> I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect.
That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it.
I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative.
I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.
The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".
> Good for you. And make sure you pass the lesson on to others so they don't have to learn it the hard way.
Already did that, I worked at a place where I was the 5th programmer on the team but the most experienced and the lead, the boss was not a nice guy and worked the two youngest programmers like dogs, I soon put a stop to that with the "If you don't turn your computers off, I'm going to go flip the breaker, it's 6pm on a Friday go home".
The thing I've learnt with bosses like that is most of the time if you stand up to them they either back down, respect you for it or fire you at some point in the future (assuming you haven't already left) but in any case your life improves.
The last job I had for someone I came in at 8:30am, left at 5:30pm and outside of work I didn't answer calls, emails or issues unless I was on call, this was despite the pressure to do so that many of the other programmers succumbed to.
Team pressure is a hard thing to fight against but I've seen enough to know that a team working (actually working, not screwing around on a computer all day) 12 hour days 6 days a week can do that for a month at most and then the damage sets in and each day is less productive till you end up getting less done in 12 hours than your team would normally get done in 6.
That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it.
I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative.
I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.
The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".