7 ms·

> the truth was I didn't want to be there anymore but I didn't know how to quit on my own. This is what it comes down to. A lot of junior employees have a fee

> the truth was I didn't want to be there anymore but I didn't know how to quit on my own. This is what it comes down to. A lot of junior employees have a feeling that something is wrong, but they don't quite know what to do about it. One of the best things young engineers can do is keep in contact with their peers from college, prior education, or other jobs. Don't be afraid to discuss your job and compare notes. If you're consistently the only one in the conversation who's miserable or even embarrassed to admit your job is bad, it's time to start interviewing.

ssully 5y ago
My first job out of college I was hired on to a team and the first day I was informed the lead dev on the project was moved to a different project and I was essentially the new lead. That was the first huge red flag that I failed to recognize. Luckily I managed to get moved to another team that I really liked and learned a lot from, but I basically ate shit for the first 2 years in my career because of that.
miketery 5y ago
Another thing is create a contract or promise with yourself that sets out conditions which when met would result in you quitting or finding something new. It’s really hard in the moment or while on the inside to make a good decision. But if you thought about it before it’s easier since you’ve reasoned about it before at a distance. You can always modify the contract of course. But I think a good reason to do this prior, is that humans are resilient and we can endure and adapt to range of conditions, even when deteriorating quickly. So remembering a certain baseline you set for yourself prior comes in handy!
- nitrogen 5y ago
  This is a really good approach to a lot of difficult problems. I'd had this idea drilled into my head growing up of deciding carefully beforehand so you don't decide poorly in the heat of the moment, but somehow it hadn't occurred to me to apply it to the workplace. Could probably have saved myself a fair bit of stress this way.
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  Jared Dunn did this, in the form of writing 3 letters when he starts a new job. And as we know, that guy f...
alexjplant 5y ago
> This is what it comes down to. A lot of junior employees have a feeling that something is wrong, but they don't quite know what to do about it. At my first "real" programming job I was the "go-to" guy for at least three people on the team yet made around 70% of the lowest-paid of them. They all told me at various times that my salary was unfair, that I had to go find a new job, and so forth. It didn't start to sink in until I took a voluntary severance and found another job for a 50% raise. When I was young I was thrilled that I was finally getting paid to do something that I'd done since I was 7 (write software). I've grown up a lot since then - whenever my friends complain about their job or financial situation I start badgering them to re-negotiate their position, interview, etc. because I've been in their shoes and don't want to see them make the same mistakes that I have.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> If you're consistently the only one in the conversation who's miserable or even embarrassed to admit your job is bad, it's time to start interviewing. Does this advice change if other people do think the job is bad?
- ksm1717 5y ago
  Yes because then it means you associated with the wrong people and you are destined to be miserable
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  If everyone agrees the job is bad sometimes there is comradery to be found in that. Whether that is healthy comradery is a complicated question. My first job after graduate school was of that sort. Some good friends came out of that fire and I generally know that if I had to work again with anyone from that former situation I probably would, just not in that exact same situation. But that sort of "team spirit" is also its own tie that binds you to a bad situation and makes it worse too. You are more likely to stay and deal with a bad job when you have good people you work with day-to-day. We're a very social species that way and a lot of us have been convinced to stick with bad jobs or awful environments with good coworkers. Figuring out when to start interviewing in a situation like that is tough, especially if it starts to feel guilty like a betrayal of "team spirit". (In my own case it took almost a natural disaster shocking me to action and I still wonder if my breaking point should have been much earlier.)
  - hinkley 5y ago
    > Whether that is healthy comradery is a complicated question. I've worked at a few places where it became an Us versus Them situation. Like we were freedom fighters, struggling against the oligarchy. I don't know what else we could have done to maintain any semblance of morale. It wasn't healthy, but it was the best we could do other than quit. In one of those it was the economy that kept us there. I can't say why we did in the other cases. The thing is when it's a "band together to survive" situation, once a couple people quit, everyone is rushing for the door. I think that's part of why turnover gets away from management so often. Everything is fine and then it's Not Fine before they even have time to notice it's happening, because they've been ignoring the warnings and signs as unactionable.
ryandrake 5y ago
I once joined a company that was a total clown show: Product was a mess, no source control, no bug tracker, no release process, little to no QA, sales drove the product priorities, which changed daily, frequent trips to VIP customers to debug live on their equipment… with a single junior engineer holding everything together. He had no idea It Wasn’t Supposed To Be This Way. We spent a lot of time talking about how it is at normal companies, best practices, and we both soon left for greener pastures. He probably would have stayed there for years if I hadn’t opened his eyes!
- shimonabi 5y ago
  Bro, I recently joined a company where the "senior" developer joins DB tables by strings and puts order header info and the order items in the same table.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    Joining by strings can make sense if there is a natural key. Often, for performance, you would use a surrogate key even if a natural key exists but there are rare times it makes sense.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    If you're joining, there better be an index (or else you have bigger problems in your DB design). Indexes are usually B-trees and can look up an item in 2-3 page faults and ~20 memory comparisons, regardless of how big the table is. The page fault time dwarfs the comparison time, so in practice it doesn't matter whether keys are strings or integers. (I guess there's potentially a space premium for strings that makes fewer records fit on a page, but remember that ints are generally 64 bits now. Anything less than an 8-character string will be smaller than the equivalent int, and 8-16 characters is within a factor of 2x.) Putting order header and order items in the same table is weird, but could potentially be defensible if it saves you a join on common queries.
    - spfzero 5y ago
      One problem with strings though is that they might, in the parent post's case, have been editable somewhere. In that case a user (admin user, for example) can unknowingly break the relation. A short string code though, only available from a lookup, for instance, might be acceptable. Since you already have a lookup though, put an int column in there and use the int.
zaat 5y ago
Last week one of my employees quit. He got himself a job well over what I could afford paying. He was really not sure if he should go and was feeling very uncomfortable since we were so good with him and invested in him so much, which is all true. I told him that I would be very happy if he stay but I can't ask him to, and that he lives his life for himself, not for me, and that as general rule he should never put his employer interest before his own. He decided to leave, but felt very uncomfortable with it and felt he had to justify it to me and explain his move. I tried to ask him firmly never to do it, since there are people out there who would exploit innocent employees in similar position. You should never justify leaving a company, if you feel like quitting will be better for you just do it. Employment should always be mutual benefit deal, and just like a company would let you go if employing you isn't beneficial anymore you should leave without too much hesitation if its for your own benefit. I'm not saying you should be ungrateful ass, but you should put yourself first in your consideration, most probably nobody else would.
- chrismcb 5y ago
  The fact that you were good to him, and he probably enjoyed his job, makes it a difficult decision. Make more money and take in the unknown, it stay where it feels warm and fuzzy.
- refurb 5y ago
  When I told my boss I was going back to school to support a career change his response was “smart fucking move”. As a manager always put your people before the company. That’s what good managers do.
- xupybd 5y ago
  You sound like a great boss.
  - zaat 5y ago
    I had a few terrible bosses as an example of what not to do. Honestly, I wasn't really happy with the guy performance. I do need him now, but if he wouldn't be quitting I probably would let him go, sooner or later, when I found someone with better attitude and skills. I would feel terrible with myself if I he would pass an opportunity being loyal to the company only to be shown the door few months after. I prefer to work with happy people who want to work where they do, and to achieve these you have to take care of your employees.

ssully 5y ago

My first job out of college I was hired on to a team and the first day I was informed the lead dev on the project was moved to a different project and I was essentially the new lead. That was the first huge red flag that I failed to recognize. Luckily I managed to get moved to another team that I really liked and learned a lot from, but I basically ate shit for the first 2 years in my career because of that.

miketery 5y ago

Another thing is create a contract or promise with yourself that sets out conditions which when met would result in you quitting or finding something new. It’s really hard in the moment or while on the inside to make a good decision. But if you thought about it before it’s easier since you’ve reasoned about it before at a distance. You can always modify the contract of course. But I think a good reason to do this prior, is that humans are resilient and we can endure and adapt to range of conditions, even when deteriorating quickly. So remembering a certain baseline you set for yourself prior comes in handy!

nitrogen 5y ago
This is a really good approach to a lot of difficult problems. I'd had this idea drilled into my head growing up of deciding carefully beforehand so you don't decide poorly in the heat of the moment, but somehow it hadn't occurred to me to apply it to the workplace. Could probably have saved myself a fair bit of stress this way.
jiveturkey 5y ago
Jared Dunn did this, in the form of writing 3 letters when he starts a new job. And as we know, that guy f...

alexjplant 5y ago

> This is what it comes down to. A lot of junior employees have a feeling that something is wrong, but they don't quite know what to do about it. At my first "real" programming job I was the "go-to" guy for at least three people on the team yet made around 70% of the lowest-paid of them. They all told me at various times that my salary was unfair, that I had to go find a new job, and so forth. It didn't start to sink in until I took a voluntary severance and found another job for a 50% raise. When I was young I was thrilled that I was finally getting paid to do something that I'd done since I was 7 (write software). I've grown up a lot since then - whenever my friends complain about their job or financial situation I start badgering them to re-negotiate their position, interview, etc. because I've been in their shoes and don't want to see them make the same mistakes that I have.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> If you're consistently the only one in the conversation who's miserable or even embarrassed to admit your job is bad, it's time to start interviewing. Does this advice change if other people do think the job is bad?

ksm1717 5y ago
Yes because then it means you associated with the wrong people and you are destined to be miserable
WorldMaker 5y ago
If everyone agrees the job is bad sometimes there is comradery to be found in that. Whether that is healthy comradery is a complicated question. My first job after graduate school was of that sort. Some good friends came out of that fire and I generally know that if I had to work again with anyone from that former situation I probably would, just not in that exact same situation. But that sort of "team spirit" is also its own tie that binds you to a bad situation and makes it worse too. You are more likely to stay and deal with a bad job when you have good people you work with day-to-day. We're a very social species that way and a lot of us have been convinced to stick with bad jobs or awful environments with good coworkers. Figuring out when to start interviewing in a situation like that is tough, especially if it starts to feel guilty like a betrayal of "team spirit". (In my own case it took almost a natural disaster shocking me to action and I still wonder if my breaking point should have been much earlier.)
- hinkley 5y ago
  > Whether that is healthy comradery is a complicated question. I've worked at a few places where it became an Us versus Them situation. Like we were freedom fighters, struggling against the oligarchy. I don't know what else we could have done to maintain any semblance of morale. It wasn't healthy, but it was the best we could do other than quit. In one of those it was the economy that kept us there. I can't say why we did in the other cases. The thing is when it's a "band together to survive" situation, once a couple people quit, everyone is rushing for the door. I think that's part of why turnover gets away from management so often. Everything is fine and then it's Not Fine before they even have time to notice it's happening, because they've been ignoring the warnings and signs as unactionable.

ryandrake 5y ago

I once joined a company that was a total clown show: Product was a mess, no source control, no bug tracker, no release process, little to no QA, sales drove the product priorities, which changed daily, frequent trips to VIP customers to debug live on their equipment… with a single junior engineer holding everything together. He had no idea It Wasn’t Supposed To Be This Way. We spent a lot of time talking about how it is at normal companies, best practices, and we both soon left for greener pastures. He probably would have stayed there for years if I hadn’t opened his eyes!

shimonabi 5y ago
Bro, I recently joined a company where the "senior" developer joins DB tables by strings and puts order header info and the order items in the same table.
- xupybd 5y ago
  Joining by strings can make sense if there is a natural key. Often, for performance, you would use a surrogate key even if a natural key exists but there are rare times it makes sense.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  If you're joining, there better be an index (or else you have bigger problems in your DB design). Indexes are usually B-trees and can look up an item in 2-3 page faults and ~20 memory comparisons, regardless of how big the table is. The page fault time dwarfs the comparison time, so in practice it doesn't matter whether keys are strings or integers. (I guess there's potentially a space premium for strings that makes fewer records fit on a page, but remember that ints are generally 64 bits now. Anything less than an 8-character string will be smaller than the equivalent int, and 8-16 characters is within a factor of 2x.) Putting order header and order items in the same table is weird, but could potentially be defensible if it saves you a join on common queries.
  - spfzero 5y ago
    One problem with strings though is that they might, in the parent post's case, have been editable somewhere. In that case a user (admin user, for example) can unknowingly break the relation. A short string code though, only available from a lookup, for instance, might be acceptable. Since you already have a lookup though, put an int column in there and use the int.

zaat 5y ago

Last week one of my employees quit. He got himself a job well over what I could afford paying. He was really not sure if he should go and was feeling very uncomfortable since we were so good with him and invested in him so much, which is all true. I told him that I would be very happy if he stay but I can't ask him to, and that he lives his life for himself, not for me, and that as general rule he should never put his employer interest before his own. He decided to leave, but felt very uncomfortable with it and felt he had to justify it to me and explain his move. I tried to ask him firmly never to do it, since there are people out there who would exploit innocent employees in similar position. You should never justify leaving a company, if you feel like quitting will be better for you just do it. Employment should always be mutual benefit deal, and just like a company would let you go if employing you isn't beneficial anymore you should leave without too much hesitation if its for your own benefit. I'm not saying you should be ungrateful ass, but you should put yourself first in your consideration, most probably nobody else would.

chrismcb 5y ago
The fact that you were good to him, and he probably enjoyed his job, makes it a difficult decision. Make more money and take in the unknown, it stay where it feels warm and fuzzy.
refurb 5y ago
When I told my boss I was going back to school to support a career change his response was “smart fucking move”. As a manager always put your people before the company. That’s what good managers do.
xupybd 5y ago
You sound like a great boss.
- zaat 5y ago
  I had a few terrible bosses as an example of what not to do. Honestly, I wasn't really happy with the guy performance. I do need him now, but if he wouldn't be quitting I probably would let him go, sooner or later, when I found someone with better attitude and skills. I would feel terrible with myself if I he would pass an opportunity being loyal to the company only to be shown the door few months after. I prefer to work with happy people who want to work where they do, and to achieve these you have to take care of your employees.