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Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?
Each of us have limits as to the things we're willing to put up with at a job. What's taking you near your threshold?
- throwaway29488 7y agoNot with the job in particular, just want to take a break from tech especially from being a programmer. Tired of staring at a screen for 80% of my awake time and constant puzzle solving. Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough, that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work.
- throwaway76576 7y agoSame. Have been thinking about taking a 6-month sabbatical from all things tech, but then worried I might just become so obsolete and out of touch that I'd rather suck it up.
- throwaway29488 7y agoyup I have the exact same worry, I have a little side business unrelated to tech that is profitting about 500-1k depending on the month. Considering taking a leave to work on that fulltime but also worried when I come back I'd just become completely out of touch.
- ScottFree 7y agoDon't worry too much about becoming obsolete. Frontend web development is my field and it moves faster than any other single area of programming. I took 5 years off due to burnout and it only took me a month or two to get back up to speed from a technical perspective. Putting up with the bullshit interviews is another story. I freelance now.
- drinchev 7y ago+1 for freelancing. I never had to deal with any of the bullshit 2 days on-site interview with whiteboard challenge. I don't get the full interview routine because I'm considered "external" and "temporary workforce" ( 6-12 months ). Funny story that I've seen lots of "internals" moving to other gigs in about the same amount of time. Freelancing gives you the opportunity to do your job, get your money and don't get involved in company policies. As a side-effect you pass interviews and have flexible working hours.
- wil421 7y agoHow do you start finding clients for freelancing? How do you figure out a competitive rate without going too high or low? I have about 10-15 hours of real work to do each week at MegaCorp. The rest is idle time at my desk/couch. Thought about moonlighting and doing 2 jobs but freelance sounds better.
- throwawatwo2222 7y agoAs someone who experienced the same thing and started their sabbatical 3 months ago, I highly recommend/encourage it. I regret not having started my sabbatical earlier.
- toop43 7y agoThe elephant in the room whenever anyone talks about taking a sabbatical is MONEY... What are you guys doing for money? Just burning savings?
- jlangemeier 7y agoActually talked with my therapist about this exact thing; apparently we're in a weird industry where your side projects matter more than your actual work that you're paid to produce. The look on their face as I'm explaining how if I ever quit my job I'll need to put twice as much work into side projects to stay relevant was... enlightening.
- toop43 7y ago> Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough, that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work. Dealing with this in the heavy right now. I've built a lot in my 10 years as a programmer. Infinitely, and automatically scaled application server based on load. Hasn't crashed or had a single downtime ever since release. I've built mobile applications 100% myself being used by thousands still today. I've learned 7 different programming languages. I've done web, mobile, server, and even bare metal firmware. The only 'domain' I haven't touched yet is ML. Yet.... I truly feel DUMB. I feel like I'm nothing in this industry when one phone screen call puts you into an 'online assessment' where I can't solve the problem in better than O(N^2) time. These fucking algorithms are killing me, and making me have a hard realization that maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Yea, I've built shit... but you know what... anyone could. I've plugged together a bunch of work other people did, and wallah, working server. Working app. Working whatever. But I can't write the libraries. I can't code a hyper scalable function that could handle petabytes of data. The only reason my fucking amazing server hasn't crashed is because it doesn't handle anything close to the scale that many companies need. Hence why these algorithms are so important. But I can't fucking get better at them.
- stevewodil 7y agoOutsource things you aren't good at. You think Tim Cook knows how to write the code required for iPhone hardware to communicate? No.
- toop43 7y agoWell, I'll be sure to tell that to the next guy who sends me an 'online assessment'.
- stevewodil 7y agoMaybe it's time to build something for yourself then. You have the necessary skills, basically a full stack dev + devOps. That's the route I'm taking - also have never studied algorithms or data structures and am mostly self taught.
- abakker 7y agoTo you and any other developers that feel this way, there are plenty of companies out there, big and small that need your skills. FWIW, developers that know how to buckle down and do work are so important to a lot of un-sexy businesses, but especially on a project basis. Ever thought of working as a consultant? Or just doing part time technology work/advisory for several small businesses? It's riskier than a salary, but the work is much more deterministic than it is novel. edit: clarity
- JohnFen 7y ago> Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough I just want to mention that this isn't an industry-wide problem. It is a cultural problem that tends to be concentrated in a few geographic areas and a few specific sectors of the industry. You might benefit from taking a step back and considering a substantial change without leaving the industry entirely -- to a new geographic area, or a new sector of the industry. Also, there is quite a lot of very interesting and well-paying dev work in businesses that aren't IT-related. They often have difficulty finding top notch talent, and as a result will pay well and be thrilled to have you.
- abledon 7y agoname these industries please!
- JohnFen 7y agoThat would be a rather lengthy list, as devs are needed in most industries. But here are a handful (not an exhaustive list) that exist in my area: trucking, railroads, banking, major retailers and wholesalers, hospitals. I'm not talking about bean-counting software here, either. The single best software dev job I ever had was not working for a software house. It was working in a neurscience lab on applications ranging from software that ran custom experimental equipment all the way through writing software that emulated biological neural networks.
- oldsklgdfth 7y agoMy office mates audibly fart throughout the day and act like it's normal. Pretty sure it's not.
- gadders 7y agoI think it's only allowed on Casual Friday at my place.
- anon4lol 7y agoIt's not. They should do what I do -- silently "crop dust" the other cubicles as I drift past on my way to an unimportant meeting. But seriously, I have a cubicle-mate that goes through a box of tissues every two days. He is constantly grunting and blowing his nose. He also spends 15 minutes brushing and flossing in the bathroom twice per day. I say 15 minutes, because he has his phone propped up with a timer. Every time my noise cancelling headset runs out of power and needs to be recharged, I re-evaluate my life choices and my tortured existence.
- _bxg1 7y agoI had a similar experience with a mechanical keyboard so loud I could hear it through my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Fortunately a spot opened up in a different room and I jumped on it.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoOMG, you must be a colleague from my old team. :) My ex boss bought a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches(the loud clicky ones) that would penetrate my noise cancelling headphones and gave everyone in our shared office 'Nam PTSD flashbacks. Nobody dared to complain to him about that. Still wondering if he did that on purpose to troll us or he was just really indifferent about the others in the office.
- _bxg1 7y agoThere's something about the sound of clacking keyboards that's more intolerable to me than nails on a chalkboard. It's pretty inconsiderate to use a mechanical one in a shared office
- eanthy 7y agoI thought this was a counter-thread to the Who wants to be hired one lol
- strikelaserclaw 7y agolol, made me laugh.
- patrickthebold 7y agoIt is.
- shifto 7y agoThe company I work for is active in an industry I have zero relation to. I can't relate to the business at all and I'm working with ancient tech. It pays well though and was brought on board by a friend and I don't want to disappoint him by leaving after just 1 year.
- echelon 7y agoHave you talked to your friend about the company since joining? If you're miserable it isn't worth wasting your time. You only have so many years to live...
- hnick 7y ago1 year is pretty much the modern standard for the minimum appropriate time before moving on in my experience, so I think it's fine.
- npo9 7y agoI have a ten month job on my resume. People ask about it years later.
- snypox 7y agoYeah I thought the OP will finish his sentence “after about 1 week”. 1 year is decent in IT.
- shifto 7y agoWhere I am from it's normal to get a 1 year contract when starting. Then if you did well you either get another temp contract or a contract of indefinite duration. I feel if you quit after a year other companies will assume you didn't make it past the first period. So I'll try to stick around some while before making moves. Also just having had a kid makes me feel I don't want to burden myself too much. A new job might be better, might be worse. For now at least I know what I've got.
- hnick 7y agoYes, it is very culturally specific so I guess that should be taken into account. Here (Australia) it's common to have a 6 month probationary period where you can be fired or leave with basically no notice as employee and employer determine if it's a good fit, after that it becomes significantly harder to fire and the employee needs to give a few weeks of notice to leave. So a year is generally fine, you passed your test and were enough of an asset to make hiring you worthwhile and repay any onboarding overhead. A few 1-year gigs in a row though, yeah, people will definitely ask.
- 3D21133181 7y ago(Throwaway, for obvious reasons.) I work for a boring start up remotely half of the week (2 days in the office) and I run my own SaaS business on the side (making a few $k MRR after 5+ years). I do sometimes day dream about being fired, selling my company and quitting tech entirely for a damn good while. I have well exceeded my threshold. Perhaps I will continue to watch Twitch instead of work, sabotaging my job, or perhaps I will get my shit together. I am not really sure.
- Chirael 7y agoEvery day.
- throwarayes 7y agoWell honestly I have had a lot of sleep problems in the last 2 years. It seems I have CPPS[1], where I am up all night with an overactive bladder. The result is 5 or 6 out of 7 nights I get very little sleep. I am in a role where I'm in leadership of a startup. I got there by being ambitious and pushing my capabilities. Now that we've experienced some success because of that, the company needs me to maintain a high level of performance. Further, I have a lot of equity tied up in the company. I feel stuck from the perspective of wanting to support the team, because of my equity, and honestly because when I'm normal, this is what I WANT to be doing. I would love to be "fired" and just spend time with my kids until I figure this out. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_prostatitis/chronic_pelvic_pain_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_prostatitis/chronic_pe...
- gnachman 7y agoI have the same issue and it was completely resolved with Amytriptalene. Until I found the right doctor it felt like my life was over, and they kept giving me useless treatments. Contact Dr Hanno at Stanford; he’s the only competent one I have found.
- bonestamp2 7y agoI assume your doctors have considered it, but have either of you had a vasectomy or undescended testical?
- throwarayes 7y agoI have had a vasectomy (which my urologist knows, cause his office did it). I'd be curious why you say that. Is there a link?
- bonestamp2 7y agoSorry, no scientific link that I know of. I just have similar symptoms and wanted to see if there was any historical similarities. It may just be anecdotal but it seems there are a few others here with similar symptoms and history, perhaps there is a link.
- 0xDEFC0DE 7y agoAfter 8 hours total interviewing at one company, I kinda feel like I was hired and fired in a single day
- 120bits 7y agoWOW! That would very exhausting.. is this norm these days to have full day interview sessions?
- 0xDEFC0DE 7y agoDefinitely not
- mikelyons 7y agoAs someone who spent 5 months interviewing, studying, applying, tech screening, full-day-onsiting, healing from rejection, washing and repeating Definitely yes, majority will do full day interviews and reject you because you can't write on a white board.
- commandlinefan 7y agoA couple years ago I had TWO full-day interview sessions with a single company. That I had to take time off of my then-current job to attend. After a one-hour phone screen. Who ended up not hiring me anyway.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoUnless the position was for serious fuck you money and I really needed it, there's no way in hell I would tolerate 2 full day interviews. I'm also guilty for spending lots of after work days studying for jobs I really wanted and getting rejected but at least I didn't burn any of my precious vacation days.
- commandlinefan 7y agoI fell prey to the “sunk cost” fallacy - after the first full day when they asked me to come back, I thought: a) it would be a shame to “waste” that first full day of interviewing by saying no now and b) surely nobody would be a big enough asshole to ask me to take two full days off of work to interview with them only to reject me after the second day, so surely this second day is just a formality. Apparently I was wrong. And no, it was just a regular programming job, nothing special.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- MisterBastahrd 7y agoOnce when I was a recruiter I got a call from one of my clients because they said that my consultant was being irritable. I called the consultant and he told me that it had been a week and a day and he still hadn't been issued a company computer to work on.
- ScottFree 7y agoMy first job was as an SQL database manager. It took them over a month to get me access to the database I was supposed to be managing.
- wil421 7y agoSomeone I know is a manager at a really large government contractor. They once had a poor engineer sit in another building for 6 months waiting to get his clearance. Poor guy finally quit after sitting at an empty desk reading books.
- bartread 7y agoI contracted somewhere once where a new full time employee had to wait a month before he was issued a machine. I don't know how he stuck it.
- throwawaaarrgh 7y agoSame happened to me as a contractor, but I was fine with it. Most I've ever been paid to read books.
- philip1209 7y agoProbably any founder of an acquired startup with vesting acceleration REALLY wants to be fired (without cause): https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/05/30/what-you-need-to-know-about-vesting-acceleration/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/05/30/what...
- walshemj 7y agoNot sure why you got voted down, the US has very poor protections for employees when a company is taken over. You might have wanted to use "redundant" and not "fired" or "laid off" as these have quite different meanings in labour law.
- throwaway7137 7y agoGetting told by my director that the product manager thought it was rude when I answered a question by sending them a link to the answer in the relevant documentation. I guess this is why nothing else at this company is documented, because why write things down when you can waste multiple people's time repeating things.
- whynaut 7y agoNot the rudest but it is basically saying RTFM. I deal with it like, here's the info you're looking for, but in the future you can read here instead of having to wait on me :) The idea being to present it as a benefit for them and not an unburdening for you.
- riantogo 7y agoThat would be considered passive aggressive messaging. People easily see through the intent. Just copy paste the content from the manual and link to source.
- throwaway7137 7y agoTried that approach and got told I was condescending.
- whynaut 7y agoI’m very sorry to hear that. Some people will go to any length to avoid work, even by putting it on us.
- voidhorse 7y agoThats cause it is. its snarky. solving someones problem and telling them they could be doing something better are two different things. its often offensive to mix the two. it also shows an incredible lack of empathy—sometimes someone is asking you something because theyre swamped and you seemed helpful, if you respond like that theyll go from thinking youre helpful to thinking you’re a know it all jerk. heres a better way to communicate the same thing without being snarky: “here it is! <link> its a pretty good resource, the docs are fairly extensive, theyve saved me a couple times in the past” that gives the person the hint without simultenousely saying “i think you’re a dope for not knowingg how to look up this doc” In fact the “next time you can just <x> :)” pattern in general is nearly always snarky—the smily face is clearly not genuine and is belittling.
- 3f8347343f4 7y ago(throwaway) every day I debate whether to quit or stay on unhappy and trying to do things the way I feel is right until I'm fired.
- 74847399281 7y agoThis fucking year... So, for starters I'm already really depressed and low energy due to a death of a really close family member. I have particularly low tolerance and high fatigue due to this. So, we shipped a product, successfully on time in a company that has had many years of difficulty of shipping products in our target market. Which was the goal. So the new management decides to disband the team, most of the team is already laid off. I get moved into an adjacent org, onto a ~15 person team building a complicated piece of technology that I have great expertise in, and have built 3 versions at other companies to commercial viability, sounds great. Well, the team has nobody else anymore who has the experience building the tech we are trying to build. Has existed for nearly one year, and (almost?) the entire team has changed through attrition already (maybe more than once). We have the sunk cost of almost 150k lines of code, that is immensely over-architected, and still doesn't provide any customer visible features for what's expected of this type of software. The team is stuck thinking way to big, and the few people who will focus are kept chasing around the rest of the team like cats. At this rate we will build something that can solve any conceivable problem in about 20 years. There are already a lot of hands in "architecture". Politics, and honestly my previously mentioned fatigue are preventing me from fighting the engineering fight I need to try to get a handle on it myself. I honestly like the new manager enough. He listens to my complaints and recognizes my experience, but solving the problems are more difficult, and honestly I think we really should just scrap everything. This is already a rewrite and we have an old version of the code base that would be a better start, or I have enough experience to properly build a new one. But the sunk cost fallacy is ohh so stronger when you have this much of a sunk cost, and a lot of expectations from execs and external teams. Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine. Anyways, thanks for an opportunity to rant.
- Dude2029 7y agoWhat managers don't understand is that there are developers with negative work output.
- chupasaurus 7y ago> Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine. Reminds me one of my past colleagues who worked at some_proprietary_compiler with so many tests for corner cases that it took 6 hours for each build on a top enthusiast grade PC each person in a project was provided. Also the presence in office for 8 hours a day was mandatory, imagine the whole team spread around the place for the most part of the day doing nothing with an excuse "I'm compiling!"
- throwawaymyjob 7y agoPlease sign me up! I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed state, then canceled. I'm on a very small team, I am the only expert in infrastructure, but all infrastructure code is reviewed by the lead engineer who is a complete novice at AWS/GCP. I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization. In my other areas of responsibility I am prompt, spot-on, and thorough. I bring experience and perspective, challenge half-baked ideas gently and constructively, and have shipped tons of solutions. I keep proving myself, and I do my best to celebrate my other team member's wins. I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default. Plain wrong solutions get approval, and prudent, cost-effective ones are ignored or even ridiculed. I would understand a bit of politics and orthodoxy on a large team, but for such a small team I'm stymied as to why that needs to exist. I keep losing bits of myself as my genuine efforts are met with forceful rejection, day in and day out. I've sought direct feedback and gotten vague responses if any, followed by closed door meetings about me as I do. The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.
- askmike 7y agoIt sounds that your additions aren't values by your team. It might be because (like you say) you are the only expert on X. If you are in such a situation you should be in charge for X, if not you'll be fighting these battles every time. > I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization. Great that you were writing all of that, but it sounds like even before that wiki reorg your docs weren't read or used by anyone else. Especially if you are the only person who understands what you're writing, why are you writing it? The only possible reason I see for spending all that time is for the situation where they hire someone else who knows about cloud as well. > I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default. Note that if you give common-sense suggestions about not X (backend code, or databases for example) but you are not the person who is responsible for it / in charge of it, you are telling people (who think they are more expert in that topic) what they should be doing. I'd probably fight that to. If you are given common-sense suggestions about X that impacts how they need to do non X, well that's work they don't want to do. I don't like lawyers or compliance guys telling me how I need to arch my code either (if I could ignore them I probably would ;)) Look at it from the other side: here is our colleague throwawaymyjob who is our cloud guy, whenever he is in whatever meeting (that's not purely about cloud) he is telling everyone else how they can do things better. But he's not responsible for doing that nor how that turns out.
- wronghorse 7y agoI've been working as a developer at a shitty company with no mentorship or room to grow for 2 years. My co-workers are obnoxious, loud sales people which drives me insane. I've tried my best to get out but due to visa constraints/random shit I've not been able to find anything.
- llampx 7y agoraises hand I'm a freelancer in the position of an interim department head. I've never had such ungrateful and hard to work with team members. Somehow the people above me and around me want to keep them. On top of that, getting anything done with other departments is like pulling teeth. Of course I'm judged on how much I get done, which means that I end up doing a lot of the work myself. Sometimes I wonder if it's all my fault but that doesn't help me either. I just want out but the money is too good.
- throwaway58129 7y agoI didn't know this format was a thing and am so very excited to discover it. I hope you folks enjoy reading horror stories. I got a job as a Software Engineer in my current company 4.5 years ago; friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. The company had an apparently disastrous piece of software that was their main LOB. They had gone through pretty much every local consulting agency - at least once, on a few occasions they had gone back to one they had already used. It was about 10 years old and consisted of a mix of VB6(!), VB.NET, C#, F# and somehow now Node. At the time tackling a disaster like that sounded fun and I was miserable at a consulting gig. It was a 20k bump but no benefits (health or retirement), but as a single guy 6 months away from paying off his college debt I wasn't worried. I figured I'd dump a few years in then move on. Three months in, I'm absolutely baffled at what the company does. I was told they handle insurance claims, basically acting as a TPA. (Important detail: I had no idea what a TPA was at the time. It's gonna matter later.) The software does handle claims, but they also have 10 other projects that cover a bunch of random business use cases. Apparently the CEO is a self-described "idea man" and would task the previous developer to 'prototype' his ideas from time to time. The problem was his idea of a prototype was a fully-functional application that he could sell to investors and clients - until he got bored with it and shelved it. This ended up with the company having around a half-dozen actively used products in a half-dozen markets. In addition to the TPA side of the company that was about 50% of revenue, the other half was split over 1) check cashing software, 2) HR/onboarding software, 3) some sort if discount medical visit scam, 4) some sort of MLM scam that the CEO's brother-in-law co-opted him into, 5) a random cannabis and self-help website run by some yoga guru type dude the CEO knew and finally 6) a piece of software that let helped churches organize events and donations that took about 50% of any transaction that was run through it as "fees" for our company. Now I could talk about any of those monstrosities at length, but this is already shaping up to be a wall so I'll skip that. 1.5 years later. I've wrangled the mix of VB6, VB.NET, C#, F#, PHP4, PHP5, PERL, ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL still using MyISAM, god knows what other horrors I've forgotten. All of this without version control - just folders copy-pasted over and over on a 10 year old server in the closet that has no redundancy, two failing disks and one PSU out of order. The last guy had started some positive changes: moving everything over to Azure, porting everything related to the claims business into a more modern MVC app. I finished his work. I squashed about a dozen Wordpress instances into a single, multi-tenant host. Squashed out all the other languages and databases into just C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server. Ended up reducing the Azure spend by about $2000 a month. Felt good! CEO loved me. COO (my direct manager) loved me. CFO was pleased. All throughout this, I had convinced the COO to cut out all the shady, near-illegal, morally bankrupt garbage we did. No more check cashing (awful, awful industry), no more MLM of any sort, no more stealing money from churches (we kept that going, just changed our fees to a nominal amount). All the work I had done lead to a decrease in onboarding time from 2-3 days to 10 minutes and the TPA side of things was now about 85% of our revenue. Happy ending, right? Just you wait... Somehow, I had not encountered a single brilliant "CEO Idea" for 1.5 years. He decided to fix that on one delightful summer day in the mid-west by announcing that we would be acquiring a healthcare startup that a buddy of his ran. Now this pissed most of the folks at the company off and is probably a good point to talk a little about the structure of said company. As mentioned, we had a CEO, COO, CFO, and "Chief of Sales" (never heard of a COS myself, but who knows). We didn't call ourselves a startup and had none of that Bay-style of startupness; we were just a small business with some investors. After the C's we had myself as the lone engineer, two sales guys, three admin-types and six or so customer service folks. None of which had healthcare or retirement benefits, mind you. So there was a bit of rancor when Mr. CEO started talking about dropping $5 mil to acquire this fancy new healthcare company. Somehow me, Mr. Software Engineer, ended up being the guy that needed to take this head-on (well, to be fair, the COO and I had great relationship). That's a tale in and of itself, but at the end of the day we ended up getting a 6% matching 401k and $500/$1000 single/family monthly reimbursement for health insurance, stopped 3-4 people from quitting, got me a whole lot of respect in the office and a fancy new title of "Chief Technical Officer" (not related to the benefits; CEO was just happy at how efficient I'd made everything) and 20k base salary increase. CTO at a company with 1 engineer. Neat. Happy ending, right? Just you wait... We also got a brand new healthcare startup for about $2.5 mil in cash, $2.5 mil in stock. We got sheisted and it was our fault. While I'm no MBA, I know what due diligence is, and I intended to do it from the technical angle while our CFO handled it from the financial. Before we bought the company I made every effort to actually review what their software looked like, but was single-handled blocked by my own CEO. "We're never going to do that, Throwaway," he would say, "Other CEO is my friend! I've known him for twenty years and if he says his software is solid, it is! Just trust me." Diligence took about three months and despite dozens of arguments, I was denied any access to anything technical. All I ever got was: "Our software is in Node using MongoDB and is hosted in the cloud." Great. I was never even allowed to meet or speak to their development team (apparently 5 engineers, all of which were phenomenal). The only human being I ever spoke to at this company was the CEO. So I tried other angles, the big one being: what the hell does your software actually do? Their big claim to fame was 'modernizing concierge medicine using AI'. If you're like me and have no idea what concierge medicine is, it basically means your doctor comes to you because you're a rich yuppie and can't be bothered to leave your beach house to visit him. How do you enhance that using AI? I had no idea. Still don't. And so we bought the company with zero diligence done, though the CFO did say their books looked good, whatever that means. So the nightmare begins... 2 years in. We start onboarding people, I start onboarding the project itself. I am finally given direct developer contacts, which are a bunch of emails that don't end in the same domain as the company we just bought? Pardon? They're all @BobsRandomConsultingCompany. I reach out, explaining who I am, that we just acquired Project X and I need access to the code, environment, engineers - the whole nine. I get a very lovely, professional response from a Project Manager over at Bob's who lets me know that they will be sending over a contract so we can get started right away, along with their rate sheet! I'm baffled! I thought Project X had 5 internal engineers, Mr. Other CEO?! At this point I promptly aged 6 months in 6 minutes and I felt the first twinge of an ulcer growing. Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO and explain that we have been duped. COO is angry; CFO is not concerned until I show him the contract that Bob's sent over. The contract ye olde healthcare startup signed apparently agrees to pay for 5 fixed resources (at $200/hr!) for 40 hours of work each, per week, for a period of a year. Now I'm not unfamiliar with being outsourced as a resource, from a consulting company, for a fixed amount per week - but never have I seen a contract that binds you for a year, especially for 5 resources, with not one deliverable mentioned anywhere. Maybe my five years of consulting wasn't enough, but that blew my mind. Additionally, they sent us the server bills (AWS) and informed us we paid directly for utilization in addition to a "HIPAA Monitoring and Compliance Fee" of $3000/mo. As I had not a year ago lowered our own cloud costs to about $800/mo, this number struck me as staggering. $3000/mo base + around $2000 for the servers currently running. Also, "what the fuck is HIPAA" I said aloud, the only answer being the two confused shaking heads of my COO and CFO. Uh-oh... Segway. The actual Project Manager of the acquired company (not the one from Bob's Hair Care IT Consulting Nail and Tire Salon) has moved in and I've finally got a victim to victimize with my many, many questions. She already looks harrowed before I begin my interrogation. Are people actually using this? How much do we make per visit? Visits per month? I forget the answers to these, but the end takeaway was: we bring in about $10k/mo net right now. I'm no accountant, but I'm fairly confident you can't pay the expenses of a company + a half dozen employees on $10k/mo. PM agrees - they've burnt through about $7 mil of investor cash over their 6 years of existence. No path to profitability is in sight. Around the same time I've got the Project X repository (whew, at least they used source control) moved over into my world and have started reviewing the actual source. I'm no Node wizard, but I'm immediately confused as I see both Express and Hapi (two server frameworks, generally considered competition to one another) used in the same project. That's...odd. Investigation intensifies: it's a simple CRUD project that takes a form submission from a registered user, saves it in Mongo and slaps it into a queue for delivery to the given doctors email. That's really it. There's some back-end admin that allows the doctor to write some notes about their visit. Like a little baby EMR (though I had no idea what an EMR was at that time). Amusingly, it's got an Angular front-end (1.x, because why not spread salt on my wounds) that hits an Express endpoint that then proxies the call to a Hapi endpoint. For no reason. I can't find a single comment or piece of documentation explaining why. Icing on the cake? Their is in fact authentication used from Angular -> Express. The Hapi endpoints, however, are wide open - but surely not from the ELB, right? Certainly it's just an idiotic architectural decision that isn't actually exposed to the public? Nope. There's a rule in the ELB. Sweet Baby Ray's someone help me, there is a publicly accessible, completely open API that anyone could discover that gives away patient and doctor information. Huh, I wonder if the US has any sort of regulation on that kind of stuff? I should really take some time to investigate that HIPAA thing I found earlier, maybe that's got something to do with it... Employment duration: unknown. My ulcer has had a baby. I think I may have had a psychotic break. I Googled HIPAA. I simultaneously shat and pissed myself, which I didn't think was possible during a panic attack, but the human body is an amazing thing. I took Thursday and Monday off from work to read through a PDF I found of this most enlightening "HIPAA" legislation. It says "SAMPLE" or "UNOFFICIAL" or some such on it, so I'm not sure how accurate it is, but whatever - I need to educate myself somehow. I spent a thrilling four days reading, re-reading, and summarizing what I understood of the several hundred page document - printed in three-column layout because why not make it more abysmal. It doesn't seem completely dire; it looks like there is some stuff we need to do if we are storing this mythical PHI, but it isn't terribly complex (at least technically!). I had already been planning encrypting everything we own, and all of our sites are already behind SSL, so this should be cake. Phew! Calm down, baby-ulcer, don't think about grand-kids quite yet. Also I found a few great summaries of the Act which I could share with my COO - but really, we need to sit down with Legal and have them explain why this was never brought up. And let's be honest, I'm not a lawyer - the professionals can handle this! Legal has never heard of HIPAA. That's not good. I convince COO to ask Legal to reach out to a different Legal who specializes in healthcare. We sit down with them a few days later and our new Legal turns white after I lay out everything we do, our concerns, and the simple question: "Do we need to do any of this stuff I read about?" Turns out, having your CTO read a complex, many-hundred-pages legal document is not the best way to get accurate legal advice. We're fucked. We're a TPA filing insurance claims - we absolutely, 100% must comply with this Act. Oh and guess what? The Act has a delightful addition called an Omnibus, passed back in '13, that makes any possible defense we might have had to not comply...completely null and void. We're in what is called 'Breach'! We have fucked up. Royally and legally. Icing? We're all personally liable, at least to the letter of the law. But don't worry - we didn't know we fucked up, so the fees are an order of magnitude less. They'll only bankrupt the company 5 times over, instead of 10! Hurray!
- algaeontoast 7y agoAnyone successfully pull off an "Office Space"?
- unnouinceput 7y agoI did. 11.5 years ago before starting as freelancer and never looking back.
- ziroshima 7y agoFreelancing sounds like fun, but it looks like a real pain getting started. From what I can tell, it means working for free or next to it on sites like upwork. Any tips or suggestions?
- satvikpendem 7y agohttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15GJtJ5qpk7H9Cl3xTBwv2FR8/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...
- unnouinceput 7y agoI can't say for others but for Upwork is not that bad. You do need to grow your profile with successful jobs to be able to charge more later, so start lower but do make a polished profile. Show lots of projects, including those from open source, if you have any, and fill all fields as well. Also state that you're at beginning and you're going for low prices only to establish your reputation. Also don't give up, keep on bidding on jobs even if it looks like a number game. In the end if you're persistent enough you get your break and can start build your clients base. After that it's a breeze, given you're indeed good at what you claim. Otherwise, it's a harsh environment for those trying to scam.
- ScottFree 7y agoI'd love to hear the details, if you're willing!
- 7y ago
- Waterluvian 7y agoI don't want to be fired. I absolutely love my job and the people I work with. But I can just smell that we are about to hit a sticking point with how I don't do on call (it was never mentioned in the interviews or part of my contract) and I don't respond to work after 5pm. If it does come to that sticking point I'm trying to figure out how to be the most assertive and diplomatic. I.e. How do I convey that I badly want to keep this job but those new terms are a non start?
- eternalban 7y ago> I'm trying to figure out how to be the most assertive and diplomatic. Having a job offer in hand does wonders for one's communication skills.
- Waterluvian 7y agoI perpetually have a few competitive alternatives. But I don't want to have a conversation that way. I shouldn't have to.
- kibwen 7y agoYou could perhaps try framing it as a negotiation, i.e. "there was nothing in my original contract that indicated this would be one of my regular responsibilities, I'm happy to open negotiations with you in order to add that stipulation." Think of a salary at which you might actually consider being on-call (don't be charitable; make it double or triple or quadruple your current salary if you want). Then, increase that number by 50% and call it your starting offer. If they balk and try to talk you down, offer to go lower, but don't go below that number from the first step. Negotiations will almost certainly stall and your supervisor (who I presume is the one putting pressure on you) will then have political cover to tell their own supervisor (who I presume is putting pressure on them) "hey, I tried", and hopefully this will continue far enough up the chain until it reaches a person that is so detached that they don't really give a damn and drop it. If they do eventually end up firing you over this, then this indicates they would likely have fired you anyway and therefore you've not lost from this exchange. And on the slim chance that they accept your terms of quadrupling your salary, I guess you can retire substantially earlier. :P
- JohnFen 7y agoI won't tell tales about my current employer, but I'll tell the one about my previous one (without naming them). I left because the code base for their main product was incredibly bad. Brittle, opaque, undocumented, buggy, and virtually unmaintainable. That alone wouldn't have been a dealbreaker as long as the company saw the problem and we were working to fix the situation. That wasn't what was happening, though, because the Big Boss didn't agree that there was a problem at all, even though literally every dev was telling him so. He saw any effort to improve the code quality as a waste of time and money. So, I had to leave in part because it was a terrible working condition, and in part because I didn't want my personal professional reputation to be damaged by being associated with that project.
- etxm 7y agoAlways be refactoring - work that shit into the ticket.
- JohnFen 7y agoYeah, that was my intention when I saw what I had to work with. But it was also specifically prohibited.
- etxm 7y agoHow do you prohibit making code better? > for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change And all that jazz... Was your boss a super dev reading the code and calling out if it looked better?
- JohnFen 7y ago> How do you prohibit making code better? By instituting a "minimal change" rule. No code changes were allowed for general refactoring. If you're fixing a bug, only the bare minimum changes to address it were allowed. If fairness, the rule was not entirely irrational. It was very difficult to make changes that didn't break stuff all over the place, and "minimal change" helped to reduce the short-term risk. This did allow some refactoring to get sneaked in, of course -- sometimes a bug required rearchitecting code, which comes with the opportunity to refactor. And if you're adding a new feature, the new code can be properly done. > Was your boss a super dev reading the code and calling out if it looked better? Pretty much. He was involved in all code reviews. He single-handedly wrote the initial implementation, and I believe that he took any criticism of it, overt or implied, as a personal attack. The truly scary part of this (for me) is that this is an enterprise product that is pretty widely used by major corporations in system-critical deployments.
- theanine 7y agoI wrote about my experience at my current job a few weeks ago [1]. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for all your support. I recently got an offer for the field I've always wanted to be in, with around a $25k pay raise too. It's such a huge weight off my shoulders to finally see a way out and I feel so much better, basic things like my appetite are back and I don't dread waking up. I already have so much more free time now that I'm not searching for jobs 2 hours a day after work. I gave my two-weeks notice this week and I'll have around 3 weeks off to decompress before starting - I'm planning on visiting Seattle, anyone have any recs? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951953
- thegginthesky 7y agoHey man, I'm so glad to hear the good update. I was really worried about that other post and just wanted to tell you that it's not normal to be bullied at work. I've been on 4 very different companies, and never went to something even close to what you did. Congrats on the new job! Be sure to enjoy your vacation, you deserve it!
- oneepic 7y agoCongrats! I moved to Seattle recently. The Space Needle and the Museum of Pop Culture (mostly if you're into rock and roll) are good tourist attractions. Personally I love the views the most (we have the Cascades and a few mountains/"active" volcanoes here, plus the lake/the ocean close by). A few nice parks in the area to check out too.
- photonios 7y agoI remember reading the thread. Awesome to hear that you've made some changes for the better. Congratulations from this internet stranger! Don't shy from letting us know how the new job is. If you feel like talking, please do. I am probably not in the same country, but sometimes it helps to just chit chat with someone in the same field. E-mail is in my profile.
- croh 7y agoGlad it worked. Just trust yourself, stay positive and keep doing good work !
- kps 7y agoIn a previous job I got very close to a ‘them or me’ ultimatum. Then I got over it. Then we all got laid off.
- throaway123 7y agoLeaders that claim to be leaders but are actually managers.
- rjplatte 7y agoI'm the sole developer working on my current project, which is overhauling a massive DOS era application, as well as overhauling an early 2000s era CRM/business management tool, that almost all of our work happens through. Did I mention that the DOS application is a HIPAA billing application that must meet all HIPAA guidelines as well as write EDI X12 billing files? I'm very junior, been coding for ~5 years, 3 professionally, but this is my first real dumpster fire. We were about to hire a second developer, but turns out he had a record. Not for just anything, which we don't really worry about, but for embezzlement on the healthcare billing application he used to own. So, no. No can do. So now poor 18-year-old me is knee-deep in a ton of shit I don't understand, working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO, and trying to get details out of my older supervisor who built the code we're using, but he's near retirement and has so many vacation days saved up that he spends maybe 10 days a month in the office. I honestly can't blame him, but I either need resources to help me deal with legacy code, or a nice entry-level rails job, because I want to finish learning rails.
- reificator 7y ago> working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO I've been there. Run.
- rjplatte 7y agoI'm studying hard, but learning new stuff while learning other new stuff is hard.
- reificator 7y agoListen. If not using version control is a problem for you, you're already more hirable than a lot of developers I've seen. Learning is always important but don't use that to procrastinate. You don't have to go straight to the best job in the world. Just find something better (and do your homework to verify) and take it.
- ctoinhiding 7y agoI am an acquired founder working in the bay area. The acquisition made me rich, I'm liquid, and I love my product and my team. Everyone did really well in the acquisition. The acquirer means well, but as a public company there is little intellectual honesty and projects are going off the cliff while my fellow executives not sharing the truth of how bad things are going and asking for help from one another for the good of the company. I'm increasingly demotivated having to deal with lying and intellectual dishonesty at every turn. I can quit, but then I lose out on almost a million bucks that's unvested, not much compared to what I've made so far but I'd really like to just be fired (without cause) and get to walk away and start a non-profit.
- rytill 7y agoIf you're fired, do you vest fully? We got acquired recently and it seems like my vesting doesn't jump ahead if I got fired (without cause)... not totally sure though.
- ctoinhiding 7y agoit's technically not vesting (my founder shares were fully vested on acquisition) - more of a hold back. we made sure to negotiate this term in. doesn't work that way for employees unfortunately.
- rytill 7y agoSo basically there are separate founder and employee shares and negotiated different terms for the two (hold-back and options)?
- naniwaduni 7y agoIf you're in a situation where your vesting schedule incentivizes your acquirers to fire you without cause your lawyers may have ripped you off.
- rytill 7y ago
- planxty 7y agoA pissing match between two unrelated branches of an enormous org chart has caused monumental waste and discord where I work as a software engineer. My employer is also allergic to open source, even though we are a huge publicly traded software company, so we're reinventing wheels for things that are already solved problems. Toxic hell, I should be gone in weeks.
- JetezLeLogin 7y agoIt's not hell on earth but I think about "oh my god dude get another job!" at least once a week. My job is this "hybrid" of 50% software developer, which I want to do, and 50% of, let's just say, flippin' burgers. It's not flipping burgers literally but the metaphor applies pretty well because being a short-order burger chef does take some skill, but it's repetitive, and subject to requests/orders that come in intermittently, each of which is urgent. So, it's like the interruptions everybody complains about from noisy co-workers and Nina from Corporate Accounts Payable, except the thing interrupting you, is the other half of your own job, and it continues all day long. So really with all the interruptions I'm doing close to zero programming. Why this arrangement? Because they figured hey, what better way for him to find all the pain points and automate them, than to have him use this crappy cobbled-together system himself! Well sure, I'm all about seeing it from the user's point of view. So yep, did that, figured out long ago everything that's wrong with it, but now what? I'm stuck. Forget burger flipping, let's say this time, that I'm an axe maker. A craftsman of fine chopping implements. And the job they gave me is to chop wood all day with somebody else's dull axe. Um that is a different thing, that is not what axe makers do! And it's not like, okay make us a new axe, here's everything you need; they need someone to chop the wood! Pretty much the stupidest situation to be in. Then there's the team - it's totally silo'd, a bunch of little fiefdoms, run by naysayers, and my every minor request for an enabling technology or whatever-it-might-be, is met with an unanswered phone call or email. I'm still kind of new, so I have no clout whatsoever, that is a truth, but I can also see that it's not just me. You've read much about the conflicts between Dev and Ops that led to "DevOps." Well on this team the Database people and the Programming people (hello, those two are the same thing, or perhaps you are an asshole) don't even see eye to eye. Also - and this shouldn't matter - but the developers are somewhere else. Instead of being surrounded by developers bouncing interesting ideas all around (not that these particular ones would), I'm here physically sitting with the other burger-flippers. Yes we're back to that metaphor. These are people who either can't, or never wanted to, be anything other than burger-flippers, and everything they talk about is in terms of burger flipping, and life is just a big burger to be flipped. Starting to sound elitist, but keep in mind I'm intentionally not telling you what they, what we, actually do. They are skilled workers. Just not the same skills. I probably should've held out for something else.
- 7y ago
- pyridines 7y agoMy boss (effectively) prohibits us from displaying negative emotions towards each other, as he pulls us aside to chide us when we do. I think the intention is to encourage more constructive conversations, but his bar for what he considers inappropriate is so low that it ends up stifling disagreements. We have a tough time making decisions because of it. It's also difficult to tell him about other problems I have, because if I show any annoyance, he'll criticize my tone. He, of course, gets visibly angry with people on our team on a weekly basis. It's driving me nuts to have to walk on eggshells all day.
- dunstad 7y agoWow, fuck that guy.
- rubyfan 7y agoYeah that’s seriously unhealthy. I’ve been in that situation. Get out, you’ll immediately be happier for it.
- vast 7y agoWow. It is already a struggle to live through conflicts in an average company. Turning any conflict down early on is insane. Sounds like he is trying to built a brainwashed cult.
- rolltiide 7y ago> his bar for what he considers inappropriate is so low that it ends up stifling disagreements ... because if I show any annoyance, he'll criticize my tone ... It's driving me nuts to have to walk on eggshells all day. this describes a woman I was seeing disagree with her, and you're being condescending agree with her, and you are bringing up something that she considers we had already resolved bring up a positive aspect or endearing moment, and you are dismissing her the best part of this is that she would rationalize her conversational superiority with her education in speech pathology!
- geekbird 7y agoUgh. I hate the "tone" police. Most of them won't even acknowledge what you say if they don't like your "tone".
- klenwell 7y agoI've shared parts of this before but it seems apropos of the topic at hand. I was working a Fortune 500 corporation. Been there 5 or 6 years. Pay was ok. Culture was meh. Technology was open source. I was happy enough but figured it was time to start looking around for other opportunities. Coincidentally, just about this time I get promoted to senior and the senior gets promoted between me and my current boss to be my new boss. He was not really prepared to manage people, was not given any training or preparation for the new role, was still expected to mainly write code, and probably preferred it that way. Because I'm pretty good at expressing myself and he wasn't so much, I think he also felt threatened by me. We had had a perfectly fine working relationship before this. But I started to hear from other team members that new boss was badmouthing me behind my back. Didn't make me feel good, but shit I'm doing my job and, you know, you can count up my story points at the end of the sprint if anyone's worried. Things came to head during my first annual review under new boss when boss gives me a mediocre review. Tells me I ask too many questions, and says I don't have adequate knowledge of our applications. I'm kinda dumbfounded. I point out to him that, besides having worked on most the applications for several years, I'm the one who set up the wiki and has written most the application documentation found therein. His reply: "That's not knowledge. Knowledge is what's in your head." I'm at a loss. I felt like I was being gaslighted before that word had entered the popular vernacular and provided me just the word I was looking for to explain the strange feelings I was feeling. I made the mistake of challenging the review with HR. It immediately became a shitshow and I quickly learned what people mean when they say HR is not your friend. Put on a PIP. Everyone I knew told me to put my head down and get the hell out of there as soon as possible. So that's what I planned to do. Problem was every other company I interviewed with seemed like it was the subject of another post in this thread. Besides, my commute was only 10 minutes with no freeways involved at current employer and I was being kinda picky on that point. Six months drag on. About everything that could go wrong while I was looking for a job seemed to go wrong. At one point I had a couple decent offers in hand I was ready to accept and then fumbled them both by trying to play one against the other. Meanwhile, I am keeping my head down and doing my job. I mean, my take on things is probably a little biased, but I'm pretty sure I was the most productive and reliable member of the team and the objective data, if management could have been bothered to try to collect any, would have backed me up. After all, in the not so distant past, they had promoted me to senior. So the period assigned to the original PIP expires. I'm ashamed to still be there. But at least I figure they'll let that go. Nope. Boss comes back with new PIP. Totally fabricated stuff. Like "On project X, Klenwell did work to which he was not assigned." I point out that I was updating everyone on the project every morning on what I was doing in the daily daily standup. Including my boss. "You were standing right there!?" I'm furious, demoralized, ready to quit. On advice of a family member, I talk to an employment lawyer. Best $300 I may have ever spent. "Yeah," he tells me. "You're fucked. They're papering your file. But don't quit. You'll sacrifice any benefits, including unemployment." I learned something that day. And the screw turned. That point forward, I'm not taking shit from anyone or anything. My boss. My boss's boss. Fire me? Cool! I'll take my unemployment checks and have my new best friend lawyer be in contact with you! It was a very satisfying two weeks. I was like a kid peddling around on over-inflated bicycle wheels. But all good things must come to an end and the final straw came in a sit-down with my boss when boss said boss's boss (my old boss) was questioning why I was writing tests for a critical piece of ancient real-money-processing infrastructure that we needed to upgrade. My response: hey, is Boss's Boss writing code again for us? Great. Let him take over this story and I'll move on to something else. I was fired the next morning. Walked out of the building with my belongings in a garbage bag. And a shadow was lifted off my little world. Lawyer never returned my call. Took me exactly 6 months to find a new job. Things have been much better since then.
- breathtakingjob 7y agoIn my country we have a two main employment contracts. One with full benefits and one with partial benefits. Second is usually used for your first contract or for hiring students on half time job. In my IT department, everybody gets two monitors, unless of course, your contract is a "partial" one. Then you get work with one monitor, regardless of doing the same job everybody else does. They buy you second one, after they sign you with the full contract...
- dvtrn 7y agoI wouldn’t hate it. They’d be doing me a favor if there were more mouths than mine to feed. A company merger resulted in lots of engineering talent leaving with multiple unfinished projects and very little documentation. We’re at a point now where only 2% of the original team remains. I was hired to complete these projects and clean up the technical debt left behind. That priority shifted to work on new products. That priority changed again. It changed a third time. Now I’m being tasked back with coming back to cleaning up the technical debt and security mitigation’s I was originally hired for after a weekend outage that affected the wrong client. Suddenly the critical infrastructure weaknesses I pointed to needed our full attention and system reliability became the first class citizen I long argued it should be. Except every time I make progress on patching up and stabilizing one system, a new hole springs in the dam. I’m the Dutch Boy of DevOps at this place. Despite recent increase in funding, management refuses to backfill any of our open vacancies, project management refuses to budge on timetables, and as a result we’re putting out fires daily with water guns and spray bottles. Meanwhile we’re on our third VP of product in two years, and our second Director of Infrastructure. Two years more later and I’m well beyond the threshold. Hoping there’s an offer letter coming soon after interviewing the last few weeks.
- systematical 7y agoI do! I work at a failing startup. I find the direction and strategy of the company lacking. My advice is often ignored or they wait years and then claim it as their own. Sluggish sales. Sluggish revenue. Haven't been profitable in the 5 years I've been there. I'm looking for a job but I rather just be laid off and collect unemployment for a while. I've been working for 17 years with no employment gaps. I'm tired.
- jmuguy 7y agoI can relate, I haven’t gone more than a week without a job in that same amount of time. I fantasize about just straight up taking a week or a month or a year off and doing absolutely nothing.
- systematical 7y agoI'm not good at getting fired. I am personable and don't slack off. Those positive qualities are having a negative impact on my dream. I've wanted to collect unemployment for years.
- archi42 7y agoEveryone makes mistakes. You can as well, you just need to want. Some suggestions (read aloud in an enthusiastic, you-can-do voice): Deploy to production! On Friday evening! Something that doesn't even build on your machine! Hardcode an universal password into the auth backend ("toomanysecrets" is a classic)! Invert a few conditionals in almost unreachable code! Enforce an overly complicated review system! Be horribly pedantic with every review you do! Skip review for your own commits! Re-write an important component from scratch! In OCAML, C# and TypeScript! While drunk! With no version control! You get the idea. Or, probably better, ask your boss to fire you for all the good work you did? ;-)
- systematical 7y agoI'll try harder...wait, you know what I mean. The first step is to stop being a workaholic, be more like the CEO.
- bryanmgreen 7y agoGetting fired from a bad job is like having the best sex of your life but with the worst human being ever. Feels amazing for a brief moment but you need a very long shower and a doctor's appointment after. Then confusion and anxiety sets in because you're afraid you'll never have that high again and some part of you wants you to go right back for that perverse rush even though your smart brain says "HELL NO". You see all your friends working for their dream companies and wonder not if you'll ever have that, but if ~anyone~ will welcome you again and you long for that filthy job. You're spiraling into darkness and come to HN for the Who's Hiring posts and see all the other depraved lunatics and that's when you realize - you are not alone and you are not special and that you're gonna be downvoted just like everyone else - and it feels like home and it's ok that you're a miserable aspiring founder like everyone else who isn't happily employed. (I say it with love from past personal experience)
- xenihn 7y agoSoo it's like dating a borderline?
- throwawaaarrgh 7y agoI do, but I need some filler on my resume so I'm toughing it out as long as I can. Just finished four months of overtime to meet an arbitrary executive-decision deadline. Now I'm on a new project, and I'm finding out just how horrible the other teams had it: legacy systems from the dark ages of tech that are being shoved into the cloud, critical account access is shared with everyone, everything was built by hand two years ago by people who are no longer here, nothing is documented, and 4am maintenance windows are a weekly thing. There's aloof parent companies imposing draconian pointless restrictions, finance has a strangle hold over everything (hiring, new hardware, new software, etc) and kills any funding no matter how much we need it, but somehow execs will buy a giant pointless thing that we never use, all the bosses refuse to take responsibility to push back or even fix problems we can control, and we have to go through three different teams to get changes made outside a single cloud account. Developers don't want to have any responsibility whatsoever for how their code actually runs or is supported, scrum masters impose ridiculous process requirements that have nothing to do with productivity, we never actually see a single customer/client until we launch a product, we have almost no tests, and almost no plans for what to do if we can't just build more cloud stuff to fix any problem. There are 10 architects whose sole job is to tell you to use arbitrary technology with absolutely no context or consultation, security is one guy who doesn't know what metasploit is, and the people building shared services for internal use don't want to actually support the users using them. I'm the only one trying to improve anything because I'm new. Everyone else is either job hunting or is super green and in love with the constant free food and beer.
- t34543 7y agoFuck my job. I make more money than ever but a bunch of chodes want to meet all day. I do NOT like meetings. Pairing is a NIGHTMARE. I’m a hardcore sysadmin, let’s debug some drivers. Instead we run php web apps where I can’t grep.
- smilesnd 7y agoI have work at a bank long enough to hear stories about people having mental breakdowns. Everything from just walking out of there office naked to people using the stairway as bathrooms to help deal with the stress and anxiety that some jobs at the bank can cause. At the first bank I worked at I never witness it myself, but when I got a new job at another one it started to become a normal. So a friend of mine got hired by a bank that needed to hire 100 technical people in 30 days time. He told me how awesome of a job it was, because they had nothing to do so he spent his day doing whatever he wanted and getting paid mad money. Something happen and 2 people got fired so they needed them replace asap. He ask me if I wanted to throw my hat in the ring. I got such a gleaming referral from my friend they skip the interview process and hired me on the spot. In the week time of those 2 people getting fired though everything had changed. We came to find out those 2 people got fired because the project was suppose to be 80% done by then, but instead it was more like 10%. They fired them 2 to show they meant business and they had the lowest performance score out of the entire 100 people so they were made a example. New policy was created no more headphones, meetings everyday, only work allowed on your computer screen, no smartphones out, and a old grumpy man was put at the back end of each isle to watch us. To make it worse all the cubicals were only shoulder height. So you had all the disadvantage of a open office with all the disadvantages of a cubical farm in a neat little package. The cubes were also smaller then normal with only enough space for your chair to slide back against the wall so you could slide out. This is when stuff gets really strange you would think with all this distress and work needing to be done everyone would have there head down pounding out whatever they were suppose to be doing? That is the thing there was no work to be done. In my 6 month contract there I probably spent 3 hours actually doing work. In reality a 10 person team could have easily done what we had to do in a month time, but because of how the bank and management had structure everything it was impossible to do anything. There was also another strange thing people were expected to work 50 hours a week no matter what. When I started I put down 40 hours and got told by my manager, my recruiter, and a higher up I need to work more to help them catch up. The following week I work only 40 hours and the talks turn into threats so I started to work 47 hours a week and the threats went away. If you work 51+ hours a week it would give you the awesome option to work weekends as well. So with all this stress, anxiety, and boredom a good number of people started to act really strange. A handful of people had stop taking showers leaving a noticeable smell in certain areas. Some people would squirrel food away leading to infestation of bugs and a underground market for trading and selling junk food. Some of the higher ups notice people were wearing the same cloths every day so after a talk those people started to wear jackets and such so the higher ups couldn't say anything to them. It became a normal thing for some to just sleep at there desk the entire day. Office supplies were constantly going missing even with the higher ups guarding them. Fights would break out randomly some just shouting a couple physical ones. Every other week a women would normally have a break down and cry in her cube because managers had started to use them as there own punching bags over emails/IMs. Lunches became more group therapy then a enjoyable outing. At some tipping point the main recruiting agency came in and had us all sign something basically pledging we would act professionally from that point forward and they were not held legally for our own actions and such. To make the matter worse the recruiting agency was adding more anxiety and stress on the people. Most of the people there had work VISA and needed a job to stay in the country. The agency bully them into working 6 days a week. Someone accidentally sent out a email letting some of the people know they were no longer need on the project would be let go in 2 weeks. All the recruiters instantly contacted all 25 contractors that email went to saying that was a mistake and not true. They said they would be on the project for at least 6 more months and to ignore that email. 2 weeks later they were all let go. I was told my contract was only going to be 3 months, I ended up 6 months there. When I hit the 3 month period I started to do whatever I wanted thinking I would get fired, but it never happen. I repeatedly reached out to my recruiter telling her to put in my 2 week notice, and it never happen. It finally hit a point where I told my manager my recruiter told me this was my last week. After my last day my recruiter contacted me 6 days later asking me why I wasn't at work. My friend that got me the job stayed on for another week, but ended up getting fired. A manager that leaned on him heavy for answering technical questions got scared he might replace her and told the higher ups he attacked her during a meeting. Security came and lead him out of the building.
- droithomme 7y agoAll I can say is every time I've been fired it was a huge relief.
- sjg007 7y agoWhy would you want to get fired at the limits? Why not talk to your managers or you know resign.. I mean if you get fired you don't get unemployment benefits.. I think you mean you'd rather as to be laid off. Getting fired in the best case means taking a moral position against the company that is righteous... Does being laid off mean you were lazy?
- sithlord 7y agothis is incorrect, at least in the US. If you get fired, you do get unemployment benefits. The only way to not get unemployment benefits when being fired is for-cause. Ie stealing, or something similiar
- athriren 7y agoIn California, so long as you do not get fired for misconduct you are (generally) eligible to collect unemployment benefits whether you are fired or laid off. The definition of misconduct in California law is actually quite narrow—there are four standards and you must meet all of them in order to be ineligible for unemployment. Obviously this is only one state in a large country in an even bigger world, so this may not be applicable to where you are. But wanted to clarify for any SF/LA/other CA city readers that the legal distinction for unemployment is not being laid off vs being fired, but losing your job for misconduct vs losing your job for some other reason.
- JBlue42 7y agoSad thing is that the money from unemployment hasn't gone up for years. $1800/mo pre-tax. I was pretty pissed when first on it that the feds tax the unemployed, seems like kicking someone when they're down, but at least in CA there's no state tax, which I learned occurs in other states.
- swtrs 7y agoMy team runs a mission critical application nearly all of us were duped into supporting. Ops engineering turned into "process champion" and now I yell at people about ticket structure (bane of my existence) instead of diagnosing db performance issues (things I gleefully lose sleep over.) Now I question my passion for IT daily, fall asleep at lunch and wait for the day I do bad enough to be fired.
- ggm 7y agoI took a role which relates to a strategic goal aligned with correctness of data held. Its public-trust information. From time to time, pragmatism around "can't we just change this record..." makes my blood boil: Its explicitly not what I took the role to do: fixing pragmatic bad choices time after time, makes me want to go do something else, when the intent was to defend a line of historical accuracy and completeness. The agency is a community benefit NFP, consensus led policy. The decisions we take off-policy worry me intensely. But realistically not all things can be done by consensus. I do think there are some pressures in this space which are similar to the above: if your own moral compass and how the enterprise is driving don't align well, you really need to talk to yourself about why you are doing things. (I am not so far mis-aligned i have this problem, but I have in the past) Friends left e.g. the IETF, precisely because of this. If you can't adhere to the norms, you need to ask why you're going.
- kraig911 7y agoWorking on 20+ years of bandaids on an MFC C++ ERP Application with no documentation and some crazy ass shit going on. The goal make it a 'web app'... The corporate office is constantly waging political fights between management. We can't get anything done. Stymied.
- i_am_nomad 7y agoThis gets my vote for worst technical situation.
- werber 7y agoHalf the time TBH
- thrwwy90876 7y agoWorking at 1000+ person companies and moving 'up' the ladder, but if it wasn't for the paycheck I'd be in a small shop actually building things. Every day is another bunch of meetings, political posturing, or just dealing with people who don't care.
- newacctwhodis 7y agoI’ve got one and a half feet out the door of a well known fruit company, after going through a half dozen re-orgs in 4 months, in an infrastructure org that has an overtly sexist management chain (down to 1 female manager in a 600+ person org). I’ve reported these concerns to the HR team, but they’ve been completely unresponsive, which makes sense seeing as their job is to protect corporate interests rather than employees, as is the case with all HR teams. It’s been over 10% attrition in the last few months, and we’re two weeks away from annual bonus payouts. I sense a mass exodus coming as soon as that happens.
- tmpacct002938 7y agoI want to be fired. Joined as Staff Software Engineer in pretty well-known company. Turned out they work a lot. There is no too much work-life balance. 95% of these folks don't have kids, and I have. I need to go home at 5, often earlier, cos commute sucks. They allow to work from home 1 day a week. Now I'm in jeopardy - need to stay for 6 more months to have my stocks and sign-in bonus vested. Also new change won't look good on my resume. Next time I'll bet on WFH and WLB. F$ck the money.
- udkl 7y agoAh I see we are playing the guessing game. Facebook ?
- rjbwork 7y agoI bet AMZN
- cloverich 7y ago> Also new change won't look good on my resume. Unless you work for people that have kids. Its difficult to understand what kids do to your schedule and needs until you have them. I've met plenty of employers where your situation could be explained with "I have kids, and they weren't flexible", and 0 questions would be asked. Its honestly a good test of whether your employer understands WLB and how to keep people happy.
- hn_temp_10_1_19 7y agoI just walked from a job after a week and a half. Applied and interviewed for a junior full stack java/angular developer position. Really excited for it. Got and accepted an offer just to show up day one to a weird point & click/drag & drop visual programming thing called BluePrism. Tried to make myself like it, but couldn't stick it out. Moved 800 miles for that job too, just to get bait & switched.
- noway421 7y agoHeard that a friend of mine had to use something similar at one of his jobs, and he was miserable. Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay. I think it felt like an extremely arcane thing to learn and just not something exciting to work with. Sometimes we forget how blessed we are with the DX in mainstream programming languages.
- hn_temp_10_1_19 7y ago> Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay. I made an honest effort to get into it for more or less those reasons. Now I'm just bumming around unsure of what to do.
- honest_tovarich 7y agoHoly molly .... dude ... that’s hilarious
- hn_temp_10_1_19 7y agoIn 6 months I'll probably agree. But right now, I just feel lost, depressed, and not sure what to do.
- Jaruzel 7y agoNever heard of BluePrism, so had to Google it: https://www.blueprism.com/why-blue-prism/ https://www.blueprism.com/why-blue-prism/ Looks like a Visio type application that churns out code automagically, a bit like Scratch[1] for Grown-Ups. -- [1] https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/
- verdverm 7y agoTopTal's CEO... if he could be...
- seizethecheese 7y agoI sure hope this format doesn't take off. Having worked as a dishwasher, line cook, pool manager, business analyst, software engineer, and startup founder, I have to say software engineer was, by far, the most coddled job. How about this: I'm a line cook, and I can't afford to be fired. I make minimum wage, and burn or cut myself badly at least once per week. I'm not allowed to take the day off and have to work through it. I work 8 hours nonstop above a very hot grill. I can't see any windows during my entire shift. Nobody respects me. My coworkers are alcoholics. Edit: of course this doesn't mean software engineers shouldn't work to improve their well-being at work! Yeesh. Just adding some perspective. Earlier in life, I would have killed to have 95% of the work situations described below.
- NullPrefix 7y agoI'm sure there are worse jobs than line cook. If someone would provide a description of a worse job, would that invalidate your argument in the same way you tried to invalidate OPs argument?
- seizethecheese 7y agoOf course not. And there are better jobs than software engineer. However, I do believe it's possible to stack rank jobs, and Software Engineer must be in the top quintile in terms of quality of work-life.
- tayo42 7y agoI think I do, though not for the reason everyone else seems to be posting. Like I do hate my job, like most people do but that's not why. I think it would force me to get out of my comfort zone, find something new to be excited about. I'm pretty sure I'm to comfortable at the job I hate. I guess it would be interesting to see what I end up doing without work sucking up time. Maybe ill find time to be excited about programming again. Maybe get good at something that I want to be good at.
- jl2718 7y agoSo many ideas in my head that I really want to be working on, and I can’t seem to separate myself from the mental model of having a set position in a heirarchy, taking confused and/or hostile direction from seemingly arbitrary sources of authority. Some kind of fear, not even financial, more like the idea of getting lost, losing touch, never finding my way back, being abandoned and undesirable, dying alone. And beyond that, I can’t seem to rationalize why my job is so stressful; I’ve kept my head in war zones and extreme sports, but corporate politics feels like it’s killing me. I don’t know why, or whether I should give up hope that it will get better. The lay-off fantasy disappears when it becomes reality. Dreams give way to fears, preparing for interviews, obsessing over things which I have no control, thinking I’m the only one that feels this way.
- fearingreprisal 7y agoI've always wondered the same thing. I've lived a reasonably stressful life, living through much worse things than the daily monotony of office life as a software engineer. However there are some days where it truly just crushes my spirits and leaves me completely spiritually depleted. There's truly something to be said regarding the elasticity of our mental health and how large a role expectations and norms play in our mental well-being. Not to mention there may be something particularly dehumanizing about the profession of software engineering.
- noir_lord 7y agoI've worked what people would consider horrific jobs (significant that most of those I was one of the few English people) like greenhouse work in the summer, freezer plants, 12-14 hour shifts in a factory with weekends. Those jobs will destroy your body, a toxic office environment will destroy for want of a better word you soul. Both are awful but the are quantitatively different.
- zeba22 7y agoYou are not alone. I feel similarly
- vast 7y ago
- cleandreams 7y agoI love my job but at an earlier one, every day I wanted to quit. My boss was threatened by me and did not value me. He tried to show he had my skills. He valued another engineer more. I felt jealous, stifled, and miserable. I learned a valuable lesson though. Don't quit because you have an impulse. Wait until you have figured out your next move.
- wintorez 7y agoI love this question!
- tfehring 7y agoOh boy. Not even gonna bother with a throwaway, draw your own inferences about whether I'm taking the thread title too literally. My current responsibilities: (1) Architect for significant updates to one of our financial projection models. The requested timeline for results from these changes has been changed (directly by C-suite) from mid-November to late October to ASAFP over the course of the last week. Said model was built by non-programmers using a 20-year-old modeling platform; the lead architect was a new grad with a CS minor. Ever tried debugging a runtime error in a >1000-line C++ function, with no error messages, using nothing but cout? Try it sometime, if you've got a good therapist. (2) PM for an internal application that executes the projection model in (1) on our in-house grid computing platform. The developers and tester for this are great, which helps. But none of them had seen the codebase until a month ago, since the previous developers and tester all moved to different teams since the last time we worked on this application. They also don't fully understand what the application is doing (I haven't had time to get them totally up to speed, though I'm working on it!), which means I get to build a lot of the testing tools myself, the highlight of which has been writing a FoxPro DBF parser in R (long story). (3) Reviewer for the twisted hellscape of Excel workbooks that makes up one of my old (~2 years ago) team's processes, since the guy who was supposed to be reviewing them quit out of the blue (can't say I blame him) and my old team apparently couldn't find anyone else to do it. The old team usually gives me a heads up when they make substantial changes to parts of the process while I'm reviewing them, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. I should mention that I'm ostensibly a data scientist, but sometimes management seems to take the idea that data scientists should be generalists a little too literally.
- huntie 7y agoI work in a factory and I see all of the problems my older coworkers have. Along with that I think the company wants to move the whole plant to Mexico so there is no long-term job security. I've learned programming in my spare time but when I've tried applying for jobs I didn't get a response, which I assume is because I don't have a degree. I've been trying to get back into university but I'm not sure that it will happen anytime soon. We've been working a lot of weekends too so programming time is limited. I'd quit but this is the best paying job I've been able to get.
- ju577ry 7y agoI decided to make an account to comment on this. Build things, put them on github, write 500 words about it, add to resume, repeat.
- Nadge 7y agoI am in your situation. No longer work in a factory but still in a dead-end job. Have you considered trying to become a sysadmin instead? Everyone and their nan are trying to become programmers, but network engineering gets overlooked a lot. CCNA + maybe an AWS cert and you would easily find an entry-level role. GL.
- epiphanitus 7y agoI recently changed careers myself. My advice is to look at positions that look interesting/are in high demand, check out the technologies that they are using, learn them, build them and put them on your Github. And make sure to put the keywords of the technologies you know on your Linkedin - if you actually know them (because otherwise you will embarrass yourself in a technical interview). Since your time is limited, make sure every time you sit down to code you are learning something new rather than retreading the stuff you already know. This won't be easy - you will have to be stubborn and persistent and really commit to it. I for one got here because I became obsessed with tech and spent countless nights coding instead of socializing. But the rewards are there if you have the passion to stick it out.
- magic_beans 7y agoCompanies don't care as much about the degree as your projects.
- bonquesha99 7y agoSometimes it's nice to step away for some perspective and start again fresh somewhere new! People do actually read these comments so please give it a shot (even with a throwaway) just to see what's out there at least: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? October 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126012 What do you have to lose, you want to be fired anyways!
- donretag 7y agoI once worked for a company that was purchased and we were tasked with signing new employment papers for the new owner. When HR asked why I still have not signed the papers, I said it was forthcoming and BTW, can I collect unemployment if I don't? Mysteriously enough, half hour later I get an email from the CTO. :) So I told him I want to get laid off since the company was terrible. He promised to fix thing, but of course nothing happened and I ended up quitting anyways a few months later.
- cryptonector 7y agoNobody. Perhaps you want to be laid off when you know your employer may be about to lay off some employees, you'll have an easy time finding a new gig, and the severance will be nice. But if you want to quit, then quit, and whatever else you do, don't get yourself fired for cause, ever.
- plausibilities 7y agoEmployer making me choose between career advancement and LOB success and then tying my job security to the latter. I usually have comparable or better options available at any given time due to the sheer number of recruiters who are constantly floating things my way. An up-to-date, relevant skillset is worth a potential 5 figure pay bump in the near future, which tends to be much more lucrative than slightly increased job security at my current pay rate. They usually get one screw-up before I skip out for a better paying gig. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Have more than tripled my salary in the last 6 years hopping around like this. But honestly, I'm also just not a fan of management styles which attempt to extract additional value via appeals to fear. Usually if I see workplace management react to crunch time by letting shit roll downhill while making negative implications about how resistance might impact job security, that instantly puts me in job hunting mode. I might stick around for a bit to help out people on my team that I actually like, but at that point I'm already mentally checked out and looking for my next gig.
- throwawaybeebs 7y agoWhat really gets my goat... Working for a boss who's a dangerous cocktail of arrogance, incompetence, and is self-conscious of it. He's the kind of person who keeps a copy of Steve Jobs' biography and The Design of Everyday Things around his desk. If you ask him a yes-or-no question he responds with, well that depends. And if you ask him to clarify be prepared for a journey through tales of the south, hippie communes, anthropology, and how it all relates to the tragedy of choice and material design. He has an opinion about absolutely everything. He always tries to get the last word. He gives speeches about failure way too much. And if you get on his bad side be prepared for a word-tsunami. You will know it's coming because you can hear him typing furiously from across the office -- the little typing notification flickering on and off in Slack for ten minutes while he composes the final word. He's the kind of person who will swear he's your friend and has your back. And in one on ones he'll make you feel like people are saying things about you. He'll put you down in front of your direct reports. Will insist on winning an argument even if he's obscenely, incontrovertibly wrong because he's too embarrassed to admit he doesn't know. He once told me that I wasn't using abductive reasoning and if I was smart I would be able to figure it out. I had asked him if we could cut one or two columns from a table in a view so that we could ship on time with a nice user experience after patiently explaining why. And he collected negative feedback from people about my work, without telling me, in order to throw me under a bus at an important meeting with advisors. Then he rolls with my ideas as if they were his own.
- philpem 7y agoThat sounds exactly like my ex-boss. Never stopped going on about how he once worked for Qinetiq and they had him implement an FFT on an FPGA... last I checked that was a fairly common student assignment in FPGA courses.
- yr1337 7y agoSounds like your boss is in fact my insufferable neighbor who is a CTO and is word-for-word the guy in your description. I've stopped inviting him back and I think he finally got the memo. Tell him I didn't say hi.
- yepthatsreality 7y agoI was just recently fired, but honestly I was about to leave. I work in a two person branch of my current gig. The other person is my supervisor and is learning how to be someone. He's constantly looking over my shoulder and decided to fire me because I missed the goals, that he forced me to quote. The project wasn't ready for a deadline. I honestly got tired of all the little supervisor experiments as well. When he fired me, he asked me if I would have liked a warning that my performance was effecting my job. I told him yes. Then asked what the reasons were that I was being fired. "You're a good developer but this team needs more speed." Whatever that means, there goes my 10% at a startup...who saw this coming (hint: everyone)? He fired me before I went on a 2 week vacation. During said time he got a good taste of the difficulty of the project and why I was resistant to quoting times. Would a manager ever admit a mistake?
- pcl 7y ago> The project wasn't ready for a deadline. I really like that way of looking at deadlines and project lifecycles. I haven’t ever heard the relationship expressed that way.
- andyjohnson0 7y agoI interpreted it as "the project wasn't ready [in time for] a deadline". But I agree, the concept of a project that is somehow too immature or unprepared for a deadline is though provoking.
- scott_s 7y agoIf the project isn't read for a deadline, then it's not product development, it's research. (And I feel I have some standing to say this!) Phrasing it that way may help get people's lightbulbs to go off.
- yepthatsreality 7y agoIt's more that the project was immature. If I have a bucket of data and an unknown part of the data is either incorrect or unknown then I can't give a full quote on completion all data in the bucket. Especially if the data accuracy/discovery is contingent on other team members also uncertain of the quality of the data. This will and did lead to burnout. The bigger issue is that I've been treated by a robot. Just talk to me and quit trying to social engineer a solution out of me or try to make me discover the results you're expecting. Final note, my supervisor said he really enjoyed working with me the past year, but they're trying to improve the "shitty parts" of the company. Doesn't that make me some of the "shit"?
- snapetom 7y agoMy last day at work is Friday. I was hired three years ago to write web apps for a major children's hospital, but given no web servers to run the apps. That hasn't changed much. Let me repeat that. My job is to write web apps. I have no servers. The first "servers" I was given were three old RedHat boxes that were used in a share environment by researchers. Ports to the box weren't open and basically everyone was root to install whatever they wanted. The second set of "servers" I was given was this "enterprise solution" called BlueData. It basically runs crippled versions of open source software and to top it off, our "DevOps" team did things like not open any ports to the farm and set up one command line ingress to it. I spent years arguing this was insane and I finally had it. It was low stress and I hardly did any work, but at the end of the day, I didn't feel good about taking salary for money that can go directly to children's care.
- james_s_tayler 7y agoThis is both funny and sad, but it just leaves me curious what did you spend your time doing for three full years working like that?
- philpem 7y agoI'm gonna guess side-projects. The sort of thing you throw together on a lunch break to learn a new library or tool or otherwise scratch an itch.
- snapetom 7y agoI'm exaggerating at the situation, but not too far off. For the past year, I've been working on an ETL app. I used Go at my last job, so I really got to hone my skills especially in regards to threading challenges. Kafka and Cassandra were also new to me. Still, the VMs these are running on are a complete mess. Frequent, unannounced infrastructure changes, spin drives, old Java in Docker are just some of the issues that made the environment completely unstable. They chase sexy buzzwords like "big data" and "machine learning" but give us spin drive machines to do it.
- damontal 7y ago
- PeterStuer 7y agoSide note: Over here employers must give you a notice of termination, the length of which depends on how long you worked for the company. For employees with over a decade of loyalty, this period can be a year or more. The intent is that a worker can get enough time to find a new employment. The regulation has a perverse effect. As an employee who is on notice is generally no longer trusted to prioritise the company's best interest, the practise is to just pay out the wages for the notice period but prevent further access to the business and its clients. This makes firing someone with enough tenure an expensive deal. There are two ways around this. (1) If you can fire someone for 'grave and urgent resons', let's say you caught them stealing from the till, the the termination period does not hold, and you can fire them on the spot. Problem is that 'grave and urgent' is not a very well defined concept, and therefore is open to abuse. You got ill and did not submit a doctor's notice within 24hrs to HR? That is formally 'illegal absense' and could be a 'grave and urgent' termination offense. (2) The notice period is reversed in case it is the employee quits. Then they have to give the company the lengthy notice. Same as above the employee is usually alowwed to leave much sooner if he agrees to tie up some loose ends and do a handover. In practice many employees that a company wants to fire will be nudged/pestered into quitting by making their work more difficult or less attractive. The regulation is well intended and for the right reasons, but fails in practice.
- mikorym 7y agoIf you say that it fails in practice, is that your opinion or is that a general opinion? Presumably, in some cases the regulation that you mention works the way it was intended? I wouldn't mind not working in the notice period; it would be a plus for me. The other question is also of course: What kind of a law should supercede such a law? I am not saying I disagree with you or anything like that, but what I am saying is that developing countries (for example) usually have concrete problems that make some scenarios around regulation in developed countries look somehow immaterial or even amusing. By the way, newer labour regulation in South Africa are also causing problems. Our particular problem is that you don't want to hire people anyway; you would rather downscale. If you hire someone who turns out to be a incapable employee, you have a harder time letting them go. This disincentivises "giving someone a chance" with an uncertain ability or a unusual background. But we have >60% youth unemployment (I think that is defined as aged 18–35) and that overrides most arguments or high level laws—there are simply more pressing matters at hand.
- jhoutromundo 7y agoOn my last job, a new manager called me for a meeting on Friday 4PM. I spent the whole month on an extremely stressful project. The meeting was about an app that integrates credit card payments, billets and bank account on a terminal that is going to be available to the general public. The deadline? 11PM of the same day. Final version. From 0 to 100% in 6 hours. I said that it was impossible. He said that I was incapable. I remember coming back home with a feeling that I was incompetent, even with my 11 years of experience with JavaScript. I didn't sleep that night, trying to build it even with delay. Saturday morning I had a burnout. I was afraid to lose my job because I sustain my family. I thought throwing myself from my apartment window. That was one of the worst days in my life. I got fired on Monday morning. Got another job on the same day. Almost twice the salary.I told them that I need a little time to cleanup my mind and they gave 2 weeks to recover from that situation. I'm happy now.
- sAbakumoff 7y agowhat kind of company takes 1 morning to fire an employee? that does not sound realistic.
- rovr138 7y agoMaybe they needed or wanted a reason to fire them. If that’s the case, it was all ready to go on HR.
- sAbakumoff 7y agoI mean it only happens in movies when an employee gets fired and immediately put his stuff in the box and leaves the building. In real life there are labor regulations that don't allow this, there is the notification period et cetera
- hef19898 7y agoDepends. Even in Germany the company can simply decide to get you physically out right now as long as they keep you on the pay roll for the legal notice period.
- carapace 7y agoI've quit a couple of places. If the management is incompetent or just out of their depth; if they company can't make good use of my skills and talents. I'm an outlier, but I've been homeless and I have no wife nor children to support, so I don't fear just quitting if any BS comes up. My advice, FWIW, is to always have your "FU" money. (Money is a technology, here's a good simple manual: "The Richest Man in Babylon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28book%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28... )
- paul7986 7y agoI'm out the door pretty soon if I'm alone in dealing with a bully or an insecure pr$&k who builds himself up by putting putting you and others down. Two years ago I reported a female colleague whom I witnessed being harassed. After reporting it I was harassed by different employee ..nothing came from reporting my harassment and so I left. That place was terrible and no longer exists. Overall There's too many jobs out there in our field to have deal with b.s. and stress.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- codesushi42 7y agoMy reason is different from most. I am working on difficult problems, more technically difficult than I ever have before. Maybe I will succeed, but I may fail because I'm way in over my head. But if I am in over my head, I hope I get fired. Because at least I was challenged enough where I hit my limit for the first time, from a technical standpoint. And then I will be free to move on and do something else with my life. If I succeed, then I will be happy continuing to succeed in this role, working on difficult problems. So it is a win win.
- honkycat 7y agoI hate all of my jobs. Computer programming just doesn't seem worth it for 100-120k. I could work an easier job for a better money/bullshit ratio. My therapist is concerned. So am I. What if I don't fit in anywhere? I'm extremely sensitive with a high EQ, am an INTP. People really like me, and I make fast friends and can run a room extremely effectively. I've always been "the funny guy." I'm absurdly driven A-type and I go crazy if I can't hack and distinguish myself through my natural work ethic and intellect. I do EXCELLENT at both the interpersonal and implementation part of software engineering. I've never had a bad review. I've fucked my career up while actively trying to build my resume. I thought building a successful start up would help my resume. It doesn't. Nobody cares. People want to pay me the same mediocre pay for a harder job five years later. They want to see Google and an ivy league on the resume. I don't know what to do anymore. After 10 years and a 4 year degree, I'm totally lost as to what to do next.
- encoderer 7y agoCreate multiple income streams. Build a product not a startup. Learn, earn, grow.
- tathatsnice 7y agoPlease give me a way to contact you. I’m roughly in the same position you are.
- james_s_tayler 7y agoMoney/bullshit ratio made me chuckle. I feel like I'm 5 years into what you are describing. From time to time I start to get that lost feeling too these days. In my mind I have it mapped out that I only really have to do this another 8 or so years. Then just go on whatever the hell journey seems the most interesting once finances are no longer the main priority. But during that 8 year trek I struggle with "now that side projects and learning new tech are no longer fun by default, how do I make them fun because otherwise the fact that they completely consume 100% of my free time sometimes makes me mildly depressed."
- samvher 7y agoI don't know you, but it doesn't sound like programming is the problem. 100-120k is objectively a lot of money and it sounds like you're comparing yourself to others who have shinier jobs and higher salaries. Maybe it would be healthy to focus less on accomplishment/prestige and more on enjoyment.
- s3nnyy 7y agoMost people leave their bosses and not their jobs. The inverse is also true. My last job as a programmer was not so great but I stayed there for many years because my boss was quite great and supportive. Now, I run a tech recruitment consultancy and if programmers come to me about changing jobs, in most cases the reason is the boss. Most programmers invest a lot of time in coding and related activities but neglect most other aspects of their career. This Ask HN is a proof of this. (Shameless plug: I am writing a guide on how to be more efficient in the workplace and get better compensated, pre-order "Coderfit: Make more money as a programmer" here: https://gumroad.com/l/cdrft https://gumroad.com/l/cdrft)
- drewbt 7y agoThis reminds me of being fired from a cult for willfully disobeying ridiculous rules
- hef19898 7y agoHappened to me a couple of times. The common denominator in all cases is managers and an organization preferring opinions over facts. The last case took three months to reach that point. During that I had to manage a serious raw material shortage situation everybody tried as hard as possible to ignore. After three months that wasn't possible anymore and all of a sudden the business decided it was up to me find a solution, prioritize customers and markets and it was also me who was responsible for sales to miss their targets due to that raw material shortage. That the root cause was a force majeure incident at a single source supplier, we were most likely in a dominant market position and the global market for the raw material was empty didn't matter. The last straw was my new manager who insisted to provide numbers impossible to extract from the ERP system and present numbers I knew were wrong simply because they showed that there was no problem. Also he directly said that apparently I was incapable of doing my job. The day after that I quit.
- ta2661dc3 7y agoI work remotely for a company in the Bay Area, doing mostly web development. - Compensation is great. - Few calls, very little micro-management. - People I work with are great. - They don't care about where I'm working from as long as the timezone isn't too far off. Somehow I feel miserable. I can't quite explain it. I think it's because the work I do is boring and I've been doing it for a long time. I've been working fewer and fewer hours because I just can't get myself to work more. Also I don't really like being an employee, even if my relationship with my employer is great. I yearn for the ultimate freedom of owning my own business. I wish I could just be happy with my situation which is fantastic in every way.
- ihadfun 7y agoI get it. It’s lonely and if you’re not careful to leave the house it gets worse. The good news is you have plenty of time to work on a side project but that requires first improving mental state to have enough motivation.
- abledon 7y agothe best jobs are where I can sit down with people beside me and crack jokes all day.
- Dumblydorr 7y agoYes, I feel like I cant get myself to work more unless I have pressing need from meeting team members. If they are on vacation or too busy, that's when I really struggle to focus and self-start as I just dont fundamentally care about the work itself.
- geocrasher 7y agoI haven't been in your exact shoes so forgive me if this sounds judgmental. I have worked remote for several years and if there's one thing I can say, it's that I don't think your job is your problem. The problem is that you don't feel challenged, and you're expecting your work to fulfill that for you. Find a way to fulfill that on your own. Start a blog, side project, or a hobby. I have all 3 going, plus more. Work is where I get work done and support my family. LIFE is where I get fulfillment ;-)
- blablabla123 7y agoOn my current job most of the engineers have little engineering experience. Mostly we use modern tools but it's obvious that they had been set up once and since then nobody took care to maintain/tweak them. That makes the workflow very disorganized and sometimes tedious. Decisions are often made very spontaneously, the process (Scrum) is often skipped and a lot of blaming happens even in meetings. One guy sometimes spontaneously walks up to others and starts loud arguments or blaming. Also there seems to be low trust among the department heads. Many tasks I work on the agreed upon solution changes back and forth. It's a real mess, so getting fired would be the easiest option. But probably I'll just have to keep my eyes open for a new job and then switch.
- somebody_sw 7y agoI'm utterly bored, I changed jobs a year ago because of family reasons. The company is great in a lot aspects (team culture, benefits, technology). I got asigned a project where I did a successful POC which was already shown the costumers and management. But after the POC the project is now on hold, there is no decision from managment since 4 months. I still have weekly calls with the PM, which tells me how he wants the project to continue, but rumor is he'll change positions shortly. My boss won't assign me to another project as he doesn't know how the project continues and wants to hold me back as resource. So since months I'm dabbling around trying to support my teammembers with random scripts and tools to do at least something useful. I've got an offer from another local company which I'll probably will take, just to do something useful again.
- ping_pong 7y agoI was told that I wasn't doing enough code reviews, even though I am the only person on my team, because the 3 other engineers left over the previous 9 months. When I pointed this out to my manager, she said that I should have found code to review on other teams instead of waiting for people to ask me. I started studying that evening and quit the next month.
- ibudiallo 7y ago2017, due to a misconfiguration or lack thereof, the system that manages 250k employees marked me as terminated. Security came to my desk and escorted me out of the building like a criminal. I was hired back 3 weeks later, with a small apology and no pay. I looked for another opportunity right away and quit the job. Today, I design and build automated systems for a startup. I made sure that the "AI" has a big red button that stops the process and spits out a backtrace of all the steps it took so we can be accountable and reverse any damage.
- croh 7y agointeresting. I thought it only happens in movies.
- sah2ed 7y agoBased on the gp's handle, I believe the full story [0] had been posted here [1] before: 0: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ninjahatori1 7y agoOrganization I work for is in experimental phase about what roles would be more efficient, last December I switched to be a DevOps from Software Engineer role, partly because of "Organizational Needs". but now, they want to move all the DevOps into a room extracting them out of their Scrum Teams, and they've asked few guys (including me) to be "Multi-Functional" which I don't get it. as they're moving backwards from what really DevOps means, I want to move out as I fail to see any outcomes of this move which will turn out to be good for either of us. also, if I start back up with Development I'll be treated as a Junior developer and will be shoved to work on non-interesting parts of the project.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoThere's a team at my workplace that I think is almost literally making our product worse every time they check in code. They rejected a security fix I made because they didn't want to test it. The manager makes incomprehensible decisions and just blatantly lies about what they are doing. My entire team has a policy of just not interacting with them to avoid problems. How am I supposed to respect the management skills and decision making of execs who keep these people around?
- vast 7y ago* three planning layers * no reasonable reaction on devastating feedback * purely numbers driven. Ignoring tech debt and creativity * no new recruits in years * not honoring experienced programmers * no working creative process to bring the product to the next level * naive and reactional cargo culting I have great colleagues. Workload is usually fine, except too many topic on the table. We have quite a lot freedom how to handle things, but not so much about the what. Our tech management is quite horrible. The top manager has unsolved conflicts with the majority of coders. Mostly because he has no idea about tech and never gives reasonable feedback. Fluctuation is currently extreme and I will be leaving soon with only 2 tech people remaining that have been there long term. Our company has the potential to break the 1bn threshold next decade, just to give an idea about the scale.
- Nitin_Dabi5551 7y agowqewerwer
- isthis1984 7y agoI work in this place where I've made quite a few nice products the management are selling, they are, in part, keeping the company competitive. However they spend all their time trying to convince me that the work I do is crap and they could do it themselves easily (they're developers to - its a small company). There is this continuing comedy where a bug or enhancement arrives and they say they'll do it - we don't need you (implied). I say sure, and they fiddle around for days or weeks, occasionally a small one is fixed, but usually they just fiddle around the edges. Eventually they give up and I do the work, and they spend all their time trying to poke holes in what I do so they can prove that they don't need me. I asked for a couple of pay rises initially and they don't want to pay me more. Here's the bit that really gets me - this has been going on for a couple of years, and competitors products are overtaking ours which were leading edge. They spend all their time saying they don't need me and to the extent that they're actually hurting their business. I've given up a long time ago and have moved to part time and I'm developing my own business, so I don't really care, the cash coming in is enough to keep me going, so all good. They still keep asking me to go back full time, but they don't need me, and they don't need anything changed. It truely is the most bizarre experience. (It feels good sharing this :-) )
- vectorEQ 7y agoalways being happy to help and people using that as an excuse to be their shit dumping ground because they are [lazy|incompetent|arseholes]
- antihero 7y agoHad a job working for an online gardening shop, where I was on minimum wage and despite being a junior I was probably one of the more switched on devs there (I had to convince everyone to use a git when joining, previously they edited files directly via SFTP on the prod oscommerce site that had not been updated in 6 or so years and had lots of config.php.2009.barry.bak type shit going on). Someone not in the IT department went around our back (held us in disdain because we pushed back with his silly demands and deadlines) and got an outsourced team to build us a solution to replace our proprietary accounting software, which needed to tap into the accounting software's MSSQL db, and our ageing OSCommerce MySQL database. Because he didn't talk to us, the spec was completely absurd and he didn't even mention that there were two completely different databases. So my task was basically to take the immensely poor quality, wrongly specced code, and "make it work". Think having to chew through a giant class with literally thousands of mysql_ (no escaping or anything like that) queries and having to rewrite them either using PDO or the mssql extension. I think I lasted about a week on this project before I got up from my desk and left, never to return.
- cryptica 7y agoPeople who have money and power today are on average less intelligent and less competent than people who don't. I guess this is the result of the past 10 or so years of expansionary monetary policy. It enabled greedy people with very little talent to capture a lot of money. Value creation was sacrificed for the benefit of value capturing (rent-seeking) activities.
- gryzzly 7y agoAny amount of blaming from management onto the employees will get me to decide to leave immediately. Lying to employees. Army-type discipline at the office. Any non-payment of salary (unless it’s not employer’s responsibility, but 3rd party and I‘m given full transparency on why that is, like a bank transfer issue etc. with a promise to sort this out). Indeed, I quit a bunch of jobs for these reasons.
- gryzzly 7y agoEvery one of these decisions to quit led to the next job being better in terms of managers, experience I got and compensation.
- jimcsharp 7y agoThey're tearing down some walls to fit a few more desks in (the openest of open offices). I've been living like a college student for 10 years now following FIRE blogs, so getting fired wouldn't be completely unwelcome.
- remi_dez 7y agoHaving to touch any Windows machine.
- tyingq 7y agoArtificial harmony. Where people smile and nod about some decision face to face, then subvert it quietly afterwards.
- ParkerContent 7y agoThe never-ending battle of sales vs. marketing. :)
- luizfnmarques1 7y agoI am living the startup to big corpo movement. Goddamn, how amateurs people with a huge amount of money can be. Toxic management? YES, a lot :)
- throwaway163256 7y agoI work at a pretty well known (in our field) and well respected digital production agency. I've been here for a bit over 7 years now. I started as a developer and learned almost everything I know. It was a really fun job and I loved my coworkers, the managers, the culture, the work was exciting and cutting-edge. Everything was great. I went from medior to senior developer pretty quickly and eventually they asked me to take on a technical manager role at a different office abroad. After my move, I was assigned development work rather than management work, and I assumed this was merely a transition to my new role. This continued for 2 years, even after I flagged it multiple times with my superiors. Eventually, about 6 months ago, I was told I hadn't been taking on my new role, and that they were considering letting me go or sending me back (I'm on a visa and depend on this company for my stay here). This came directly from the people who both asked me to take on this new role and who were not allowing me to do said job. I was completely in shock by the absurdity of it. We cut a "deal" where they'd allow me to do my "new" job and to reevaluate a year later. I'm 6 months in now and I think it's going fairly well. I'm learning a lot and working really hard at this role. In reality though, I'm using the job to learn how to perform in this role and I'm planning my leave to take on a similar role elsewhere. This whole episode has left a really bad taste in my mouth (that and a change in leadership which is more passionate about money than craft), and I have no intention of staying after this year is over. I hope I get fired, since it would require them by law to pay me a months salary for every year I've worked there.
- bigYahnz 7y agoI've been pushing boundaries seeing what it will take to get fired for a couple years. I apparently have not found the limit yet. We've lost over half our team. Have no manager. Have no project manager. No QA. No testing. 4 developers to support a growing list of custom apps which currently sits somewhere around 260. Fun stuff.
- howard941 7y agoI was hired to write firmware but we lack hardware for me to run and if we do get it the hardware people are too overloaded to build it for me. As a result I have no hardware to test my code against and I'm constantly shooting in the dark.
- kerkeslager 7y agoIf you actually want to be fired, find a new job and quit. The best thing you can do for yourself is to take responsibility for your part in a toxic relationship. Don't wait for other people to make your life decisions for you. Before anyone starts in with the "but there aren't better opportunities"--if that's really true, you don't want to be fired, so what I'm saying doesn't apply to you.
- brightball 7y ago7 years ago I was hired as the sole developer in a train wreck situation. 14 year old company had just relaunched their site to early and without any testing. It was like eBay but for an expensive niche market. The primary developer walked after the launch. The new site was buggy and the whole thing had been rebuilt without any of the previous security tooling. Phishing and fraud against the user base were everywhere. I spent a year fixing this site, combatting fraud, building anti fraud tools, setting up DMARC, learning both the old Perl system and the new rails system, adding new features, running the servers and being on call 24/7 at the expense of my home life. I did it too. I stabilized the site, rendered the fraud and phishing ineffective and saved the company. At my review they thanked me for saving the company...and told me they didn’t think I was working hard enough. I realized that if they actually believed that after the year I just put in there was nothing I could do to change their mind and I was really, seriously depressed for most of the next month. As you might expect, during that month my work actually did suffer and the CEO sent me a nasty note over a weekend while my wife and I were out. She saw the note and told me to quit because she didn’t want me working for somebody like that. It was the biggest relief in the world to hear that from her because I was struggling with how to tell her any of it. I internalized it all. I asked what about money? She said we’d figure it out. So I called and resigned immediately and told them I’d write up transition documents for the next developer. Told him what he needed to do moving forward to make the company work and he actually listened to exactly what I told him to do and paid me an extra 2 weeks after my last day to actually thank me for saving his company. Couple of months later I got a good job for the next 5 years and now that experience has me working in the email security and antiphishing world...very happily.
- joncrane 7y agoYou did great! Congratulations. For anyone reading this and considering doing the same, one minor tweak. > I called and resigned immediately and told them I’d write up transition documents for the next developer ...or any other task they want at an appropriate hourly rate. That rate being at least 3x what you were making previously. Also you have to be totally OK with them not hiring you. Depending on the relationship, perhaps the hours are only sold in packs of 10 and must be prepaid. (e.g. hourly rate is $300, no work done until each $3000 check clears)
- wowandflutter 7y agoManagement which prefers to recruit only “offshore” talent, believing the offshore talent is inherently superior to all other talent that is not from their county. Discrimination? Yep. Happening anyway? Yep. Obvious? Usually, but it’s subtle. Anyone important taking notice? Not really. The higher ranks from offshore support the offshore model first.
- kostarelo 7y agoRecently, the business I’ve been working for the last few months, threw me in a project where I (and my whole team really) ended up realizing that they didn’t even understand what the problem was. Specifically, I had to develop an integration with our system and an external provider but we ended up realizing that our system wasn’t even close to being integrated with this provider. So what we thought it would be a few months work, we started hitting walls on every step and realizing that it was just impossible, at least based on our initial assumptions. The project ended up stale after working on it for three months, I ended up being completely demotivated and eventually quitting the company for what I thought an incapable executive layer for taking business decisions.
- Grangar 7y agoWell I actually just got "fired" today. I'm doing an infosec traineeship right now, and I supposedly don't put in enough effort at home. Employer told me the company expects people to put in another ~20hrs of studying by themselves on top of the 40 in the office, I hope this is not industry wide... Had I known this I wouldn't have signed in the first place. Any infosec companies with sane hours hiring trainees in the Netherlands?
- nickthemagicman 7y agoI work at a tech company that just lost 70% of its stock price in under a year, my team was laid off from 15 people down to 3 people, my boss quit, and the app I've been working on for a year is questionable to be shutdown. And I'M going to look like the jerk on my resume for quitting before a year is up. God love capitalism!
- rinchik 7y ago"And I'M going to look like the jerk on my resume for quitting before a year is up." - this problem is in your head. Capitalism has nothing to do with that. You can quit at any point, even after a couple weeks. If you can't bubble-wrap an explanation for future interviews then work on that. Soft skills are also important.
- nickthemagicman 7y agoI thought resumes exist to GET the interview.
- Random_Person 7y agoThat'd be great. I'm actively searching, but a 40 year old junior dev isn't in high demand. I took my present job hoping for some mentor-ship to better develop my skills. My days are spent in my office, with no concrete understanding of what is expected of me. I have projects that are "mine"... and by that, I mean that no other developer has a clue what I do. There is no team. No goals. No targets. I just work on whatever I feel like working on, and it's slowly driving me crazy.
- abledon 7y agotalk to people around the office and figure out the mission of the company, figure out how to make peoples tasks easier to complete so they have less work to do, and can work easier throughout the day.
- Random_Person 7y agoIt's not that I don't have work. I have plenty of things I could be doing on a daily basis. It's that there is no direction. No plan. No priority. I just show up and do whatever I do and go home. Once a week, I send a report to my supervisor of my activities for the week. My projects are entirely separate from the other developers here, so it's not really an option for me to go sit with them and co-work because we don't know each other's codebase.
- abledon 7y agoHow does your company make money? Thats the priority. Make whatever they have to do.. to make money.. easier. Also, bring up Silo-effect with your supervisor and let him know you wanna go meet the other team, go take a cookie tin or some beer or whatever to the other team and introduce yourself and hang out 30mins in the morning or something just to get a feel for what theyre doing/pain poitns etc... ask questions to get a feel for how _they_ interpret the organizatiosn priorities and plans... maybe they have an entirely different paradigm/perception.
- 7y ago
- throwaway_xpto 7y agoIn theory I have the perfect job: I create developer tools to be used with my company's platform. I choose the tech, decide the features and when to deliver. The commute is OK - about 30 minutes from door to door. I get reasonably paid but the workload is just too little. I have to come up with things to do just to fill in the mandatory 40 weekly hours in Jira. There aren't that many developers using our tools and there isn't a "push" to improve/evolve them so I just drag any tasks endlessly so I have enough to do all week. Still everyone is quite happy with my performance as I get shit done. I know I am not the only one. Other departments have people just idling most of the time. I feel that I am completely useless. I've already mentored a junior developer so I guess he could handle it on his own. I am seriously done with this and I would consider moving to a new job if it weren't for two problems: I am having my first baby in a few months and there aren't any product companies around (I don't want to go to a consulting company again). If I stick around my unit test code coverage will be 200%.
- whynaut 7y agoIf you're going to be sticking around, is there someway you can (perhaps covertly) pivot within the company? You didn't mention what the platform does, but is there some featureset you could work on in your free time, and then surprise the company?
- throwaway_xpto 7y agoI don't think I could do something within the platform itself because it's a different team, a different tech stack and a different mindset. They are disconnected from reality and build whatever features the product owner & CTO puts on their plate. The only thing I could do is to try to convince Sales or Account managers that we need new integrations and POC projects...
- exikyut 7y agoOkay, how about: make extremely casual friends with the developers you can resonate with the easiest, and unofficially learn about any and all pain points and so forth. Maybe even hint at the truth about not having enough work to do, if you think it would be understood correctly (something to play by ear), and point out the specific area of tooling you work on. If you play your cards right, you might be able to go up your chain at the same time you get your new friend(s) to go up their chain, producing a most odd coincidence where some random idea you offhandedly mention to your boss one day happens to be exactly what the boss heard the developer team lead really wanted :) or something to that effect. Basically figure out how to engineer a planets-aligning moment in terms of approval. If possible, mix things up so it looks like your initiative was key in the new feature happening. Maybe (more playing by ear) you could skip the coincidence stuff and just mention that you happened to grab lunch with a developer and heard they really wanted XYZ feature (that happens to be exactly the kind of thing you'd be perfect to implement etc etc). Sort of sounds a tad less impressive put that way, but could still work.
- notTyler 7y agoThis isn't nearly as bad as the others here but recently our scrum master came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively over pointing stories because apparently it looks so bad to management if you don't complete something within it's estimate. A week later I finished something early and was instructed to not bring anything else into the sprint because, you know, visibility is more important than actually being productive. I get that deadlines and metrics are important. And I get that managers/mgmt will never see eye to eye with developers about how long stuff takes. But this is just sheer idiocy, encouraging doing the bare minimum and a culture of fear instead of rewarding good work. If I actually told the next up the chain about it, they'd absolutely sweep it under the rug. So yeah I'm interviewing looking to go somewhere way, way smaller at this point.
- karussell 7y ago6 or 7 years ago I did some freelancing to fund my open source project (some nice algorithms and stuff). After two or three clients I had the idea to build some parts around it to make it a real product and invested 2 months into this, which meant no money in that time. After that I urgently needed a new client as money on my bank account ran out. I did not plan this properly. Unfortunately it took weeks to find a new offer and so I accepted the first that came in and it was a completely crazy contract that required me to do parts I never did before (e.g. database and mobile related) in a very short time. Additionally it was a few weeks before X-mas where I should have planned with some holidays. The other ugly downside of this task was the contact person behind this. He was unfriendly and put huge pressure on me, insisting on the contract deadlines and adding requirements (I know now this is not uncommon, but I hadn't this with my few older clients). Additionally or logically I got ill a few days before X-mas, which made the already crazy project now impossible. The client called me one day after X-mas about the progress (was still ill) and I got crazy and didn't know what to do. Luckily my wife earned money too! Still I needed to find a solution of how to end this and still get a bit money for the done tasks. After my health got back I discussed with the client of how to define the next milestone and I tried hard to avoid to state that I cannot fulfill the contract although in retrospect no one could have done this. This process took 2 weeks and I was able to remove many requirements from the contract and somehow was able to deliver this and got some money. A few months after this I got a shock when I got another Email from this company and thought now they'll sue me, but luckily the original contact person left the person and they just wanted to know how a few things work. So finally I was really able (with 2 other founders) to rescue my plan to make the open source project a product, which is now a smoothly running, small company. Lessons learned: * as a newbie define smaller milestones, include holidays in your plans, include at least monthly payouts * never give your clients your private phone number and let them know when you are available (e.g. not on weekends) * do freelancing with enough money in the bank or enough clients
- ariel_h 7y agoToday was really close to it. I'm a team leader and I texted my boss in the morning that I'm sick today, he called me 10 minutes later asking me how I feel, and also telling me there is an alert in production, asking me if I saw it, and asking if I talked to my team members to check this. My throat hurts and I have fever, so no, I didn't do it.. I feel that I need to hold his hand with anything and if I'm sick he can't handle anything alone. 2 hours later he called me again, just wanting to ask a "small question" that a sales guy had, regarding the product. My boss is the VP of engineering.. I really don't understand how he got this job, he can't handle anything alone and don't have empathy for his employees when they are sick.
- geekbird 7y agoSilence your phone, let it go to voicemail. When he asks why you didn't answer, say "I was sick with a fever and a sore throat. I didn't answer my phone because I was sleeping, trying to get better."
- throwaway162853 7y agoI just recently left a startup that was giving me Theranos vibes. The founder seemed far more interested in attending conferences and becoming a "thought leader" in the industry than actually building the product and the company. I'd consider myself as someone who enjoys working in a startup setting with ambiguity and the opportunity to shape the product vision. But there never seemed to be any effort to try to resolve the ambiguity. Instead, we had major problems with secrecy/lack of communication and the inability to be honest with the current state of the product. A lot of people in the company (including myself) tried to introduce some rigor and establish common ground, but none of us were successful. And honestly, this felt like it was by-design. Every employee was only privy to understanding part of the problem and only the founder held all the cards. My opinions would frequently be superseded by "you're wrong because you only understand the user side, not the customer side" while my colleague who worked on sales/business-development would hear the opposite. At a certain point, it just felt like an uphill battle with the founder that was no longer worth the debating and shouting. Any effort to measure efficacy was dismissed. No one could actually articulate the problem we were trying to solve, how our product solves it, and whether or not it was effective. It's a real shame because on paper the domain and vision of the company is exactly what I'd want to focus my career on, but this was starting to feel more like a shell of a startup than an actual one.
- kylek 7y agoThe magnitude of this post is very distressing to me. (Also, HN is an unfortunate format for this kind of thing). I hope plenty of employers will read this thoroughly and take heed. I always try to assume positive intent, though it's obvious that's not what many commenters here are experiencing. Expectations seem to need to change industry-wide. To the employers that do (supposedly) care about your employees mental health: you may not know what you're asking for sometimes. To the employees: you need to be better at expressing your troubles and needs. I don't know what a solution might be. But I'm praying for y'all.
- metalgearsolid 7y agoI was asked to implement "passive data analytics", so our iOS app could soak up data on age, gender, etc. I put in my notice the following Friday. That was almost a month ago. Currently struggling with the realities of unemployment and depression. Not sure where things will go from here. I haven't discovered any kind of support system for software developers who left their jobs because of their personal morals.
- geocrasher 7y agoRewind to 1996 or so. I was around 20 and living in Reno NV at the time and was really good at fixing computers. There were a number of local mom and pop computer shops, and I needed a job. A working interview consisted of 10 breakfix cases inside of a day. They'd have been happy with me handling 5. I was hired. I was confident that I'd do a good job for them. The first sign that there was a problem was when the guy who also interviewed that day got hired. If you go back that far, you might remember that there were two piece power headers on motherboards. If you didn't install them correctly (with the ground wires in the center) and forced them the wrong direction, you'd let out the magic smoke. Somehow they thought hiring the guy who made that mistake was a good idea. The first week wasn't so bad, but then the bullying started. Verbal abuse. Name calling. Giving me nickname that they'd use to remind me of every mistake I made. Harassing me over mistakes I made to the point that I wanted to cry. If I didn't know something that they knew, even if I couldn't be expected to, I was berated and treated like an idiot. I was young, and so badly needed that job because I was living with my grandparents at the time and they made it clear that I was to get on my own ASAP. They were kind, and didn't kick me out (and it wasn't threatened) but I wanted to be a Good Boy and Do The Right Thing. But it wasn't easy. Then there was the shop talk. Sometimes they'd talk about work, but most of the time it was talking about strippers and drugs. I was in a shop full of coke addicts. 8 weeks in, I was let go. I was never more glad to be fired from a job in my life.
- ramtatatam 7y agoI worked for a startup that was only founder and myself at the beginning. I took responsibility to build the product, the company grew from us two to 24 in 3 years. At some point he invited manipulative manager into the team who had a very bad habit of making friends with people by badmouthing other people. Founder did not want to read these signs until the point that manager got private phone line with investors and started badmouthing founder and everyone else. Half year later founder was fired, that manager took over. Soon after I was told off, but I was on my way out anyways after I found him shouting at his subordinates. Anyways this was way too long after I was stripped off from any voice in the company.
- tbyehl 7y agoI clicked expecting a What's the worst / most creative thing you'd do to get yourself fired? thread. But I'll play. My $dayjob involves hosted healthcare software. Looks more like bespoke outsourcing than SaaS. I'm on a two-person team responsible for a relatively tiny number of systems within each customers' deployment. Officially I'm on-call every other week. In reality, on a team this small, everyone is always on-call. During my first year here, we busted ass to reduce after-hours calls -- cleaning up our own messes, giving support teams access to handle certain internal items, demanding better judgement of "Is this potentially affecting medical outcomes, or can this wait until normal working hours?", etc. This year the company launched a more formalized and automated Major Incident process. Much human judgement has been removed -- if a Major Incident is raised, every team is contacted by a PagerDuty-like system to join a WebEx. At the start of implementing this process, I found myself being called out-of-schedule by the automated systems. MIs weren't being raised that often so it took a few weeks to figure out that we were both being called every time and then months of venting to everyone up-the-chain as MIs were increasing in frequency before they finally believed us and got the right person engaged to fix it. Then the reality of having a process with little human judgement really started to sink in. People default to CYA behavior. We're getting called for things that don't come close to meeting the criteria for a Major Incident. Often the MI process is initiated after the right teams have been engaged and are working towards resolution. We're getting stuck on calls for hours where the incident manager doesn't want to release anyone, "just in case they're needed later." Right now I feel thoroughly abused by this process and automation and being such a small team. We've removed too much human discretion, and where there's any left, it's being exercised poorly. The anxiety I and my family experience when my phone rings is palpable. Apart from this aspect of my employment, my job is pretty cush. The work itself isn't stressful, most of my coworkers are great to work with, management is above-average, PTO is generous. I've been officially 100% remote for three years now and at this point my life is completely structured around the freedom it provides. My salary is relatively high for direct W2 employment in my field -- nobody has come close to offering a big enough bump to make up for the monetary expenses of a soul-crushing commute, loss of benefits for a contract gig, and needing to pay for after-school care for my girlfriend's twins. Nevermind the intangibles. Which makes me feel trapped. The girlfriend changed jobs last month, trading a negligible amount of salary relative to shaving a dozen stressful commuting hours from her week and getting home about the same time as the kids. So that's a massive improvement to our lives -- I say 'our' because, aside from happier wife happier life, I'd not fully appreciated the burden I was feeling this past year having to be at home for the kids on an inflexible schedule -- plus we've removed the greatest obstacle to my changing jobs... Tho I still feel fairly pessimistic about finding another job that doesn't leave me worse off financially or mentally.
- yr1337 7y agoMy limit was that after a decade of single-handedly spec'ing, programming, supporting and otherwise being in charge of all internal app development efforts for the $6 billion North-American arm of a $50 billion multinational corp... I still wasn't deemed worthy of the opportunity of a green card, or a salary commensurate with my responsibility and impact on the corp. The day I got my GC by other means and thus was no longer stuck working for them, I gave my 2 weeks, to everyone's surprise and disappointment! And that was with no jobs lined up after that.
- ospider 7y ago996. My last employer was ByteDance, the creator or TikTok and Toutiao. Actually, the situation was a little better than 996, we call it "big small week", we work one more day per two weeks, not each week.
- DreamScatter 7y agoWhen there are stupid and idiotic power trips in the workplace, then I can't put up with the situation and will quit. Nothing annoys me more than people exerting power over somebody else unnecessarily, especially to coerce or bully somebody in a social or work related way. Also, if there is gossip about other people, then I don't want to work in that environment. Social gossip is toxic.
- nimmo007 7y agoI keep pressing my work to never take a job from AIPAC again because as a "progressive" company you can't be "progressive until palestine"
- tfont 7y agoDon't want to be fired. However, what would get me the most is the interaction/attitude between my team and boss. Also, a terrible salary makes for a low tolerance. From a programmatic point-of-view, inadequate framework, legacy code, and disagreeable methodologies.