I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

So management posted an article "10 signs you suck at your job" in the lunch room. It's pretty passive-aggressive; I wish I could find the link to it somewhere to post here.

Would you post the similar article "10 signs you're not management material" in there as well?

We were 4 dudes developing this little disposable material management system for a course in college, and we had to write documentation and present on the last day of class. Second week into the course and one dude goes rouge, not taking phonecalls nor replying to messages, just goes to class and does not get together with us to make progress. Neddless to say the other three of us had to do all the work. Fast forward to last day, all of us wondering where this dude could be. He shows up 6 mins before the presentation, already late, reads like 3 pages of the doc, and decides he will be the lead presenter.

>Mfw he takes over and starts bs'ing the whole thing.
>Mfw he mentions the possibility of the system to be extrapolated to manage salami in a butchery.
>Mfw the professor seemed to have swallowed all that bs like cake.
>Mfw we get an A, including him.
>Mfw I have no face

I have kind of been put in charge of software development in one department of the company I work at. Only myself and a developer in the IT department have ever done programming as our main jobs and follow formal processes. The issue I am having is I don't know how to approach some co-workers assisting me part time with programming to tell them the code they wrote needs major refactoring. Just after a short review there are hundreds of lines of duplicated code and code that is duplicating features built into the framework etc. I just hate conflict and don't know how to tell them we have a lot of work to do. Any advice?

So, I've been with my current employer four years now, three and a half of which have been spent working as a time material developer for a huge fashion company. I've been trying to get out of It for the past six months only for my exit to be postponed everytime. There's also no clear idea as to what I would be moved to, going forward. Nobody Is telling me a thing and I think other developers will be moved to different projects before I do.

That's why I took matters into my own hands and started getting back into the recruitement process. I'm about to receive an offer. A fairly better one.

The thing is, I wanna use such offer to see if my current employer can reedem himself and propose to me a good counter offer. I'm not in the mood of starting over, but I want security and management to have a fucking idea of what my future Is gonna be like at this fucking company.

What do you guys think? Am I playing with Fire?