{"data":{"items":[{"id":"27570564-0025-46a5-b000-daef31ecfd67","excerpt":"My technical co-founder ghosted an investor meeting on purpose as a \"lesson,\" delivered nothing usable in ~12 months, and I rebuilt the entire product myself in 9 days. What's the actual right way to fix the equity split? I will not promote — Long post. I'm too deep in this to judge it clearly and I need outside perspe","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1vhjoyi/my_technical_cofounder_ghosted_an_investor/","role":"pain","weight":1.3564118,"occurredAt":"2026-08-06T23:06:15.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"startups","intent":"purchase_intent","painScore":0.42714286,"sentiment":-0.14285715,"confidence":0.9504387,"matchedPatterns":["terrible","would_pay","missing_feature"],"statement":"But I pay for the shared dev tooling, so I can see usage.","title":"My technical co-founder ghosted an investor meeting on purpose as a \"lesson,\" delivered nothing usable in ~12 months, and I rebuilt the entire product myself in 9 days. What's the actual right way to fix the equity split? I will not promote","body":"Long post. I'm too deep in this to judge it clearly and I need outside perspective, specifically on what to actually do now.\n\n\\-> Background:\n\nWe're both around 23, same age, no seniority gap. We've been close friends for about a decade: dinners, birthdays, the whole thing.\n\nAbout 15 months ago I came up with the idea for our B2B AI SaaS product. I did all the concept work myself: product vision, feature structure, user flows, monetization model. Then I spent the first 1-2 months building the entire frontend and design myself using AI tools, because I knew the backend would take a while and I wanted to carry as much as I could.\n\nI pushed all of that to GitHub, handed it over, and from there his part was clearly defined: build the backend, tie it together, make it a working product. He's CTO, I'm on product/business/marketing. Verbal agreement, roughly 50/50. Nothing signed, no entity formed.\n\nI financed everything: AI/dev tooling, subscriptions,… At one point I told him to upgrade to the higher-tier AI coding plans and paid for them, specifically so tooling wouldn't be a bottleneck.\n\n\\-> The \\~12 months after handover\n\nHe told me consistently that he was working almost daily, sleeping very little, sacrificing a lot. He repeatedly emphasized that he was putting in far more hours than I was. I believed him. I couldn't judge whether something should take two weeks or two months.\n\nWe set four separate launch dates. Before each one he was 100% confident we'd hit it. We missed all four,five,…\n\nFor context on the \"he pressured me constantly\" accusation that comes later: what I actually did was ask how things were going, and eventually ask, genuinely confused, how we kept missing dates he himself had been certain about.\n\nI should also say the collaboration itself had become unpleasant well before things escalated. Any time I asked a direct question about status or timelines, it turned emotional and I'd get insulted. I stayed factual throughout, which seemed to make it worse.\n\n\\-> Month \\~9: the investor meeting\n\nI managed to get a meeting with a good strategic partner/investor. In the run-up he went completely dark. No replies, no calls answered.\n\nWith about 4-5 days left, I built a working demo myself. Barely slept, ran AI coding tools (Codex, Claude) around the clock. The meeting happened with just me and went fine.  \n\nThen he resurfaced and told me the silence had been deliberate. He wanted me to experience \"the same medicine\" he'd supposedly been getting from me for months. Long emotional message: he felt treated like a pure executor rather than an equal co-founder, said I pressured him on deadlines, blamed him for delays, didn't acknowledge his sacrifices, and that he was taking back his \"rights and freedom.\"\n\nA founder conflict aimed directly at a real business meeting.\n\n\\->Trying to merge, not compete\n\nEven then I wasn't hostile. I assumed his version had to be further along, since it had been his full-time focus for months. So I proposed: let's compare both, identify the strengths in each, and merge them into one better codebase. That was genuinely the plan.\n\nI asked him to push his repo to GitHub. All that was on there at that point were my own commits and a few of his from roughly six months earlier. It took two more weeks before he actually pushed his current state.\n\nDuring that wait I kept building my own version, partly because it was fun, partly because I had more ideas I wanted in. Another multi-day stretch of nonstop AI-assisted work. Total across everything: roughly 8-9 days. By the end, my version was essentially beta-ready.\n\n\\-> The comparison\n\nWhen he finally pushed, we did it live on a call. We had AI go through both repositories in full and evaluate them against the same criteria. It took hours; we sat on that call 2-3 hours while it ran.\n\nMy repo scored roughly double his, across basically every category. His didn't meet even basic requirements: incomplete core flows, security issues, and a tech stack that didn't fit the product.\n\nHis: \\~11-12 months. Mine: 8-9 days.\n\nHonestly, I was skeptical of my own result and told him \"that can't be right.\" He was deeply offended that I'd \"believe an AI tool.\" So I said, let's check with a different one. That's when the insults started: that I don't value his work, and a lot more in that vein. I ran it through several other independent coding tools anyway. Same outcome every time. He kept dismissing all of it as biased.\n\n\\-> Proposing a path forward\n\nThe next day I told him we needed an actual solution. Two proposals:\n\n1. Use my version as the technical foundation, since nothing from his was reusable and the stack was wrong.\n\n2. Re-evaluate equity. I proposed 65/35.\n\nMy reasoning: I had the idea. I did all the concept work. I built the entire frontend and design. I financed everything. I did the networking, got us into an accelerator program, ran conversations with potential customers. I'd prepared the marketing (videos, posts, launch strategy) because I believed the launch dates. And now the technical part, which was his single defined responsibility, was also mine.\n\nHe rage-quit the call and insulted me again on the way out.\n\n\\-> What happened after\n\nSilence. I messaged, nothing came back.\n\nBut I pay for the shared dev tooling, so I can see usage. Right after that call his usage exploded: millions of tokens, top models, running essentially nonstop for four or five days. From the pattern he was barely sleeping.\n\nThen he came back and proposed we \"re-compare.\"\n\nI told him plainly that I knew what he'd been doing. He was offended again and went completely silent for another 1-2 weeks. During those weeks I worked 15+ hour days, tools running constantly, and kept pushing the product forward.\n\n**-> Meeting in person**\n\nWe eventually met up in real life. I told him I still think 65/35 is fair, and suggested we bring in an experienced third party to advise us, since we're both 22 and neither of us really knows how this should be structured.\n\nHe insulted and accused me again: that this had been my plan all along, that I wanted to take everything away from him. That he sacrificed so much more than I,…\n\nHe also said he never actually wanted to be CTO in the first place. It just seemed like a good fit at the time because he'd gone to a technical school and had some coding experience.\n\nI asked him directly: what specifically did you build, what did you concretely design or conceptualize that I can credit or reuse? Nothing came back, just insults. Not one specific thing. At one point his evidence for his own productivity was that his AI tool had told him \\~400 changed lines of code per day was a good rate.\n\nHe kept coming back to having invested far more hours than me. But that's exactly the problem: there's nothing to see for those hours. No product, no components that survived, no concepts, nothing I could point to and say \"he made that.\"\n\nHe said that he'd had to learn an enormous amount, and that he'd been going through a rough patch with family and health. I take that seriously, but it only ever surfaced once equity got concrete.\n\nHe said he wants to contribute more going forward, not just code: marketing, other areas, a broader co-founder role. But over 15 months he's had endless opportunities to show that. Every part of the business was open to him: product concepts, marketing, positioning, growth ideas, customer conversations. Nothing ever came.\n\nHe also argued he'd already conceded by agreeing to 50/50, since in his view a CTO does more and deserves more than half. And that equity should be valued through to an eventual exit, not just up to launch, which conveniently means past non-delivery doesn't count.\n\nHe proposed 52/48, tied to him covering half of all costs going forward. I said absolutely not. And then, this part is on me, I accepted something around 55/45 anyway, it was already a 3hour talk and I didn’t know what to do. A decade of friendship, a very emotional conversation, and I caved on a number I already believed was wrong.\n\n\\-> Where it stands\n\nThat was about a week ago. Since then I've kept building nonstop. He's currently on doctor-advised personal leave.\n\nThe product is fully beta-ready and effectively launch-ready, and it was already beta-ready before that last equity conversation. I gave up ground I had no reason to give up.\n\nThere's also a competitor building something similar. Not launched yet, but close enough that being late costs us.\n\nOn top of that, we both agreed months ago that we need to bring in a third, genuinely experienced developer, who will almost certainly need equity too. Which makes his actual remaining role even smaller than it already is.\n\nNothing is signed. No entity formed. I've talked to lawyers and tax advisors about how to structure it, but nothing exists on paper yet.\n\n**-> What I'm stuck on**\n\nHe's still \"CTO and co-founder.\" But consider what that's meant to describe: owning architecture, owning delivery, being the person you point to and say \"that exists because of him,\" being reachable when it matters,..\n\nEverything we have right now is my work. Concept, design, frontend, backend, business, networking, marketing.\n\n**-> What I'm asking:**\n\nI know I don't want to stay at 55/45. That number doesn't reflect anything real and I'd resent it every single day. But I don't know what the right move actually looks like from here.\n\n1. What would you actually propose in my position: a much smaller fixed stake, pure milestone-based vesting from near zero, or a clean separation? What's the realistic fair number here?\n\n2. How do you reopen a verbally agreed split without it becoming a war? Nothing is signed, no entity exists. Does that change what's reasonable to do?\n\n3. Does \"co-founder/CTO\" still apply when the entire technical output was unusable and rebuilt from scratch? Should the title change before or alongside the equity conversation?\n\n4. How do you weigh \"I'll contribute more in other areas going forward\" when there's been 15 months of opportunity and zero evidence?\n\n6. Anyone who rebuilt solo after a technical co-founder underdelivered: how did the renegotiation go, and what would you do differently?\n\nWe're both 23 and neither of us has done this before, which is probably visible in every part of this story.","offTopic":false},{"id":"a54d83f6-7594-40f8-90b1-e3ae8d20d40f","excerpt":"How can I get my Head of Product Design to actually do their job effectively? — I have been working at my current gig for 2 years now; for the most part, it's been good. Myself and another product designer started at the same time. About a year in, the C-suite gave the other designer the Head of Product Design title. A","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/UXDesign/comments/1sjgf2j/how_can_i_get_my_head_of_product_design_to/","role":"demand","weight":1.2978284,"occurredAt":"2026-04-12T14:44:22.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"UXDesign","intent":"tool_discovery","painScore":0.41142857,"sentiment":-0.42857143,"confidence":0.91951406,"matchedPatterns":["wish","is_there_a_tool","how_can_i","frustrating"],"statement":"Is there a way I can help them without taking on all their responsibilities?","title":"How can I get my Head of Product Design to actually do their job effectively?","body":"I have been working at my current gig for 2 years now; for the most part, it's been good. Myself and another product designer started at the same time. About a year in, the C-suite gave the other designer the Head of Product Design title. At first, I was excited to be able to work with someone they saw as leadership material, as for the first time in my career it would give me a very clear and direct line to mentorship.   \n  \nAlmost all of my career has been myself handling most of the UX and design tasks within an organisation. That being said, I have over 10 years’ experience across government and private (both B2B and B2C) sectors, and I am good at what I do, but very much enjoy being close to the work. \n\nI don't know much about their career other than they were within a more corporate environment at a much larger company and pivoted into UX via a bootcamp during the pandemic.   \n  \nI have sat back for the past year and listened, watched, and experienced how they've been operating. What I've been through has been incredibly frustrating, and I'm just about at the end of my rope. They seem incredibly out of their depth from both a UX and managerial perspective, and my attempts at helping them in either capacity do not seem to be working. I feel compressed into being a commandeering asshole just trying to get them to do their job.\n\nThey are consistently eating up my time by scheduling recurring meetings or ad hoc meetings in my calendar. At no stage (and I've checked) have these had an agenda, notes of preparation, or noted outcomes. They are almost always end of day and occur frequently on Fridays. I have addressed this with them; they need to be more mindful of inviting someone to a 1-hour meeting with no context titled \"Buttons\". I noted that at their level this should be SOP, and if they did this to a junior designer or a coworker with anxiety, it'd likely negatively impact them + anyone senior will get fed up with it. \n\nAs for the content of the meetings, it'll be questions like, \"Where have you used this type of button across your platform surface?\"—something that, if asked beforehand (while time-consuming), I could definitely provide.\n\nThey seem to like using meetings as a way to block out time and voice questions they can easily find the answers to themselves or talk through problems. This is fine, as rubber-ducking is a valid problem-solving tool, but the meetings are never prefaced with this, and I am never told ahead of time what they might need from me, so 20 minutes of the hour is eaten up by me darting around files. I've established a boundary with them that I will no longer accept agendaless meetings, but they keep sending them anyway.\n\nOff the back of this—and this is going to sound harsh—but they seem incapable of internally synthesising solutions to problems. They frequently parrot phrases or ideas from leadership and direct me to complete work based on these ideas without knowing why or how to achieve it. It will be extremely vague, like \"improve colour on this page\". I often have to ask them repeated follow-up questions like what's prompted this, why they believe it's an issue, etc. They never have a resolute answer and don't even bother to look at the analytics to see if the page is performing well or not. I've tried communicating that they need to provide clear context and outcomes, as it's incredibly important when assigning tasks to team members so they can complete the work without constant oversight.\n\nAdditionally, they like to absorb my work. To be honest, ordinarily I am okay with this; it's part of being a team player and the norm if you're an IC who likes to keep their head down. The issue is that the team simply isn't big enough to have this happening, as it's just me under them.\n\nThey will mention my work as part of their outcomes or reporting for the week. They will go into my files looking for conceptual artefacts to present or use. They will assign me tickets, and after I ask all the team questions to determine what actually needs to be done, once they realise the task isn't as hard as they thought, they *reassign* it to themselves.\n\nAgain, normally I would chalk this up to manager things, but they often turn off meeting transcripts, wait until others leave the room to ask me architectural questions about the project, or refuse to actually assign me a task in the project management software so there's clear ownership. They seem to prefer non-tracked, agendaless meetings for this very reason.\n\nI've stopped playing ball with a lot of the above for my own sanity, but as a result, they will go to the devs asking completely design-related questions to try to get the answers to problems they should be able to figure out. The devs will actually push back and say that this is a question design needs to answer (props to them), but it's not really helping the erosion in design authority or culture.\n\nI think they know they're struggling and the areas they're falling short, but they're doubling down on masking it all via these secretive tactics, which is beginning to cause me grief because the execs are starting to ask me about timelines for projects they are in charge of (because they know the work is large enough to be divvied up, and by that measure I should have some idea). The reality is I don’t know, because they don’t communicate or break work down unless I do it myself. Some tasks have dragged on for 6 months that should take less than a week. They also seem resistant to my advice and I think it's partially due to them being much older than me and holding the title.  \n\nIs there a way I can help them without taking on all their responsibilities? I feel exhausted trying to mentor someone who was supposed to mentor me.   \n  \nI wish I could say I was being selfless here but them constantly putting me on the spot in meetings when they can't explain the basic UX thinking behind my work they've pilfered without me knowing until it appears in a slide or leadership probing for their project status through me is stressing me out. I just want the heat off me so I can focus on the work.   \n","offTopic":false},{"id":"f0b6e906-af49-44bf-92e7-999ca667081d","excerpt":"Ask HN: How to Follow the Bosses' Wants — Probably a pretty classic story.. keep in mind this is me being affected so there&#x27;s no way I can give an impartial representation of what&#x27;s happening, but I promise I&#x27;ll try...<p>I&#x27;ve been working in a startup for 5 years now, and the startup is going throug","url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739230","role":"request","weight":0.705288,"occurredAt":"2026-01-23T23:09:15.000Z","sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","credibility":0.7,"venue":"news","intent":"howto_question","painScore":0.09,"sentiment":0.33333334,"confidence":0.6470532,"matchedPatterns":["how_can_i"],"statement":"How do I deal with this?","title":"Ask HN: How to Follow the Bosses' Wants","body":"Probably a pretty classic story.. keep in mind this is me being affected so there&#x27;s no way I can give an impartial representation of what&#x27;s happening, but I promise I&#x27;ll try...<p>I&#x27;ve been working in a startup for 5 years now, and the startup is going through growing pains to make a more formal company structure. As they do.<p>We have a new boss of my product area, who is looking to deliver on their first quarter.<p>Our product area has a long-running issue design issue that we have been trying to find a way out. This has been multiple years of discussions and proposals, a real group effort of design and feedback, and finally we have reached a point where we&#x27;ve &#x27;ve found a design that helps everyone, and so people are excited to get onto it. (It&#x27;s just event sourcing).<p>I&#x27;ve personally been leading the design of this event sourcing solution, and we&#x27;ve had an implementation strategy and parallel verification strategy etc. That the CTO himself recommended I do, and everyone is on board. There&#x27;s real excitement in the air.<p>Our new boss has come in, and over promised on Q1 deliverables, and has made a notion document ( experimenting a bit with AI to come up with a plan, as he says) - talking about little things like using DTO to abstract from the database.<p>All of the details of his plan are using keywords that don&#x27;t fit together. Like he&#x27;ll call it &quot;immutable DTO (bitemporal) event sourcing live calculation model records&quot; -- if I try to push on what this means, which part where, he says that the words all just mean the same thing and that if I want to be pedantic I can change the terminology.<p>His example source code of how this would look like is a snippet of our current code, but with &quot;FooQueryset&quot; replaced with the words &quot;list[FooDTO]&quot; and that&#x27;s all.<p>Meanwhile the plan that I have been working on and people are getting excited about is the &quot;alternative, second, backup&quot; idea. He&#x27;ll repeatedly say it won&#x27;t work and we haven&#x27;t sorted out those details and we need to make sure we add value. He&#x27;s also brought in our product team (so it&#x27;s not just me and him) - and he leads with his version first, meaning some others on the team have no clue what certain terms mean, and when they try to get clarification, he&#x27;ll butt in with how it&#x27;s just my alternative plan and that words mean the same things and we should refer to the code sample. Some seem fine with this explainer, and I&#x27;m being inadvertently aggressive when trying to ensure we&#x27;re all speaking the same language.<p>He&#x27;s talked to some other lead engineers about his plan, and he said they&#x27;re happy for it, but I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s because they&#x27;re assuming it&#x27;s the original plan under the hood (that they&#x27;ve already been happy with) or if he&#x27;s making sense and I&#x27;m actually the one who&#x27;s confused here.<p>If I didn&#x27;t have a grounding in reality I think I&#x27;d probably be in the ward ATM. How do I deal with this? Do I just ride out the inevitable year-of-pain and then bring us back to the original plan? Is this the way the corporate world works?<p>Last year, some heads-of-engineering have been happy with my work and told me they want me leading my own team. I feel like taking up that offer, but it will look like I&#x27;m just being a spoilt sport because I didn&#x27;t get my way, and really I don&#x27;t even know if I can argue against that.<p>What do I even do here?","offTopic":true},{"id":"21f17a35-baee-4223-a3d4-a098381ac9e9","excerpt":"Don't know everything, quiet quit, be mediocre. It'll save your sanity in the long run. — # The Clock that should not be\n\n\"Why is this clock 10 minutes off? It syncs to this NTP server.\"\n\n  \nThe Firewall indicates that the NTP server is responding properly, and I can confirm it is giving me the correct time.\n\n  \n\"Okay ","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1nx9z1k/dont_know_everything_quiet_quit_be_mediocre_itll/","role":"pain","weight":1.2370286,"occurredAt":"2025-10-03T20:17:41.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"sysadmin","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.6457143,"sentiment":-0.71428573,"confidence":0.75166667,"matchedPatterns":["urgent"],"statement":"Now that that's settled, why have a deadline (which was already accelerated in the first place) to just move it up again in the future?","title":"Don't know everything, quiet quit, be mediocre. It'll save your sanity in the long run.","body":"# The Clock that should not be\n\n\"Why is this clock 10 minutes off? It syncs to this NTP server.\"\n\n  \nThe Firewall indicates that the NTP server is responding properly, and I can confirm it is giving me the correct time.\n\n  \n\"Okay but it's still off\"\n\n  \nAnd that's my fucking problem how? I don't manage it. I didn't purchase it. I was blissfully unaware of its existence until you brought this misfortune upon me. Go fucking reboot it or get a new one.\n\n# Our firewalls suck ass, we spent millions on these, fix pls\n\n\"Our IPSec tunnels are dropping between these two sites, and when it does, our firewall stops forwarding your routes to our switches\"\n\n\n\nOkay? My device is doing its job, and yours isn't, and I'm expected to jump through hoops and go sailing through waves of low-level vendor support for an issue that isn't occurring on my device? I'm giving you the routes again once it re-establishes.\n\nYou're getting our routes, they exist in your routing table. YOU are not sending them forward when these drops occur. (because drops on the internet are normal, shit happens, sometimes an entire ISP in India, China, Russia, etc, lays claim to the entire internet, just another Tuesday.)\n\n\n\nMaybe if you updated your gear more than never, it might not have so many issues. \n\n\n\nMaybe if you selected a better solution back during the PoC when you and only you got to trial both solutions to unilaterally decide on a direction for the company and spending millions upon millions of dollars, we wouldn't be having this conversation. \n\n\n\nAdditionally, you don't even do firewall rules with the NGFWs, so what does it fucking matter? You might as well have not deployed them in the first place if you didn't plan on doing anything with them, but sure, now I have to migrate my working solution, **without** a shitty cloud managed platform that has had multiple outages since we had the misfortune to be forced to use it, to yours and replicate my work so we can have a unified infrastructure.\n\n\n\nWhich, I'm not opposed to, but maybe listen to the guy who made the working unified infrastructure for our side of the business or at least involve him in the PoC. Multi-billion dollar shitshow of a company.\n\n# Solarwinds. That's it. That's the title.\n\n\"Why didn't we get an alert in Solarwinds for this?\"\n\n  \nBecause you decided to fucking spend money on Solarwinds in the year 2025.\n\n# Switch Failure = Panic Brain\n\n\"We had a switch fail here yesterday, but I don't know what ports were configured where\"\n\n\n\nOkay, well maybe if you used the Solarwinds NCM to download the old config, you would know. Here you go. If I have to explain this to you again, I'm going to explode. Literally. My walls will be a Christmas tree of gore and disappointment in you.\n\n\n\n(Also, we could still replace all of Solarwinds with Zabbix and Gitlab for backups, like I suggested, but I don't get any say in how the circus is run, nor which monkeys we employ)\n\n# Let's cut staff and accelerate ALL OF THE THINGS!\n\nWe've lost an entire teams worth of people to cuts and them leaving for better things (go get that bag and leave this shitshow), but can you make your project be done in 3 quarters instead of a year?\n\n\n\n*Two quarters later and over 70% done*\n\n\n\nYeah, we're going to need to wrap this up by the end of this quarter, *insert VP name* isn't happy with it.\n\n\n\nWell, firstly, through staffing us properly, all things are possible, so jot that down. Next, can you just take a big step back and literally fuck your own face? \n\n\n\nNow that that's settled, why have a deadline (which was already accelerated in the first place) to just move it up again in the future? Why have dates at all? Why have work hours at all? We should just work until its done like the overtime exempt slaves we are, right?\n\n\n\n\"We're not going to have the capacity to do all of these in the next quarter, as we barely had capacity for  *insert other project not related to above* this quarter.\"\n\n\n\n*Proceeds to try and do it anyways*\n\n\n\n\"Guys, we're really falling behind here, why isn't it going to schedule?\" (\"Who do I scapegoat for this?\")\n\n# ISE ISE Baby\n\nThis client is failing authorization, it should be authorized as they have a business use-case for it, and it needs to be added to the whitelist, so I ask our resident ISE expert to get this added.\n\n*crickets*\n\n*crickets*\n\n*crickets*\n\nI swear he never responds because he is the only person who is allowed to touch ISE and purposefully does his job slowly and never teaches others for job security, which honestly is what I should do, but I'm too well established as the person that knows all at this point.\n\n# The DB Admin who cannot be a wizard (For he cannot spell)\n\n\"I'm having issues connecting our SQL monitor into your database, can you check if this is a firewall issue?\"\n\n\n\nWell, having already created that rule when this project kickoff happened, I doubt it, but I'll take a look.\n\n*Shows traffic flowing just fine*\n\n  \nHere you go, it's reaching it, can you show me the error?\n\n  \n*Something along the lines of failed to connect*\n\n\n\n\"Can we hop on a call to discuss?\"\n\n  \nI fucking wish I could say no, but sure. Show me what you're doing with it.\n\n  \n*notices that he is completely misspelling the DB name and user account, advises to fix*\n\n\n\nNo, not like that, two r's. No, r then another r. No, it's not Windows authentication, you asked for this to be setup as a local DB user. Yes, I'm sure. You didn't spell the username right. Yes, still two r's.\n\n\n\n\"Wow, it's working now, thanks for your help!\"\n\n  \nGlad I get paid six figures to be a fucking spell checker for a guy who makes more than me.\n\n# Open Source is Scary!\n\n\"We'd like to see about supporting the open-source products you use, can you get quotes and setup meetings for these so we can get them supported?\"\n\n\n\nSure, I'm all for that. You are actually going to spend the money, right?\n\nRight?\n\n\n\n\"This really isn't in the budget for this year, so we can't proceed\"\n\n\n\nOkay, but we don't have a replacement for what I'm doing with these, so I am going to continue using them and encourage my team to keep using them. The code is all in a private GitLab which is also backed up nightly, and so are all the servers for this. We also collectively wasted probably $3,000 in man hours going through these PoCs and meetings with the vendor. Did you at least put it in the budget for next year?\n\n  \n\"We really don't have the budget and we're looking to cut costs at this time\"\n\n\n\nYeah, when aren't you? Fucking MBAs focusing on quarterly share prices because capitalism is in its inevitable march towards the enshittification of everything. \n\n\n\nHow's that VMware support renewal working out for you? \n\n\n\nAlso, we paid $1000 per site for shitty internet managed through our 3rd party, and I've shown you a better and cheaper way to do this, but no, let's cut costs on the things making us more efficient and providing solutions for problems YOU don't have answers to. \n\n\n\nAlso, I've proven how its cheaper to send our guys out there than to constantly hire contractors, or we could deploy this solution to access our gear remotely since we have locations all over the globe, but yeah, we need to cut costs alright.\n\n\n\nEven if you are the one who solves everything, it doesn't mean you get more say, more direction, or more pay. You just get everyone hitting you up at every hour of the day to do things that they could probably figured out if they bothered to learn how to use google.\n\n\n\nAnd if I have one more phone call with my new boss (The same new boss as the number of years I've been working at this shitshow) where I have to listen to him breathe and slowly come to the realization that I'm correct, but still not work to correct the issue, I am going to have my own joker moment (and look forward to receiving my reddit cares notification from this post).\n\n\n\nNo, I don't want to work through this on a call with you, I can't think and listen to your drivel at the same time.\n\n  \nThe only thing I'll miss about this place are the people who have already left, and the one guy who constantly misspells \"you're welcome\" because he is consistently good with the quality of his work, following directions, and the way he spells that sentence. Maybe it is my welcome after all.","offTopic":true},{"id":"5123045b-ab8b-4b87-b2b1-ba116a14f357","excerpt":"26F stuck in a job I've outgrown, Roast my plan or tell me what I'm missing ? — Throwaway, coworkers lurk everywhere.\n\nTL;DR at the bottom if you don't want the full story, but the details are kind of the point, so read if you can.\n\nI've had six months of \"I'll start tomorrow\" and I'm done being the only person in this","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/comments/1vvg6yl/26f_stuck_in_a_job_ive_outgrown_roast_my_plan_or/","role":"pain","weight":1.0348157,"occurredAt":"2026-08-22T16:01:26.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"careerguidance","intent":"feature_request","painScore":0.49333334,"sentiment":-0.33333334,"confidence":0.6929569,"matchedPatterns":["missing_feature","urgent"],"statement":"26F stuck in a job I've outgrown, Roast my plan or tell me what I'm missing ?.","title":"26F stuck in a job I've outgrown, Roast my plan or tell me what I'm missing ?","body":"Throwaway, coworkers lurk everywhere.\n\nTL;DR at the bottom if you don't want the full story, but the details are kind of the point, so read if you can.\n\nI've had six months of \"I'll start tomorrow\" and I'm done being the only person in this conversation. Laying it all out below because I genuinely can't tell anymore if I'm overthinking the office politics, underselling my own skills, or both.\n\n**\"You're clearly good at this, why haven't you started?\"**\n\nThat's the question I can't answer myself, so I'm asking Reddit.\n\nPeople Systems Analyst on Oracle HCM at a large global company since Sept 2024. Before that, Data Analyst on a pharma account, a gap, then this role. I got a raise this year, honestly probably because they can't easily replace me, not because anyone's thrilled with my work. Some days the job genuinely feels like glorified HR admin dressed up with an \"analyst\" title. Not sure if that's this company or just what the role is everywhere.\n\nSavings after two years working: on the low side for the tenure. I own that too.\n\n**The part that lit a fire under me**\n\nMy manager, who actually had my back, is being pushed out, demoted, then engineered his own exit. Separately, the manager of an adjacent technical team told me when I joined I was \"hired for meagre work,\" recently dumped his team's mess up on mine to clean up, then told my new manager I ask too many questions and should \"sit with the other team instead.\" He's has been on a lookout for hiring for a role that overlaps with mine. It reports to him.\n\nI'm not here to relitigate the politics. I mention it because it's the thing that finally made \"I need to leave\" feel urgent instead of theoretical and because there IS a counter data point: senior leadership has pushed back on this manager's team before, so it's not a complete black box where nothing ever sticks.\n\n**The actual plan I've been sitting on for 6 months, untouched**\n\n\\- Target: Oracle HCM Functional Consulting at a Big 4 or Tier 1 firm.\n\n\\- The one thing standing between me and applying: a specific Oracle HCM implementation certification. Study material bought/bookmarked. Opened zero times.\n\n\\- Side track I keep half considering: CAT + MBA (ISB/IIM) in 2–3 years for a longer leadership path. One cold mock, decent score, never touched again.\n\n\\- Known weak spot either way: my SQL isn't where it needs to be.\n\n**Where I actually want your take, not sympathy**\n\n1. Is HCM Functional Consulting really the highest-leverage move from 2 years of mostly operational Oracle HCM experience, or is the gap to \"consulting level\" bigger than I think?\n\n2. If you've made an HR systems analyst → consulting jump: what actually closed the gap? The cert, client exposure, a lateral move first, something else?\n\n3. Running CAT/MBA and the consulting cert as parallel tracks, realistic, or am I just diluting focus on both because starting either one feels too big?\n\n4. Straight vote: **exit route first (cert + applications) or try to outlast the internal politics first**, given there's actual precedent that leadership sometimes acts on documented patterns?\n\nTell me if I'm overthinking this, underselling myself, or just stalling. I can take blunt.\n\n**TL;DR**: 26F, 2 years into an Oracle HCM analyst role that's started to feel like HR admin with extra steps, dealing with an adjacent manager who's actively working against me, sitting on an unfinished certification that's the only thing between me and applying to Oracle HCM consulting roles, and I've made zero progress on it in 6 months. Also weighing CAT/MBA as a parallel or alternate path. Want honest opinions on the actual pivot, not just \"you should leave.\"\n\n","offTopic":true},{"id":"030595d9-3299-4284-97fa-bbb777bdd57c","excerpt":"Unresponsive PM, how to deal with it? — Hi everyone,\n\nI'm looking for advice as to how to move forward with an unresponsive PM I'm dealing with.\n\nContext: Feb this year my company went through a pretty harsh lay-off round, 2-3 ppl from every department were let go, one of those ppl was the PM I reported to. He was a re","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1vt1tf5/unresponsive_pm_how_to_deal_with_it/","role":"pain","weight":1.0176916,"occurredAt":"2026-08-19T22:49:47.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.54636365,"sentiment":-0.09090909,"confidence":0.6581192,"matchedPatterns":["terrible"],"statement":"Best case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, everything respectfully in a \"we need to improve\" manner instead of \"your buddy is useless\" – and maybe things do improve.","title":"Unresponsive PM, how to deal with it?","body":"Hi everyone,\n\nI'm looking for advice as to how to move forward with an unresponsive PM I'm dealing with.\n\nContext: Feb this year my company went through a pretty harsh lay-off round, 2-3 ppl from every department were let go, one of those ppl was the PM I reported to. He was a really good PM, a real go-getter. He was replaced by a content design guy who was \"promoted\" to PM, this content design guy also happens to be buddies with the CTO from a previous company. That, and my previous PM being very vocal about things he disliked about our processes led to this.\n\n  \nSo, sure, I might be a little biased against this guy because he replaced a very competent person just because of nepotism basically. I'm trying to push that feeling aside tho. The problem is that this new PM, the content design guy, isn't just not a go-getter, he isn't responsive at all. About all the negative traits he brings to the table we have:\n\n\\- He makes a town hall meeting to decide on every little thing, he asks the designers or the QA for product feedback, things that he should decide. He is unable to make one single decision. \n\n\\- He abuses DM, like instead of kicking a thread on the dev or design channel, he just messages a bunch of ppl privately and we all miss context about things going on.\n\n\\- Doesn't keep consistency for any processes. We have decided that we would start using Google Docs to spec the features out so we could talk about them in there. We did that once. After that he decided he would use JIRA tickets as the spec. Then not even that, we coded a POC and because it \"looked good\" went out with that.\n\n\\- I pinged him on Slack asking for product decision feedback and he doesn't reply until next day, some times he never does reply at all!\n\n\\- We, the dev team, were running out of things to do, so I drafted some specs for some low-hanging fruit we could pull, shared those specs and never got any feedback from him.\n\nAll this being said, what the f am I supposed to do?\n\nAgain, this guy is buddies with the CTO from a previous job, and the CTO is the only person I think I can bring this up to, as my engineer manager has lost any will to do anything in the company. \n\nIs it worth talking about this with the CTO? I've always been proud of my skill to not shy away from difficult situations, but for the first time in my carrer I kinda feel there are no options to move forward.\n\nBest case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, everything respectfully in a \"we need to improve\" manner instead of \"your buddy is useless\" – and maybe things do improve.\n\nWorst case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, he wipes his ass with my feedback and puts me on the chipping block for the next lay-off round.\n\nI don't, has anyone gone through this situation ever? \n\n","offTopic":false},{"id":"8e5da406-482a-4f0b-a04c-bc28f62a1742","excerpt":"3 Months at job and I feel like I don't fit. Advice please. — Earlier this year it became apparent that my job as an IT Project Manager at a Fortune 500 company with a large office located in a smaller town in the midwest was under threat of being eliminated. So, I jumped ship.\n\nI ended up at a way smaller company and ","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/careeradvice/comments/1vvh641/3_months_at_job_and_i_feel_like_i_dont_fit_advice/","role":"pain","weight":0.9105386,"occurredAt":"2026-08-22T16:40:18.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"careeradvice","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.58,"sentiment":-0.25,"confidence":0.57629025,"matchedPatterns":["frustrating"],"statement":"When I started using some tools to help me get everything organized, I had several people get frustrated with me because I upset the apple cart.","title":"3 Months at job and I feel like I don't fit. Advice please.","body":"Earlier this year it became apparent that my job as an IT Project Manager at a Fortune 500 company with a large office located in a smaller town in the midwest was under threat of being eliminated. So, I jumped ship.\n\nI ended up at a way smaller company and I've gone from managing 3-4 large enterprise wide projects with thousands of human hours attached to them to carrying a constant portfolio of 40-60 really tiny (8-20 hour) software implementations. All I am doing nowis sending emails to customers and entering information in to our CRM. There isn't any real project management going on. And, as the firehose has been turned on, keeping everything straight with my \"projects\" is difficult becasue I receive and close 2-4 new small projects per week.\n\nThe cons -\n\nMind numbing repition of work in a very inefficient way. When I started using some tools to help me get everything organized, I had several people get frustrated with me because I upset the apple cart. The tools being Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Lists, and Powerpoint.\n\nIt is a family run business with all of the C-Suite people having the same last name, which means no room for career growth.\n\nThey are insanely risk and change adverse, which means improvements are non-existant.\n\nCustomers do not get a consistent experience from all PMS because there is zero standardizaiton.\n\nThey are very reactive when mistakes are made and they seem to be allergic to process improvements or finding the root cause.\n\nThe office has music playing in all the hallways all the time and it plays Sirius XM oldies. It plays barely above the audible range in the hallways and gets louder the closer you get to the breakroom.\n\nThe first day I was in the office one of my coworkers said the words skin flute, blow job, ass fucking, and eating ass within the first 15 minutes of meeting him.\n\nThe work just keeps coming, no breaks, no review, just more and more orders coming in. Very little structure.\n\nThe boss talking cryptically about changes and won't share what they are.\n\nThe pros -\n\nThe pay and vacation are nearly the same as my old job. However, insurance was double what it was before. Ended up moving backwards a couple thousand dollars a year.\n\nMost people have been there for 15+ years. They've only hired 5 people in the last 5 years because they have non-existant turn over.\n\nI am doing a good job and my boss and my coworkers seem to like me, sort of.\n\nUnlimited remote work\n\nI could probably stay at this job forever and provide minimal effort and keep my job.\n\nI know that this sounds like a \"steak too juicy, lobster too buttery situation,\" but something just doesn't feel right working here. Almost every internal meeting has a lot left unsaid and hints to things changing. It's just all weird and cryptic\n\nMaybe I'm stressing over nothing.\n\nSuggestions?","offTopic":true},{"id":"bd5f7c7a-d2c0-4507-ba76-74ed467a624f","excerpt":"Asked to play \"unofficial architect\" to fix a dysfunctional team. It backfired, my manager abandoned me, and now I’m the villain. — About 8 months ago, my manager asked me to play \"architect/lead\" for our uncoordinated very dysfunctional team. The original system was built by an older embedded dev learning web developm","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1uhbn27/asked_to_play_unofficial_architect_to_fix_a/","role":"pain","weight":0.7525,"occurredAt":"2026-06-27T19:30:51.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"ExperiencedDevs","intent":"other","painScore":0.22857143,"sentiment":-0.5714286,"confidence":0.6125,"matchedPatterns":[],"statement":"Asked to play \"unofficial architect\" to fix a dysfunctional team.","title":"Asked to play \"unofficial architect\" to fix a dysfunctional team. It backfired, my manager abandoned me, and now I’m the villain.","body":"About 8 months ago, my manager asked me to play \"architect/lead\" for our uncoordinated very dysfunctional team. The original system was built by an older embedded dev learning web development by raw-dogging c++/php via SSH on the production VPS. No source control. Lots of instability.\n\nTo \"scale,\" management hired 10 devs based on a 45-minute vibe check style interview. We ended up with a range of 20+ YOE devs (yet some struggle with really basic concepts) to <5 YOE self-taught devs who have never shipped a functional product to production. Titles are completely flat though, seniority or rank does not really exist. There are maybe 3 or 4 including myself who seem to have more solid experience and know how to collaborate on a team. None have experience with c++ or php though.\n\nThe original embedded developer was remarkably territorial about the system he built. To avoid dealing with him, the manager mandated a massive, over-engineered \"microservice\" architecture bolted onto his. The team didn't understand it (some don't know what REST is), resulting in some really *interesting* technical design (like API endpoints serving SPAs that accept raw table/column lists to query a shared database two networked services away). After generating quite the tangled mess, my manager asked me to lead.\n\nAfter about 2 months or so of survey of where technical experience was at, the actual business needs and strategy, and where we were most misaligned, I drafted RFCs, seemingly got team alignment, and tried to simplify architectural strategy without trying to rewrite the world all at once. The team and manager seemed mostly bought in. However, my manager forced me to mandate tons of more discrete decisions and steamroll m,ore combative individuals instead of letting the team find consensus on shit like which ORM to use or what web framework. I was hoping for a promotion if this resulted in improvement even though it felt like the wrong approach for this team. I obliged by mandating a ton of decisions but also trying to build some group consensus through mob programming and a little forced mentorship, where less experienced individuals drove and more experienced folks (sans myself or the manager) deliberated over how to structure things like the design of some cross cutting concerns and structural patterns.\n\nSix months later, I've got a cohort of enemies and the remaining team barely shows up just to avoid the conflict.\n\nOne of the ICs who is more opinionated has really escalated his reactivity to just about every technical decision that comes up. Most of the time he gets his way and we've pivoted from decisions I was asked to mandate, or what the team collectively decided to what he wants, but he goes about it in the most hostile / aggressive manner and it's always after the fact. He filibusters strategy ex-post-facto by turning PRs into 2,000-line refactor / pissing contests. He yells and gets really elevated when he feels something doesn't jive, and will switch his position a day later if I back him up or validate his opinion. Lots of attachment to the victim role - when I ask him to share his input or reasoning, he shuts down and claims I'm not letting him participate. I have asked our manager privately to do something about this or advise me on what I can and can't do and she has told me a few times she'll do something about it - not my task. Now she has recently suggested that we're having an interpersonal conflict and that isn't her problem. I've tried having 1/1s with him but he deflects and or doesn't respond when I ask what's going on, claims he's upset with the process and that he still feels unheard. Doesn't seem like a reset is really on the table here, the motives may lay elsewhere.\n\nThen I've got a prototypical dunning kreuger junior who wants to rewrite everything in rust, use cool new protocol x, use AI to rewrite an entire legacy codebase, change our whole SDLC around how he likes to use git, etc. He's been increasingly emboldened by the aformentioned IC and openly pouts, drags unrelated conversations back to his hurt feelings about being unheard. I used to carefully and kindly redirect him but if I'm the only person doing so, it's really easy to become the bad guy responsible for why we're not prioritizing his ideas over other work. Now I just disengage.\n\nRecently, the manager completely checked out and abandoned me or any sense of participating in technical discussion. Full capitulation, now advising me to just let these two run the show despite us still being accountable for outcomes. The more passive, oft older devs stopped participating to avoid the drama. New hires seem to think I'm the dictatorial asshole who created this mess. I'm starting to pick up on some factioning happen now and I'm super uncertain on what to do here. I know I've made mistakes but I'm not sure how to proceed.\n\nLooking for advice from more experienced leads here who've worked this kind of environment. Obviously I think there's some responsibility abdication happening with management that's outside of my control, but I am looking for more serious wisdom about what I actually can do besides abandoning ship or fully checking out too.","offTopic":false}],"breakdown":[{"sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","count":7},{"sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","count":1}],"total":8}}