"Well, you should have thought of that when you fired me."
perfect statement.. better to place mom or spouse in a company where you can give recommendation and have contacts not in our own shop, unless you are running coffeshop (OK I guess :)
coming from the same company, here are my few thoughts
when I was joined on Day1..i hated that there is no documentation, but learnt about system by talking to people mostly. and infact no one has given me time to learn. right now for the stuff I have been doing, i dont have time to document them. in Agile, my managers are not expecting me to spend time on that. once some user story satisfy biz. req. they dont want to waste spending time on making absoutely beautiful code or at least they move to technical debt and never look at that again.
code reviews can be skipped sometimes, usually I too go by offline review and checkin. even the people I work with don't give a fk about open source, HN/reddit or about competitors. at our level we are there to develop what we are told to. If you are interested in something you have to spend time after 6PM at home which is reality in most agile teams.
to end 'LIVE WITH IT'
I am from India and until high school studied in non english medium..though I am able communicate well in English thanks to eslpod.com podcasts, preparation for GRE/TOEFL (increased vocabulary) and lots of english movies.
I second that.. I used to play lot of games on PC.. I bought xbox and some games , but mostly I will be playing youtube videos thru my android youtube app remotely or play a movie in netflix :)
My work used to start at 10 and it was hard to be there in the morning meeting by 10AM. I always used to be late.. people are getting changed in our team, so rules. I was asked to come by 9-9:15 and there is new meeting scheduled at 9:30 and I was being constantly mocked for being late.
I came across this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359041 and seems this guy is similar to me, but a more severe problem. I am a consultant and not worried about getting a new job when fired and team looks for the work I have done unlike fulltime. But I hate the feeling of subtle mocking for being late by my lead in my current job :(
I use mocking framework(Moq for .NET) to mock my service response and various xml responses i will save in test xml files..
Anyways, I will try to use it to test over network rather local mocking