6 ms·

> Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? An insane employee. Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense,

hzay 4y ago
[flagged]
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack. We ban accounts that break the site guidelines like that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - hzay 4y ago
    Sorry!
serioussecurity 4y ago
I've spent much of my last four years systematically turning down every project a specific director has launched. The turn downs save enormous amounts of our hardware budget, and each time are measured as not happening users. No one has yet noticed that basically none of that directors projects are still running and put together that the things he builds stop working after two years. I keep getting paid good senior engineer money, and don't have to think too hard about what my next project should be. But it's really demoralizing to realize that he will continue to be promoted.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mrkeen 4y ago
Not good, my dude! I've always been agitated by core failures moreso than my teammates. (E.g. Search engines not returning results, music players not starting/stopping when you hit the button, finance systems needing needing manual adjustments) I want to scream when management pushes new fringe features when the main ones are flakey. I'm starting to work on myself though, so I don't care as much. In most cases, you're not an employee building correct software for an employer who values it, even if that's the way it should be. You're in a company whose employees/managers flow in and out, and they just want to be surrounded with good vibes. Chill people get rehired, bitter people get booted.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Like, maybe this is naive because I've probably never worked long at a corporation as large as the one you're probably at, but... if I were a senior VP and our main software was flakey while we were pushing fringe features, I would want to hear this from you. I'm not saying that it's always worked for me, but in cases like that I've always just done an end-run past the chain of command.
  - msy 4y ago
    Which is why you likely won't be a senior VP. Sales are demanding the fringe feature to meet a RFP requirement & the flakiness in the main software isn't meaningfully impacting renewals. These things are not (always) accidents.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      >> Which is why you likely won't be a senior VP I'll take that in the spirit of a compliment ;) What I mean is, I've definitely worked for organizations that were resistant to fixing things that were only mildly broken, but I've never worked for one where there wasn't someone you could talk to who would put the brakes on to fix something if you made the case that it had to be addressed before building new features. Particularly if the case was that the new features would have to be rebuilt soon if you didn't address these problems first.
  - 4y ago
trabant00 4y ago
As anything else it depends. You have to find the right balance between annoying management and fixing the problems against their will. I went on multiple jobs from making managers lose their temper in meetings to them coming to me first asking for help. But I was also offered a significant compensation to just leave a company, which I took cause it had come to outright war. I don't think you can "find your sanity" as I believe that taking technical issues personal is just the way some people are built. But you can and should learn politics even if you find it repulsive.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Yeah. Over the last four years, I have had a lot of really successful products at my current company - but for all of them, I basically had to do it "rogue" which takes a lot for me to do, because I value having buy-in from the business and management. But, they needed to be done, and I was right - even though I was fought on the products. It sucks.
andersource 4y ago
I was pretty much like this for a long time, 1 / 10 would not recommend. For me the change was gradual but basically it was a couple of realizations revolving around separating my identity from my career and finding personal stuff I'd rather pour my emotional energy into, instead of pouring it to fight my employer to do things I thought they should be wanting me to do.
terminal_d 4y ago
Companies either want you to be technically proficient or to support the hierarchy. You need to suss out what kind of company you work for and act accordingly.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
d23 4y ago
Looks like you’ve found a bunch of other people in the club here. I don’t think I can muster the energy to type my story up, but it’s comforting in some way to know I’m not alone.
JamesSwift 4y ago
It can be exhausting having the target on your back all the time, but if you are confident in yourself and are approaching things honestly then its generally "fine". Id rather the frustration of fighting through the BS and knowing I tried to make a difference, than going along with it and also hating it at the same time. You can only control the things within your control however, and if you find yourself spinning into insanity fighting things that you ultimately do not control then thats when you need to take a step back and be honest about if you gave it your best shot. If you did, then let it go and allow the other members of the organization to do their own jobs however they think is best.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  Admitting you gave it your best shot is incredibly difficult for those who are overly self-critical or suffer from imposter syndrome. For me I had to accept that even if it wasn't my best shot it was good enough, and any system relying on perfection to be successful is inherently unstable.
  - JamesSwift 4y ago
    Thats a good point, its not about convincing yourself you've done _everything_ you could. Theres almost always the nuclear option of quitting. But its about choosing your battles appropriately and giving it "enough" of an effort to say that you gave it an honest attempt. Hopefully then circle back and try again next time. Assuming an org that isn't completely off the deep end of toxicity and politics, things do get slightly easier over time as people respect that you are fighting for the right things and are generally correct in your analyses.
corobo 4y ago
I found personal offence in them putting me on a PIP after a hip break (Being on morphine makes you bad at your job?? Give me more than 10 sick days and I'll not be trying to work high as balls, lol). Picture the film Office Space. There were 3 managers for like 14 people. It was insanity. One day I'll write my mashup of The Office and Office Space based on working there now the NDA is expired haha. Nothing whistleblowery, just hilariously silly stuff happening constantly. We agreed via my solicitor that that was a dumb move to have made and they settled so I'd go away. It later turned out I was working with undiagnosed ADHD so it might not have been all bad all the time but man I'd die on a lot of hills back then. I used to wonder who got the bad luck from me being employee #13, me or them haha. Freelance now. Y'all solve your own office problems, I'm not getting involved.
fatnoah 4y ago
> Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? An insane employee. Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense, and will repeatedly risk annoying management by fighting to stop these things. Especially someone who spends their own political capital, You're not alone. I am this person, but I also have the advantage of being management. In one case, I led a 9 month ninja effort refactor an entire spaghetti monolith in semi-opposition to my boss' (CEO) wishes. We did it very smartly, though, which was to have a plan in place that was to a) have a plan b) focus on observability in the final product and c) used "extreme campfire rules" to implement. First steps were hard, which was where we completely reorganized everything into logical services with defined APIs within the monolith. During the couple months, overall product velocity slowed, so we tread with care and hustled to get stuff out on time. After that point, the resulting code sanity increased velocity so we could focus on things like revamping logging to be massively more useful, better data migrations, consistent deploy process for developer machines, dev integration server, staging, and production servers, and implementation of automated service and integration testing. The net result of 9 months of work was shipping tons of new features, virtually eliminating any down time (from hours a month to minutes per year), and a net loss of about 20% of the codebase. It was a smashing success that I couldn't tell anyone else on the management team about. I did get the ultimate payoff a couple years later when we were acquired by a $30B company and received many kudos during the technical due diligence process for the state of our architecture and reliability.
bick_nyers 4y ago
This is me. At my last job I was doing 3 jobs at once. 1 was what people THOUGHT my actual job was (gotta support the old system to buy myself enough time to roll out the new system, 1 was an additional job to get promoted/salary brought up to industry standards (risk manager for health tech., it didn't work), and 1 (what I was actually hired for 2+ years ago) was doing a rewrite properly to solve 50% of the engineering problems plaguing the company for near a decade once and for all (got it to 99% completion, but has been stuck in QA and Compliance hell for 8 months now on legacy features that are 1 out of 1 million requests). Oh but I accidentally did job #1 too well so now the rewrite I originally got hired to do is now not a priority on anyone's mind. Oh and I did job #2 so well that now I am getting daily requests from Compliance, and they are acting like my boss, as if the Architect, PM, overstepping and undertrained CS reps. and actual boss wasn't enough. Ok now I'm just venting at this point but it's therapeutic. I feel as though I've aged 10 years in the past 2 and I burned out very bad 4 months ago, still haven't recovered. Unemployed now. The worst part? I'm not sure I'm not going to try it again. Should I accept "mediocraty"? Should I strive to leverage my abilities to the fullest to truly be transformative in technology? Maybe I should just focus on getting "fuck you" money so I can work for free on things that actually have an impact.
kthejoker2 4y ago
If I've learned one thing, repeatedly, experience by painful experience: Time is an illusion, professional time doubly so. Don't waste it worrying about what might have been or never was, accept your failures, be magnanimous about others', and always work to make things better tomorrow. Maybe there's a Sliding Doors world out there where you can try all the possibilities and see where they take you, but time's arrow flows in one direction here. So choose the paths that you think move things up and to the right, and if you find yourself heading down and to the left, have a laugh and try again.

hzay 4y ago

[flagged]

dang 4y ago
Please don't cross into personal attack. We ban accounts that break the site guidelines like that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hzay 4y ago
  Sorry!

serioussecurity 4y ago

I've spent much of my last four years systematically turning down every project a specific director has launched. The turn downs save enormous amounts of our hardware budget, and each time are measured as not happening users. No one has yet noticed that basically none of that directors projects are still running and put together that the things he builds stop working after two years. I keep getting paid good senior engineer money, and don't have to think too hard about what my next project should be. But it's really demoralizing to realize that he will continue to be promoted.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mrkeen 4y ago

Not good, my dude! I've always been agitated by core failures moreso than my teammates. (E.g. Search engines not returning results, music players not starting/stopping when you hit the button, finance systems needing needing manual adjustments) I want to scream when management pushes new fringe features when the main ones are flakey. I'm starting to work on myself though, so I don't care as much. In most cases, you're not an employee building correct software for an employer who values it, even if that's the way it should be. You're in a company whose employees/managers flow in and out, and they just want to be surrounded with good vibes. Chill people get rehired, bitter people get booted.

noduerme 4y ago
Like, maybe this is naive because I've probably never worked long at a corporation as large as the one you're probably at, but... if I were a senior VP and our main software was flakey while we were pushing fringe features, I would want to hear this from you. I'm not saying that it's always worked for me, but in cases like that I've always just done an end-run past the chain of command.
- msy 4y ago
  Which is why you likely won't be a senior VP. Sales are demanding the fringe feature to meet a RFP requirement & the flakiness in the main software isn't meaningfully impacting renewals. These things are not (always) accidents.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    >> Which is why you likely won't be a senior VP I'll take that in the spirit of a compliment ;) What I mean is, I've definitely worked for organizations that were resistant to fixing things that were only mildly broken, but I've never worked for one where there wasn't someone you could talk to who would put the brakes on to fix something if you made the case that it had to be addressed before building new features. Particularly if the case was that the new features would have to be rebuilt soon if you didn't address these problems first.
- 4y ago

trabant00 4y ago

As anything else it depends. You have to find the right balance between annoying management and fixing the problems against their will. I went on multiple jobs from making managers lose their temper in meetings to them coming to me first asking for help. But I was also offered a significant compensation to just leave a company, which I took cause it had come to outright war. I don't think you can "find your sanity" as I believe that taking technical issues personal is just the way some people are built. But you can and should learn politics even if you find it repulsive.

roflyear 4y ago
Yeah. Over the last four years, I have had a lot of really successful products at my current company - but for all of them, I basically had to do it "rogue" which takes a lot for me to do, because I value having buy-in from the business and management. But, they needed to be done, and I was right - even though I was fought on the products. It sucks.

andersource 4y ago

I was pretty much like this for a long time, 1 / 10 would not recommend. For me the change was gradual but basically it was a couple of realizations revolving around separating my identity from my career and finding personal stuff I'd rather pour my emotional energy into, instead of pouring it to fight my employer to do things I thought they should be wanting me to do.

terminal_d 4y ago

Companies either want you to be technically proficient or to support the hierarchy. You need to suss out what kind of company you work for and act accordingly.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

d23 4y ago

Looks like you’ve found a bunch of other people in the club here. I don’t think I can muster the energy to type my story up, but it’s comforting in some way to know I’m not alone.

JamesSwift 4y ago

It can be exhausting having the target on your back all the time, but if you are confident in yourself and are approaching things honestly then its generally "fine". Id rather the frustration of fighting through the BS and knowing I tried to make a difference, than going along with it and also hating it at the same time. You can only control the things within your control however, and if you find yourself spinning into insanity fighting things that you ultimately do not control then thats when you need to take a step back and be honest about if you gave it your best shot. If you did, then let it go and allow the other members of the organization to do their own jobs however they think is best.

bick_nyers 4y ago
Admitting you gave it your best shot is incredibly difficult for those who are overly self-critical or suffer from imposter syndrome. For me I had to accept that even if it wasn't my best shot it was good enough, and any system relying on perfection to be successful is inherently unstable.
- JamesSwift 4y ago
  Thats a good point, its not about convincing yourself you've done _everything_ you could. Theres almost always the nuclear option of quitting. But its about choosing your battles appropriately and giving it "enough" of an effort to say that you gave it an honest attempt. Hopefully then circle back and try again next time. Assuming an org that isn't completely off the deep end of toxicity and politics, things do get slightly easier over time as people respect that you are fighting for the right things and are generally correct in your analyses.

corobo 4y ago

I found personal offence in them putting me on a PIP after a hip break (Being on morphine makes you bad at your job?? Give me more than 10 sick days and I'll not be trying to work high as balls, lol). Picture the film Office Space. There were 3 managers for like 14 people. It was insanity. One day I'll write my mashup of The Office and Office Space based on working there now the NDA is expired haha. Nothing whistleblowery, just hilariously silly stuff happening constantly. We agreed via my solicitor that that was a dumb move to have made and they settled so I'd go away. It later turned out I was working with undiagnosed ADHD so it might not have been all bad all the time but man I'd die on a lot of hills back then. I used to wonder who got the bad luck from me being employee #13, me or them haha. Freelance now. Y'all solve your own office problems, I'm not getting involved.

fatnoah 4y ago

> Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? An insane employee. Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense, and will repeatedly risk annoying management by fighting to stop these things. Especially someone who spends their own political capital, You're not alone. I am this person, but I also have the advantage of being management. In one case, I led a 9 month ninja effort refactor an entire spaghetti monolith in semi-opposition to my boss' (CEO) wishes. We did it very smartly, though, which was to have a plan in place that was to a) have a plan b) focus on observability in the final product and c) used "extreme campfire rules" to implement. First steps were hard, which was where we completely reorganized everything into logical services with defined APIs within the monolith. During the couple months, overall product velocity slowed, so we tread with care and hustled to get stuff out on time. After that point, the resulting code sanity increased velocity so we could focus on things like revamping logging to be massively more useful, better data migrations, consistent deploy process for developer machines, dev integration server, staging, and production servers, and implementation of automated service and integration testing. The net result of 9 months of work was shipping tons of new features, virtually eliminating any down time (from hours a month to minutes per year), and a net loss of about 20% of the codebase. It was a smashing success that I couldn't tell anyone else on the management team about. I did get the ultimate payoff a couple years later when we were acquired by a $30B company and received many kudos during the technical due diligence process for the state of our architecture and reliability.

bick_nyers 4y ago

This is me. At my last job I was doing 3 jobs at once. 1 was what people THOUGHT my actual job was (gotta support the old system to buy myself enough time to roll out the new system, 1 was an additional job to get promoted/salary brought up to industry standards (risk manager for health tech., it didn't work), and 1 (what I was actually hired for 2+ years ago) was doing a rewrite properly to solve 50% of the engineering problems plaguing the company for near a decade once and for all (got it to 99% completion, but has been stuck in QA and Compliance hell for 8 months now on legacy features that are 1 out of 1 million requests). Oh but I accidentally did job #1 too well so now the rewrite I originally got hired to do is now not a priority on anyone's mind. Oh and I did job #2 so well that now I am getting daily requests from Compliance, and they are acting like my boss, as if the Architect, PM, overstepping and undertrained CS reps. and actual boss wasn't enough. Ok now I'm just venting at this point but it's therapeutic. I feel as though I've aged 10 years in the past 2 and I burned out very bad 4 months ago, still haven't recovered. Unemployed now. The worst part? I'm not sure I'm not going to try it again. Should I accept "mediocraty"? Should I strive to leverage my abilities to the fullest to truly be transformative in technology? Maybe I should just focus on getting "fuck you" money so I can work for free on things that actually have an impact.

kthejoker2 4y ago

If I've learned one thing, repeatedly, experience by painful experience: Time is an illusion, professional time doubly so. Don't waste it worrying about what might have been or never was, accept your failures, be magnanimous about others', and always work to make things better tomorrow. Maybe there's a Sliding Doors world out there where you can try all the possibilities and see where they take you, but time's arrow flows in one direction here. So choose the paths that you think move things up and to the right, and if you find yourself heading down and to the left, have a laugh and try again.