Been in the programming and development world for over 12 years now. I never thought I'd be here. In fact, I went to school for psychology. I wanted to better the relationship between humans and the workplace. To be honest, knowing what I know now, I'm glad I'm here and nowhere else. The pandemic would've had me unemployed, but I watched as everyone else was laid off and I was protected, working from home.

I will tell you the story of a programmer I worked with who was in his own world and never came out. No one ever knew what he was really ever working on. He was given a bunch of tasks to do and he'd do them and always be busy. He never wanted anyone to talk to him, not even the big bosses. One day, he was so far gone, even the bosses had no idea what he was doing, because he stopped attending meetings with everyone else. He figured he'd knew it all and he was doing what he thought he should be doing. Unfortunately, after a year of product deliveries, they started hiring a few other programmers and taking the program in a different path. They eventually fired him because they just didn't know how to get him out of his own world anymore.

So becareful: you may not know everything. But you're still a part of the corporate world, and this is a world where I've been for many years as well. It's not your game. It never will be. It's not your rules. It's their rules that you must play by even if it means you have to shut up and just do your job because that is what they expect. Until you have your own company, do what you must to survive, especially when you have children.

The woman who hired me who worked her way up to the glass ceiling and could not go further: she got there with a combo of her own ideas and stealing everyone else's ideas. She would say she had an "open door policy" and every few months, she'd want everyone to talk to her, and tell them about their ideas, making it seem like we could trust her, and our ideas would go somewhere. I could never figure out why our "ideas" never made it anywhere, until they started surfacing in different but similar ways until one day, she must've gotten lazy when she presented my idea in front of everyone. I had told my co-worker about this idea a while ago and I knew she knew.

After the idea was presented, I was expecting her to put credit to my name, but instead she simply asked what everyone thought, and at that point, I got up and walked out. My co-worker, who sympathized with me, knew the idea, also ended up walking out. We couldn't do much because I had no actual proof. And I was in another dilemma: this woman hired me many years ago and saved my job many times. The only thing that made me forgive her in the end before she left the company: she got the manager who was giving me heaps of headaches and trouble fired. So in essence, her debt to me was paid. It was her admission without admission that she knew what she did a few years before that.

The corporate world is filled with stories similar to yours and mine... and there's not much we can do about it. I've even gotten a paycut "due to COVID-19" after watching my company lay off 200+ people. Couldn't find it in the budget and cut my pay by $2? I mean, c'mon. Inflation is killing us all. To this day, as we speak, with 10 years at my company, I'm under company review for my performance -- I was expected to complete a job in 4 hours and it took me 5 hours and I'm in trouble for that, so now I have a "two month review" to improve my performance.. or else. Not my first and I'm sure not my last. It only makes me work on my side projects harder, but unfortunately, I've yet to create anything that can replace my salary.

Fortunately, I invested in a property that I paid cash for outright and I'm renting it out... only costs me $2,500 a year to hold on to this property and getting between $1200-$1300/month for rent as my ROI. I'm trying to get another property and have plans to rent out the house I live in while I travel, so hopefully I'll see even better returns and won't have to completely rely the corporate world anymore. Plenty of people go into the corporate world and have amazing experiences, get promotions, raises, restructure the company, etc. And then there is us... the people who do the work for those people while they get all the credit. That shit happens all the time.

Anyways, I know it's frustrating, but you are there to do a job and get paid to do it. Let it motivate you to be better, to seek out ways to make money in different ways, just as mine has done for me over the years. While I do give my all and collect my paycheck for the work I do, it is fun to figure out new ways of having multiple streams of income coming in.