9 ms·
Why I have left Samsung
- santu11 13y agoHey wsieroci, all the best on your new endeavour. You have trying a lot of stuff and asking a lot of stuff on HN. :) You will surely do awesome.
- wsieroci 13y agoThanks :)
- deanclatworthy 13y agoThis comes across to me as more of a rant, than a constructive exit description from a company. When hiring new candidates, and doing background checks alarm bells would go off if I saw people whining about their previous jobs in a blog post. Be professional, accept that some jobs are shit, and find a new one. This post will do you no favours in the future.
- parennoob 13y agoThere has to be some sort of balance between criticism and "maintaining a professional attitude" (whatever that phrase means -- I have never understood it). A lot of times "be professional" is used to silence criticism of truly horrendous software development practices. Being forced to use a stack of horrible software including IE strikes me as a perfectly valid professional criticism. Possibly, this might be because I worked at another company (also in the mobile space) that had exactly this sort of atmosphere of bureaucracy and using a contrived, corporate software stack for their development teams. I don't have a company of my own right now, but if I did, I would have no problem hiring someone who ranted about an environment that is toxic to good software development. (I guess I would prefer it if he also gave an instance where he tried to improve that environment and failed, but from experience I know that it often tends to be a futile endeavour.)
- xtracto 13y agoWell, for starters, the bunch of emoticons makes it look as if the guy is trying hard to tell everyone that he is happy. Was it needed? ;-)
- asdfologist 13y agoSo what? It does a good service to future prospective employees by spreading information about what it's like to work there. It's like saying that citizens under oppressive governments should never speak up because doing so can only land them in jail.
- mrkipling 13y agoThis is exactly what I was going to say. Writing a blog post riddled with grammatical errors (and emoticons!) slagging off your former employer is not a good look as far as future employers are concerned.
- RoryH 13y agoWhile reading it you may have also noticed the fact this person is Polish, meaning English is not their first language.
- freehunter 13y agoThe grammatical errors could be due to English as a second language. I'm not sure that part of the requirements of working for Samsung in Poland is a flawless grasp of the English language.
- heidar 13y agoAre we honestly that concerned with formality in this industry? I'd be more concerned with the contents and less with how formal they are. And what is wrong with using emoteicons in personal blog posts? I don't necessarily agree with slagging off your former employer but his criticisms are still valid. The only thing that I didn't like was: "First of all I did this because this job was terrible boring for me (fixing code of other people is not especially exciting)." - That's not perhaps the best thing to write since he was a junior and this will make some people think he is lazy and does not want to take on the less fun jobs that we all have to do from time to time. And like someone pointed out, English is not his first language. I'm sure you just didn't notice that though. :)
- mrkipling 13y ago> And like someone pointed out, English is not his first language. I didn't register that part, no. In that case his use of English is fine. The emoticons, not so much for a blog post. I still don't agree that writing this sort of post is professional or will do him any favours.
- anxx 13y agoI interned at a big telcom and worked at a bank. Amount of crappy software that needs to be used is mindboggling. Amount of money that is spent to license that crapware is even more mind boggling. There is a real market for these beautiful b2c software products that can make their services store data on the bigco's servers (as opposed to their own - security is a concern) and write decent, mostly .NET interface to communicate with the company dabatabases.
- mbesto 13y agoThere is a real market for these beautiful b2c software products Careful. "Beautiful" software isn't necessarily a large addressable market in B2C...right now. Not saying you're wrong, but bigco's software packages value security, safety, and supportability over beauty, usability, and time-to-build. It's sad but it's true.
- willvarfar 13y agosecurity? Was surprised that was first on your list. IME its only ever gets lip service. :(
- JanezStupar 13y agoAs long as you get certification, nobody will care.
- denzil_correa 13y ago> bigco's software packages value security, safety, and supportability over beauty, usability, and time-to-build. Why does it have to be either/or? I mean you can have secure/safe and supportable software which is beautiful and usable. It eventually helps in the long-run.
- mbesto 13y agoI agree, hence "...right now" ;)
- 13y ago
- angerman 13y agoI cannot comment on the inner working of Samsung or a similar corporation of that size. But having grown up on a farm I can very much sympathize with the joy and, can we call it freedom, farming has to offer. I often wonder if we, who code and spend quite a bit of our lifetime in front of computer displays have distanced ourselves from the nature around us a bit too much from time to time.
- _wojtek 13y agoso he left corporation because it was, well, a corporation? welcome to the real world =,=
- rubinelli 13y agoMost people don't realize Dilbert isn't an exaggeration until they join the workforce.
- santu11 13y agoYou are so right!! You do not realize it until it hits you. When I was in my last job, reading Dilbert almost felt like it was happening to me. Dark sarcasm..
- sammyo 13y agoFor years Scott Adams had serious letters accusing him of secretly being an employee in 'their' workplace and just transcribing meetings.
- qompiler 13y agoI think we can all start a Dilbert style comic to highlight weekly (if not daily) bizarre happenings @ the office.
- santu11 13y agoI guess some of us are no longer that (un)lucky. We have already started(up). :)
- hga 13y agoAs I like to put it to those who don't know, Dilbert is Revealed Truth.
- willvarfar 13y agoThis was 10 months ago. So how has it worked out?
- wsieroci 13y agoI am doing startup, but actually I do not want to describe it here now, maybe I will do it later :)
- willvarfar 13y agoYou don't have to describe the new startup, you only have to describe how you organise your life with particular respect to the points you raised in the article. And what do you miss from your enterprisy days?
- wsieroci 13y agoI work MUCH harder than in Samsung, but this work really matters to me. And what I miss? Hm.. I miss constant stream of salary on my bank account.
- seivan 13y agoIt's not a question of scale, it's a question of management. Companies like Samsung, others and etc are managed by idiots. Pure and simple. Suit wearing, non-technical morons. Congratulations on your new job, exercise, fresh air and freshly picked berries and vegetables. Sounds pretty decent compared to sitting in front of a screen slaving for knock-off phones with shitty vendored junk. Seeing the company you work for doing commercials like http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/04/29/a-terrible-idea-samsungs-reworks-gangnam-style-to-promote-the-galaxy-s4-at-a-launch-event-in-india/ http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/04/29/a-terrible-idea-... (even if it was by a third party PR company) is kinda.. weak.
- clearly 13y ago> Companies like Samsung, others and etc are managed by idiots Samsung shareholders may disagree with you there....
- seivan 13y agoNo I am sure, and they are producing more wealth than I (probably) _EVER_ could. But doesn't mean it's a fun place for a designer and/or software engineer to be. It means it's great to be on the board, manager or shareholder. OP is a software engineer.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> But doesn't mean it's a fun place for a designer and/or software engineer to be. I bet it was wonderful to work at Apple under Steve Jobs. Just wonderful.
- seivan 13y agoIt sounds tough, but at least the thing you do isn't bullshit. I mean. C'mon iOS as an operating system is amazing, working with those engineers would be kick-ass for some people.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
- Syssiphus 13y agoI love this post. It just screams: Follow your heart.
- wsieroci 13y agoNice to hear this:)
- ArekDymalski 13y agoWell the grass is always greener on the other side. Did you already have this awkward moment of missing the corporation?
- wsieroci 13y agoNever
- ArekDymalski 13y agoCongratulations and good luck with keeping it this way then.
- wsieroci 13y agoThank you
- ozim 13y agoWhat have you been expecting as Junior Developer? Especially in large company, there are lots of smarter people there, you are just starting. Sometimes people need to be a little more humble, than thinking that on start they will be doing new android features right away. I've worked for similar big cos as junior, did not like it also and runned away. But someone has to do the dishes...
- coldcode 13y agoAny technology company that still uses Active-X for anything should be avoided, no matter what.
- ozim 13y agoBelieve me there are far worse things in big co than Active-X. You would be surprised how Excel can be abused...
- bruceboughton 13y agoI'm sure even Apple has some criticial, internal application in finance or some other part of the corporate structure that they bought from a vendor that uses ActiveX.
- corresation 13y agoAny technology company that still uses Active-X for anything should be avoided ActiveX is apparently still really big in South Korea for some reason - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/12295718818/south-korea-still-paying-price-embracing-internet-explorer-decade-ago.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/12295718818/south-... Nonetheless, if a firm has committed to Windows (which alone is a problem, but assume they've done that), it is perfectly fine to use ActiveX for systems. IE is simply a runtime, and having to use the IE runtime for some internal systems -- get the hell over it. As others have said, blog posts like this are never professionally constructive. While some readers might sympathize with the writer, most will wonder if the problem is really with the writer (the old http://www.despair.com/dysfunction.html http://www.despair.com/dysfunction.html). There is an unavoidable smell that the writer might be toxic. Which of course the writer can disregard. I've burned bridges and never had an ounce of concern because I understood that I was burning bridges and embraced that. If the author is doing that knowingly, then brilliant for them.
- raverbashing 13y agoThe only reason I'll never work for a "big" company again: Clearcase If the job involves this tool, I won't even apply. (Yes, there are some other bad tools as well)
- Drakim 13y agoMy personal hate-passion is Lotus Notes.
- aurelianito 13y agoMy personal hate is Crystal Reports.
- xtracto 13y agoWow I did not know CR was still around! I used that back when I was doing my BS about 10 years ago. A lot of people used it with Visual Basic. I remember learning to interface VB with Microsoft's Word libraries in order to create reports in DOC to avoid using Crystal Reports (this mainly just for college projects). I also remember one real-life project (for a restaurant I did during college) where we proposed the client to have DOC reports and he was amazed that it could be done. OTOH, I ted to think that those things like CR, JIRA, Lotus Notes and others are a necessary evil. The mere fact that they continue existing is because they solve some kind of problem (otherwise people won't use them, right?). I guess the main problem of these platforms is that once they grow so big (trying to accomplish a lot of things) they become difficult to manage or use.
- greedo 13y agoTry Notes, Netware, and Novell Application Launcher. It's the Terrible Trifecta...
- cs02rm0 13y agoIt staggers me that there are people who, to this day, would defend Clearcase.
- moubarak 13y agoi hope OP comes up with a farming related app and enjoys the best of two worlds. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/04/29/f-farming-apps-mobile-technology.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/04/29/f-farming...
- SandB0x 13y agoWhining child damages his career prospects with unprofessional rant after just nine months of work.
- xtracto 13y agoAnd he will come back full circle after he starts his own company and realizes there's a bunch of bullshit and stuff that he needs to swallow. He yarns about how at least in his job at Samsung he had a good income and he understands that everyone, yes absolutely everyone has to start from the bottom and fight their way to the top positions/companies. Crap, with a foot already in Samsung, he could have stay 2 years and then bargain for either: a) a better position, or b) a position in another company. blah.
- hkmurakami 13y ago2 years (or even 1.5, or hell, even 1) at Samsung then moving to Apple would have been a pretty natural choice (The fruit company is definitely always hurting for more software talent) Can't really think of other handset makers that he might want to go to, but depending on his skillset, some chipmakers would have been a good fit as well.
- mikecane 13y agoI tend to agree with you. Corporations will often test you out in what you consider to be a "crap" job. Why? It's not a test of skill, it's a test of initiative. Without slamming him -- it's his personal choice, after all, and good luck to him -- this is why some people don't advance. They see a position as being "beneath" them when actually they're being watched to see if they can -- on their own -- bring something new to it.
- xtracto 13y agoI used to be like that (no really I did): I started programming when I was about 7 years old (LOGO, then Basic, then C). I finished my degree in Software Engineering with the highest grade of all my peers and with honours. About one year before graduation I started working at a software company (doing some rent-a-car systems and tourism web-dev) but inside me thinking I was so-much-better than what I was doing (programming .NET v1). So I took off and went to the UK to do a Master and a PhD. Fastforward 8 years (4 of Masters/PhD, 4 of a PostDoc), I am 'back' as a 'simple' software engineer in a great company doing what I realized I love: programming software. I have been one year now, learning the company processess and their domain, meeting the people. And after this year, I've got a good career path laid in front of me with the opportunity to sometime become a tech lead.
- arcosdev 13y agothis kid is my hero
- praptak 13y agoWarsaw software developers' job market has gotten really interesting since Google opened an engineering center here some umpteen months ago. There is just no reason to stick to crappy jobs at this time. Edit: OTOH, this is no reason to go with a bang - releasing some pressure is just not worth it.
- michaelochurch 13y agoWarsaw software developers' job market has gotten really interesting since Google opened an engineering center here some umpteen months ago. There is just no reason to stick to crappy jobs at this time. What makes you think Google is better? Google pays decently, but the work isn't interesting unless you have social access. Being in an Eastern European satellite office, you're not going to get the machine learning work. You're going to get the stuff that California, Seattle and New York don't want to do. I'm sure there are Polish companies that offer real work; OP would do better at one of those than in some multinational's branch office. The problem is that most corporations are still pretty colonial and you don't get high-quality work unless you're in the main office.
- ctek 13y agoGoogle in Poland does work on interesting work from what I've read... search and gmail for example.
- praptak 13y ago> What makes you think Google is better? Statements from friends who work there plus knowledge from seminars they sometimes organize with Warsaw University. Example (Polish language warning :-) ): http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/SR/rok12-13/Google.html http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/SR/rok12-13/Google.html Short translation of the above link: cluster management, availability management, load balancing. OS-level things, definitely not maintenance of a legacy ticketing system for "real" devs in California.
- michaelochurch 13y agoYou could be right, but my experience at Google is that even on the projects that seem interesting, the microallocation comes down to rank. For example, on my team of ~15 people there were plenty of individuals doing interesting stuff, but if you were SWE 2-3 you were fucked. Your boss could take advantage of the fact that SWE 3's are pretty much considered to be parasites not worthy of consideration as humans. You'd never get to work on a green field and actually have an opportunity to prove yourself. The only thing that matters at Google is your rank and your "calibration score". That, and nothing else, determines what projects are available to you. If you're willing to spend 5+ years playing politics and trading favors in order to get promo story you need, then you can get something passably interesting.
- alcuadrado 13y agoA junior developer quits his job to found a tech company? Really? Unless he has other non-mentioned skills he probably made a very bad decision
- webjunkie 13y agoWhat do you think most silicon valley tech entrepreneurs are? Senior developers with years of experience?
- alcuadrado 13y agoWhy do you assume that because many people does something it's correct to do it? I think you should reformulate your question like "what do you think most successful silicon valley...". I don't mean that technical skill is everything in a tech company, but it's a very important part of it.
- Dirlewanger 13y agoIs this a fucking joke? Then again, not surprised garbage like this being upvoted on here.
- michaelochurch 13y agoEnglish isn't his first language. The writing is poor (by native speaker standards; again, I think it's safe to chalk that up to not being a native speaker of English) but he's intelligent and way more honest (corporate jobs truly suck, and idiots are far too often in charge) than 99.99% of white-collar workers have the courage to be.
- mikecane 13y agoI have a question as a user to devs: Do you consider fixing code a bad job, as he did? The Net is filled with complaints about things that require fixing in lots of software that's been around a while. Yet it never seems to get done. Is this more because dev hate to fix old code by someone else -- what in the book world would be termed an editor's function -- or is this the nature of the corporate beast, to just keep moving forward?
- praptak 13y agoThere are different kinds of bug fixing. Hunting for an elusive hard to fix bug might be very satisfying. You get to know the environment, you might have to construct custom tools to gather data for the debugging purposes and you obviously get the bragging rights if you succeed. Most bugs are not that challenging though. A textbox is too small to display a value, shoveling of records from point A to point B loses some data fields, this kind of stuff. You basically know right from the start what kind of fix is required and the only challenge is finding the place in the (potentially messy) code where the fix needs to be applied.
- mikecane 13y ago>>>Most bugs are not that challenging though. What you subsequently described is a copyeditor's function on a book. Maybe such jobs need to be described as such to attract the people who really want to do them?
- xtracto 13y agoI am a dev, and I am sure my comment won't be liked here but there it goes: Nobody likes bug-fixing: not their bugs and of course not other people's bugs. You can see this clearly in open-source software (mainly because the communication channels such as Bugzilla, forums, mailing list are all open). It is like writing documentation: programmers don't like to do it. However, fixing bugs is worse, because there is really no payoff in doing that: if you create a feature or write a program then you are doing something new... whereas when you fix a bunch of bugs, then it mens at the end you get a piece of software which is working the way it was supposed to work on the first place... so for any external observer (client, manager, user, etc) there was no value added.
- nick2021 13y agoThis article has win written all over it!
- jzs 13y agoI'm not very surprised by being forced using IE and all kinds of active X plugins at samsung. Consider the fact that south korea sold their soul to Microsoft and IE years ago by making it mandatory that all online purcases etc. require ActiveX plugins for IE. Poor technology choices forced upon the population by governments are inherently bad.
- kyllo 13y ago(for example you have to use IE to work because much of their sofware works only as ActiveX controls) This is a problem endemic to South Korea. They actually passed legislation in the late 90s mandating the use of ActiveX for security. Now that ActiveX is an orphaned technology, that isn't working out so well for them. They are trapped on an old version of IE.
- bobdvb 13y agoFormer colleagues told me that Samsung is also known to put two teams on a task, tell neither that another team is working on said same problem, then whoever succeeds is a rockstar and whoever fails is 'restructured'. Korean companies aren't the easiest to work for, I should know I also just left a large one, but the Koreans work harder than any other group I know. Just a shame they work harder not smarter because they waste so much time.
- kyllo 13y agoYeah. "Militaristic" is the adjective I would choose to describe Korean corporations in general.
- hawat 13y agoAs I know, (from my own sources inside) Samsung Poland is - as for Corporation - nice place to work. There are many, many worse employers here in Poland. Most big players treat polish workforce as second grade (better than those in 3rd world, worse than in "better world"). It`s funny to hear not that someone who spend 9 months in Korean origin corporation don`t know that in Korea ActiveX is some kind of "standard" for webapps (long and painful story, someone with grater knowledge in this topic should write some word about it - is interesting how they tied themselves in closed and problematic ecosystem)
- tled 13y agoI love doing technical job. But man, I wish I had a farm like you.