[taknil]

Truly sorry to hear about your experiences. If you are not explicitly a founder, just do not work for companies that doesn't actually have at lease a couple of employees doing non-managerial IT work. Otherwise the founders may be inexperienced in managing IT teams and consider it okay to pile on forever more work to a stagnant IT staff and be down-right exploitative like in your first example.

When interviewing for a position, remember that you are also interviewing the company. You already know what doesn't work for you, so ask about it. Don't be shy, you're not desperate for that job, you're a developer in Berlin, people want you! What even are "productive hours"? Only the ones where you type symbols into your IDE? Revisit this article [1] from the hn front-page a few days ago then.

https://blog.feenk.com/developers-spend-most-of-their-time-f...

[ritchiea]

Thanks for the advice. I really was trying to find the right situation for me in both cases, I may just be bad at doing that. In the first case, I made sure that the company had been established for several years, and had actual clients and revenue (which were both very impressive tbh). It was a development team of 2, just the technical founder and one remove dev. I probably should have taken that as a red flag, as I discovered after working with them that the founder had cycled through many other devs on his team over the years and been unable to find people he works well with despite the business side growing. In other words, he was consistently finding/creating conflicts with his dev team & either firing them or like me they left.

The 2nd company was definitely more of a calculated risk, where I knew they had zero product & zero dev talent but thought it would be interesting to be the manager and put together a team of my own. I just didn't anticipate that after actually delivering, shipping and hiring a high performing team member (and unfortunately hiring one other team member we had to let go for performance reasons). I would then be let go rather than my contributions appreciated. Despite hearing from all sides we were on a great trajectory.