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I'll add one point. You are not your job. Don't take things personally at work. And never be afraid to leave if you're not fitting in with your company . I've

I'll add one point. You are not your job. Don't take things personally at work. And never be afraid to leave if you're not fitting in with your company . I've left jobs over a few reasons, primarily bad managers, increased compensation, and bad code . If people are writing bad code at your company, to the point where you know it's going to come back to haunt you later, it's okay to just walk away . Don't embarrass anybody, don't escalate to a manager and explain how horrible the code is. I was in a situation where someone our team was effectively writing code that pretended to do things it really didn't. I got into a really nasty argument with half my team about this. I ended up putting in my two weeks, and then my manager was like oh you were right the entire time . Life is too short to deal with incompetent people.

namrog84 2y ago
Also in addition to not being your job. I left a place that had interesting work, great management, great coworkers and excellent pay/benefits/growth. A place I once considered a dream job. Why did I leave? Because I grew a little bored of it and wanted to try something different. I wanted to try and build my own company. Which is going good so far. (It's been about 14 months since) I am not my job and thus it gives me freedom to pursue things because I want too.
oblio 2y ago
Unless you have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you work, this type of advice is becoming less relevant in an IT job market that's in free fall. Much fewer devs can just jump ship at will than between 2003 - 2022.
- jononor 2y ago
  Don't just jump ship. But do actively look for better opportunities if you are not satisfied where you are.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  In my situation it would have been much easier to just keep my head down until I was able to get another job. I ended up causing a lot of tension at work, the engineer who had wrote this code openly resented me . Usually when people are putting broken code into the code base it's a wider cultural problem, that you're not realistically going to solve.
- mostlysimilar 2y ago
  > Unless you have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you work, this type of advice is becoming less relevant in an IT job market that's in free fall. > Much fewer devs can just jump ship at will than between 2003 - 2022. Citation needed. Good developers are just as in demand now as they have ever been.
  - icedchai 2y ago
    It's supply and demand. Demand is lower (less jobs.) Supply is higher (more layoffs, people looking for work.) Even if you are "good", there's a lot of other "good" people looking, too. Some even may be better than you! Or at least better at marketing themselves.
    - dandrew5 2y ago
      Marketing yourself is more important now than ever. The advent of AI has created a noise problem at the hiring level on both sides: applicants are leveraging tools to generate necessary documents (targeted resumes, cover letters, social profiles), recruiters are using scanning tools to weed out anything that doesn't contain the magical keywords or phrases.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    The demand might be there, but if you have a proven way to get recognized as a "good developer" during the hiring process I'd love to hear it.
    - rowanG077 2y ago
      References. Ask the good devs you have for someone good they know.
      - oblio 2y ago
        None of the FAANGs or even tier 2 companies work on references, unless you invented the internet or something. And even then, there is a famous story of the dev of the popular MacOS FOSS package manager, Homebrew, failing his interview at Apple.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  The market is not in a free fall. Or rather, it's only a free fall for junior fresh-out-of-college developers. If you are skilled and senior, don't believe this nonsense and have confidence in yourself. This is just an extension of the imposter syndrome that I see often in many people.
  - oblio 2y ago
    If you are skilled and senior about 2 years back you'd compete with 5-10 other qualified candidates. Now it's 100+.
  - maxrecursion 2y ago
    This is exactly it. The entry level market is getting more and more over saturated. It is bleeding upwards to mid level slowly. But if you are a skilled senior you are still in high demand. If not your resume probably sucks or you are not as skilled as most seniors.
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  Define “free fall”, please. There seem to be plenty of interesting openings as far as I can tell. Less hysterical hiring, but plenty of work (and more interesting than the endless CRUD of 15 years ago).
roughly 2y ago
Related, the computer doesn’t care about you and isn’t judging you when it throws an error. Your code has the bug, not you. Stop feeling shitty about yourself and go fix it.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  I find it helpful to blame all my bugs on the stupid computer not knowing how to listen, then comb through to code to find what the computer was too dumb to understand. When I find it, I realize that in my haste I had accidentally misspoken to the computer who was doing the best it could to please me, I correct it and promise to explain myself better next time, then apologize. I find it therapeutic to externalize to inanimate objects.
  - roughly 2y ago
    Sounds like you’re ready for management!
icedchai 2y ago
I disagree. If you have problems, you should try to escalate them. It's better for the company... it's better for your coworkers (they're probably also having these problems!) If you escalate them and nothing is changed, then it's time to go. If you're going to leave anyway, you may as well try to change things for the better first.
- josephg 2y ago
  Yep. I’ve heard this talked about as Voice and Exit. They’re two strategies you almost always have available: essentially, speak up or leave. If all the people who care about a problem leave, it becomes harder for the organisation to solve the problem. This is one form of organisational rot. Most of us are good at one and bad at the other. Eg, my instinctive response has been to quit my job when I’m not enjoying it. And that’s fine, but some of the situations were almost certainly salvageable. And I could have helped. Some people try to fix a workplace indefinitely, even to their own detriment, and even when the situation is probably impossible to fix and they should just get out of there. I think it’s really important to learn both skills. And remind myself when I’m stressed that they’re both options.
  - tmoertel 2y ago
    That model comes from Hirschman's treatise on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Feels a bit like a false dichotomy, in that there's at least one other option: wait it out. If you believe things will improve, the lapse is temporary, then doing nothing is a good move, and that's neither Voice nor Exit.
      - josephg 2y ago
        Totally right - it’s not a dichotomy. Those are just two strategies that happen to be broadly applicable. There are almost always other strategies available too, depending on the specific problem you’re facing. (Maybe you can fire the people involved. Maybe there’s a technical solution. Maybe you can ask for help. Etc etc.)
glouwbug 2y ago
Do what is asked and go home to your family
- osigurdson 2y ago
  That is ok for some but others want to feel like there is some point to the 2/3 of their life that they spent working and preparing to work (i.e. school). For some, punching the clock and collecting a pay check isn't enough.
  - nevertoolate 2y ago
    For me the paycheck isn’t enough so I decided to not to overextend myself at work so I can spend time with family, learning, cooking, etc. I still have the urge to fight but I also have realized that fighting is more nuanced than pushing all the time. Maybe the best course of action is to push a bit and wait for the next opportunity. Find people you can trust in the org. Play the game. Or sometimes just do like the others, and chill, put in the minimal amount of work.
  - redserk 2y ago
    US-based individuals here are making 2-3x (or higher!) more cash than the median family (not to mention other comp that easily exceeds a year+ of income of other families) If 4 years of school and sitting in an air conditioned home office for a few hours a day isn’t rewarding enough on its own, perhaps these folks should pursue perspectives of other people outside of their isolated tech bubble. I’ll take “bad but meh coworker code” for a life on easy-mode.
    - osigurdson 2y ago
      There is nothing wrong with that at all. Some people (myself included) are just wired differently.
      - glouwbug 2y ago
        I scratch my itch with side projects
dan-robertson 2y ago
It’s funny, this comment went in a totally different direction from what I expected based on the start. When you wrote ‘don’t take things personally at work’, I was expecting you to say things things about various kinds of humility – trying to make requested changes in code review instead of pushing back, not feeling wronged if someone rewrites something you wrote, etc – and seeing the bigger picture – the code exists to serve business purposes and sometimes priorities there don’t align with your more narrowly focused desires for the direction the code should be changed in. I would say that the rest of you comment gives examples of taking things quite personally – feeling such strong ownership over the code that you’ll quit when you can’t control it as well as you’d like. To be clear, I’m arguing that the beginning does not match the rest of the comment, but not really about the overall message, which to me feels to be more something like ‘you are not required to be loyal’ than ‘don’t take it personally’.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  I explain more in other comments, but in this situation I was dealing with people who fundamentally could not program . It wasn't a matter of, oh I would have done this differently, it was more like this company is full of people who have no idea what they're doing and I'd rather not be here . I will say you should absolutely never talk about code issues at a current employer when interviewing. Who's ever interviewing you is going to interpret this as you being some weirdo who argues over tabs and spaces. There's not enough nuance communicated. Maybe I'm trying to say you shouldn't take it personally when a company isn't a good fit.
  - eddd-ddde 2y ago
    I agree so much with your arguments. There's a huge difference between "I don't like your variable name" and "this code is so messed up that any change will have to be manually checked against 20 major features under 20 different cases".
- klysm 2y ago
  A lot of my progression as a software engineer has come from decoupling my ego from the things I produce. That’s hard to do because the code you produce is a very strong reflection of your mental models and it’s justified to feel some connection to it. Tactfully navigating this kind of thing in code review takes practice. In my experience, the best teams of programmers work through problems with their egos held to the side.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> If people are writing bad code at your company, to the point where you know it's going to come back to haunt you later, it's okay to just walk away . IMO, one of the biggest reasons for this, is coders that know that they won't be around to have to clean up their messes. Sort of a "chicken and egg" scenario.

namrog84 2y ago

Also in addition to not being your job. I left a place that had interesting work, great management, great coworkers and excellent pay/benefits/growth. A place I once considered a dream job. Why did I leave? Because I grew a little bored of it and wanted to try something different. I wanted to try and build my own company. Which is going good so far. (It's been about 14 months since) I am not my job and thus it gives me freedom to pursue things because I want too.

oblio 2y ago

Unless you have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you work, this type of advice is becoming less relevant in an IT job market that's in free fall. Much fewer devs can just jump ship at will than between 2003 - 2022.

jononor 2y ago
Don't just jump ship. But do actively look for better opportunities if you are not satisfied where you are.
999900000999 2y ago
In my situation it would have been much easier to just keep my head down until I was able to get another job. I ended up causing a lot of tension at work, the engineer who had wrote this code openly resented me . Usually when people are putting broken code into the code base it's a wider cultural problem, that you're not realistically going to solve.
mostlysimilar 2y ago
> Unless you have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you work, this type of advice is becoming less relevant in an IT job market that's in free fall. > Much fewer devs can just jump ship at will than between 2003 - 2022. Citation needed. Good developers are just as in demand now as they have ever been.
- icedchai 2y ago
  It's supply and demand. Demand is lower (less jobs.) Supply is higher (more layoffs, people looking for work.) Even if you are "good", there's a lot of other "good" people looking, too. Some even may be better than you! Or at least better at marketing themselves.
  - dandrew5 2y ago
    Marketing yourself is more important now than ever. The advent of AI has created a noise problem at the hiring level on both sides: applicants are leveraging tools to generate necessary documents (targeted resumes, cover letters, social profiles), recruiters are using scanning tools to weed out anything that doesn't contain the magical keywords or phrases.
- lolinder 2y ago
  The demand might be there, but if you have a proven way to get recognized as a "good developer" during the hiring process I'd love to hear it.
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    References. Ask the good devs you have for someone good they know.
    - oblio 2y ago
      None of the FAANGs or even tier 2 companies work on references, unless you invented the internet or something. And even then, there is a famous story of the dev of the popular MacOS FOSS package manager, Homebrew, failing his interview at Apple.
kccqzy 2y ago
The market is not in a free fall. Or rather, it's only a free fall for junior fresh-out-of-college developers. If you are skilled and senior, don't believe this nonsense and have confidence in yourself. This is just an extension of the imposter syndrome that I see often in many people.
- oblio 2y ago
  If you are skilled and senior about 2 years back you'd compete with 5-10 other qualified candidates. Now it's 100+.
- maxrecursion 2y ago
  This is exactly it. The entry level market is getting more and more over saturated. It is bleeding upwards to mid level slowly. But if you are a skilled senior you are still in high demand. If not your resume probably sucks or you are not as skilled as most seniors.
mlhpdx 2y ago
Define “free fall”, please. There seem to be plenty of interesting openings as far as I can tell. Less hysterical hiring, but plenty of work (and more interesting than the endless CRUD of 15 years ago).

roughly 2y ago

Related, the computer doesn’t care about you and isn’t judging you when it throws an error. Your code has the bug, not you. Stop feeling shitty about yourself and go fix it.

pessimizer 2y ago
I find it helpful to blame all my bugs on the stupid computer not knowing how to listen, then comb through to code to find what the computer was too dumb to understand. When I find it, I realize that in my haste I had accidentally misspoken to the computer who was doing the best it could to please me, I correct it and promise to explain myself better next time, then apologize. I find it therapeutic to externalize to inanimate objects.
- roughly 2y ago
  Sounds like you’re ready for management!

icedchai 2y ago

I disagree. If you have problems, you should try to escalate them. It's better for the company... it's better for your coworkers (they're probably also having these problems!) If you escalate them and nothing is changed, then it's time to go. If you're going to leave anyway, you may as well try to change things for the better first.

josephg 2y ago
Yep. I’ve heard this talked about as Voice and Exit. They’re two strategies you almost always have available: essentially, speak up or leave. If all the people who care about a problem leave, it becomes harder for the organisation to solve the problem. This is one form of organisational rot. Most of us are good at one and bad at the other. Eg, my instinctive response has been to quit my job when I’m not enjoying it. And that’s fine, but some of the situations were almost certainly salvageable. And I could have helped. Some people try to fix a workplace indefinitely, even to their own detriment, and even when the situation is probably impossible to fix and they should just get out of there. I think it’s really important to learn both skills. And remind myself when I’m stressed that they’re both options.
- tmoertel 2y ago
  That model comes from Hirschman's treatise on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Feels a bit like a false dichotomy, in that there's at least one other option: wait it out. If you believe things will improve, the lapse is temporary, then doing nothing is a good move, and that's neither Voice nor Exit.
    - josephg 2y ago
      Totally right - it’s not a dichotomy. Those are just two strategies that happen to be broadly applicable. There are almost always other strategies available too, depending on the specific problem you’re facing. (Maybe you can fire the people involved. Maybe there’s a technical solution. Maybe you can ask for help. Etc etc.)

glouwbug 2y ago

Do what is asked and go home to your family

osigurdson 2y ago
That is ok for some but others want to feel like there is some point to the 2/3 of their life that they spent working and preparing to work (i.e. school). For some, punching the clock and collecting a pay check isn't enough.
- nevertoolate 2y ago
  For me the paycheck isn’t enough so I decided to not to overextend myself at work so I can spend time with family, learning, cooking, etc. I still have the urge to fight but I also have realized that fighting is more nuanced than pushing all the time. Maybe the best course of action is to push a bit and wait for the next opportunity. Find people you can trust in the org. Play the game. Or sometimes just do like the others, and chill, put in the minimal amount of work.
- redserk 2y ago
  US-based individuals here are making 2-3x (or higher!) more cash than the median family (not to mention other comp that easily exceeds a year+ of income of other families) If 4 years of school and sitting in an air conditioned home office for a few hours a day isn’t rewarding enough on its own, perhaps these folks should pursue perspectives of other people outside of their isolated tech bubble. I’ll take “bad but meh coworker code” for a life on easy-mode.
  - osigurdson 2y ago
    There is nothing wrong with that at all. Some people (myself included) are just wired differently.
    - glouwbug 2y ago
      I scratch my itch with side projects

dan-robertson 2y ago

It’s funny, this comment went in a totally different direction from what I expected based on the start. When you wrote ‘don’t take things personally at work’, I was expecting you to say things things about various kinds of humility – trying to make requested changes in code review instead of pushing back, not feeling wronged if someone rewrites something you wrote, etc – and seeing the bigger picture – the code exists to serve business purposes and sometimes priorities there don’t align with your more narrowly focused desires for the direction the code should be changed in. I would say that the rest of you comment gives examples of taking things quite personally – feeling such strong ownership over the code that you’ll quit when you can’t control it as well as you’d like. To be clear, I’m arguing that the beginning does not match the rest of the comment, but not really about the overall message, which to me feels to be more something like ‘you are not required to be loyal’ than ‘don’t take it personally’.

999900000999 2y ago
I explain more in other comments, but in this situation I was dealing with people who fundamentally could not program . It wasn't a matter of, oh I would have done this differently, it was more like this company is full of people who have no idea what they're doing and I'd rather not be here . I will say you should absolutely never talk about code issues at a current employer when interviewing. Who's ever interviewing you is going to interpret this as you being some weirdo who argues over tabs and spaces. There's not enough nuance communicated. Maybe I'm trying to say you shouldn't take it personally when a company isn't a good fit.
- eddd-ddde 2y ago
  I agree so much with your arguments. There's a huge difference between "I don't like your variable name" and "this code is so messed up that any change will have to be manually checked against 20 major features under 20 different cases".
klysm 2y ago
A lot of my progression as a software engineer has come from decoupling my ego from the things I produce. That’s hard to do because the code you produce is a very strong reflection of your mental models and it’s justified to feel some connection to it. Tactfully navigating this kind of thing in code review takes practice. In my experience, the best teams of programmers work through problems with their egos held to the side.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

> If people are writing bad code at your company, to the point where you know it's going to come back to haunt you later, it's okay to just walk away . IMO, one of the biggest reasons for this, is coders that know that they won't be around to have to clean up their messes. Sort of a "chicken and egg" scenario.