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2-4 status checks a day, and you have not launched? That is dysfunctional. The only time that kind of status checking is warranted is during some sort of produc

2-4 status checks a day, and you have not launched? That is dysfunctional. The only time that kind of status checking is warranted is during some sort of production crisis, which by definition you cannot be having. The right big company job can be fulfilling and good for your career. Like any other career choice, it has to be evaluated on its own merits.

throwaway4921 16y ago
2-4 status checks a day, and you have not launched? That is dysfunctional. Thank you. It's a bit much. I've observed that it leads to the micromanagement death spiral: status checking leads to low productivity leads to a further sense (on the manager's part) of the need for status checks. Too high a ping frequency leads to a work environment that's about "beating" the checks, which is shitty going both ways, an awful way to work (from an employee's perspective) and a terrible work ethic (from a manager's viewpoint). If you manage people like children, they either become children or get out. I really let myself slide, staying out of a sense of loyalty, even though the negatives turned me from an A-player to a B-player to now a middle C. I want to be an A-player again. If that means changing jobs, so be it. The nice thing about this job search (as opposed to others) is that I have a job and no urgency. I really enjoyed this job for the first 18 months, though. For all the negatives, it was fucking fun as hell at first, even though I was living on very little money. Then we had a panic point when we discovered how terrible our first technical hire did his part, and how much work that put between us and a launch. (No one had, to that point, audited his code. Ever. The guy is very smart and has been programming for 10+ years so no one, myself included, saw the need. Lesson learned: a programmer can be smart as hell and have years of experience and still be bad in his specific role. Trust but verify.) I disagreed with the CEO on how to manage this awful code (he wanted to use it and put me into kludge/workaround hell, I wanted to rewrite) and lost, so I dropped to a 9-to-5er because I was pissed about his decision, and then the insanely-frequent status checks came.

throwaway4921 16y ago

2-4 status checks a day, and you have not launched? That is dysfunctional. Thank you. It's a bit much. I've observed that it leads to the micromanagement death spiral: status checking leads to low productivity leads to a further sense (on the manager's part) of the need for status checks. Too high a ping frequency leads to a work environment that's about "beating" the checks, which is shitty going both ways, an awful way to work (from an employee's perspective) and a terrible work ethic (from a manager's viewpoint). If you manage people like children, they either become children or get out. I really let myself slide, staying out of a sense of loyalty, even though the negatives turned me from an A-player to a B-player to now a middle C. I want to be an A-player again. If that means changing jobs, so be it. The nice thing about this job search (as opposed to others) is that I have a job and no urgency. I really enjoyed this job for the first 18 months, though. For all the negatives, it was fucking fun as hell at first, even though I was living on very little money. Then we had a panic point when we discovered how terrible our first technical hire did his part, and how much work that put between us and a launch. (No one had, to that point, audited his code. Ever. The guy is very smart and has been programming for 10+ years so no one, myself included, saw the need. Lesson learned: a programmer can be smart as hell and have years of experience and still be bad in his specific role. Trust but verify.) I disagreed with the CEO on how to manage this awful code (he wanted to use it and put me into kludge/workaround hell, I wanted to rewrite) and lost, so I dropped to a 9-to-5er because I was pissed about his decision, and then the insanely-frequent status checks came.