I remember the 2 years I spent as a developer. I had no interest in the work I did. I was extremely lazy. And I didn’t doubt that I was going to quit my developer job soon.

At one point I was working on the back end of a profile service that was being developed by my team. Every day I would come to the standup and say shit like: “Yeah, yesterday I wrote the API to get the name from the database and return it”. The next day it would be like “today I was working on address”. It was a simple GET call to return all these fields collectively. I just wasted time. Because I could. And the TL was a friend of mine. So I knew he was not going to call me out.

I have found myself telling the above story to a lot of people in recent times. I know what I was doing was wrong. But I was severely underpaid and my excuse was that it was my first job. And I was only doing it temporarily. But I see a lot of people who are extremely well paid pulling these shenanigans in the workplace. These are developers with almost half a decade of experience in building software. Up until last year, no one really cared about that. Anything goes in a world of 0 interest rates. But the world has moved on. And it is of vital importance that we see the writing on the wall. Gaslighting technically incompetent managers is all fun and games. Until they start questioning every work estimate you give. Not every project takes a month. They know it. They know it.

Don’t do what I did. Do better.