81–90 of 102 posts
I was doing a full-time PhD and working. One day my advisor asked, `Are you working for me or Lockheed?' I chose the PhD.
They were starting to adopt a cutthroat culture where managers boast about firing people. I remember the point where I knew I was going to quit was when the VP called all the tech leads in a room and essentially told us, "Good riddance to these other folks, but good news! You are the ones we wanted to keep..."
Almost 2 years in, never touched rails code, lots of ansible playbooks, dockerfiles, random ruby scripts, several company trips to Japan/US; it seems that I became the de-facto Big Data engineer on the company. Many would think it was something I liked. But I didn't. Executives, managers and engineers in the company relied on me to solve what was "sold" to current enterprise customers about "Big Data" and "Machine Learning". The pressure sets in. I couldn't in my nature pose myself as an "expert data scientist" and "big data guy" when I have 0 experience with ML, Python, Spark and Statistics.
I resigned. I thought the reason why I felt stressed because I was alone in this Big Data thing. Boy, I was so wrong. They counter-offered and gave me a high position + a 5-person team, 3 statisticians and 2 system administrators. I never should have took that counter-offer. This time, the pressure is higher since I'm officially responsible for the entire Product line. I needed to catch up to a hyped-up ecosystem of frustrated customers whose only chant was 'your company told me my Hadoop platform could do "Big Data + Machine Learning + AI" where is it?'.
After 4 months of trying; getting me and everyone on the team into Datacamp + Python training seminars, while writing an MVP for a ML-product I thought of, while building product roadmaps, being on meetings, handling internal politics and current customer support. I resigned.
I guess the real reason was; I didn't want this in the first place. Even if I tried to embrace the work, the climb was too steep with amount of runway I had. Customers are expecting ML-based products, now. I couldn't live up to the standards of a Big Data Lead when I have 0 experience on anything Big Data, no mentors teaching me about the proper way to write ML products, let alone run a team.
Because they couldn't guarantee they wouldn't call me on my wedding day, which is on Saturday. Hence I've spent the last two months with my wife to be sorting out house out and making it awesome for the wedding reception!
My boss has been gradually overdosing his LSD and MDMA, becoming more and more frantic and chaotic. Once he called me on Saturday night, apparently under influence, and demanded a new feature to be done by tomorrow morning. I said no, adviced him to get some sleep and hang up on him. He sent me a message saying that "he knows people who can make my life very hard". I took a screenshot and emailed the message to the w…
To a much lesser extent, no matter how many times I asked for a new chair I got the same response - "I can ask. But there's nothing I can do about that". I would not have decided to find another job if they made this minimal gesture.
Really the chair thing! I sat in a 15yo hand-me-down desk chair that the leather was peeling off of. I brought in my $100 back support chair from home cause I started having back pain. They were like "huh, ok". I didn't ask for a $3000 herman miller with all the bells and whistles. I asked for some decent back support while spending 8hrs in a chair. If I were my boss I would have bought an amazon gift card for a few hundred bucks and said "pick whatever you like". I would have been forever indented to that guy and probably wouldn't have asked for anything else.
I still don't understand why people don't pick the low hanging fruit when they can.
Bored. The people I really liked working with weren't there anymore. Development environment was getting more overbearing (emphasizing process just for the sake of it while ignoring its flaws). Finally just got sick of getting up every day and coming to work.
So what did you do, just quit and hang out? Or did you have a backup plan and backup savings?
Was not given any meaningful work and felt I was not growing as a developer. Been at my current job for 1.5 years, and feel the same way. I'm looking around, but after being a "Software Engineer" for 4 years, employers look for a particular set of skills and experience I simply have not gained during my track record. Feels like a catch-22.
Same here man. What do you think the way out is? I'm thinking that you study the big picture stuff by reading HackerNews, and get good at the "interview questions." Then you build something on the side with a full modern stack and devops practice. That part is tough. Then I think you (we'd) have the confidence and the experiences to fall back on during an interview. What kind of stuff have you done so far?
I've done front-end & back-end on web applications, without ever specializing in either. These days, I mostly write single-page applications with a vdom JS library.