5 ms·
The company I work for is losing all of its humanity, I don't know where to go
- homeonthemtn 5mo agoIf you have been coding for 8 years and don't have marketable skills you are either naive/insecure or doing something very very wrong. In either case, this job is clearly not healthy for you in several different ways
- Induane 5mo agoI've been doing full-stack Dev (mostly Django though I foolishly had a brief moment where I kinda thought Flask was okay then fell for the same dumb thing briefly with FastAPI) for 20+ years and don't feel marketable. I went from jQuery to a brief dalliance with Angular to HTMX+_HyperScript. Everyone wants full stack Devs to use react and struggle eternally with insane dependency trees and challenging client side state management. I like to build things that can be maintained in perpetuity by small teams. So I'm not very marketable.
- hyperhello 5mo agoWrite a script that tidies up and fixes everything in a repo.
- Induane 5mo agoTurn Claude loose I guess.
- joss82 5mo agoDude. You are marketable as fuck. Don’t live in the hype. Not everyone is drinking the ai cool-aid bottoms up. What do you mean by fastapi being a mistake ?
- Induane 5mo agoI don't know; I am not sure I'm marketable in THIS particular market. As for FastAPI bring a mistake - that's an overgeneralisation to be sure. It has it's uses. My first issue is that it falls into the same kind of small footprint as Flask. Every Flask project I work on slowly reinvents Django via a combination of plugins of varied quality and custom code/plugins. Get some Auth plugins, build step for manifest static files, add in Jinja2, grab an ORM like SQLAlchemy (or hopefully PeeWee), a migration system, test runners with fixtures/dB integration and rollback and on and on and on. FastAPI is operating more at that level but also adds the often unnecessary complexity of async. In Python this is a cooperative setup meaning you have to yield to the event loop yourself (otherwise despite being "async" it blocks). Plus with a webapp all async often does is let you hammer your services (i.e. dispatch more queries to your poor DB) harder. The actual performance improvements don't manifest so much at scale as people often think. Plus you end up with a whole second set of ways to call functions and... makes me pine for gevent. There are absolutely cases for this kind of async, even in webapps, but it's often not actually that helpful in places that it's used (and doesn't actually need to be everywhere). Good development imo means picking the right tool for the job rather than jumping on hype trains. MongoDB is webscale!!
- joss82 5mo agoThank you for this answer, it saved me hours of experimenting. And bonus points for bashing MongoDB, of course. Every single project that I worked on where MongoDB was used, also had MongoDB as the single largest constraint and operations time sink.
- wccrawford 5mo agoI'm full stack for 19 years and I love React, and I've been laid off for 1.5 years now. This is a terrible job market right now. That doesn't mean you don't have good skills, it just means that too many people have them. It happens from time to time in every industrial, for all skills. Obviously, I don't have any good advice about how to deal with it.
- altern8 5mo agoYou mean you haven't been working for 1 1/2 years? How do you buy food?
- vkou 5mo agoPresumably they haven't been living paycheck to paycheck for the past 19. It's not that difficult for a SWE in North America.
- altern8 5mo agoYes, I guess investments, etc., but 1.5 years is a long time. I don't think I could go more than 2-3 months. Maybe I should start saving some money.
- Sohcahtoa82 5mo agoLocation matters a LOT. The parent comment mentioned North America. This is huge. Tech salaries in Europe are half what they are in NA. In India, they're like 1/4 to 1/3. Saving is absolutely important, especially in such a layoff-ridden industry. You should really strive to get at least 6 months of living expenses into savings.
- altern8 5mo agoI know but there's always something shiny that keeps me away from that goal. But I keep reading about people getting fired because of AI and every time I do I get progressively more anxious and closer to getting start on that.
- hyperhello 5mo agoYour company is laying people off because they need something to do. They’re goalless in the extreme and relying on big talk and big action about the latest fad. You don’t have leaders, you have owners. You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
- bossyTeacher 5mo ago> You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one. What exactly does this mean?
- DonaldPShimoda 5mo agoI think parent commenter is using "men" in a manner similar to mensch, as in "a person of integrity and honor" [1]. In other words, "look around and notice nobody is taking responsibility, and choose to be the person who lifts others up." Or something. It's a weird way to phrase it, in my opinion, especially in this era where we are generally avoiding ambiguously gendered collective nouns... but I'm pretty sure that's the gist. Or, at least, it's how I read it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensch
- happytoexplain 5mo ago"Men" is colloquially used here to mean "decent people", "strong people", "principled people", etc. It's a generic positive description ("Be a man", "Man up"). Younger generations might bristle at this use of the word, and that's fine, but try to give the benefit of the doubt (in fact, it's a rule on HN).
- fc417fc802 5mo agoGiving the benefit of the doubt can only come after one understands what was said. Case in point, asking someone to clarify should be assumed to be a good faith question that comes from a place of ignorance. (And to your credit you did indeed provide an explanation.)
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- andrewstuart 5mo ago[flagged]
- pebble 5mo ago[flagged]
- rdbl27 5mo ago[flagged]
- Henchman21 5mo agoThe problem is the existence of money and hierarchy to reinforce class strata
- happymellon 5mo agoDo you mean socialism, or communism? Because socialism has definitely not been "far worse". Cooperatives and employee owned businesses can be great for workers and incentivises them to work towards investing in their work without the rent seeking C levels.
- altern8 5mo ago[flagged]
- DonaldPShimoda 5mo agoYou haven't looked up what "capitalism" or "communism" is nor considered the possibility of other alternative economic systems, I see...
- lordkrandel 5mo agoAnywhere! Just leave! :)
- nh23423fefe 5mo ago[flagged]
- 827a 5mo agoHow do you know your skills aren't marketable if you don't go out and market them? Go apply around. You don't necessarily need to leave to do it.
- appreciatorBus 5mo ago[flagged]
- pesus 5mo agoI think we should improve working conditions for everyone, not make them worse for everyone.
- appreciatorBus 5mo agoHow is being asked to show up and clock in making things worse?
- reaperducer 5mo agoFull-time, white collar workers generally are not expected to "clock in" in the United States. It's why certain employees are legally exempt from overtime pay. To ask exempt employees to clock in and out demonstrates that management doesn't trust its employees, which is a failure on the part of hiring/management, not the workers.
- appreciatorBus 5mo agoIndividuals making 3x the national median income are not "workers" by any definition. They are a part of the elite, top 10% of society. They will survive!
- mjamesaustin 5mo agoAt a minimum any commute is extra unpaid time you have to spend for no benefit. For many people where I live, commutes can be an hour or more each way.
- appreciatorBus 5mo agoWe should abolish zoning so that people can live closer to work.
- benjiro3000 5mo ago[dead]
- aniou 5mo agoI feel Your pain. And I have a advice: take a deep breath and leave. Because burn-out is real, because there is nothing that can compensate damages of Your mental health. You are still a human. You are intelligent. Yes - you are, this is demonstrated by the ability to think critically and independence of your views. So - You are capable to adapt into new environment and into new tech. Search for anything and switch job. Don't wait for a toxic environment to destroy your confidence.
- egypturnash 5mo agoUnionize.
- dddddaviddddd 5mo ago> I don't have any other marketable skills. My coding skills were barely marketable to begin with. Hot take: moving is more about interview skills than coding skills. Whether you leave or not, start interviewing now. You might end up finding a better place sooner than you hoped.
- watershawl 5mo agoYes, it's about how you think about yourself. Identity matters just as much as experience, sometimes moreso.
- Quarrelsome 5mo agofear is a reaction, courage is a choice. You don't have to quit to start looking for another job, just start looking. You have 10 years experience, how can you say that you have no marketable skills? You could network, go to events, get involved in your local dev communities, show someone else your enthusiasm.
- internet2000 5mo agoYour company never had humanity. Thinking it did is mistake number 1.
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agoSometimes I wonder about even if you are the owners of such companies[0], then there would simply be issues arising in the near future about profitability at one or the other time. The only thing that I can realistically think through is the fact that because such owners were able to get the personal income and expenses sorted out for a few years and maybe got a bigger house. But if things change, which realistically speaking, it would. they might get so accustomed to the way of doing things and the shock would be too much in too short period of time. It doesn't atleast in the moment, seem worth it to me to try to create or chase trends for investors or anything. I also sympathize with the workers working in said companies like OP. Not sure what realistic solution is out there, the job-market is terrible at the moment for many people and IMO business-making is a hard thing to do and some of us might like to over-estimate ourselves in it too (& side note on under-estimating yourself too) Accurate estimations of if you should do business or not seems to me to always contain some inaccuracies and you might have to decide your own decision in that and in that sense, job seems better. You also can't go live without money if one has to exist within society. I don't know if there is a catharsis to such problem. To me, it seems like an authenticity/trust issue on if you can trust the founders or not but trust by definition is a bit weird and immeasurable and it can always have blind-spots. Maybe the investors investing into such a company trusted the wrong guy but what if the company somehow sells to more people (Ahem SpaceX) and ends up making incredible amounts of money. You would never know and thus you have to just trust the system but the system doesn't work sometimes in a good fashion. [0]: (We need a better term for such companies which are just trend-chasing and mostly are just built to impress investors rather than try to generate actual profits)
- SoftTalker 5mo agoIf the pay is OK and you're not being asked to do anything unethical, just ride it out. AI is the technology du-jour but one day it will just be a part of the landscape and its role will have stabilized. Certainly worth interviewing and seeing what else you might find, but pretty much every dev organization is in chaos right now.
- conartist6 5mo agoLook, it sucks and nothing I say will fix it, but know this: it's never been easier to spot people WHO ARE DOING THE ACTUAL WORK, and never so easy to spot the impostors who care most about looking productive. The world is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There are precious few of us left who even still know how to write in our own voice, who have a will to grow ourselves and faith left in human ability. I urge you beyond all urging not underestimate yourself, for you have never been more rare and valuable!!!
- josefritzishere 5mo agoI look forward to the day that AI slop is embarrassing for executives. We're at an inflection point for the herd mentality moment where they're dreaming of mass layoffs. When AI proves incapable of delivering ROI the wave will roll back.
- happymellon 5mo agoDid we get any embarrassment from all the 2000s outsourcing that went to the cheapest sweatshop, and then slowly rolled back when they realised that you need to have expertise? Thinking that you can do this without skills has been here before, and it'll come around again after the executives take the money and run.
- wseqyrku 5mo agoThere's nothing but sand at the end of that road, start building something that you own.
- eudamoniac 5mo agoI don't get how OP has 10 years of full stack experience and thinks that sums to zero marketable skills.
- selfhoster1312 5mo agoThe answer is "simple": invest your energy in a workers union. Respect working law, and don't let the boss/manager overstep boundaries. Depending on your jurisdiction, this may mean that you can refuse extra hours, that you have no obligation to answer calls/emails outside of working hours, etc. You should document everything the bosses are doing, because in many countries firing people for not magically becoming more productive is highly illegal. And workplace harassment is highly illegal. Build up your power with your colleagues, stay strong and solidarity will prevail!
- jjav 5mo agoIf the company is losing all its humanity, leave. I've done it twice. First when an $evil company aquired the place I worked, and the second time when an $evil company aquired the place I worked (the second one being Oracle and Sun, as described in the anthropomorphizing Ellison speech better than I can).
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5mo agoThis is a relationship question. Like any other relationship in your life that you might see early warning red flags or full-on toxicity right now, you have to consider if continuing to dedicate your limited time and energy to them is healthy for you. That a job takes up a very significant portion of a persons waking time, often as much or more than is given to family, friends, and romantic partners, then it is very important question to have a good answer to.