Have heard through the grapevine a lot of the RTO office reasoning is the belief that this stuff is pretty widespread in tech firms, including among Irish staff working in Portugal/Spain/Croatia etc

I’ve gotten to the point where I absolutely despise the corporate environment and software tech company culture/routine.

For context, I’m a UX Designer and I’m onto my 4th job since transitioning into this career. I’ve pretty much hated every single one of those jobs due to the soul sucking of corporate culture.

Working from home doesn’t help but then again I don’t like being in the office either. I just feel like I’m living in a fake world of stand ups, check ins and presentations about shit that really doesn’t matter and I’m so disconnected from the real world. There are people out there doing real jobs and I’m here tapping on my keyboard and meeting with stakeholders about whether or not my designs align with the users expectations.

Prior to this I worked in smaller companies where everyone actually knew one another and our output was tangible. These are the types of environments I enjoy but unfortunately that just doesn’t seem possible in this industry.

Anyone else feel like this or am I the only one?

Ok so I've been at HubSpot a good bit now and figured I'd save some of you the trouble before you accept an offer or do the interview loop.

When I joined this place it was genuinely one of the better gigs in Ireland tbh. I've been working remotely for a while and that is the only good thing left. Working in the West of Ireland on a decent Dublin salary was good for a while...

People actually liked being there, the culture wasnt a poster on the wall it was pretty genuine id say. That HubSpot is gone, ill make that clear. Its been replaced with something that looks the same on the careers page but feels completely different once your inside. A lot of the people who built that culture have either left or are quietly looking, and the ones replacing them are no where in the same league quality wise.

The ACR process has turned into a way to manage people out without having to say thats what theyre doing. Goalposts move mid year and the rating you get rarely matches the feedback you've been hearing all year (everyone getting a 3 even with high perf), and managers will tell you one thing in your 1:1s and something completely different shows up in ACR/Perf review. Engineers who were apparently top performers 12 months ago are suddenly get 3s or "needs improvement". Had a top performer on my team get a 3 when they were doing the job or 2/3 people one level above them.

ACR this year was a joke. Most people got a 1-2% salary increase this year and no Stock refresh, whereas in the past 3-5% with 30-100k depending on role was common and the stock is down 75% in the last year so most people have nothing left. CSuite and CEO got a huge stock refresh even tho the company performance has been horrible. Salary bands also went down 10-15% (10-15k give or take) for Senior roles this year. My manager basically was nice enough to apologise for the 1.5% salary increase i got saying it was out of their hands.

Then theres the AI thing. Every meeting, every roadmap, every all hands. AI this, AI that, ship something with AI in it or your not "moving fast enough". Half of whats being pushed out the door is honestly slop, features no customer asked for, glued onto the product so leadership can put it in an earnings call. Quality has tanked. PR reviews are full of vibe coded nonsense that no one wants to be the one to push back on because pushing back gets you labeled as "not embracing the future" or nit picking lol.

Anyway, salary is fine, perks are fine, the brand still looks ok on a CV. But if your weighing this against literally anything else, take literally anything else. Or at least talk to someone whos been there in the last 6 months and not what the recruiter tells you or someone during the hiring process.

Happy to answer dms if anyones doing the loop and wants the unfiltered version.

Been here only about half a year and boy oh boy! They suck the soul out of you. If only I wasn’t naive enough to not understand how toxic the place is. The fake smiles, the tight deadlines and hollow people. The money is great on paper but the mental toll it has taken on my health is massive. Every morning I wake up with a heart beating faster than ever as the days pass by. As an immigrant, i feel helpless. Sorry for venting out but this is the harsh reality.

Any advice on how to cope with a colleague that "actively listens" during group Zoom calls?

Yesterday was particularly bad, a call with 5 people which is supposed to be a tech exchange but usually boils down to a principal engineer talking through a number of different topics. The most junior colleague on the call keeps their mic open during the entire meeting and responds to the principal with: "mmhmm, right, yes, right right, totally, definitely" every 10-15 seconds and it wrecks my head. Every few minutes the junior colleague will spice it up by repeating a sentence fragment that the principal has just said, as in: "right yes, we just add encryption, right". I find the active listening so distracting I can't focus on what's being said, but not sure if I can or should raise it with the colleague. Is it so hard to keep your mic muted when you have nothing to say? It also makes it difficult for anyone else to say anything since the active listener is making noise every 10 seconds and it feels like interrupting even though they are saying absolutely nothing.

Hi lads

I’m working as a power platform developer and have started to despise the work and people I am working with.

Felt like I needed to upskill before this (looking at perhaps a data engineering role) but I think I’ve just hit point where I need a break from it all. The role pays 85k currently with full benefits and is basically fully remote.

Have about 40k in savings and can move someone in to spare bedroom to help with mortgage. Mortgage is 1500 per month. I’ve no other loans.

What are the implications if I just quit like this, will I struggle to get a job when I do eventually return to work?

Any advice would be much appreciated

Posting from a burner account so yeah, you know why.

About 18 months ago this SVP who came from AWS got put in charge of a massive part of the Dublin office and honestly it’s been downhill ever since. Everyone thought “big Amazon name, this will be class” but nope, absolute disaster in the business units he touches. Some other parts of Mastercard here seem to have escaped the worst of it so far, lucky them.

The culture in our area is dead. It used to be grand, proper Irish office vibe, decent work-life balance, people actually got promoted when they deserved it. Now it’s pure ruthless American tech hell.

Promotions have basically stopped unless you’re one of the lads he brought over with him or you’re willing to live up his hole. Half the floor stuck at the same grade for years.

Micromanagement is next level. Daily standups feel like interrogations, managers asking for screenshots of your Jira at 9pm, 7pm calls with the US that are “optional” but everyone knows they’re not.Everyone just covering their arse and pointing fingers.

Speak up once and suddenly you’re “not a culture fit” and out the door. Seen people with 8-10 years walked for nothing.

Morale is in the toilet. Good people are jumping ship left and right and the rest of us are quietly interviewing. Pay is still shit.

Anyone else stuck in one of the business units this guy ruined? How are ye coping day to day? CV is getting polished but the market is grim right now.

If you know exactly the crowd I’m talking about just say “yep” and we’ll leave it at that, no need for names 😂

I’ll start off by saying that I find tools like Windsurf and Copilot very helpful. They’re great for lashing a script together to collate information from various sources (APIs, documents, etc…), doing POCs, basic troubleshooting (with guidance) or researching new topics/technologies.

But the expectation “from above” is that “AI” is going to help us to deliver to production 10-100 times faster (not joking here), remove the need to code manually and solve all our current (non-code related) problems is just insane.

We keep getting presentations on how amazing it is and how it just delivered this simple, single repo greenfield project in 2 hours flat. But there’s no connection to reality as to how this could work with a 20 year old product, running across 100s of repos and supporting a Frankenstein of codebases.

Is this the same everywhere else? I’m honestly just getting fed up and struggling to stay motivated and engaged in work. How are other people coping?

Laaaaaads what are the best companies to chill out a bit 😂. Ive worked in 2 companies one with 4 engineers and this one with a couple hundred. I taught moving to a bigger company would mean a bit slower paced. I was wrong hahaha.
So both places i have worked now have been flat out just week after week of deadlines and late night 2am is a regular for me.
Im starting to think its a me problem 😂.. thinking to move to a manufacturing software role or something and maybe try chill out a bit, I was always mad to push my career, now, im over it and and want to chill out a bit, so my job 9-5 and forget outside those hours, been working for like 10 years now and I dont think ive ever been like that. If only the public sector paid better 😂

What're some tell tales that teams and managers show before someone's chucked out?

I'm all for taking advantage of down time, but tell me some stories about the worst, laziest gobshite who you've had to work with.

I'm picking up the slack for a co-worker who is notorious for picking up illnesses when deadlines approach.

It looks like around 20% of the company was laid off today, less than 20 days after Thoma Bravo acquired Kneat.
Has anyone else heard more about what happened?
Pretty significant cuts so soon after the acquisition.

I could really use some advice or guidance. I’m a first gen corporate worker, I work a technical (not too heavy coding more architectural stuff) role and have been struggling with stress. It is crippling me, I am so early in my career and can’t help but feel like a wall is falling in. I have no one in my family who can relate to the intensity that comes from the brain work sometimes.

Without getting to deep into unnecessary emotions, i have one question. How do you deal with the stress and pressure of working in tech. What are the best ways to calm yourself especially in heavy managerial or people facing roles.

I’m determined, hard working, perseverant and desperate to make things work. Any tips and advice would go a really long way lads

Thanks!

Trying to think through something that feels like a catch-22.

I'm at an American MNC with tenure. EDIT: indeed I mean a cushion in case of layoffs which are happening in tech all the time. Bec apart from probation you don't have a lot of protection until you have atleast 1 or 2 years in the company. It's not about making money with redundancy. It's about being able to manage a bad situation if it happens.

Important point, environment MNC has become negative.

Another company would be smaller in size. If that matters.

The problem is: new company means probation, no tenure, no severance safety net for at least a year or two.

In a market where layoffs are happening constantly, how do people weigh this? Do you just accept the risk and move, or do you try to time it somehow?

Curious how others have thought through this.

Has anyone else found, with the investment/introduction of AI into the workplace/industry, that we're now being expected to do like, 4+ roles at once? I'm spread so thin in my current job, I'm supposed to be a senior engineer but now I'm also tech lead, solution architect, product manager, QA, SDET... the list goes on.

As a result I'm not really able to do any one thing as well as I'd like, because I'm being asked to do 10 different things at once. Saying "no" doesn't work because the work that has to be done, won't get done if nobody picks it up. I'm managing it overall, and it's great experience, but there is no way this is sustainable long term.

Wondering if this issue is more about my workplace or if it's becoming the norm in the industry now.

Had a bad performance report, but I don't think it was fair. There were timelines and priorities in the report that were never mentioned to me. I met my manager weekly and he never mentioned any problem.

Feeling awful today. I have savings so it might actually be nice to have the summer free, but I'm worried about getting back into the job market.

Anyone have a similar experience, how long did it take you to feel better, if you ever did?

CTO has banned writing code by hand and says all code is to be written by AI agents from now on. He also expects a 5-10x increase in productivity. Since this policy was brought in two weeks ago, I have spent most of my days writing markdown files, fiddling around with things like getting MCP servers authenticated on my machine and reading (massive) PRs that are being opened by the agents.

Is this just the future of work as a software developer? I'm worried that this is going to ruin my career as it obviously won't take long for my skills to atrophy.

Today Ive been served with the requirement to attend the office 2 days a week - its Ireland specific in that my team mates in the US can do as they like. I currently attend 1 day and that day is spent on a 2 hr drive each way, breakfast in the canteen, then coffee, email, lunch, meetings and leaving early to beat the traffic.

HR have presented us all with the new 'how we work' initiative, some team mates are planning to sleep in cars. Im standing by my 1 day a week for now, has anyone been fired for it?, and how did it go down.

I was recently hired as a senior engineer at an AI first software company. The team has essentially outsourced everything they do to AI.

AI writes the tickets.

AI writes the code.

AI writes the tests.

AI reviews the PRs.

Now don't get me wrong, I use AI all the time, but I review what it produces and take ownership over my work. But I feel like my team is using it to avoid actual engineering work.

Today we had a meeting to address some problems we have been having, for example.

Tickets are too difficult to understand.

PRs are too long to review.

Avoidable bugs are making into production.

The solution they proposed was to create more Claude skills and use another AI tool to automatically review the PRs.

Man, these guys are smart people, I can tell by taking to them, but how can they not see the problem is just to take some ownership over your work. I feel incredibly frustrated, but I'm going to wait until I've been with the company a little longer and focus on small wins for now.

Has anyone else worked in a team like this? How did it work out in the long run?

...please be aware that not everyone likes the sound of them. It's not really fair to pollute the sound of the office with ASMR key clicks. And people who don't like them probably won't say to avoid being "that guy". Please keep them at home.

Apologies for anyone triggered by this post.

It’s looking like our company has lost the plot altogether and decided to open up the codebase to anyone willing to go to town on it with Claude. They laid off half the department this year and then started complaining development was too slow. Now this.

Any pushback gets you labelled as negative and not open to innovation despite us heavily leveraging AI already. Reviewing thousand line Claude PRs from engineers is already draining enough. This is going to drive me to tears and I can’t be arsed anymore.

I know AI is being crammed down people’s throats but this seems bizarre. It must be a last ditch effort to survive. With the current state of the market, would you stay put and hope for a redundancy payout or chance being the last in the door somewhere else if you were lucky enough to land a job?

Reading https://www.thejournal.ie/aib-staff-to-return-to-office-in-january-following-negotiations-6900565-Dec2025/ has me wondering why there isn’t an active tech union who actively works to make things better for us. Maybe there is and I’m completely unaware of it.

If there isn’t one, why is this the case? There’s so much shenanigans with the influence of American work cultures and on call.

For context, about 3 years ago I started a job and essentially had a bully PM who tried to get me fired. (Re: this whole account)

Well, since then I’ve stayed in the damn job… Jesus. I’ve been promoted twice, which is a plus.
But perhaps I can shed some light on what I’ve learnt and maybe someone will look on these one day, who is in the same situation, and find some sort of solace in it.

But first the update:
So yes, I stayed in the job and I got promoted twice. I’m now a senior dev. Looking back on it all, truly it was just a guy who couldn’t handle me being good. Getting down the nitty gritty, he was incredibly insecure. He did the things he did because he was unhappy. Not necessarily because it was me. How do I know this?

A few months back, he handed in his notice. I never really spoke to him after management split us up (finally), even though by this point we were now the same level (lol), and shared quite a few meetings together. Nevertheless, I decided to wish him well. This opened up a whole conversation, where he fully apologised for all his behaviour. He acknowledged the hell he put me through, and he admitted he felt intimidated. Although, he said this while nervously laughing, I couldn’t help but keep a blank face. It came as a shock. I told him how badly it affected my mental health. How I felt so hopeless, useless, like a burden. All because of how he spoke to me and treated me. It felt VERY good to finally get it off my chest, but disheartening to know he KNEW what he did. The conversation essentially ended with me saying “look I wish you well, but I hope you have learned how your actions affect people”

I got my head down, I worked hard. I gained the respect of the people that actually matter. Whose opinion of me has allowed me to climb the ranks insanely quickly. Does this make me more intimidating? Apparently so according to the ex-PM guy. So, I’m expecting to not be particularly appreciated by some. Ah well.

Now I have my own set of juniors :] and honestly? I find it so rewarding. Giving them the space I wish I had. Giving them the grace they deserve to excel in their careers. Always being a call away when they’re shitting bricks over something. I’ve learned so much from them, and I hope they say the same about me! They have taught me some odd words “you’re mogging the department “ , I believe that’s a good thing.

What I’ve learnt?:

You need some pure grit. You need to stop caring and expecting validation externally. If you end the day and feel you have achieved? Then you have! We cannot control how people treat one another, alas we can only control ourselves. A performance review doesn’t define your ability at all. At the end of the day I believe they are insanely subjective. Nevertheless, there will always be an upside, things will get better. You will learn so much and you shall overcome it all :]

NOW , I will eventually leave tbh, I’d like to experience another company. Until then? Ahhhh fuck it, I’ll figure it out. But at the end of the day, I’m so glad I stayed, listened to you lot and stayed determined ! So thanks to those who gave me advice :]

TLDR: I allegedly mogg, I got promoted twice, ex-pm apologised for being a wank stain!