6 ms·

The grass was probably not greener and eventually reached an equilibrium at the new company. This letter reminds me of my recent departure. I wasn't really codi

The grass was probably not greener and eventually reached an equilibrium at the new company. This letter reminds me of my recent departure. I wasn't really coding much anymore, the company had been ignoring suggestions since I started years ago. We fought the same fires and nothing was learned on company time. I had to devote my own time to growth. Sadly we don't know the rest of the programmer's story. I'd like to know if they finally found the dream job.

mark-r 5y ago
I wonder in general what are the odds of finding a better job? Are they 50/50 or do they skew one way or the other?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Depends on how bad your current job is. The better the current job, the harder it is to find something still better. There can be a halo effect - the better your current jobs, to some degree the better offers you get - but I still think that on net, you should be more reluctant to leave a decent situation. If your current job is in the top 10% of jobs, then the odds are 9 to 1 that switching will get you something worse.
  - jll29 5y ago
    > If your current job is in the top 10% of jobs, then the odds are 9 to 1 that switching will get you something worse. This is a wise insight. It therefore would be good if developers had created a Glassdoor-like site where people can enter technical details about their jobs (languages used, appreciation of refactoring, software tools, pair programming, technical documentation, use of version control, A/B testing, unit tests, UML, ...) in order to permit people to get a sense of what they're getting into. Asking about this at interviews is not productive, as hiring managers may bend the truth a bit to get talent on board.
  - mlac 5y ago
    I’ve seen a similar idea with employees, but a bit more forgiving. I can’t find the article, but it was about when it makes sense to replace someone vs keep them. The idea was to keep them if they get 70% of their work correct / do 70% of the job well and go to the market for a new hire if they don’t hit that. It seems low, but with the inefficiency caused by turnover I guess 70% is where they settled.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  Seems very difficult to gauge quantitatively. I've changed jobs at year 2, 12, and 19. Each time, what I was interested in to make my next job better had changed based on my age as well as my accrued experience at the different jobs. And there's the fact that for someone like myself, I'm guilty of moving the goalpost. I honestly have a great job right now. Bit as I get used to that, then new things bug me.
  - jojohohanon 5y ago
    This. I loved my first job. Every thing about it. But looking back in hindsight, it was a vanity project of the ceo, and was never going to recoup the manpower investment. Requirements and goal posts were ever-shifting. I was too naive to even perceive role status and did little or nothing concrete to forward my career except turn out (quality) code. I loved it. I would be frustrated to distraction if I were in that position now.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    I've often found that the thing that made me take a new job was the change that I wanted and failed to make in the old. In fact, often enough I misjudged the new org in the interview and they had the same problems but I ended up being the force for the change that I wanted to see. For some odd reason, it always seems like getting that inertia is easier at the next job than the current one.
  - matwood 5y ago
    Great point. My first programming job in college was for a little boutique software company in town. My boss would walk into my office at noon, describe some software, and ask if I could have a PoC by 4 so he could drive over to the client and hopefully get a check to build. Now, something like that would drive me nuts, but at the time I didn't know better and it was exciting. The one consistent thing in my career is I don't tolerate jobs that have too little work to do. I've had 2 jobs at various points in my career where was I told to just hang out for extended periods of time, and in neither case did I make it a year working there.
- namenotrequired 5y ago
  The more inclined you are to leave it, the worse it is (all else equal), and therefore the bigger the chance the next one is better. (By your own judgment.)
- xwolfi 5y ago
  You can always reduce to more material aspects, like money. Sometimes a large salary increment can make you accept much more shit. I have incredible frustrations at my current job but the 2x increment I got compared to my amazingly fun job I had in a small company before makes me brush them off much more easily :D
- dagw 5y ago
  Every time I've changed jobs I've been happier for maybe 12 month or so and then it felt like the same old grind as the last job. It's almost like I might be a factor as well in the whole thing and not just the job.
MathYouF 5y ago
The grass is greener if you stop working for companies dominated by non-technical leadership. Unfortunately the types who move from one corporate behemoth to another rarely see the light and continue indulging in the fantasy that one day they'll find a large old company run by non-technical leadership with respect for engineering, other good developers to collaborate with who haven't left, and processes focused on progress. The rest of us learned the lesson and stopped working as engineers for such companies.
- spfzero 5y ago
  This is the conclusion i came to as well, but you said it better.
- isoprophlex 5y ago
  Do you have any tips to share about finding places run by technical minded leadership, before actually getting yourself hired? I feel my bullshit-job detector when interviewing at potential workplaces isn't as good as it could be...
  - oytis 5y ago
    I'm not good at it either and landed at a good place by sheer luck. But once I know what a good culture looks like, next time I have to look for a new job I would try to do an extensive reverse interview to learn what their approach to architecture, planning, development and testing is. Basically I'd like to make sure that these all are driven by developers, that people care about quality, not just metrics, and that there is a long-term vision of what the team wants to deliver.
  - MathYouF 5y ago
    Ask who your manager will be. Look them up on LinkedIn. Look at all the people on the technical side of the company and their LinkedIns. If their last few jobs for the last several years aren't technical, that's the answer. In general, pretty much any company that isn't a technology company will fail this test. Working for companies which are young and specifically software companies is your best bet.
systems_glitch 5y ago
There will be a full writeup on this system later on, but the diskette that contained this letter of resignation was part of what remained of the author's 8" diskette library, and contained a lot of 8080/Z80 code he'd written. He's deceased now, the fellow who passed the system on to me never knew him either, but digging through that much of someone's code and notes (a banker's box of documentation), I at least sort of feel like I end up in the programmer's shoes a bit. Unfortunately, it seems this machine had a fault in its floppy drive controller some time in late 1985 or early 1986 (files stopped being updated). The fault caused any writes at all to disk to clobber whatever was under the write heads. So, this is about the end of the information I've got w.r.t. personal correspondence, etc.
- neurostimulant 5y ago
  Someone posted this[0] recently about recovering old data from damaged floppies using oscilloscope. [0] https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2021/05/recovering-lost-treasure-filled-floppy.html https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2021/05/recovering-l...
adreamingsoul 5y ago
“The grass is greener where you water it.”
- LaundroMat 5y ago
  Manure also seems to help.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  "The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/432288.The_Grass_Is_Always_Greener_over_the_Septic_Tank https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/432288.The_Grass_Is_Alwa...
- cellularmitosis 5y ago
  You can attract more flies with honey than vinegar, but a big steaming pile of BS works best.
paxcoder 5y ago
When I was fired from my 3rd programming job, God gave me confidence in Him that it would work out for my good (Romans 8:28). To be honest, I was kind of glad too as my job was getting tiresome even though I was working for only a couple of months at it and did multiple different things since I starded. It wasn't hard to thank God before the my superiors when after they told me the news (Job 1:21). But I prayed to God he'd give me a better, stress-free job that would suit me. And He definitely lead me to greener pastures, first of all to Him, and then to a stress-free, enjoyable job. Praised be God! (Psalms 23:2) And if He should take it away, praised be God again! May He be praised forever.
gifnamething 5y ago
On the other hand, a job that is 'good enough' can make you too scared to make the jump to leave. Then you get paid less, learn less and it becomes harder to make the jump if the job stops being 'good enough'
fuzzfactor 5y ago
I have the unpleasant task of informing you that I will be leaving __*this_crummy*__ employment as of __*shortly*__. As you know I have not been very happy with __*the_same_old_shit*__. I have not __*seen_anything_worthwhile?*__ in a little over 3 months. I have not learned anything new in the __*professional*__ field in the past year. I have been putting out the same old fires that were here __*a_sad_number_of*__ years ago. I will be working as a __*much_better_position*__ for __*a_truly_respected_employer*__. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who I have worked with for the past two years. I know that I will miss you all.
mbrodersen 5y ago
The grass is still greener where I work now. And it has been for 10+ years.

mark-r 5y ago

I wonder in general what are the odds of finding a better job? Are they 50/50 or do they skew one way or the other?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Depends on how bad your current job is. The better the current job, the harder it is to find something still better. There can be a halo effect - the better your current jobs, to some degree the better offers you get - but I still think that on net, you should be more reluctant to leave a decent situation. If your current job is in the top 10% of jobs, then the odds are 9 to 1 that switching will get you something worse.
- jll29 5y ago
  > If your current job is in the top 10% of jobs, then the odds are 9 to 1 that switching will get you something worse. This is a wise insight. It therefore would be good if developers had created a Glassdoor-like site where people can enter technical details about their jobs (languages used, appreciation of refactoring, software tools, pair programming, technical documentation, use of version control, A/B testing, unit tests, UML, ...) in order to permit people to get a sense of what they're getting into. Asking about this at interviews is not productive, as hiring managers may bend the truth a bit to get talent on board.
- mlac 5y ago
  I’ve seen a similar idea with employees, but a bit more forgiving. I can’t find the article, but it was about when it makes sense to replace someone vs keep them. The idea was to keep them if they get 70% of their work correct / do 70% of the job well and go to the market for a new hire if they don’t hit that. It seems low, but with the inefficiency caused by turnover I guess 70% is where they settled.
travisgriggs 5y ago
Seems very difficult to gauge quantitatively. I've changed jobs at year 2, 12, and 19. Each time, what I was interested in to make my next job better had changed based on my age as well as my accrued experience at the different jobs. And there's the fact that for someone like myself, I'm guilty of moving the goalpost. I honestly have a great job right now. Bit as I get used to that, then new things bug me.
- jojohohanon 5y ago
  This. I loved my first job. Every thing about it. But looking back in hindsight, it was a vanity project of the ceo, and was never going to recoup the manpower investment. Requirements and goal posts were ever-shifting. I was too naive to even perceive role status and did little or nothing concrete to forward my career except turn out (quality) code. I loved it. I would be frustrated to distraction if I were in that position now.
- busterarm 5y ago
  I've often found that the thing that made me take a new job was the change that I wanted and failed to make in the old. In fact, often enough I misjudged the new org in the interview and they had the same problems but I ended up being the force for the change that I wanted to see. For some odd reason, it always seems like getting that inertia is easier at the next job than the current one.
- matwood 5y ago
  Great point. My first programming job in college was for a little boutique software company in town. My boss would walk into my office at noon, describe some software, and ask if I could have a PoC by 4 so he could drive over to the client and hopefully get a check to build. Now, something like that would drive me nuts, but at the time I didn't know better and it was exciting. The one consistent thing in my career is I don't tolerate jobs that have too little work to do. I've had 2 jobs at various points in my career where was I told to just hang out for extended periods of time, and in neither case did I make it a year working there.
namenotrequired 5y ago
The more inclined you are to leave it, the worse it is (all else equal), and therefore the bigger the chance the next one is better. (By your own judgment.)
xwolfi 5y ago
You can always reduce to more material aspects, like money. Sometimes a large salary increment can make you accept much more shit. I have incredible frustrations at my current job but the 2x increment I got compared to my amazingly fun job I had in a small company before makes me brush them off much more easily :D
dagw 5y ago
Every time I've changed jobs I've been happier for maybe 12 month or so and then it felt like the same old grind as the last job. It's almost like I might be a factor as well in the whole thing and not just the job.

MathYouF 5y ago

The grass is greener if you stop working for companies dominated by non-technical leadership. Unfortunately the types who move from one corporate behemoth to another rarely see the light and continue indulging in the fantasy that one day they'll find a large old company run by non-technical leadership with respect for engineering, other good developers to collaborate with who haven't left, and processes focused on progress. The rest of us learned the lesson and stopped working as engineers for such companies.

spfzero 5y ago
This is the conclusion i came to as well, but you said it better.
isoprophlex 5y ago
Do you have any tips to share about finding places run by technical minded leadership, before actually getting yourself hired? I feel my bullshit-job detector when interviewing at potential workplaces isn't as good as it could be...
- oytis 5y ago
  I'm not good at it either and landed at a good place by sheer luck. But once I know what a good culture looks like, next time I have to look for a new job I would try to do an extensive reverse interview to learn what their approach to architecture, planning, development and testing is. Basically I'd like to make sure that these all are driven by developers, that people care about quality, not just metrics, and that there is a long-term vision of what the team wants to deliver.
- MathYouF 5y ago
  Ask who your manager will be. Look them up on LinkedIn. Look at all the people on the technical side of the company and their LinkedIns. If their last few jobs for the last several years aren't technical, that's the answer. In general, pretty much any company that isn't a technology company will fail this test. Working for companies which are young and specifically software companies is your best bet.

systems_glitch 5y ago

There will be a full writeup on this system later on, but the diskette that contained this letter of resignation was part of what remained of the author's 8" diskette library, and contained a lot of 8080/Z80 code he'd written. He's deceased now, the fellow who passed the system on to me never knew him either, but digging through that much of someone's code and notes (a banker's box of documentation), I at least sort of feel like I end up in the programmer's shoes a bit. Unfortunately, it seems this machine had a fault in its floppy drive controller some time in late 1985 or early 1986 (files stopped being updated). The fault caused any writes at all to disk to clobber whatever was under the write heads. So, this is about the end of the information I've got w.r.t. personal correspondence, etc.

neurostimulant 5y ago
Someone posted this[0] recently about recovering old data from damaged floppies using oscilloscope. [0] https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2021/05/recovering-lost-treasure-filled-floppy.html https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2021/05/recovering-l...

adreamingsoul 5y ago

“The grass is greener where you water it.”

LaundroMat 5y ago
Manure also seems to help.
DonHopkins 5y ago
"The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/432288.The_Grass_Is_Always_Greener_over_the_Septic_Tank https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/432288.The_Grass_Is_Alwa...
cellularmitosis 5y ago
You can attract more flies with honey than vinegar, but a big steaming pile of BS works best.

paxcoder 5y ago

When I was fired from my 3rd programming job, God gave me confidence in Him that it would work out for my good (Romans 8:28). To be honest, I was kind of glad too as my job was getting tiresome even though I was working for only a couple of months at it and did multiple different things since I starded. It wasn't hard to thank God before the my superiors when after they told me the news (Job 1:21). But I prayed to God he'd give me a better, stress-free job that would suit me. And He definitely lead me to greener pastures, first of all to Him, and then to a stress-free, enjoyable job. Praised be God! (Psalms 23:2) And if He should take it away, praised be God again! May He be praised forever.

gifnamething 5y ago

On the other hand, a job that is 'good enough' can make you too scared to make the jump to leave. Then you get paid less, learn less and it becomes harder to make the jump if the job stops being 'good enough'

fuzzfactor 5y ago

I have the unpleasant task of informing you that I will be leaving __*this_crummy*__ employment as of __*shortly*__. As you know I have not been very happy with __*the_same_old_shit*__. I have not __*seen_anything_worthwhile?*__ in a little over 3 months. I have not learned anything new in the __*professional*__ field in the past year. I have been putting out the same old fires that were here __*a_sad_number_of*__ years ago. I will be working as a __*much_better_position*__ for __*a_truly_respected_employer*__. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who I have worked with for the past two years. I know that I will miss you all.

mbrodersen 5y ago

The grass is still greener where I work now. And it has been for 10+ years.