11–20 of 71 posts
He was like having -2 engineers on the team. I'd been in the job half a decade. I quit 2 months after he joined.
Ultimately, it's a relationship. There will be ups. And downs. But if I look into the future and don't see it looking back at me...
I update my CV and start looking. Life is too short for relationships with no future.
If you don’t understand where this link will come from, which new service (does it exist? should it be created? should it be a service, or is it just an assumption?), how and where to apply a 15min constraint, what’s the second case - neither do I. Every task starts a hard deciphering process of a context, a goal, a supposed solution (which is not how it gets done anyway) and a sentence itself. It doesn’t take much time to sit and try to form some structure in a dialogue, but it takes so much mental energy that it hurts.
The job itself is hacker-ish and includes funny tech like xvfb/vnc, adb, ocr, some infra, frontend, some hw. Which I like and not afraid to use, learn or hack. But this constant contextless gibberish just drives me nuts.
Aside from that, one of the founders would just randomly fire people and say "we liked them but they just weren't a great fit for the company" - then go on a charade about how "you'll know if you're not in good shape".
The last straw was the usual "if you're not consistently going above and beyond on all fronts we question if you are committed to the company". I work 45hr weeks and do on call rotations one week a month - candidly, fuck off.
As a rule of thumb...no future. Ultimately, it's a relationship. There will be ups. And downs. But if I look into the future and don't see it looking back at me... I update my CV and start looking. Life is too short for relationships with no future.
I churned a while on this and about a week later just moved on and got a $40k bump at a new gig. No reason to work on frameworks that have no future (in this case, Retool) or that you explicitly said you had no interest in doing.
I got an engineering manager who was a hardcore micromanager. He insisted on adding a lot of process, but refused to conform to any processes himself. He caused numerous false SEVs because he was picking around in ancient logs, assuming every error message was actually a production outage. He was like having -2 engineers on the team. I'd been in the job half a decade. I quit 2 months after he joined.
When an EM starts nitpicking engineering work products (code, designs, etc.) or demanding specific work hours, it's time to leave. EMs should not behave like retail or fast food managers.
I was severely underpaid anyways, but it was a fun job until that guy showed up. I know at least 1 of my coworkers on a different team quit because of the same VP.
I've been setting up massively complicated sending rules for a webshop in health care products so that it selects the correct carrier for the products in a client's cart. This webshop has own stock, but also does drop shipping and depending on what products are in the cart, different carriers should be selected during checkout. Then they also have discounts / free shipping for some products, but not for all, and some…
Turns out he constantly berated our manager for not being on track in private. But publicly acted cool about it and said the deadline wasn't real.
Oh, and all the while, he hired "his people" in another office who were C++ devs with no Haskell experience or interest. Nobody was hired for our team despite the time pressure.
He actually blocked literally every potential Haskell hire. I found this out once I started interviewing. Good Haskellers rejected one after another. The vote? 4 for, 1 against. Guess who was against.
Then suddenly, we had to abandon the Haskell prototype when we were almost done (like final testing was all that was left). "Most of the team can't learn Haskell and don't want to." How convenient!
It all came to a head in a meeting where I mentioned some of the stuff he was saying to me privately about Haskell and the Haskell team. It was more critical and contradictory to what he told others. The guy was clearly manipulating us - he even went around our manager to garner support from some senior devs before we as a team could discuss and object privately.
Oh and when we discussed all this, one engineer was DMing the VPE about this conversation in real time. Rat.
I and many other of the Haskellers dipped. I'm pretty sure that was his real intention all along. A lot of them were with the company from its earliest stages, so they were pretty ingrained. But he didn't like them and wanted control.
I make a lot more money and stress a lot less now. And still write Haskell.