@Dr. Acula your story reminds of me a gig I had back in 2019 where I worked at a small startup that had lead and senior guys my age who had been with the company 4 or 5 years. there was also another one in his late 40s who was also just as inexperienced. I quickly realized within 3 months that I was leagues ahead of everyone there. Later i found out that I was the lowest paid memBer of that development org as the only black person in.the entire fukking company.
shyt hurt my feelings so much and I began resentful of everyone there because I was busting my carrying every project on my back while the "leads" didnt know shyt and were getting taught by me how to do things the right way. It got to a point where I started bumping heads with a few and they couldnt really do shyt to discredit my work so they started to use the fact that im a confident ass nikka as a weapon against me and tried to claim I was aggressive and difficult to work with.
From then things went down hill, COVID hit and those mofos used that as an excuses to convince management (some of them were close with the CEO) to put me as the first person on the chopping block when mofos had to be laid off to cut costs. Management didnt know shyt about who was useful on the development side so they took their advise and i was let go just like that.
From that experience I learnt a valuable lesson: company culture is not something you can change as an individual contributor unless you are one of the early engineers. Management doesnt really give a shyt unless money is being lost. Your best bet when faced with bullshyt like this is to keep your head down, let your work speak for itself and then carve out your exit plan by interviewing and weighing out potential offers. Once you stumble across a gig you really like that pays more, drop the hammer on your current gig and never look back no matter if they counter the offer.
Most importantly, never get high off your own hype and think you're hot shyt just cause your work with overpaid goofies in your current gig. Stay hungry and continually learn. Being heavily involved in the open source development space has taught me so much about this and as a result ended up working with some of smartest mofos ive ever met that made me realise that I cant ever get too comfy thinking I know a lot about software development. Those people are the same reason I have my current gig now because they actually appreciated my skillset because they valued the same best practices I valued.
Moral of the story: get out of there and seek a company with people who will complement your development practices before your bitterness towards this guy consumes your and turns you into the "bad Apple" in the team. You will be much better off elsewhere and probably make substantially more.
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One more thing is he is like a 50's style sexist. Like he will literally ignore a female developer on the team if she asks him something and not even acknowledge her existence. I could tell he was shocked to see me when I first joined but not to brag, when you have a certain level of confidence in yourself when dealing with certain people, especially bytch made ones like this, they know they can't test you like that. The female developer on our team on the other hand is one of those nice and quiet types, so he takes advantage. We've talk to him directly about this too about how he needs to acknowledge her presence and treat her with respect btw and so this shyt isn't sliding and no one really hides the fact they don't respect him. He has huffed and puffed about that openly before.
