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How I survived being a $220k/year intern
- highprofittrade 7y agoDamn I had an offer from them years ago. I should have took it. I don't mind making that much for doing little that's plenty of free time for my side projects....this guy could have used his time wisely and never complain about it ...you can't force companies to be good employers or successful at what they do obviously this company had major red flags you could have left quietly long time and find a more fulfilling role ...otherwise shut up and take the money and use that free time to do great things if you are capable
- masklinn 7y agoShould be tagged [2017]: while the article itself doesn't have a date, the next in the series ("How Dumb Must You Be To Work For Pivotal in 2018?") notes: > Previously (December 2017): Pivotal Empolyment 2013-2016
- Thorrez 7y agoAlso here[1] it's listed with the date 2017-12-16. It's confusing that the article appears to have 3 titles: "Commit. This.", "How I Survived Being A $220k/year Intern", and "A Senior Developer Who Couldn’t Commit Code". Also obviously confusing that the article page itself is undated. [1] https://matt.sh/ https://matt.sh/
- slazien 7y agoI wonder how widespread this phenomenon actually is, anyone has similar stories to share?
- themagician 7y agoExtremely, and not just in tech. Most people just don’t want to admit it because most people need to feel like they “earned” their money. The reality that many, even most in some companies, people get paid simply to maintain a social system is a troubling thought for a lot of people. You can easily work for a decade at some companies and contribute absolutely nothing if you know how to play the politics.
- rolltiide 7y ago> .... shady “customers, but also investors, but also customers.” It’s convenient having combo customer/investors. If quarterly numbers look bad, just ask your customers, who are also investors, to buy more services to prop up their own investment. After all, they wouldn’t want their investment decisions to look bad, right? That's not shady, to me, it is a common practice and does take advantage of the accounting practices that different stakeholders use. This is what all of tech is doing with VC portfolios. That startup that delivers lunch to your startup, do you think that was random? It is an incestuous movement of money around VC portfolio companies to merely print higher revenue numbers so they can sell them one at a time for 10x those revenue numbers. Pretty much nothing is organic, so I can't make a distinction for this particular practice. The market can bare it. Honestly, it should be a more common practice for market participants to be taking pseudo-activist roles in their investments. Just because you are used to passive investments - and probably can't do anything else - doesn't mean it is the best strategy for your portfolio. Not making any opinion about the other problems with Pivotal, just pointing out how this section isn't validation for the complaints.
- throwsprtsdy 7y agoJust because it is common doesn't mean it's not shady. And depending on what the "pseudo-activist role" entails, that could be a massive conflict of interest. If a person at Company A is steering business toward Company B because they have an investment in Company B, that could easily conflict with their obligations toward Company A.
- rolltiide 7y agoThis > so I can't make a distinction for this particular practice. was meant to be a rebuttal to this > just because it is common doesn't mean it's not shady. so I think you walked right into it. > If a person at Company A is steering business toward Company B and that's company A's problem
- hpcjoe 7y agoI'd comment, but if I did, I'd likely exceed the boundaries of my own agreement with a different company.
- fancyfredbot 7y agoBeing paid a lot of money for not having any responsibility sounds good to me. This guy sure seems angry about it though.
- globular-toast 7y agoSome people just don't enjoy that kind of life. I worked for a large financial company where I had a super easy job, very little responsibility, but great compensation. I didn't last a year there. Every day I could feel the life being drained from me. After a few years I would have been a braindead drone just like the rest of them. Doing what I'm good at is far more fulfilling than getting paid to waste my life.
- allovernow 7y agoMy first real job out of grad school was like that. I was making bank but not doing anything useful. It was soul crushing to spend so much time doing nothing, or doing bullshit work - writing reports that no one would read, making presentations that no one needed to hear... I took a paycut but the world is totally different when you enjoy your job.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- herenorthere 7y agoalso giving up a $50k severance package doesn't sound as exceptional when you've already collected $660,000 from them. Yeah it's still a lot of money, but apparently being able to promote his blog with anecdotes from Pivotal was worth the $50k to him...
- RobRivera 7y agoTo be fair, his severance legal vernacular seemed problematic.
- herenorthere 7y ago
- throwlaplace 7y agothe weirdest thing to me about pivotal is that they require full-time pair programming. how do people survive in that company at all? i can't fathom being yoked to someone (literally) 40-50 hours a week.
- ycombobreaker 7y agoI think if a dev shop is literally yoking their programming pairs together, they're taking the metaphor a bit too far!
- inferiorhuman 7y agoSo is that what Matt is complaining about? The pair programming?
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y agoI work at a company that does pair programming and it’s not that bad. Generally, one is encouraged to switch who you’re pairing with every couple days to avoid creating knowledge silos.
- DonHopkins 7y agoWhen working alone remotely from home, I simulate pair programming with a methodology I call "The Stranger". I sit on one of my hands until it becomes numb and tingly, and then it feels like somebody else is typing and moving the mouse!
- throwlaplace 7y agolol I get the reference
- throwaway13337 7y agoIt was hard to get at the main bullet points from the rant. I found that what he did - his job description as he put 'Matt as a service' - to be reasonable. Support, bug fixes, documentation, and development. It would be nice to see more companies have someone completely own a small piece. Often when I contact developer support, I talk to someone who clearly does not know anything about the product I'm talking about. It would have been nice to talk to Matt at that time. Conversely, having the developers directly talk to customers gives them more visibility to how their products are being used. This is both fulfilling and enlightening.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- blondin 7y agothis seems old, but to be honest, the "work got boring" part is not unique to the company described. i have this nagging feeling that we have tons of issues, and overly complicated systems created today because very talented and smart engineers are being giving the most mundane tasks to do on a daily basis...
- kaiabwpdjqn 7y agoI find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little expected work. It’s not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about problems in the sales culture are likely true. But he could have left any time and instead chose to stay there for 3 years. And I get that leaving a job isn’t always an option for people but those reasons don’t feel relevant for his situation. Author reads as overly entitled and arrogant imo.
- noncoml 7y agoIt’s a symptom of our dysfunctional industry. We are stuck in that old Annie Hall joke: “A guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy! He thinks he's a chicken. Then the doc says, why don't you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs”
- liquid153 7y agoStupid joke. Don’t quit your day job
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoDitto. Taking into consideration average salary in US it is just asking for rather uncharitable read. And that is not taking into consideration in demand skill set that could land him another like job with relative ease. I don't often go for dismissive, but cry mich ein river.
- tracerbulletx 7y agoI don't understand people who write things like this. If you're unhappy leave, if you think the corporate culture is wrong, either participate in fixing it, or get out. I honestly can't stand people who self righteously sound the alarm about how they can see all of the things wrong with everybody else. It sounds especially childish when you are making so much money.
- herenorthere 7y agoI get the impression that he views his declining of severance package as analogous to Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem, or some other righteous form of protest. But you're right it doesn't carry the same weight given his quarter-mil. per year salary
- makkesk8 7y agoI agree to some extent.. only the point being here from what I gather is that they deliver sub par software, defraud their customers and just straight out lie. This is very toxic and can be very depressing and when I see posts like this I salute them because everyone who reads this will think twice before working for that company.
- metalgearsolid 7y agoI have a similar story, but it was my first programming job, and it wasn't a cake-walk to get it, so for myself I simply couldn't imagine doing much better. And to be honest, after quitting, I haven't. I'm at least healthy and happy again. But you're right, honestly the only thing I really learned about that experience was I should have just quit sooner. That's really all there is to it.
- Ecstatify 7y agoIf no one calls these companies out nothing will ever change, maybe he still has friends in the company he'd like to help out, nothing will light a fire under a companies ass more than appearing on the front page of HackerNews for the wrong reasons. If I was applying to this company I would like to have this insight to make my mind up, it's another data point, doesn't mean it's 100% correct but that's up for me to decide. For example on glassdoor this company has a 4.4/5 rating. I know for a fact my company posts fake reviews on glassdoor, where are we supposed to get real insights about companies from?
- chrisseaton 7y ago> I worked from home for three years with a $220,000 salary, traveled a total of six times, two SF, one Seattle, three to Europe, and contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects, all the while never being granted responsibility greater than what you’d give a middle school intern. But... that all sounds like a lot of responsibility doesn't it?
- watwut 7y agoNone of it implies responsibility.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects What's more responsible than pushing code to a high-profile project? Responsible for the product's performance, security. Responsible for what the customer sees and experiences. Responsible for keeping their data safe and guarding the company's reputation. Responsible enough to be allowed to work independently from home. Responsible enough to travel the world representing the company in-person.
- DuskStar 7y agoMy reading was that those were to open source projects the company didn't control.
- chrisseaton 7y agoContributions required by paying customers as a result of a commercial support contract. If he's pushing to Redis he's responsible for the integrity of probably billions of dollars worth of data. That's a massive, international-scale level of responsibility, in the name of his employer. That's huge responsibility!
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
- omerbensaadon 7y agoI work for the "Labs" (Services) portion of Pivotal and I've seen this guy's stuff on HN before... Can't comment on what non-services teams are like at Pivotal but the services organization is pretty spectacular. Pivotal's got problems just like every other organization does, but this guy seems to be mad as hell and blowing things a _bit_ out of proportion.
- dehrmann 7y ago> but the services organization is pretty spectacular. Overall, the org looks decent on Glassdoor.
- quadrifoliate 7y agoSeparately from this specific case, Glassdoor is a very imperfect way to evaluate an org. Companies will encourage employees to juice the reviews (https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/22/companies-gaming-glassdoor-reviews-to-look-better-investigation-finds/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/22/companies-gaming-glas...). Anecdotally, Glassdoor will often remove negative reviews for paying employers by giving flimsy excuses like "They are against the 'Community Guidelines'" (something that's so broad it's impossible to hold them to specifics). The "features" they advertise for paying employers are all above-the-board though.
- oarsinsync 7y agoCan confirm. Old employer started asking employees to post positive reviews when their rating tanked following a series of poorly integrated acquisitions
- jonahss 7y agoAdding another anecdote, I worked for a company which paid Glassdoor to remove a bunch of negative reviews. The score jumped from 2 to 4 overnight and a bunch of well-written negative reviews disappeared.
- techslave 7y agotitle really needs the leading ‘How’ from TFA
- lawlorino 7y ago> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects, all the while never being granted responsibility greater than what you’d give a middle school intern Am I being a bit dim or did they immediately contradict themselves here?
- goostavos 7y agoI read that sentence like 8 times trying to figure out how the first part tied into the latter part. I may be similarly dim.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoA lot of people, I suspect including the author, consider "responsibility" to exclusively mean the power to tell other people what to do.
- avip 7y agoThe only interesting thought I've had while reading this pretty mundane post is "man am I happy to not be working with that dude".
- danw1979 7y agoRight. A guy who'd give up fifty grand just so he was free to write a rant.
- nmca 7y agoIt's actually 50k of time off (not made clear other than in the contract at the bottom), which is not exactly the same thing.
- VectorLock 7y agoWhat does "50k of time off mean?" They were going to give him vacation time accrued or something else?
- nmca 7y agoirrc 50k at the rate of his salary until he got a job, may be mis-remebering.
- VectorLock 7y agoOh so they were going to pay him 50k to sit on his butt for X amount of time. I don't know if I would really consider that leaving money on the table, personally.
- techslave 7y ago> At founding, the company allotted about 13% of company stock for employee ownership. Is this meant to be disparaging? it’s actually above average (of 10%). Note that at each finding round, and as needed if you make too much money (don’t spend money fast enough to require another round), you allocate another chunk. The 13% isn’t fixed for eternity. That’s like the first paragraph. It’s already clear author doesn’t understand how companies work.
- creddit 7y agoBlog posts like this are usually best interpreted as the bitter ranting of an ex-employee who was let go. The author himself was semi-notorious (possibly still so?) in the Redis community for being a bit of a self-serving demagogue (to put it nicely). Generally speaking, if an individual was a remote, WFH, IC employee whose manager didn't even talk to them for a year, they probably don't have the working knowledge to do much critiquing of the company at large. It should also be noted that Pivotal was acquired by VMware for ~$2.7B. Points like this: > At the other end, you have employees who create your products being treated like unwanted interns because development and engineering isn’t given recognition for generating revenue. Obviously only sales and executives are money makers. Developers are just an unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable burden reducing your profits because they have non-commission-based salaries. Why not just fire all your developers then sell what they made without fixing or improving anything—wow, infinite profit! Coupled with him making $220k/yr in salary (no mention that I saw about equity) doesn't seem to gel. The entitlement is strong with this one.
- noja 7y ago> The entitlement is strong with this one. You'd need to know what sales were earning before you resort to name calling.
- creddit 7y agoI'm not sure why the amount that sales is earning is relevant. The sales team could all be earning $20B/yr each but it may very well be the case that they are worth that. He was making $220k/yr as a remote employee. That, again, disregards any possible equity comp as well. The median _household_ income in the US is ~$60K, indicating he was earning over 3X the median. Speaking from experience, that $220k/yr is very much so inline with the cash comp at top end firms for a Sr. SWE. He was clearly NOT being treated as an "unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable burden". The world isn't zero-sum everywhere.
- gist 7y ago> The entitlement is strong with this one. And stupidity. He is already behind $50,000 for refusing to sign off his rights to tell his 'story'. Maybe he feels there is a market for his skills (and to your point, um, attitude) for his take on things. (There isn't) And the idea that there is no potential blowback from the company because of free speech means he is simply not aware of what a willing and able (financially) adversary can do to you if they want (using legal or other means). Company could decide to go after him just to send a message even if no chance of actually winning or collecting or other tangible benefit.
- alexfromapex 7y agoHaving worked for a strange startup with plenty of cronyism and nepotism, I honestly think there needs to be some kind of government oversight to make sure that executives aren't squandering investors' money or worse that the investors are in on some kind of shell company.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoThe point of private investing is that the investors get to do that kind of oversight on their own. There's a whole world of public companies to work for, if you're looking for government oversight to double check the investors' work. (Although Pivotal seems to have been a public subsidiary for at least part of the author's story.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Dansvidania 7y agoWhy is this at the top of HN?
- soared 7y ago“jUsT QuIt yOuR jOb” -hn With no second thought on any outside life factors.
- chrisseaton 7y agoSomeone who earns nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year can probably quit their job and continue to support themselves and any outside life factors for several years if they want to.
- dehrmann 7y agoThe other doesn't seem to be in SF, but have you seen what a mortgage payment is in SF?
- unlinked_dll 7y agoI get the sense that the author is somewhat toxic in the workplace and his managers didn't have the power to fire him, so they gave him as meaningless a job as possible to get him to quit. I'm also surprised he isn't more concerned with anonymity. I know if he applied for an open role at my current company, based on this post he would not be hired.
- rvz 7y agoSome people would be happy if their first job was to be at a customer service desk or even stacking files for experience with a decent salary in order to get their foot in the door to a internship at a FAANG company. Where as here we see a very arrogant developer paid top dollar for a less demanding role and yet still complains about their employer and chose to work there for over three years. Every company has problems and you don't have to stay there even if you hate everything under the sun about them. Perhaps he was too focused on hate-watching his company's culture to even think about quitting.
- baryphonic 7y agoI think "Matt" thinks he's a bit cleverer than he is. It's not clear what he's talking about. He also uses the word "fraud" ad nauseam. One place I worked actually used Pivotal Tracker, and I found it worked pretty well from the end-user perspective. Wasn't ground-breaking software or anything, but it at least worked. I could see my tasks at a glance a lot easier than with, say, Basecamp. Just another person with an axe to grind.
- autarch 7y agoFor what it's worth I think Tracker is a very small part of the overall Pivotal business. I think their main focus is their cloud computing products. I love PT and I've used it for 6+ years at my last two jobs.
- dosethree 7y agoYeah I’ve used PCF and their open source stuff a lot, and i’ve never had an issue with their stuff not working. Pair programming and TDD lends itself to code that works well and is pretty well documented. No complaints
- mamcx 7y agoIf anyone is tired of getting $220k/year, i could take it!. --- I think sometimes developers have drink so hard the kool aid of changing the world and all that, and if is not happening, then get sad. But why? Maybe because I have a long time in this industry, but this is what I do: If see an opportunity to improve things (without need to convince others) I do. If need to convince others, and succeed, great. If not, but the environment is okey, I keep going.
- throwawayjava 7y ago> If not, but the environment is okey, I keep going. If you're a strong developer and willing to live in certain areas -- at least for a couple years before you're trusted enough to go remote -- you can make $200K/yr. It's mostly just a matter of telling yourself you are worth that much, applying to companies that pay that much, and not being afraid to be on the job market every few years.
- qznc 7y agoDoing meaningful work and getting respect for it are important aspects of job satisfaction. The author seems to be offended for not getting that.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI think sometimes developers have drink so hard the kool aid I think a lot of people just have no perspective. I'm fond of this movie scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlHlKi2dATw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlHlKi2dATw
- betadreamer 7y agoNo interns make that high of a salary. That means they value his work/skill. It’s clearly a management problem but this is a hard problem. In fact it’s different for everyone. Some people like well structured management and others don’t. On top of that he was remote, which makes it even harder. His rants are mostly in sales. Engineer ranting about sales is like Sales people saying Engineers are pointless. (Btw both are very common perception). Now that I’ve done both ends I can share that sales people are doing that for a reason. At the end of the day, high end sales are all politics and you need to be good at the game. This type of rant is what interns do.
- robertlagrant 7y agoInterns also don't read articles properly.
- Stratoscope 7y ago> I Passed Up a $50,000 Severance To Write This I wish he had taken the $50K. We would have all been better off! (As noted in the article, the $50K severance would have been tied to a non-disparagement agreement.)
- jcadam 7y ago$50k to not write an alcohol-fueled angry screed on my personal blog sounds like a pretty fair trade to me. I'd take it.
- astro-codes 7y agofuck this was funny
- stevespang 7y agoGreat post.
- booleandilemma 7y agoI survived a job that amounted to fixing keyboards for $35k/year but kudos to you for surviving your $220k/year internship. I’m sure it was brutal.
- robertlagrant 7y agoIt's even more brutal reading articles properly and realising he wasn't an intern.
- quadrifoliate 7y agoI think everyone is hyper focused on the 220k number, which is not that unusual for a VC-backed Silicon Valley startup. Admittedly the article is a bit rant-filled, but I have also heard other people say Pivotal is (was?) a bit weird, especially regarding taking pair programming a bit too far (another blog example: http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair-programming-and.html http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair-pro...) I am a bit surprised at all the criticism of the author and saying that "I wouldn't hire the guy because of this post". Consider the asymmetry of power between employer and employee. Companies often put up self-praising blog posts describing their perfect hiring process and how great they are, but often they are a big messy hairball inside. In the US, people very rarely work up the courage to criticize them, because they have mouths to feed, health insurance to pay, and can't afford the expensive lawyers to combat the large companies' legal teams. So we should encourage those who speak out, or at least not punish them more for doing so. In fact, I think the only reason this person is comfortable doing so is that they have probably enough left over from that 220k/year to be comfortable speaking out.
- hobofan 7y agoI wouldn't want to encourage anyone else to write such a rambling "speaking out" blog post that you can't really take anything away from. There are good ways to write such blog posts, e.g these accounts from an ex-Apple employee[0], that nicely lay out what was going wrong. I tried to extract similar information from this blog post, but failed, as it was filled with so many detours, vagueness, and subjective name calling about the company in general rather than an actual retelling on how he personally was supposedly mistreated. [0]: https://techreflect.net/2019/12/10/aperture-senior-qa-2004-2005/ https://techreflect.net/2019/12/10/aperture-senior-qa-2004-2...
- aprdm 7y ago> At the other end, you have employees who create your products being treated like unwanted interns because development and engineering isn’t given recognition for generating revenue. Obviously only sales and executives are money makers. Developers are just an unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable burden reducing your profits because they have non-commission-based salaries. Why not just fire all your developers then sell what they made without fixing or improving anything—wow, infinite profit! Funnily enough I've worked in a company that did just that, they developed a TV software that puts ads on the streaming of soccer games and the software was 5 or so years old with no software team. They had a person who did support and was there for a long time and would always have 2-3 developers on the payroll who wouldn't stay more than their probation period. I left within 2 weeks but the company owner was very rich and seemed pretty OK with how things were...
- 1123581321 7y agoCan anyone elaborate on “and proudly brags about his criminal acquaintances in the news”? It’s a bullet point in the section about, presumably, antirez.
- jcadam 7y ago> "I worked from home for three years with a $220,000 salary" I stopped reading right there. I really don't want to hear someone in this situation complain. Suck it up or find a new job - take a pay cut if you're really that unhappy. I've worked for shitty companies for a fraction of that salary. Hell, It's taken me over 15 years to get to a salary even within spitting distance of that amount - and I've never been able to work from home.
- traitsnspecs 7y agoThe interesting thing to me is that they had an open-source support business getting requests to buy their services, which the salesmen dropped because it wasn't the most lucrative deal they could be doing. But presumably there's a viable business in that particular type of support.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoIn my experience, those kinds of support contracts are mostly valuable (and mostly intended to be valuable) as a way to shove your foot in the door at large companies. Often they're not valued at all, and exist just as a legacy from when the company was younger and any sale was a good sale. It's not surprising to me that an incoming lead whose first question is "what are your prices" would be considered a waste of time.
- adamrezich 7y agoThere are a lot of interesting and useful takeaways from this article that are being overlooked because of the jealousy of, "boy, I wish someone paid me 220k to not really do anything while working from home!"
- j45 7y agoHaving grown up in and around both, it's interesting how many people who complain about mental jobs would fare in physical jobs that are far worse. It's good to work thru your feelings, but for many people feelings are a luxury, having access to opportunity to improve yourself in anyway is a privilege.
- deanCommie 7y agoSomething smelled fishy, so I did a bit of follow-up. This dude is leaving out a huge detail to make his employment troubles be a pivotal problem when...it's not. Let's footnote a coupleo f his "Story of Pivotal The Employment" > Hired To contribute to Redis > All My Work Is Owned by Another Employee? What? The primary redis maintainer, not a pivotal employee? > Let’s Organize Instead of Being A Hobby Project Let's misrepresent the philosophical position of the OS project maintainer on the best way to move the project forward. > Two Days of Work to Clear 4 Years of Issues Ignored By The Creator Because Laziness A bunc hof those issues have fundamental problems that the creator explicitly drilled into and explained (https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906#issuecomment-51452143 https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906#issuecomment-5145...)
- lima 7y agoNot disagreeing, just pointing out that Redis development was sponsored by Pivotal at the time, and antirez was presumably on their payroll: http://antirez.com/news/91 http://antirez.com/news/91 The response by antirez is professional and reasonable.
- itronitron 7y agovery interesting thread, I'm impressed with the depth of antirez's patience and goodwill.
- Aeolun 7y agoI don’t understand. Does the fact that the author of the project in question is antirez change anything about the authors experience?
- itronitron 7y agoGiven that they were tasked to contribute to a very popular open source project, the author may have been able to get past their perceptions of mismanagement at Pivotal. But part of their complaint seems to be that they were not able to contribute as much as they wanted. Different people adapt to such a situation in different ways.
- iou 7y agoI worked at this company overlapping this time frame. Although the post is emotionally-charged,it's totally on point.
- zaksoup 7y ago> That’s okay though, just hand off the company to your bloated, slovenly, zero-posture assistant whose name literally means “I’m going to rip you off.” This is where I got lost. I worked at Pivotal from 2014 to 2017. There's a lot I can say about Rob Mee but this is just a bizarre and wrong attack given that he 1) Founded Pivotal labs and lead it through the EMC Acquisition, 2) Was responsible for creating a first-tier services company with a name to rival Thoughtworks and a reputation that to this day bumps my resume to the top of many recruiters' lists by virtue of just seeing "Pivotal" on it. Edit: Quote from one of the prior posts in this "series". > Future employers judge you on your past employment. Having any extended tenure at Pivotal on your CV is a negative mark against you. I have absolutely not had this experience. None of my former coworkers have had this experience. On the other hand, people who write blog posts like these... might have this experience.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thosakwe 7y agoImagine giving up 50 racks to complain about getting $220k per year. If you don't want the job, I'll take it.
- shrimpx 7y agoThis article takes “tech bro” to a whole new level of entitlement.
- adultSwim 7y agoWe engineers need to organize ourselves. We make piles of money for companies, yet we are too often voiceless.
- meddlepal 7y agoSounds like a person who is really bitter. Good thing he wrote this as a warning sign to all future possible employers or managers.
- slumdev 7y agoSo much whining in this thread. It is possible to make $220k/year and also be unhappy. Deal with it. Beyond a point, money won't increase your happiness. Riding out a terrible job where you're underutilized and overpaid because the job pays well isn't "grit". It's dishonest. It's opportunism. It's cowardly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Traster 7y agoI really feel the need to rebuke hacker news commenters on this. The number of comments shouting "You made 220k! STFU!" is ridiculous. I don't care how much you pay me, you don't get to treat me like shit. Once you reach a certain salary a job is more about fulfilment/ego/interest/motivation than $$, there's a reason we're not all whoring ourselves out on street corners for an extra couple of dollars in the evening. What the author is talking about is a real issue - there is a very significant portion of enterprise (and b2b) software that basically adds little or no value compared to a competitor. Often the money is made by leveraging relationships with contacts in large corporations who frankly won't notice the money is missing - and for a plethora of reasons are more incentivised to push for buying something than to actually see the company succeed. I've personally seen sales organisations pay hundreds of thousands to external contractors when we had more competent staff literally sitting waiting to be asked to do the work. Even then, there's a hell of a lot of software out there that isn't difficult and isn't interesting, so the defining feature of who provides it is what their sales organisation looks like. The result of that dynamic though, is the engineering organisation can be crap- because they're not where the company derives its value. Which might not be what an software engineer wants to hear, but it's true. (as an aside, find out what sales folks are paid at your current job - it's probably more than you).
- rossdavidh 7y agoWhile lots of organizations are not great, and some are even dishonest, something about the guy's tone suggests the demotivator from despair.com: https://despair.com/products/dysfunction https://despair.com/products/dysfunction