5 ms·

A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled

by hughrr 5y ago

A side effect of working for asshole companies like that for years is I’ve slowly developed a zero fucks attitude and an immunity to threats and carrots dangled in front of me. I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.

square_usual 5y ago
> I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not entirely sure I want to. Working on projects where you care but almost nobody else does does that to you, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it back to a position where I can care for projects.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlements from it. Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into. It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    But your life is spent at work, so if you don't care, your life is spent doing something you don't care about.
    - np- 5y ago
      You can care about your career and your self improvement while still maintaining healthy boundaries around the mental effort expended for your job. We’re in it for a long time but jobs come and go
      - DarylZero 5y ago
        That's not what I'm talking about. Your working life is where you act on the world outside of yourself. If you don't care about what you're doing, you're spending most of your influence on the world on something you don't care about.
        np- 5y ago
        Why not? You can care about delivering beautiful code. You can care about ensuring the workplace is a pleasant place to work for all. You can care about your relationships you’re building. You may even be a huge fan of the product you’re building. That doesn’t mean you need to shit a brick when someone comes running in with their hair on fire—it’s not a binary proposition. Caring about things can be done “a la carte” and you can simply just not care about the bullshit
        lostdog 5y ago
        Exactly. You can even care about your product and its users, but not care that it went down for a couple hours last tuesday or launched 4 weeks later than a made-up deadline.
        apohn 5y ago
        At least to me, of the best things about this attitude is that the working culture starts to matter a lot when you search for jobs. That's what you care about. You look for places where relationship building is important and people try to get along and support each other. Other stuff starts to matter less. Lots of places basically put so much pressure on you to deliver that being a decent human being becomes impossible. If my choice is between working at a boring job where I can support my colleagues, and an exciting job with cool tech where people are having mental breakdowns and nobody has the mental space to support them, I'll take the boring job where people don't care about stupid directives and dealines from above.
    - hughrr 5y ago
      Not much of my life is spent at work. I spent the last 10 years optimising the ROI from work down to a suitable compromise of time vs money.
    - pnutjam 5y ago
      Next time around I'll be sure to get born wealthy so I don't have to worry about it. But it's incredibly privileged to be able to do the sort of work we do compared to standing in a factory production line or working away from family. I enjoy my work, but I know if the company fails it's not my fault and I will be working somewhere else tomorrow.
- indigochill 5y ago
  I think it's healthy to not care about something you have no real stake in. But you can compensate for that condition in a day job with hobbies or pets or friends or generally something to care about outside of work. I personally do a number of regular social things outside work as well as occasionally writing and producing music on a purely amateur basis, where the only reason to do them is _because_ I care.
- np- 5y ago
  What I’ve found is that you can care about things like craftsmanship, problem solving, and quality while not being bothered by the day to day short term project level thinking.
  - CPLNTN 5y ago
    The problem is that writing good code requires more time than writing shitty one.. and if there is a lot of external pressure to finish the project, it’s quite difficult for me to stay focused on quality
    - np- 5y ago
      That's fair, and I'm not saying it's as easy as flipping a switch. We are all social human beings wired to easily get caught up in the day to day panic, especially when someone is breathing down your neck. But you need to consider that somebody breathing down your neck does _not_ have your best interests in mind. You are master of your own career, and any shitty code you deliver will have your signature on it. It's all about setting boundaries and being able to push back when people are unreasonable. This is where the "not caring" is an invaluable skill. You are an immovable mountain in the face of a hurricane. At the end of the day, YOU are the professional. If an amateur decides that you are going too slow, that doesn't mean anything--they can feel free to hire more engineers or whatever needs to be done, but the onus is on _them_ to ante up. No matter how much you love your job, you're probably going to have multiple throughout your career so you need to focus on yourself first and foremost.
vaughandroid 5y ago
I imagine that's a good place to be, but I don't know if it's possible without going through a lot of trauma and building up substantial mental scar tissue. Getting on 15 years into my career and not sure I'll ever get there. On the other hand, I actually work on a project I care about and for a company that treats me like a human being and not a "resource". Think I'm OK with that.
- hughrr 5y ago
  I was at that sort of company, finally. They got bought out. It changed. I’m staying for the retainer at the moment.
octagonal 5y ago
I was lucky enough to experience a 2 year long project in which everything that went wrong was blamed on the developers. Project managers breathing down your neck, feeling so pressured you barely dare take a bathroom break, the whole shebang. Quit working for them and now I'm a freelance dev. They asked me to get back on the project and I said fine, that'll be €700/day. After some grumbling they realized they had no other option so they agreed. The project is still failing due to bad management but I no longer care. I believe to now feel the same sense of calm around chaos and failure like you do. A lot of developers have real mental scars from bad projects like this, because they get duped into thinking it's a matter of personal pride to see it trough. It's not. Your primary concern should always be personal health.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Spot on. Another relative point to note is that I learned pride should be ranked well below dignity.
- urthor 5y ago
  700 a day??? Why did you undercharge by so much. I know the EU dev market isn't great but those are rookie numbers for "danger money." Three of the "retired, then handed enough money to unretire" COBAL guys at my old place were doing 2500 a day.
  - sandos 5y ago
    Well, cobol is special of course. The more specialized you are... But for a generic c++, java or c# or web dev I would say you can't charge specialist money at all in the EU.
    - urthor 5y ago
      Well it's a negotiation. Those guys succeeded at asking for 2500, but you would start at a number they are guaranteed to say no to, and work your way down. Like the going rate for a senior here is 900, and a good senior is 1200+. So your starting offer would be at least 1800, probably 2000s to round it up. Which is the high end of your zone of possible agreement (900-1200) plus 50% for danger money, plus a few hundred to round it up to 2k. Then you see what happens when you throw out the big number.
kitd 5y ago
This is exactly why I think contract work is the most honest form of employment in the software industry. "Mission statements" and "customer zeal" are meaningless when you're having to do endless weekend and evening hours. If it means so much to you, pay me by the hour first, then we can talk about devotion to the customer.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Completely agree with this. Customers always seemed to want to pay me fixed amounts for jobs and be absolutely no good at estimating them. I got paid 28 days contract fees for a job that took 3 hours once. They paid up and asked me to not come in for the last 3 weeks so their other employees didn’t catch on to what had happened…
- urthor 5y ago
  During log4j, I was a contractor embedded in a team that was 2/3rds fulltimers. Guess who got called in on the weekend for log4j? Guess who only heard about the problems on Monday at 9am? You guessed it, the call was made to not pay the (documented) day rate for contractor call outs on weekends. Full-timers got "days in lieu."
- sp332 5y ago
  If my health insurance weren't so dependent on employment, I'd agree more.
  - nickjj 5y ago
    It is true, a lot of tech companies will give you very good medical coverage without pay period fees but at the end of the day this boils down to money. Your salary is adjusted based on the company paying whatever rates they pay to offer you great insurance. When doing contract work, you might be paying $500 / month out of pocket for medical insurance but your hourly rate is likely higher than your hourly rate as a W-2 employee even after factoring in company holidays, PTO and 401k matching. You also have the option of not buying insurance if you really wanted to. Most insurance in the US is horrendous too. The whole system is optimized to provide you the least amount of coverage while making the process as inefficient as possible for you. I spent literally 12 hours on the phone over a few calls trying to get basic information from a few different dental insurance providers, in the end I got nothing concrete out of it and the only way I could have gotten concrete numbers is if I submit a form that takes 30 days to get processed except in the US you only have 30 days a year where you're allowed to enroll into insurance. Basically it was impossible for me to pick insurance based on coverage because it's impossible to know the coverage without first signing up and then you're stuck in it for a year in which case everything resets the next year and the process has to start again from scratch.
epolanski 5y ago
Same, I couldn't give two damns if the project fails and burns. I try to be professional, hard working and I even do some unpaid overtime when deadlines are strict. But the moment you pressure and stress me to do more it's the moment I say no and all my commitment goes away. I'm not here to clean up poor management, project planning and low budget.
serial_dev 5y ago
One of the things I surprisingly (?) learned at a small startup as the first employee. It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter how close you are to the decision makers, influencing them is still hard. Since then, I just don't care. Sure, I'll do my best, but I do it for me and to get another offer in two years. Now, I work at a big company, I'm like 5-8 levels removed from the decision makers, and I just don't care. I still try to do my best, if I have any concerns, I might mention it once, but if decision makers are not interested in my feedback, I don't mind. I work my hours, do my best, I don't take anything personally, but I also don't care if there is an outage at Friday (that could have been prevented if only we addressed the issues I brought up a couple of times) or if the feature we are developing never gets to production or if the feature fails (predictably, but a CxO has the amazing idea to pursue some obviously bad product decision). It's difficult to not show the rest of the team how much I don't care. It's very different to show everyone openly you don't gaf (that's not accepted) and just simply not giving a f while pretending you care (that's okay), so I learned to "mask" my true emotions.
- democracy 5y ago
  i had to check twice that it wasnt me who wrote it )))
- gkop 5y ago
  Those cofounders are terrible leaders. Was the startup successful?
  - serial_dev 5y ago
    I don't think so. They didn't throw in the towel yet, it doesn't look rosy (at least to me). One of them is still a friend of mine. I learned a lot, so I'm glad it happened, but I'm also glad that I left.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
This is a great comment and how one should evolve to stay sane and healthy. My BS filter is highly developed now. "We will have the project done by the end of the month. Failure is not an option. We dont fail. We are xxxxxx. Come hell of highwater we will get it done. Lets do it". High fives. "If you get this done you will get ...... " ($$, vacation, yacht)" "Give it 110% people" "If we dont get this done ....... " This means: "This project is screwed. Nothing the team can do will save it. I do the right thing; I talk to the PM or whoever is in charge and politely but honestly share my professional assessment of the project. This is most often totally ignored. Which is fine. It is no longer my problem and nobody can come with "I thought you told me you would get this done ,.... " or some such variant. I will do a good job and try within my own parameters of sanity and health and time. After a rather unpleasant and unwelcome time I found myself in the army, having people yell at me all day (and night at times) Even when you have not slept for 48 hours, still screaming. I can't say anything positive about the army but it did give me thick skin. I am entirely unfazed and bored by some office drone talking to me loudly. Even if said drone starts turning purple. > ""With all due respect, sir, you're beginning to bore the hell out of me."" (Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergent Thomas Highway in Heartbreak Ridge (1986))
zamalek 5y ago
Bravo! I'm working with and for genuinely great people, but my past experiences with such "stick and carrot" bullshit mean I still treat my employer (i.e. the legal entity) as the schoolyard bully: don't cross their radar.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock. That's why a PIP puts said pay checque on the line though.
- pnutjam 5y ago
  Never dealt with PIP, but anyone worthwhile will just quit and get a lateral or better job. That's what I did when one of my employers extended the mandatory 6 month probationary period because she just wasn't sure about me. I don't need that stress. I just hopped over to another company, cut my commute, and made about 20% more salary.
pnutjam 5y ago
Bingo, you find a problem that's been broken for 6 months, it's not an emergency. It will still be broken tomorrow. Also see, when everything is a priority/emergency, nothing is.... The squeaky wheel has to be actively on fire to get attention at this point.
throwingawayyou 5y ago
Well said! I'm there with you. Totally agree. We should all strive for this mindset.
potta_coffee 5y ago
I've finally reached the same state of mind, and there's no other way to live.

by hughrr 5y ago

square_usual 5y ago

> I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not entirely sure I want to. Working on projects where you care but almost nobody else does does that to you, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it back to a position where I can care for projects.

hughrr 5y ago
Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlements from it. Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into. It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  But your life is spent at work, so if you don't care, your life is spent doing something you don't care about.
  - np- 5y ago
    You can care about your career and your self improvement while still maintaining healthy boundaries around the mental effort expended for your job. We’re in it for a long time but jobs come and go
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      That's not what I'm talking about. Your working life is where you act on the world outside of yourself. If you don't care about what you're doing, you're spending most of your influence on the world on something you don't care about.
      - np- 5y ago
        Why not? You can care about delivering beautiful code. You can care about ensuring the workplace is a pleasant place to work for all. You can care about your relationships you’re building. You may even be a huge fan of the product you’re building. That doesn’t mean you need to shit a brick when someone comes running in with their hair on fire—it’s not a binary proposition. Caring about things can be done “a la carte” and you can simply just not care about the bullshit
        lostdog 5y ago
        Exactly. You can even care about your product and its users, but not care that it went down for a couple hours last tuesday or launched 4 weeks later than a made-up deadline.
        apohn 5y ago
        At least to me, of the best things about this attitude is that the working culture starts to matter a lot when you search for jobs. That's what you care about. You look for places where relationship building is important and people try to get along and support each other. Other stuff starts to matter less. Lots of places basically put so much pressure on you to deliver that being a decent human being becomes impossible. If my choice is between working at a boring job where I can support my colleagues, and an exciting job with cool tech where people are having mental breakdowns and nobody has the mental space to support them, I'll take the boring job where people don't care about stupid directives and dealines from above.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Not much of my life is spent at work. I spent the last 10 years optimising the ROI from work down to a suitable compromise of time vs money.
  - pnutjam 5y ago
    Next time around I'll be sure to get born wealthy so I don't have to worry about it. But it's incredibly privileged to be able to do the sort of work we do compared to standing in a factory production line or working away from family. I enjoy my work, but I know if the company fails it's not my fault and I will be working somewhere else tomorrow.
indigochill 5y ago
I think it's healthy to not care about something you have no real stake in. But you can compensate for that condition in a day job with hobbies or pets or friends or generally something to care about outside of work. I personally do a number of regular social things outside work as well as occasionally writing and producing music on a purely amateur basis, where the only reason to do them is _because_ I care.
np- 5y ago
What I’ve found is that you can care about things like craftsmanship, problem solving, and quality while not being bothered by the day to day short term project level thinking.
- CPLNTN 5y ago
  The problem is that writing good code requires more time than writing shitty one.. and if there is a lot of external pressure to finish the project, it’s quite difficult for me to stay focused on quality
  - np- 5y ago
    That's fair, and I'm not saying it's as easy as flipping a switch. We are all social human beings wired to easily get caught up in the day to day panic, especially when someone is breathing down your neck. But you need to consider that somebody breathing down your neck does _not_ have your best interests in mind. You are master of your own career, and any shitty code you deliver will have your signature on it. It's all about setting boundaries and being able to push back when people are unreasonable. This is where the "not caring" is an invaluable skill. You are an immovable mountain in the face of a hurricane. At the end of the day, YOU are the professional. If an amateur decides that you are going too slow, that doesn't mean anything--they can feel free to hire more engineers or whatever needs to be done, but the onus is on _them_ to ante up. No matter how much you love your job, you're probably going to have multiple throughout your career so you need to focus on yourself first and foremost.

vaughandroid 5y ago

I imagine that's a good place to be, but I don't know if it's possible without going through a lot of trauma and building up substantial mental scar tissue. Getting on 15 years into my career and not sure I'll ever get there. On the other hand, I actually work on a project I care about and for a company that treats me like a human being and not a "resource". Think I'm OK with that.

hughrr 5y ago
I was at that sort of company, finally. They got bought out. It changed. I’m staying for the retainer at the moment.

octagonal 5y ago

I was lucky enough to experience a 2 year long project in which everything that went wrong was blamed on the developers. Project managers breathing down your neck, feeling so pressured you barely dare take a bathroom break, the whole shebang. Quit working for them and now I'm a freelance dev. They asked me to get back on the project and I said fine, that'll be €700/day. After some grumbling they realized they had no other option so they agreed. The project is still failing due to bad management but I no longer care. I believe to now feel the same sense of calm around chaos and failure like you do. A lot of developers have real mental scars from bad projects like this, because they get duped into thinking it's a matter of personal pride to see it trough. It's not. Your primary concern should always be personal health.

hughrr 5y ago
Spot on. Another relative point to note is that I learned pride should be ranked well below dignity.
urthor 5y ago
700 a day??? Why did you undercharge by so much. I know the EU dev market isn't great but those are rookie numbers for "danger money." Three of the "retired, then handed enough money to unretire" COBAL guys at my old place were doing 2500 a day.
- sandos 5y ago
  Well, cobol is special of course. The more specialized you are... But for a generic c++, java or c# or web dev I would say you can't charge specialist money at all in the EU.
  - urthor 5y ago
    Well it's a negotiation. Those guys succeeded at asking for 2500, but you would start at a number they are guaranteed to say no to, and work your way down. Like the going rate for a senior here is 900, and a good senior is 1200+. So your starting offer would be at least 1800, probably 2000s to round it up. Which is the high end of your zone of possible agreement (900-1200) plus 50% for danger money, plus a few hundred to round it up to 2k. Then you see what happens when you throw out the big number.

kitd 5y ago

This is exactly why I think contract work is the most honest form of employment in the software industry. "Mission statements" and "customer zeal" are meaningless when you're having to do endless weekend and evening hours. If it means so much to you, pay me by the hour first, then we can talk about devotion to the customer.

hughrr 5y ago
Completely agree with this. Customers always seemed to want to pay me fixed amounts for jobs and be absolutely no good at estimating them. I got paid 28 days contract fees for a job that took 3 hours once. They paid up and asked me to not come in for the last 3 weeks so their other employees didn’t catch on to what had happened…
urthor 5y ago
During log4j, I was a contractor embedded in a team that was 2/3rds fulltimers. Guess who got called in on the weekend for log4j? Guess who only heard about the problems on Monday at 9am? You guessed it, the call was made to not pay the (documented) day rate for contractor call outs on weekends. Full-timers got "days in lieu."
sp332 5y ago
If my health insurance weren't so dependent on employment, I'd agree more.
- nickjj 5y ago
  It is true, a lot of tech companies will give you very good medical coverage without pay period fees but at the end of the day this boils down to money. Your salary is adjusted based on the company paying whatever rates they pay to offer you great insurance. When doing contract work, you might be paying $500 / month out of pocket for medical insurance but your hourly rate is likely higher than your hourly rate as a W-2 employee even after factoring in company holidays, PTO and 401k matching. You also have the option of not buying insurance if you really wanted to. Most insurance in the US is horrendous too. The whole system is optimized to provide you the least amount of coverage while making the process as inefficient as possible for you. I spent literally 12 hours on the phone over a few calls trying to get basic information from a few different dental insurance providers, in the end I got nothing concrete out of it and the only way I could have gotten concrete numbers is if I submit a form that takes 30 days to get processed except in the US you only have 30 days a year where you're allowed to enroll into insurance. Basically it was impossible for me to pick insurance based on coverage because it's impossible to know the coverage without first signing up and then you're stuck in it for a year in which case everything resets the next year and the process has to start again from scratch.

epolanski 5y ago

Same, I couldn't give two damns if the project fails and burns. I try to be professional, hard working and I even do some unpaid overtime when deadlines are strict. But the moment you pressure and stress me to do more it's the moment I say no and all my commitment goes away. I'm not here to clean up poor management, project planning and low budget.

serial_dev 5y ago

One of the things I surprisingly (?) learned at a small startup as the first employee. It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter how close you are to the decision makers, influencing them is still hard. Since then, I just don't care. Sure, I'll do my best, but I do it for me and to get another offer in two years. Now, I work at a big company, I'm like 5-8 levels removed from the decision makers, and I just don't care. I still try to do my best, if I have any concerns, I might mention it once, but if decision makers are not interested in my feedback, I don't mind. I work my hours, do my best, I don't take anything personally, but I also don't care if there is an outage at Friday (that could have been prevented if only we addressed the issues I brought up a couple of times) or if the feature we are developing never gets to production or if the feature fails (predictably, but a CxO has the amazing idea to pursue some obviously bad product decision). It's difficult to not show the rest of the team how much I don't care. It's very different to show everyone openly you don't gaf (that's not accepted) and just simply not giving a f while pretending you care (that's okay), so I learned to "mask" my true emotions.

democracy 5y ago
i had to check twice that it wasnt me who wrote it )))
gkop 5y ago
Those cofounders are terrible leaders. Was the startup successful?
- serial_dev 5y ago
  I don't think so. They didn't throw in the towel yet, it doesn't look rosy (at least to me). One of them is still a friend of mine. I learned a lot, so I'm glad it happened, but I'm also glad that I left.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

This is a great comment and how one should evolve to stay sane and healthy. My BS filter is highly developed now. "We will have the project done by the end of the month. Failure is not an option. We dont fail. We are xxxxxx. Come hell of highwater we will get it done. Lets do it". High fives. "If you get this done you will get ...... " ($$, vacation, yacht)" "Give it 110% people" "If we dont get this done ....... " This means: "This project is screwed. Nothing the team can do will save it. I do the right thing; I talk to the PM or whoever is in charge and politely but honestly share my professional assessment of the project. This is most often totally ignored. Which is fine. It is no longer my problem and nobody can come with "I thought you told me you would get this done ,.... " or some such variant. I will do a good job and try within my own parameters of sanity and health and time. After a rather unpleasant and unwelcome time I found myself in the army, having people yell at me all day (and night at times) Even when you have not slept for 48 hours, still screaming. I can't say anything positive about the army but it did give me thick skin. I am entirely unfazed and bored by some office drone talking to me loudly. Even if said drone starts turning purple. > ""With all due respect, sir, you're beginning to bore the hell out of me."" (Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergent Thomas Highway in Heartbreak Ridge (1986))

zamalek 5y ago

Bravo! I'm working with and for genuinely great people, but my past experiences with such "stick and carrot" bullshit mean I still treat my employer (i.e. the legal entity) as the schoolyard bully: don't cross their radar.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock. That's why a PIP puts said pay checque on the line though.

pnutjam 5y ago
Never dealt with PIP, but anyone worthwhile will just quit and get a lateral or better job. That's what I did when one of my employers extended the mandatory 6 month probationary period because she just wasn't sure about me. I don't need that stress. I just hopped over to another company, cut my commute, and made about 20% more salary.

pnutjam 5y ago

Bingo, you find a problem that's been broken for 6 months, it's not an emergency. It will still be broken tomorrow. Also see, when everything is a priority/emergency, nothing is.... The squeaky wheel has to be actively on fire to get attention at this point.

throwingawayyou 5y ago

Well said! I'm there with you. Totally agree. We should all strive for this mindset.

potta_coffee 5y ago

I've finally reached the same state of mind, and there's no other way to live.