(MAY 2021) Several months of casual conversations up until August 2021, on and off, very friendly and inviting tone all around. The leader seemed genuinely caring and nice. Had an interview take-home assignment before that, almost aced it with basically two small details that I missed, in an otherwise superbly executed homework project. Everybody was very happy and seemed genuinely excited to work with me (and the rest of the team is still asking when I will work with them to this day).

Eventually started at mid-September and I was a given a greenfield project extremely far away from what we talked that I'll work on. The "project" is basically "bootstrap a new side business for the CEO, by hopping on a crypto hype train"; happily I don't do everything there but everything on the backend and day-to-day Ops is 100% on me (at least the leader re-provisioned the servers when it was needed... once).

A few days ago the leader hinted that they'll try to hire new programmers soon and that I'll have to evaluate them. I don't even know if I will last this one last week of the project and he thinks I'll tolerate even further departures from my agreed-upon responsibilities!

The red flags are piling up.

On the other hand I was told that most of the people responsible for communicating with me on this project were extremely busy and had a lot on their plate in the personal sense as well... which is fine and I can relate because it happened with me in the past, but that has lead to me wasting part of the time on the project just thrashing around and trying to figure out WTF was I supposed to do exactly.

One other team member reached out yesterday and we had a very pleasant chat where he apologized for me being practically isolated in a new company... not to mention left with a huge responsibility on my lap to boot. And he kept reassuring me that the rest of the work in the company is nothing like this one project. I see no reason why he'd lie to me but who knows.

But I feel the damage has been done already. Plus I am not 20 year old anymore; you can't just tempt me with nice words and "team spirit". The money I get is on the mid-high end for EU but still far from enough for that level of stress.

...And I have an offer waiting for me, right now, for 2.3x the money, with a much more exciting (for me) work in the projects.

What's really saddening to me, and what disarmed me and made me grind my teeth but still push through, is that I was crystal clear that I wanted a more chill position, working on products with clear vision, clear requirements, and want to be given time to achieve excellence in my technical work (bonus points for the fact that technical excellence really does help the company's core products, by the way; I was told that by the leader and the other devs). I was promised all that and then... was practically thrown at a startup project with non-negotiable deadline, and with almost zero communication. My leader was routinely taking 5-6 days before answering anything I asked on Slack.

I can forget but I find myself unable to forgive. And I am not even sure I want to work on the originally agreed upon projects (just one week from now) anymore. I've been at this for almost 2 months and I am already severely burned out.

Because let's face it, if the company routinely conflates "senior dev" with "technical cofounder", "semi project lead", "interviewer", "ops" AND "anything and everything else we can think of", that's basically an abuse of my trust. Again, I was crystal clear about what I want in a job. I was being a professional and did not, in any form, try to force my way in through lies. I did quite the opposite!

I don't mind that such companies exist. And there are plenty of people who even thrive in these conditions. But I severely object to being lied to when I specifically didn't want to work in one!

I don't even care if they scan HN and find this thread and recognize me. Pfeh. They'll just give me one final small nudge that I need before I tell them to eff off.

Any advice or observations, guys / girls?