4 ms·

Having read a number of your posts Michael, I can't help but see a pattern which is skewed by 2 things: 1) you seem to have worked a quite a few terrible compa

Having read a number of your posts Michael, I can't help but see a pattern which is skewed by 2 things: 1) you seem to have worked a quite a few terrible companies ("salary is how much it costs to waste your time"?? Really?) 2) your attitude is almost always negative, which may have had a significant effect on #1 Don't chase money. Go for experience. And that's not just career experience. Life experience. Travel. Choose adventure, and connections with others. Some of the best things that happened during my 20s: - getting fired from my first job after only 6 months. I didn't demonstrate my value to the mostly non-technical management enough, and a later hire above me made it seem like my role was unnecessary. He got a 30% raise and 14 hour days, I lost my job - after working for a few years and feeling confident in my skills, pushing pause and leaving to travel the world for the better part of a year. During that time I learned to ride motorcycles and scuba dive which have become my non-code passions - deciding that coding was not just my job, but a craft and skill I would make an effort to always try and improve - most recently, joining a group of awesome folks to do a startup that has already begun to change people lives for the better, and I hope will continue to grow and do so even more There have been ups and downs, I've never fought super hard for the highest salary possible, but I've always felt fairly compensated and been comfortable. Most importantly, I've learned to enjoy every experience of it all, even the bad ones. When it comes to your career, it's pretty simple: have a good attitude, be honest, do the things you say you will, to the best of your ability, and always be improving (aka learn from your mistakes and move on). Out of that, you will have a career. There is no end game, there is just the journey

michaelochurch 13y ago
I think that my anger/negativity come from two sources, that I've conflated even though they're separate. 1. I consider the ratio between how much value programmers do add and what we could add to be unacceptably low. (See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-autonomy-is-a-1-trillion-issue/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-au... .) It means we have low leverage, few opportunities to excel, and that we can rarely become financially independent. It sucks to lose 90+ percent of what we're capable of to the fact that the wrong people call the shots. 2. I had a 16-month period (1/11 to 4/12) in my career that was astonishingly negative. First, I had a startup fail for reasons that were not my fault and completely out of my control. Then, I had a manager at Google for whom I found out recently that recruiters consider him to be the worst manager in Google NYC (my perceived pattern of him using fake performance problems to tease out health issues then fuck with people is actually well-known; N >= 5 and probably 7, but not knowing all the individual details, I'm unsure on duplicates). Third, I observed something that I can't talk about but would be legendary if it got out. Fourth, I worked for a startup with the most unethical management I've ever encountered (worse than Google; Google's a good company with some really bad actors and terrible HR infrastructure, this company's management was just rotten all the way through) and, after I left it, the CEO (the black sheep of a powerful family) mounted a personal campaign to destroy my reputation. So... (1) is why my fights matter to the world. We really do need to unlock the trillions of dollars of value we'll add to the world by making programmers more autonomous and powerful within organizations. It's probably (2) that's behind a lot of my personal anger.
- areeve 13y ago
  You need to step away from all this. You clearly have a toxic mindset (though not necessarily by any fault of your own), and the fact that you insist on perpetuating it and projecting it on arguably unrelated situations is evidence of that. I feel like every thread I read has an identical anti-corporation or anti-manager comment from you! I've said this before, but you often have some great insights in your posts. This negativity achieves nothing and simply works to discredit the rest of what you say. So you had a bad experience, so what? The world isn't out to get you. Learn what you can from it and move on.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I think that my anger/negativity come from two sources, that I've conflated even though they're separate. 1. I consider the ratio between how much value programmers do add and what we could add to be unacceptably low. (See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-autonomy-is-a-1-trillion-issue/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-au... .) It means we have low leverage, few opportunities to excel, and that we can rarely become financially independent. It sucks to lose 90+ percent of what we're capable of to the fact that the wrong people call the shots. 2. I had a 16-month period (1/11 to 4/12) in my career that was astonishingly negative. First, I had a startup fail for reasons that were not my fault and completely out of my control. Then, I had a manager at Google for whom I found out recently that recruiters consider him to be the worst manager in Google NYC (my perceived pattern of him using fake performance problems to tease out health issues then fuck with people is actually well-known; N >= 5 and probably 7, but not knowing all the individual details, I'm unsure on duplicates). Third, I observed something that I can't talk about but would be legendary if it got out. Fourth, I worked for a startup with the most unethical management I've ever encountered (worse than Google; Google's a good company with some really bad actors and terrible HR infrastructure, this company's management was just rotten all the way through) and, after I left it, the CEO (the black sheep of a powerful family) mounted a personal campaign to destroy my reputation. So... (1) is why my fights matter to the world. We really do need to unlock the trillions of dollars of value we'll add to the world by making programmers more autonomous and powerful within organizations. It's probably (2) that's behind a lot of my personal anger.

areeve 13y ago
You need to step away from all this. You clearly have a toxic mindset (though not necessarily by any fault of your own), and the fact that you insist on perpetuating it and projecting it on arguably unrelated situations is evidence of that. I feel like every thread I read has an identical anti-corporation or anti-manager comment from you! I've said this before, but you often have some great insights in your posts. This negativity achieves nothing and simply works to discredit the rest of what you say. So you had a bad experience, so what? The world isn't out to get you. Learn what you can from it and move on.