I left the first job I got out of college because the place was so horribly broken. The code was awful, impossible to debug, broke almost randomly, and if a customer asked for a feature - even one that didn’t make sense - they were promised they’d get it in a few days (which meant we’d be working nights and weekends… again).

I stuck it out for about a year - after a year I was the only person left who was there when I started. I followed one of the other exiting programmers to my second job. I was hoping it would be better. It wasn’t. Similar problems: nobody could describe what they wanted, but they knew they wanted it by the end of the week. Just a year out of college, I was saddled with a huge legacy codebase and nobody else to help.

I stuck it out for another year before the constant criticism and ridiculously long hours got to me. But this was the late 90’s, jobs were easy to find. I found another one. It was somehow worse than the first two. I had managed to refine some of my people skills and learned how to avoid a few of the landmines that the “business people” laid for unsuspecting programmers, but this third place had the same high turnover the other two had and in no time I was maintaining undocumented software whose intended function nobody even fully remembered.

I moved on to my fourth job in as many years. It was no better. We put together a desktop application and it worked pretty well, but they wanted us to port it to Citrix so that they could distribute it. They expected that to happen in a couple of weeks. Everybody but me quit.

It was then that I realized one of two things were true: either every software organization is ridiculously unreasonably dysfunctional, or the types of software organizations that would hire me were ridiculously unreasonably dysfunctional.