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I don't understand what you mean by "people like this OP". They don't say that they struggled with the hiring process or feel like a fraud. Rather they seem to

I don't understand what you mean by "people like this OP". They don't say that they struggled with the hiring process or feel like a fraud. Rather they seem to be easily capable of the work. Actually I'm not sure what any of your post is about. Your friend doesn't like their job because they're hiring people to make facebook ads more effective?

jasonmp85 6y ago
Hiring doesn’t show whether you’re capable of the work, it just answers whether you might be hired. The reply here is entirely in line with the poster; they didn’t say anything about feeling like a fraud, they said candidates in tech minmax career choices with no thought as to their actual purpose. And yeah anyone remotely self-aware would feel disgusting working on adtech. It’s just that most tech workers do not think about such things.
- ghettoCoder 6y ago
  Some of us end up working at jobs infinitely worse than adtech, the public service.
  - feteru 6y ago
    What? What do you mean by worse...
    - ghettoCoder 6y ago
      Worse as in you try to get things done in a cost effective way in order to deliver value to taxpayers but have to deal with lifers, deadwood, and clueless managers who are completely risk-averse. I know. I work in the public service.
      - jiscariot 6y ago
        Right there with you. Not saying I'm a bright shining star, but it is amazing the level of incompetence you sometimes run across. It is legitimately the first place where I've found people who actually cost time/resources for anything they touch or interact with. The other thing is the supreme deference to rank at the cost of initiative. It was mind blowing coming from a more competitive corporate world.
watwut 6y ago
And in addition slacks as much as he can get away with. There is that option where even if it looks like you can get away with working only on Mondays spreading results, you would work on Tuesday, Wendsday etc too.
- VRay 6y ago
  I was in the same boat as OP a few years back at an old grimy tech megacorp. I worked my ass off, and couldn't make any progress because of terrible tools, terrible teammates, terrible process. It was a fucking nightmare.* If that'd been my first tech job, I might have just ragequit the whole industry. Fortunately, I'd already been around the block a couple of times, so I knew that I just had a particularly bad team at a mediocre company. I hopped ship, and everything was great at the next company. *A bad job: My teammates were annoyed any time I asked them any questions. "Just read the code! It's in the code!" Yeah, OK, I'll spend 8 hours digging through this fucking code when you could have spent 10 minutes explaining it. I think this is probably the worst thing for productivity I've come across in my career. Any time someone asks you for help at work, DROP EVERYTHING AND FUCKING HELP THEM. Teach them how to fish, too, don't just walk them through things. Show them where you're finding documentation, show them the local equivalent of a man page, introduce them to the people with the tribal knowledge. If they spent an honest 10 minutes trying to figure something out on their own, it's part of your job to go help them out. I'd fix a bug, then have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting to try and get permission to check in my fix. It'd often be either rejected, or I'd have to redo the same handful of lines of code a dozen times before I could get it in. I'd have to set up some internally-developed test infrastructure, but it was a 40 step procedure to get the tool running and if any one of those steps went wrong, you'd have to go back to the start and start over. Nobody who was familiar with it was willing to walk me through it, so it took an incredible amount of willpower to force myself to get that shit set up. There was another team working on the exact same thing as my team in another org, but we weren't "tented" (AKA: "disclosed") on each other's super secret projects, so we weren't allowed to work together at all or share any information. My team hated the other team, and they in turn hated our team. (I knew this because I had a close personal friend on the other team) The development environment was almost completely paralyzed by company-wide bugs. The company was sharing a single insanely gigantic codebase across thousand and thousands of engineers, and there'd be month+ long stretches where the build and tools were broken. Since things were broken so long, people would check in new build breaks without realizing it, and it ended up in a vicious circle of badness. And of course, the product we were building was a useless piece of crap that everybody hated.

jasonmp85 6y ago

Hiring doesn’t show whether you’re capable of the work, it just answers whether you might be hired. The reply here is entirely in line with the poster; they didn’t say anything about feeling like a fraud, they said candidates in tech minmax career choices with no thought as to their actual purpose. And yeah anyone remotely self-aware would feel disgusting working on adtech. It’s just that most tech workers do not think about such things.

ghettoCoder 6y ago
Some of us end up working at jobs infinitely worse than adtech, the public service.
- feteru 6y ago
  What? What do you mean by worse...
  - ghettoCoder 6y ago
    Worse as in you try to get things done in a cost effective way in order to deliver value to taxpayers but have to deal with lifers, deadwood, and clueless managers who are completely risk-averse. I know. I work in the public service.
    - jiscariot 6y ago
      Right there with you. Not saying I'm a bright shining star, but it is amazing the level of incompetence you sometimes run across. It is legitimately the first place where I've found people who actually cost time/resources for anything they touch or interact with. The other thing is the supreme deference to rank at the cost of initiative. It was mind blowing coming from a more competitive corporate world.

watwut 6y ago

And in addition slacks as much as he can get away with. There is that option where even if it looks like you can get away with working only on Mondays spreading results, you would work on Tuesday, Wendsday etc too.

VRay 6y ago
I was in the same boat as OP a few years back at an old grimy tech megacorp. I worked my ass off, and couldn't make any progress because of terrible tools, terrible teammates, terrible process. It was a fucking nightmare.* If that'd been my first tech job, I might have just ragequit the whole industry. Fortunately, I'd already been around the block a couple of times, so I knew that I just had a particularly bad team at a mediocre company. I hopped ship, and everything was great at the next company. *A bad job: My teammates were annoyed any time I asked them any questions. "Just read the code! It's in the code!" Yeah, OK, I'll spend 8 hours digging through this fucking code when you could have spent 10 minutes explaining it. I think this is probably the worst thing for productivity I've come across in my career. Any time someone asks you for help at work, DROP EVERYTHING AND FUCKING HELP THEM. Teach them how to fish, too, don't just walk them through things. Show them where you're finding documentation, show them the local equivalent of a man page, introduce them to the people with the tribal knowledge. If they spent an honest 10 minutes trying to figure something out on their own, it's part of your job to go help them out. I'd fix a bug, then have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting to try and get permission to check in my fix. It'd often be either rejected, or I'd have to redo the same handful of lines of code a dozen times before I could get it in. I'd have to set up some internally-developed test infrastructure, but it was a 40 step procedure to get the tool running and if any one of those steps went wrong, you'd have to go back to the start and start over. Nobody who was familiar with it was willing to walk me through it, so it took an incredible amount of willpower to force myself to get that shit set up. There was another team working on the exact same thing as my team in another org, but we weren't "tented" (AKA: "disclosed") on each other's super secret projects, so we weren't allowed to work together at all or share any information. My team hated the other team, and they in turn hated our team. (I knew this because I had a close personal friend on the other team) The development environment was almost completely paralyzed by company-wide bugs. The company was sharing a single insanely gigantic codebase across thousand and thousands of engineers, and there'd be month+ long stretches where the build and tools were broken. Since things were broken so long, people would check in new build breaks without realizing it, and it ended up in a vicious circle of badness. And of course, the product we were building was a useless piece of crap that everybody hated.