about, not an insult to them.

remember that “2 weeks notice” is a kindness you’re giving them, it’s not a requirement and companies will never show you that kindness when they fire you

I am okay with some discount on my salary if I am really happy with my colleagues. We go to work every day, it is important to be happy.

If most of my friends are gone, and the salary is not satifactory, I will definitely quit for higher pay!

I'm likely to do that shortly. I'm in an environment with a few toxic colleagues who know fuck all about what needs to be done, or how to do it, but manage to impact decision making and cast doubt on my abilities and deliverables to date. I have had to step outside of my role to deliver multiple big ticket tasks (e.g. I've been brought on to uplift code for multiple applications, but have also had to build a MEM deployment from scratch as there was no endpoint management), but no-one has the knowledge or the interest in taking over the finished products, expecting I'll add it to my responsibilities.

A job is about to open up elsewhere that I've been encouraged to apply for, so I'll keep trudging along and will let them know at my notice period. I've tried so hard to get involved with no luck, so now they'll be forced to take interest.

Awesome 😀 But as you don't pay me I will only do what I like when I like to do so. So if your project is not FLOSS and useful for me or others I care about I will do nothing 🤷‍♂️ And if people need to pay (even through ads/datamining) to use it I'm out too.