1. Your company is relocating from that “stuffy” office in the business park to a “bohemian” section of the parking lot.
2. When you ask senior leaders about the next target platform for your product, they reply that it doesn’t matter and that you’re welcome to pick whichever one you want.
3. After a steady stream of departures from your team, you are now your own boss since you’re the only one left.
4. When you tell your developer friends about your latest stories from work, they politely respond “Oh, I thought that you guys closed down already. You’re still around?”
5. If you’re the new hire, your new equipment includes a blood-covered monitor and a partially-smashed keyboard.
6. Even though you weren’t hired as such, you’ve become a full stack developer out of necessity. (When people ask how things are going, you reply that you feel like you’re running a marathon through a mine field.)
7. Your coworkers don’t even hide the fact that they’re using your main competitor’s product in the office. Worse yet, it’s used at company meetings.
8. Turnover is so high that the most senior programmer has a grizzled employment record of three months and works inside a padded room.
9. Management has repeatedly asked you whether you would like to buy them out.
10. Every other commit message in the code repository ends with a variation of “…Please, somebody kill me.”

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.