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Some extra tidbits that didn't make it in because the edit timer ran out: - Despite the big release and herculean efforts, both of us were paid a fraction of o

Some extra tidbits that didn't make it in because the edit timer ran out: - Despite the big release and herculean efforts, both of us were paid a fraction of our target bonus. This was the day I decided to move jobs. - I eventually grew some balls and told Apple to (a) pay me 2.5x during overtime (b) hire SREs for this critical service, or (c) go fuck themselves. They chose (c), which worked alright because our service was pretty stable. - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. - Only my first manager at Apple was an asshole. My last manager was a kind and genial person.

ma2rten 6y ago
I got an offer from Apple. The hiring manager told me "You worked at a startup before, you'll have no problem working overtime". I didn't end up taking the offer.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  I can only answer with LOL to such offers Yes I've worked for a startup. Yes I did long hours. Yes I learned that's not sustainable and not a good way to make things work. So, no, I won't do it again.
  - geophile 6y ago
    I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!". That appears to mean that you will work in a small team, putting in unsustainable hours, but not receive the financial reward that a successful startup could provide. I've worked in several startups, and occasional death marches are unavoidable. They don't work month in and month out. But enduring that kind of life for just salary is nuts.
    - andrewem 6y ago
      The other notable thing about “just like a startup but in a big company” (often for startups which have been acquired) is the frequent claim that the startup will be left alone by the rest of the company. Every single process and incentive is against that remaining true. Maybe in some cases you can hope for the acquired startup to be the pet project of the acquirer’s founder/CEO?
      - geophile 6y ago
        I knew that to work out exactly once, (not a company I was at).
    - Tommah 6y ago
      > the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!" I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke."
      - mgkimsal 6y ago
        > I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke." Sure... but you may still come in and find "this project has been nixed". Upside is that you may still have a 'job' in the bigger company, but everything you worked on may be thrown away, you may lose whatever political power your project had, etc. Certainly there's an 'immediate safety net' issue of "you may have a paycheck next week", but doesn't address any of the emotional stuff that goes along with "we'll have a scrappy startup mentality!" I had been in something similar - not quite a 'startup in a large company' situation, but similar. And... we hit a "hey, this project is being shut down, and there's no other budget in the company for this team". So.. the company itself was still going OK - everyone else kept rolling along - but a handful of us were effectively cut adrift for a bit. Some were able to be assigned to other internal teams, some weren't.
        p_l 6y ago
        A project at big financial company... At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts. Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.
- Raed667 6y ago
  I got a similar line from a certain european video-game company.
  - nvarsj 6y ago
    I interviewed for Blizzard many years ago. One of the first questions they asked is how many all-nighters I had done. Yeah, that was the end for me.
    - tankenmate 6y ago
      My frank response would be something along the lines of "I'm going to ask you a question, and how you respond will likely determine if I work here, 'Are you self selecting for incompetents or doormats?'" Their response to this question would probably tell you most of what you want to know about working at that company.
      - p1esk 6y ago
        Yeah, you can do this when you have several equally good offers in your pocket. Meaning you're good enough to be picky. What would be your response if you don't feel you're better than all others who applied for this position?
        bigiain 6y ago
        There’s nothing wrong with choosing a job that you know are going to expect all-nighters, probably un compensated all-nighters - but make sure you choose it knowingly instead of pretending it’s an office hours job. It’d be a rare job in video game production that didn’t involve crunch time, and if you want to work in those roles you can, so long as you accept/embrace that. If you’re the sort of person for whom 2-3 months a year of crunch time is going to destroy your relationships/family/mental health, you should probably choose a different industry. There are lots of 9-5 ish coding jobs that involve zero or minimal outside-office-hours work. Don’t fool yourself I to pretending your “dream job” is one of those if there are obvious (or even subtle) red flags that it’s not.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- shoulderfake 6y ago
  You should have just said no sir I wont have any problem working overtime and my rate is 2.5x for overtime hrs, you wont have a problem paying for that you're a rich company.
- SkyPuncher 6y ago
  I work at a startup right now and can count the number of times I've had to work overtime with a null-pointer - 0. Well run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    I completely agree, sure if you’re into a feature and on a roll in a startup keep going but if you’ve reached a good point to stop no need to cause yourself stress!
    - SkyPuncher 6y ago
      There are definitely days I work late, but that's almost always by choice. When I do work late, it means shorter days for me later in the week.
  - derivagral 6y ago
    I've never had a startup that hasn't roped me into a production support on-call for a month or more in addition to regular duties. Under 10 engineers, 50 engineers, 500+ engineers: they've all done this.
    - qppo 6y ago
      I've never worked on a product where it ever made sense to be "on call." I'm an engineer, not a doctor.
      - lostlogin 6y ago
        It’s probably obvious, but I’d suggest never working on a product doctors use.
      - Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
        If something goes catastrophically wrong at 1am, caused by some unforeseen bug in the code, who fixes it? Who diagnoses that an issue flooding the logs is not an issue with your software but something else down the line? I think it makes sense to have an on-call rota. Some people do it for a week or so. Cycle it through the team. There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Working overtime at a startup here and there can have an emotional reward, as a small team works together with enthusiasm to bring something to market. Yes, this can be abused by bad management and planning, and often is, but .. it's an entirely different beast from demanding overtime out of employees at a large profitable company where poor planning and under-resourcing are not really excusable.
libria 6y ago
> - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. I think this close, but a little off. Work hard only on what matters. Join the high visibility projects and work hard on the important parts. "Nobody notices" -> that's up to you. Document and demo your achievements every few weeks. Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP. Never, ever wait for "things to improve". So many times after I switched jobs, I said to myself "Man, why didn't I leave sooner?"
- xvector 6y ago
  > Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP. I agree with this but you have to understand that it's very difficult and frightening for an inexperienced new grad or someone on a green card to do. These groups are also unfortunately the most exploited.
  - rmk 6y ago
    I do not understand why someone w/ a green card needs to be afraid of being fired. Isn't the whole point of it to firm up your status as someone who is allowed to stay on indefinitely with very few conditions, one of them being % of year spent in the US, plus not committing certain serious offences (felonies?)
    - vp8989 6y ago
      That is true. The parent probably meant to say Visa not Green Card. I can definitely relate to the feeling of being "stuck" in a bad situation while on a Visa and/or while waiting for a green card to be processed. It's such a huge relief when you finally get that freedom to move around in the job market.
    - rhizome 6y ago
      People with green cards don't need to be afraid of being fired: they're permanent residents. The people who have to worry are those on work visas.
oconnor663 6y ago
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. As with most things in life, there are places where it matters and places where it doesn't matter. If someone's a junior employee working in a big company, it's likely that they don't have the necessary experience to figure out whether hard work matters in their position. That's an important risk to be aware of. But the opposite advice, avoiding hard work, is also risky. (And not a good habit to cultivate in the long term of course.) If you're not sure which position you're in, and you don't trust your more experienced coworkers to tell you honestly without punishing you for asking, then putting in some amount of hard work with the goal of finding out is a pretty good start.
- temac 6y ago
  I don't know. Work fairly, certainly. Work hard... what's the point? So in some cases you want to fast track your advancement in a direction that you like and this possible through this method, and you actually can work hard, so in this case take the chance if you want to. But that kind of situation is quite rare, I think. Also certainly do not appear to be working too lightly. But also do not appear to be working extremely hard if it is not the case. And remember, the (perceived) results are more important than actually working hard. It can be very unfair sometimes, because e.g. if you have to maintain and add features in a legacy codebase, (poor, but that's common) higher-ups may be uninterested with your difficulties caused by the spaghettis of your predecessors, but well life is just unfair I guess :P
  - oconnor663 6y ago
    > Work hard... what's the point? I think it really depends on the person. It's a very common problem for people to procrastinate or drag their feet on the parts of their job that they don't particularly like. (Just like most students drag their feet doing homework they don't like.) But no job (or school program) is ever 100% fun stuff, and being able to delay gratification and get the unpleasant parts done is a super important life skill that not everyone has. For a lot of people, maybe most HN readers, this is basic stuff that they nailed in high school and never had a problem with after that. But I'm not sure that's the majority experience.
rmk 6y ago
- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. This has been my experience as well. Nowadays I work hard only while most of the following are true: - I'm making top dollar (good salary + equity value is high) - Work is interesting (something new to learn, or challenging, or both) - My home life is not going great (there are ups and downs, and working hard during the downs is a pretty decent way of coping) I absolutely do not work hard if any one of the following is true: - Project Manager is applying pressure. - People who do not deliver value have been promoted over me. - Manager/Technical leadership has repeatedly ignored my advice and leanded the team in hot water (cutting corners to make arbitrary timelines, only to incur high support costs or maintenance costs later) - Performance Management is not occurring at the company (underperformers are not thrown out, or, worse, promoted). - Company is not doing well (equity value is down). - Salary has not kept pace with market (i.e., nothing more than 3-4% raises per year). - There is an over-reliance on junior people and they start calling the shots, thereby making my hard-won experience useless to the team.
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
  Wow, Great List! The last one (juniors calling the shots) really hit home; when I worked in <automobile industry>, I was ultimately standing on the shoulder of midgets. The worse part? As a CS grad, I knew how to do better, but: nobody with the power to change things understood how or why what I was suggesting was better(!). I've long thought about this afterward, and concluded it's that 'my world' (which includes a lot of experience, and facility with Math) required me to study a lot and learn a lot; and these 'coders' simply did not have the background to understand what I was trying to teach them. I would have had to fill in several semesters in order to get my points across. Yes, I left. (And yes I tried simplifying - but that only goes so far.)
  - rmk 6y ago
    It's very prevalent in this industry. Newbies cost less and there is usually a lot of mundane work that needs doing, so they comprise the majority of any average team. Even more so in established or mid-size companies where the sudden expansion or huge existing base necessitates a lot of grunt work. Sadly, there is also a trend of managers bending over backwards to please newbies (otherwise the hiring pipeline is thought to dry up; also, it's easier to hand out raises that appear larger if pay is lower) which exacerbates the situation.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I can empathize with your story. I once landed what I thought would be my dream job at my dream company. I quickly discovered that the position was open because all of the previous team had quit due to the extreme toxicity. > The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard Be careful about getting jaded and cynical. This is far from a universal truth in the tech industry. I've hired a few ex-FAANG who had burned out and become cynical on work altogether. We had to let them go because their negativity was dragging everyone down. A similar thing can happen to people who go through difficult divorces. If they let themselves become cynical, they start believing that marriage is a doomed institution and that all members of their ex-spouse's gender are equally terrible people and such. It can become very counterproductive to moving on.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  The last few jobs I’ve had were glowing from the interviews and believe me I asked some very tough questions I hoped would be revealing enough without torpedoing my candidacy. Every one of them: as soon as I started, the foundational person of the team quit, you know the guy or gal who burned themselves out building the process. Fixing all the cruft and actually trying to unfuck everything but leaving scant documentation because the mountain of technical debt rivaled the heights of K2? As a result I had to “drink from the water hose” constantly. And this is something I am absolutely sick of doing, and no team should tolerate it. It’s happened so often I’m beginning to wonder a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent (I’ve had companies straight up lie about things like attrition and retention) or b) if I just have some kind of gravitational pull for companies that are running people out the door.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent Nothing wrong with asking the average tenure of people on the team imo, that is something you can frame in a way less likely to make them lie.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      I'll be honest, my default perspective is to expect filibustering and non-answers from all but the actualized and self-aware teams, who if reading this thread and many, many others like it, and lived experience are anything reliable: are less common than their frustrating counterparts.
dylan604 6y ago
If you're the type of person that can only "work hard" due to being driven by needing the project to be completed and as best as it could possibly be, then maybe working for MegaCorp is not the best idea. Seems to be you'd be much better suited for a start-up (hopefully with prospects of major funding). If you're the type that doesn't want to work very hard and just there for a paycheck, then you are probably more suited for working at MegaCorp. Getting these out of wack makes for unhappy working conditions.
spottybanana 6y ago
> - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. This depends a lot on the situation/company. It is definitely true that in many cases it doesn't make sense to work hard. However there are situations where hard work is rewarded. Those are just probably quite rare situations after all.
rasengan0 6y ago
>- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. This. And the intrinsic metric does not necessarily align to the company's until much further down the road or sometimes not at all. Hard lesson for me to learn after a score at the same company and the health insurance stays the same regardless.
OOPMan 6y ago
Stuff like this is why I refuse to work at large companies. Shit does happen at smaller companies, for sure, but it seems like larger companies are just that much more dysfunctional that I don't want to take the risk.
- mangamadaiyan 6y ago
  I've been on both sides of the BigCo fence, and in my experience, the small companies I've worked at have been much more dysfunctional than the alternatives. A BigCo is usually a loose conglomerate of smaller fiefdoms; -much- the sanity level in your team depends on your immediate boss and coworkers. If you luck out and find the right bunch, you're set. A small company is usually a larger fiefdom than a BigCo team, and self-selects for certain bodily orifices, doormats and complexity junkies. YMMV.
Gibbon1 6y ago
> I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices What I learned people that spend all their time working don't have time for the social engineering needed to get ahead. Also a lot of people that focus heavily on social engineering make bank on passing dirt on their coworkers to upper management.
rubicon33 6y ago
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. Exactly this. Unless your manager has a history of giving raises and/or promotions to YOU for doing your JOB then do not assume, ever, that they will give you anything for overworking to chase a carrot on a stick. That said if they have a history of recognizing and appreciating your work, and compensating you for extra effort, then by all means feel free to put some sweat into the work. That's a good relationship. My rule of thumb whenever starting a new job is - Work hard for the first year, but almost never overtime. Do my job, and do it well, but don't kill myself. If manager recognizes the good work, and gives me a raise, I'll talk to them about incentive based objectives, and that I'm willing to work over time if there's a reward structure. Or, that I'm happy to continue at my 9-5 pace if that's working for them. Point is - always wait for them to make the first move. If they don't, either accept the 9-5 work for the pay, or move on to another employer that does value incentive based (bonus) salaries.
alsetmusic 6y ago
> Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. This is the most important lesson I learned working at the fruit company. That and never have a long commute. I now work at a place that's ten minutes door-to-door in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon. I took a pay cut to achieve that (I live in East Bay), but maybe the new wfh culture post-COVID will open up more possibilities. Anyway, point being that I've decided that my job is second to my happiness.
wpietri 6y ago
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. I knew of one company, a pair programming shop doing the sort of financial software where bugs could get very expensive. To maximize quality, they had firm rules about all code requiring a pair, and that barring emergencies, everybody had to go home on time. It worked; they had very low bug rates. They told me about a new employee they had, somebody who'd come from a company where performative overwork was valued. He'd stay until the wee hours, coding up a storm, expecting people to be impressed. In the morning, they'd thank him for his enthusiasm, revert the commit, and do the work again with proper pairing, testing, etc. I never heard what happened to the guy, but I imagine he pretty quickly unlearned his bad habits. That or he quit and went somewhere he could feed his heroism addiction. In contrast, I remember a long-ago 6-month contract a major online auction company starting with e and ending with Bay. I was on some internal mailing list where I'd get promotion announcements. Every fucking one of them included a dramatic story about how the person had egregiously overworked themselves. The code was of course a giant fucking mess. It was simultaneously the result of tired idiots who never cleaned up and also the cause of so many bugs and schedule issues that people had to dramatically overwork themselves to hit arbitrary managerial deadlines. It was a valuable lesson to me, the coding version of the Allegory of Long Spoons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons Ever since I've done my best to work at places where sanity is rewarded and drama discouraged. And to bend things in that direction as I'm able.
rafiki6 6y ago
The lesson should be work as hard as you need to (which usually isn't that hard). Never work harder.

ma2rten 6y ago

I got an offer from Apple. The hiring manager told me "You worked at a startup before, you'll have no problem working overtime". I didn't end up taking the offer.

raverbashing 6y ago
I can only answer with LOL to such offers Yes I've worked for a startup. Yes I did long hours. Yes I learned that's not sustainable and not a good way to make things work. So, no, I won't do it again.
- geophile 6y ago
  I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!". That appears to mean that you will work in a small team, putting in unsustainable hours, but not receive the financial reward that a successful startup could provide. I've worked in several startups, and occasional death marches are unavoidable. They don't work month in and month out. But enduring that kind of life for just salary is nuts.
  - andrewem 6y ago
    The other notable thing about “just like a startup but in a big company” (often for startups which have been acquired) is the frequent claim that the startup will be left alone by the rest of the company. Every single process and incentive is against that remaining true. Maybe in some cases you can hope for the acquired startup to be the pet project of the acquirer’s founder/CEO?
    - geophile 6y ago
      I knew that to work out exactly once, (not a company I was at).
  - Tommah 6y ago
    > the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!" I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke."
    - mgkimsal 6y ago
      > I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke." Sure... but you may still come in and find "this project has been nixed". Upside is that you may still have a 'job' in the bigger company, but everything you worked on may be thrown away, you may lose whatever political power your project had, etc. Certainly there's an 'immediate safety net' issue of "you may have a paycheck next week", but doesn't address any of the emotional stuff that goes along with "we'll have a scrappy startup mentality!" I had been in something similar - not quite a 'startup in a large company' situation, but similar. And... we hit a "hey, this project is being shut down, and there's no other budget in the company for this team". So.. the company itself was still going OK - everyone else kept rolling along - but a handful of us were effectively cut adrift for a bit. Some were able to be assigned to other internal teams, some weren't.
      - p_l 6y ago
        A project at big financial company... At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts. Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.
Raed667 6y ago
I got a similar line from a certain european video-game company.
- nvarsj 6y ago
  I interviewed for Blizzard many years ago. One of the first questions they asked is how many all-nighters I had done. Yeah, that was the end for me.
  - tankenmate 6y ago
    My frank response would be something along the lines of "I'm going to ask you a question, and how you respond will likely determine if I work here, 'Are you self selecting for incompetents or doormats?'" Their response to this question would probably tell you most of what you want to know about working at that company.
    - p1esk 6y ago
      Yeah, you can do this when you have several equally good offers in your pocket. Meaning you're good enough to be picky. What would be your response if you don't feel you're better than all others who applied for this position?
      - bigiain 6y ago
        There’s nothing wrong with choosing a job that you know are going to expect all-nighters, probably un compensated all-nighters - but make sure you choose it knowingly instead of pretending it’s an office hours job. It’d be a rare job in video game production that didn’t involve crunch time, and if you want to work in those roles you can, so long as you accept/embrace that. If you’re the sort of person for whom 2-3 months a year of crunch time is going to destroy your relationships/family/mental health, you should probably choose a different industry. There are lots of 9-5 ish coding jobs that involve zero or minimal outside-office-hours work. Don’t fool yourself I to pretending your “dream job” is one of those if there are obvious (or even subtle) red flags that it’s not.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
shoulderfake 6y ago
You should have just said no sir I wont have any problem working overtime and my rate is 2.5x for overtime hrs, you wont have a problem paying for that you're a rich company.
SkyPuncher 6y ago
I work at a startup right now and can count the number of times I've had to work overtime with a null-pointer - 0. Well run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  I completely agree, sure if you’re into a feature and on a roll in a startup keep going but if you’ve reached a good point to stop no need to cause yourself stress!
  - SkyPuncher 6y ago
    There are definitely days I work late, but that's almost always by choice. When I do work late, it means shorter days for me later in the week.
- derivagral 6y ago
  I've never had a startup that hasn't roped me into a production support on-call for a month or more in addition to regular duties. Under 10 engineers, 50 engineers, 500+ engineers: they've all done this.
  - qppo 6y ago
    I've never worked on a product where it ever made sense to be "on call." I'm an engineer, not a doctor.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      It’s probably obvious, but I’d suggest never working on a product doctors use.
    - Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
      If something goes catastrophically wrong at 1am, caused by some unforeseen bug in the code, who fixes it? Who diagnoses that an issue flooding the logs is not an issue with your software but something else down the line? I think it makes sense to have an on-call rota. Some people do it for a week or so. Cycle it through the team. There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Working overtime at a startup here and there can have an emotional reward, as a small team works together with enthusiasm to bring something to market. Yes, this can be abused by bad management and planning, and often is, but .. it's an entirely different beast from demanding overtime out of employees at a large profitable company where poor planning and under-resourcing are not really excusable.

libria 6y ago

> - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. I think this close, but a little off. Work hard only on what matters. Join the high visibility projects and work hard on the important parts. "Nobody notices" -> that's up to you. Document and demo your achievements every few weeks. Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP. Never, ever wait for "things to improve". So many times after I switched jobs, I said to myself "Man, why didn't I leave sooner?"

xvector 6y ago
> Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP. I agree with this but you have to understand that it's very difficult and frightening for an inexperienced new grad or someone on a green card to do. These groups are also unfortunately the most exploited.
- rmk 6y ago
  I do not understand why someone w/ a green card needs to be afraid of being fired. Isn't the whole point of it to firm up your status as someone who is allowed to stay on indefinitely with very few conditions, one of them being % of year spent in the US, plus not committing certain serious offences (felonies?)
  - vp8989 6y ago
    That is true. The parent probably meant to say Visa not Green Card. I can definitely relate to the feeling of being "stuck" in a bad situation while on a Visa and/or while waiting for a green card to be processed. It's such a huge relief when you finally get that freedom to move around in the job market.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    People with green cards don't need to be afraid of being fired: they're permanent residents. The people who have to worry are those on work visas.

oconnor663 6y ago

> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. As with most things in life, there are places where it matters and places where it doesn't matter. If someone's a junior employee working in a big company, it's likely that they don't have the necessary experience to figure out whether hard work matters in their position. That's an important risk to be aware of. But the opposite advice, avoiding hard work, is also risky. (And not a good habit to cultivate in the long term of course.) If you're not sure which position you're in, and you don't trust your more experienced coworkers to tell you honestly without punishing you for asking, then putting in some amount of hard work with the goal of finding out is a pretty good start.

temac 6y ago
I don't know. Work fairly, certainly. Work hard... what's the point? So in some cases you want to fast track your advancement in a direction that you like and this possible through this method, and you actually can work hard, so in this case take the chance if you want to. But that kind of situation is quite rare, I think. Also certainly do not appear to be working too lightly. But also do not appear to be working extremely hard if it is not the case. And remember, the (perceived) results are more important than actually working hard. It can be very unfair sometimes, because e.g. if you have to maintain and add features in a legacy codebase, (poor, but that's common) higher-ups may be uninterested with your difficulties caused by the spaghettis of your predecessors, but well life is just unfair I guess :P
- oconnor663 6y ago
  > Work hard... what's the point? I think it really depends on the person. It's a very common problem for people to procrastinate or drag their feet on the parts of their job that they don't particularly like. (Just like most students drag their feet doing homework they don't like.) But no job (or school program) is ever 100% fun stuff, and being able to delay gratification and get the unpleasant parts done is a super important life skill that not everyone has. For a lot of people, maybe most HN readers, this is basic stuff that they nailed in high school and never had a problem with after that. But I'm not sure that's the majority experience.

rmk 6y ago

- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. This has been my experience as well. Nowadays I work hard only while most of the following are true: - I'm making top dollar (good salary + equity value is high) - Work is interesting (something new to learn, or challenging, or both) - My home life is not going great (there are ups and downs, and working hard during the downs is a pretty decent way of coping) I absolutely do not work hard if any one of the following is true: - Project Manager is applying pressure. - People who do not deliver value have been promoted over me. - Manager/Technical leadership has repeatedly ignored my advice and leanded the team in hot water (cutting corners to make arbitrary timelines, only to incur high support costs or maintenance costs later) - Performance Management is not occurring at the company (underperformers are not thrown out, or, worse, promoted). - Company is not doing well (equity value is down). - Salary has not kept pace with market (i.e., nothing more than 3-4% raises per year). - There is an over-reliance on junior people and they start calling the shots, thereby making my hard-won experience useless to the team.

GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
Wow, Great List! The last one (juniors calling the shots) really hit home; when I worked in <automobile industry>, I was ultimately standing on the shoulder of midgets. The worse part? As a CS grad, I knew how to do better, but: nobody with the power to change things understood how or why what I was suggesting was better(!). I've long thought about this afterward, and concluded it's that 'my world' (which includes a lot of experience, and facility with Math) required me to study a lot and learn a lot; and these 'coders' simply did not have the background to understand what I was trying to teach them. I would have had to fill in several semesters in order to get my points across. Yes, I left. (And yes I tried simplifying - but that only goes so far.)
- rmk 6y ago
  It's very prevalent in this industry. Newbies cost less and there is usually a lot of mundane work that needs doing, so they comprise the majority of any average team. Even more so in established or mid-size companies where the sudden expansion or huge existing base necessitates a lot of grunt work. Sadly, there is also a trend of managers bending over backwards to please newbies (otherwise the hiring pipeline is thought to dry up; also, it's easier to hand out raises that appear larger if pay is lower) which exacerbates the situation.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

I can empathize with your story. I once landed what I thought would be my dream job at my dream company. I quickly discovered that the position was open because all of the previous team had quit due to the extreme toxicity. > The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard Be careful about getting jaded and cynical. This is far from a universal truth in the tech industry. I've hired a few ex-FAANG who had burned out and become cynical on work altogether. We had to let them go because their negativity was dragging everyone down. A similar thing can happen to people who go through difficult divorces. If they let themselves become cynical, they start believing that marriage is a doomed institution and that all members of their ex-spouse's gender are equally terrible people and such. It can become very counterproductive to moving on.

dvtrn 6y ago
The last few jobs I’ve had were glowing from the interviews and believe me I asked some very tough questions I hoped would be revealing enough without torpedoing my candidacy. Every one of them: as soon as I started, the foundational person of the team quit, you know the guy or gal who burned themselves out building the process. Fixing all the cruft and actually trying to unfuck everything but leaving scant documentation because the mountain of technical debt rivaled the heights of K2? As a result I had to “drink from the water hose” constantly. And this is something I am absolutely sick of doing, and no team should tolerate it. It’s happened so often I’m beginning to wonder a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent (I’ve had companies straight up lie about things like attrition and retention) or b) if I just have some kind of gravitational pull for companies that are running people out the door.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent Nothing wrong with asking the average tenure of people on the team imo, that is something you can frame in a way less likely to make them lie.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I'll be honest, my default perspective is to expect filibustering and non-answers from all but the actualized and self-aware teams, who if reading this thread and many, many others like it, and lived experience are anything reliable: are less common than their frustrating counterparts.

dylan604 6y ago

If you're the type of person that can only "work hard" due to being driven by needing the project to be completed and as best as it could possibly be, then maybe working for MegaCorp is not the best idea. Seems to be you'd be much better suited for a start-up (hopefully with prospects of major funding). If you're the type that doesn't want to work very hard and just there for a paycheck, then you are probably more suited for working at MegaCorp. Getting these out of wack makes for unhappy working conditions.

spottybanana 6y ago

> - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. This depends a lot on the situation/company. It is definitely true that in many cases it doesn't make sense to work hard. However there are situations where hard work is rewarded. Those are just probably quite rare situations after all.

rasengan0 6y ago

>- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. This. And the intrinsic metric does not necessarily align to the company's until much further down the road or sometimes not at all. Hard lesson for me to learn after a score at the same company and the health insurance stays the same regardless.

OOPMan 6y ago

Stuff like this is why I refuse to work at large companies. Shit does happen at smaller companies, for sure, but it seems like larger companies are just that much more dysfunctional that I don't want to take the risk.

mangamadaiyan 6y ago
I've been on both sides of the BigCo fence, and in my experience, the small companies I've worked at have been much more dysfunctional than the alternatives. A BigCo is usually a loose conglomerate of smaller fiefdoms; -much- the sanity level in your team depends on your immediate boss and coworkers. If you luck out and find the right bunch, you're set. A small company is usually a larger fiefdom than a BigCo team, and self-selects for certain bodily orifices, doormats and complexity junkies. YMMV.

Gibbon1 6y ago

> I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices What I learned people that spend all their time working don't have time for the social engineering needed to get ahead. Also a lot of people that focus heavily on social engineering make bank on passing dirt on their coworkers to upper management.

rubicon33 6y ago

> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. Exactly this. Unless your manager has a history of giving raises and/or promotions to YOU for doing your JOB then do not assume, ever, that they will give you anything for overworking to chase a carrot on a stick. That said if they have a history of recognizing and appreciating your work, and compensating you for extra effort, then by all means feel free to put some sweat into the work. That's a good relationship. My rule of thumb whenever starting a new job is - Work hard for the first year, but almost never overtime. Do my job, and do it well, but don't kill myself. If manager recognizes the good work, and gives me a raise, I'll talk to them about incentive based objectives, and that I'm willing to work over time if there's a reward structure. Or, that I'm happy to continue at my 9-5 pace if that's working for them. Point is - always wait for them to make the first move. If they don't, either accept the 9-5 work for the pay, or move on to another employer that does value incentive based (bonus) salaries.

alsetmusic 6y ago

> Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king. This is the most important lesson I learned working at the fruit company. That and never have a long commute. I now work at a place that's ten minutes door-to-door in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon. I took a pay cut to achieve that (I live in East Bay), but maybe the new wfh culture post-COVID will open up more possibilities. Anyway, point being that I've decided that my job is second to my happiness.

wpietri 6y ago

> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. I knew of one company, a pair programming shop doing the sort of financial software where bugs could get very expensive. To maximize quality, they had firm rules about all code requiring a pair, and that barring emergencies, everybody had to go home on time. It worked; they had very low bug rates. They told me about a new employee they had, somebody who'd come from a company where performative overwork was valued. He'd stay until the wee hours, coding up a storm, expecting people to be impressed. In the morning, they'd thank him for his enthusiasm, revert the commit, and do the work again with proper pairing, testing, etc. I never heard what happened to the guy, but I imagine he pretty quickly unlearned his bad habits. That or he quit and went somewhere he could feed his heroism addiction. In contrast, I remember a long-ago 6-month contract a major online auction company starting with e and ending with Bay. I was on some internal mailing list where I'd get promotion announcements. Every fucking one of them included a dramatic story about how the person had egregiously overworked themselves. The code was of course a giant fucking mess. It was simultaneously the result of tired idiots who never cleaned up and also the cause of so many bugs and schedule issues that people had to dramatically overwork themselves to hit arbitrary managerial deadlines. It was a valuable lesson to me, the coding version of the Allegory of Long Spoons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons Ever since I've done my best to work at places where sanity is rewarded and drama discouraged. And to bend things in that direction as I'm able.

rafiki6 6y ago

The lesson should be work as hard as you need to (which usually isn't that hard). Never work harder.