I am using a throwaway to prevent recognition. Please excuse my poor language, it has been a long day..
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Honestly, I will never consider any software engineering positions again.
And most of the reason I despise that title comes from the following story.
I was approached by a client that was running a company in the energy sector, they had a failed product and needed assistance.
The product was a joke, and their internal team was not capable of producing software worth selling, so I went into the company with another programmer and a UX designer that had experience in building products.
After some back and forth we found a alternative niche for them to enter, we built out various semi-functioning demos to show customers, letting us probe what they actually needed.
And bit-by-bit we built out an actual product that had a decent market fit, raised a few rounds, and grew the company.
Five years later, the company had gone from being worthless to being valued at several hundred million dollars.
However, my problem was with the management, even after serving them a unicorn on a silver platter while they had been asleep at the wheel.
They only ever considered us as "programmers", we werent "worthy" of them.
We brought all their customers, did all their sales, all the design, positioning, strategy, pitching, machine learning, development and even organized their god damn company events.
Meanwhile they kept having fancy dinners with leads that never went anywhere, hired a bunch of project managers that did nothing but slow us down, played ping-pong, and promoted their friends to executive level positions.
Near the end, they invited us to a special event, saying they where going to give us a reward for all the hard work.
We travelled an entire day to meet up at the location, and the only thing that met us was a stage with a drunk executive babbling about one of the trips he and his friend did to meet a potential customer, and about how that was the defining moment for their success. (It was not, they didn't even last three meetings.)
And that was pretty much the moment I snapped, not visibly, but it made me finally decide to withdraw from the project.
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After that, I tried doing projects for a few other clients, but I was no longer really capable of functioning in a professional setting, so I ended up withdrawing from all of them.
I get that I was naive, and honestly, I didnt even expect a reward, I was simply too obsessed with the project to think about that.
But the sheer lack of respect from the management and project managers, treating us like "code-monkeys".
We built out the entire company, the vision, the strategy, and the product, and then they decide to hire a bunch of project managers to somehow "manage" or "control" us, treating us like we where unable to understand the strategy of the "higher ups", leaving us out of important meetings, and started micro-managing us.
In the end, something inside me broke, I ended up hating project managers (and most other people that think if you know how to write code, you are mentally unable to do anything else) with a passion, and I can't really function in a professional setting anymore, atleast not when other people have authority over me.
As a bit of karma to close up this rant, when we left, they lost pretty much all their momemtum, and now they are stuck with a ton of funding, but without being able to further develop their company. What was once a rocketship is now losing traction, and customers.
They have contacted us several times in the past year, trying various tactics to get us to come back, unsuccessfully.
And now they are burning up their funding by buying a bunch of other companies, as if that will solve their problem, lol.
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In the end I started a new company together with my SO, it has shown moderate success, but is by no means any unicorn, however, we have no project managers, no investors, and no worthless management.
Instead we have a small amount of revenue, and the ability to focus on making nice products for our community.
And after years of drought, it has slowly brought back the joy and passion I once felt for building things.
For me, running this company has been salvation, and some day I hope that it is successful enough to expand that freedom to other people that has gone through similar experiences.