I'm rn =P
Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
81–90 of 94 posts
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#82A few times. The one I regretted the most was the last year of my career in game development. We were asked to work the weekend once to get some features done. That turned into two weekends in a row turned into a full year of non-stop crunch. Programmers these days like to say how they're so "burned out" because they don't like the work. I was so burned out that I was mainlining energy drinks to stay awake. I develop…
You didn’t have to go attack “developers these days” tbh.
There’s always someone who has a worse situation than you. It doesn’t mean yours gets “better”. Burn out is a valid thing at many job stress levels.
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#83A few times. The one I regretted the most was the last year of my career in game development. We were asked to work the weekend once to get some features done. That turned into two weekends in a row turned into a full year of non-stop crunch. Programmers these days like to say how they're so "burned out" because they don't like the work. I was so burned out that I was mainlining energy drinks to stay awake. I develop…
You didn’t have to go attack “developers these days” tbh. There’s always someone who has a worse situation than you. It doesn’t mean yours gets “better”. Burn out is a valid thing at many job stress levels.
The fact that you saw that as an attack says more about you than it does about me.
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#84I was at the same company for seven years. It was my first job after college. Don't make the same mistake I made. I am now unemployed, and nobody wants to hire me because my skills are out of date. I have been without a job for so long that I have decided to take out student loans, and enroll in a boot camp. I've had to sell my car to afford this. My life is absolutely miserable right now. Remember, the people you work with are not your friends, they just want to exploit you to make money.
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#85- left for a 2.5x salary bump after 1.5 years
- that place ran out of money after 1.5 years
- back at the original place, but got bored after 6 years
- let a recruiter talk me into a potentially more interesting place even if it paid less, left before hitting the 4-month mark for 2x more money
- left after 2+ years because the boss was a ginormous asshole and I was colleagues with Hamas (UN)
I regret step 3. As I was leaving there, a colleague asked me, bewildered: "why don't you just do side projects if everything's so easy and you're so bored?" And he was fucking right. I'd be done with work by noon Tuesday and then go tinker on some open source thing on Github or write on Medium or saw stuff at the country place. And so much more money would roll right in every year.
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mind giving more details about your last sentence on "growing" and their relevance nowadays ?
Yeah, no worries. In 2011 the hotness was "puppet", coming from cfengine, so I spent time learning puppet, it's quirks and desired ways of working. Then I "grew" into using Chef instead, being similar but very different. Then I went to a company that had to start fresh, in a predominantly Windows environment, I tried "round-hole, square-peg"-ing chef into the situation. That failed and I found myself working with Sal…
It probably depends on the place, I know projects that use Ansible, I know some that use Docker Swarm, I know some that also are either all in on Kubernetes or, quite the opposite, run in a VM or on bare metal somewhere.
Honestly, sometimes Ansible or even Docker Swarm or something like Docker Compose are nice to use because they’re a better fit for a problem than one of the “mainstream” solutions (e.g. Kubernetes is great but has complexity to manage, unless you can pay someone else to provide a cluster for you).
Sadly, none of that matters when you’re looking for a job and the latest mainstream technologies reign supreme then.
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#87I was with an employer for 6 years, and I left because I felt like it was hindering my skill building and long term career development. In hind sight, that was the worst mistake I ever made.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#88Yes, but the situation was much different than the one you have found yourself in.
As an "intern" I found myself at a very small company - literally just my boss, his son, and me. I was the only programmer. I loved the autonomy that came with being the only one who knew how to write code, and they were in desperate need of it. There was a lot to do, and they had a dream I believed in. I worked there - sometimes I even slept there I worked so late - for five years. They ended up giving me a salary of 48k per year (in 2006) and no healthcare or benefits. I worked every weekday and most weekends, lost contact with friends and family, and ate terribly because I wouldn't even take time to try and make healthy food. Spent those five years cramming shitty fast food down my throat every day.
There are several warning signs that are hopefully plain as day to people reading that.
1) an "internship" should be tightly directed learning under a mentor. If you are the only software engineer at your "internship" what they are really looking for is free labor.
2) No software engineering job should pay 48k in America.
3) No full time job should go without health insurance.
4) Under no circumstances should a person work 60-80 hour weeks, but particularly under that horrible pay and no benefits.
I stayed because I felt a misguided sense of loyalty to them, and because their desperation to make their small business work meant that I got a huge and diverse array of systems that I got to build, and I got full autonomy to build them. There was something deeply addicting about that: addicting enough that I didn't even think about how my finances were crumbling and I hadn't seen a doctor in half a decade.
I finally woke up from my addiction when I started encountering health problems and couldn't see a doctor.
After a lot of soul searching, I left - and instantly upon finding a new job realized just how badly they had abused my naivete and sense of loyalty. I make many multiples of that income now, but I will never regain the lost health, lost friendships, and years of earning potential.
My advice to people is that, no matter how fun the work involved in the job ITSELF is, you need to still take an honest assessment on a regular basis about whether it is worth it. Even a very fun and fulfilling job can be killing you, or underpaying you, or distancing you from your family and from other opportunities.
In your situation, you are earning a reasonable wage and it sounds like you are not being stretched thin by it. Feel free to look around, but I don't see your situation as dire or necessarily in need of change.
I don't think people can realize how bad the "inglorious" side of software engineering can be. That isn't to say don't look and see if you can find better, but recognize that you are already in a great situation. And also one where you can either comfortably look for a new job or do your own side projects to learn and grow in ways your job might not be providing.
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#89I spent 15 years with HP in their services division. I liked the work I was doing, even though I was slightly underpaid for it. I would have stayed there but they cut me loose back in 2014 with 50K other employees. They did give me a decent severance package (3 months pay with health insurance) but it was shocking how easily they just cut me loose after years of dedicated service. In the end they did me a favor; I've spent the subsequent 10 years doing interesting stuff for four different companies in that time. I'm in my mid 50s now and thinking about optimizing for a decent retirement sometime in the next 10 years. I don't know if I'll be forced to change jobs again or not.
Yes I regret being with HP for 15 years; I had a lot to learn to be marketable again after being there for that length of time. But since I'm working toward retirement now, I will probably try to stay as long as I can where I am.
Re: Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
#90Never, when it felt right. I'm in my mid fourties now, still doing web development and I stayed 13 years at a startup and am now celebrating 10 years at my current employer. In between I joined a somewhat well-known (prestigious) company which had a very toxic work culture, so it was a no-brainer to leave after just 1,5 years. Management was clueless, most people were awkward all the time, pay was very good, but I ju…
How did you find weathering the growing pains, as your first employer (presumably) went through startup adolescence? Did you remain IC or branch into people-management?
Sound advice, caveat that (for so many reasons) a shop that feels right and _stays that way_ is increasingly rare and precious.