During my exit interview at a BigCo, when they asked why I was leaving I said "I just don't think it was a very good fit", which I believe is the most polite way of saying "I just didn't like the job".

The manager doing the exit interview started getting defensive and blaming my "attitude problems" [1], and eventually I started explaining that it felt like the entirety of the culture at BigCo, particularly amongst management but even with engineers, came down to "try and justify your existence in the company". Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, and then drop constant references to your management about how hard what you're doing is.

The manager didn't like this response, and got more defensive, we ended up going back and forth, and eventually the interview ended and despite taking a pretty considerable paycut I was ok with my decision.

I didn't know the term "Resume Driven Development" until after I left, but that was a pretty accurate description.

[1] Not completely wrong, but that doesn't absolve them of their sins.

Yeah I've worked at enough places that could generate vastly more software feature ideas than they could ever implement, to find the "justify your own existence"-type places utterly insufferable. And I absolutely refuse to suffer them and everyone else should too.

> Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, (...)

I see this as a red flag, and an attitude problem typical of toxic employees. I'll explain why.

More often than not, I see this sort of complain from junior developers who either completely miss key requirements behind constraints or are completely oblivious to operational constraints. They invest little to no effort to try to understand the problem domain and what problems are fixed, and instead they redirect all their energy arguing for major rework that they claim makes things simpler albeit their analysis is superficial and simplistic as they are oblivious to the actual constraints. But that doesn't dissuade them.

This analysis failure ends up creating problems within the team because they conflate any lack of support for their half-baked ideas as an irrational opposition to their personal initiative, and thus somehow a part of the problem. Consequently, you start to see those types lashing out at team members and throwing accusations and being an all around pita. They pull these stunts at every single occurrence of any minor inconvenience, as if it automatically means anything else is always better than what they have.

The worst comes if these egregious types get their way. They roll out a change that they depict as a silver bullet for all inconveniences, except that even in ideal circumstances in the real world there are always minor inconveniences. When they surface, these egregious types get all defensive and throw tantrums to bully the team into suppressing any sort of criticism that they themselves spent their time creating for others.

There are many reasons why some companies impose and enforce principles such as "respect what came before" and "disagree and commit". No one wants to work with the assholes who don't follow these principles. Their output is always pristine and the shit shortcuts they took are always thoroughly justified, but he'll forbid if someone else's changes have anything that pricks their sense of taste.

It's a red flag. Clearly an attitude problem. Throwing a whole organization under the bus is a clear tell. If everyone around you is an asshole, the ugly truth is that you are very likely the only asshole around.