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The work question

I'm at a crossroads. No, that's not right. I'm at a point where I'd like to make a decision to either stay at the hypothetical company or leave. Leaving will mean two weeks and I'm gone--no bullshit waiting until I find another job.

Staying means I accept that I'm working in an environment of lazy assholes who only make it difficult for others. I tried explaining to my parents earlier about the lazy asshole affect in software (although they've lived long enough to not need me to tell them how the world works). Lazy co-workers means that more work gets pushed onto those who'll do it. That's the easy part. Lazy programmers also means that others must struggle with the flaws that the assholes were too lazy to correct.

It's the classic situation of people living in a society and not making any effort to help others. You can code monolithic functions, ignore error handling, and provide no comments. The code squeaks by testing and gets shipped. Then some poor sap has to debug mysterious buffer overruns and wade through your obscurist pointer arithmetic (what the hell context does memcpy(++*pb, --*buf1, 4) provide?). Yes, code will always have bugs. No, we shouldn't have to deal with your ignorance of C++. Object oriented C++.

There're crap employees everywhere. We all complain about them everywhere we go. However, at what point do we decide that we're in an un-workable situation?

I had originally thought that management, lack of management, at the hypothetical company was the problem. It's a problem. But once you ignore the lack of technically intelligent project managers, lack of a head of development, lack of reviews or raises, and lack of any recognizable structure within development, the real problem that hits you, the real day-to-day issues, are your co-workers. Is there a reason to stay if the every-man-for-himself attitude is endemic?

No, I'm not the only perfect employee there, but there are so many others dragging us down, that we can't keep our heads above water (and most have just accepted that it's hopeless).

As soon as I get this fucking finger fixed on the corporate insurance dime, the decision will be made.