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Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

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Re: Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

#11

Post by busterarm »

Yes. I accepted a job some years ago at a company that was working a contract for a General Dynamics subsidiary in Georgia (some of you will know exactly which one). They had incredible difficulty giving me a start date and strung me along after signing for about a month.

I was extremely eager to get out of my then-current employer, so the situation became extremely stressful to me. I didn't want to burn a bridge with my then-employer and wanted to give them a full two-week's notice.

Eventually I'd had enough of waiting and gave them my resignation before I worked a single day, even though I was supposedly an employee (went through full handbook, tax stuff, etc). This was on a Friday morning. The full rest of my day was them calling me over and over convincing me that they could start me the following Monday.

I still walked -- not worth that kind of disorganization and hassle. I'm convinced that the whole time I wasn't working they were billing the client for me to be there. ...They paid a lot of money for my background check too... whoops!

Re: Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

#12

Post by ux4 »

busterarm wrote: post #11

Yes. I accepted a job some years ago at a company that was working a contract for a General Dynamics subsidiary in Georgia (some of you will know exactly which one). They had incredible difficulty giving me a start date and strung me along after signing for about a month. I was extremely eager to get out of my then-current employer, so the situation became extremely stressful to me. I didn't want to burn a bridge wit…

Did you already have another offer or did you resign to just continue the job search?

Re: Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

#13

Post by bckygldstn »

neerkumar wrote: post #6

In the US, in tech, it is relatively common for people to sign an offer and then change their mind and choose to not join. It happened a few times in different companies where I worked. It wasn't really a big deal, it is considered part of the game. Note that the opposite can happen too and it is much more frequent. It can happen especially to students. They get an offer starting in 6 months after they graduate and b…

This attitude doesn't really apply to Germany, where OP is from.

Re: Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

#14

Post by expertentipp »

Signed the employment contract with the first company? Then notice period during the trial period applies. Didn’t sign? Ghost them, send an email, whatever. Don’t feel obliged in any way if the employment contract hasn’t been signed by both parties. I see no problem with resigning on the first day (if they want cheap, they’ll pay twice) although I’ve never done it myself. Personal advice? IT companies in Berlin are awful cheapskates, make everyone a favor and increase the average.

Re: Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

#15

Post by 68c12c16 »

neerkumar wrote: post #6

In the US, in tech, it is relatively common for people to sign an offer and then change their mind and choose to not join. It happened a few times in different companies where I worked. It wasn't really a big deal, it is considered part of the game. Note that the opposite can happen too and it is much more frequent. It can happen especially to students. They get an offer starting in 6 months after they graduate and b…

  Note that the opposite can happen too...It can 
  happen especially to students. They get an offer
  starting in 6 months after they graduate and by 
  then the company has problems, like layoffs or 
  hiring freeze, so they cancel the offer.
Ditto...

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was hired by a well-known tech company (based in NYC) but was soon laid off just 2 months later, together with several other newly hired employees, due to the financial difficulties the company had at the time (at least that's the reason he explained to me). It should not be that he was not fit for the job position, or something related to his capability (the job was an entry-level one...I knew him well and he was a fresh PhD graduate at the time).

I just feel that it is quite often that the value of morality is overlooked for profit (or at least financial) reason, especially for big organizations. The larger an organization is, the more rational and more abstract, and less human, it becomes -- especially for employees working at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Morality usually is valued most for individual human beings (perhaps that's also the reason why the OP is having the feeling of cognitive dissonance that is described in his question)...The rules of morality are quite different at a level of statistical aggregation of individuals...

Re: Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

#16

Post by nyxtom »

I once worked for a company that did some intensive training sessions for the first week. When I finally got around to working on their codebase it was entirely written in VB. This was something they chose to leave out in terms of their technical stack. I had better opportunities working with a consulting gig that later got me relocated and that led me to even better opportunities later down the road. It's better to just pursue what you want than get bogged down, just be professional and straightforward about it.

Re: Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

#18

Post by busterarm »

ux4 wrote: post #12
busterarm wrote: post #11

Yes. I accepted a job some years ago at a company that was working a contract for a General Dynamics subsidiary in Georgia (some of you will know exactly which one). They had incredible difficulty giving me a start date and strung me along after signing for about a month. I was extremely eager to get out of my then-current employer, so the situation became extremely stressful to me. I didn't want to burn a bridge wit…

Did you already have another offer or did you resign to just continue the job search?

I stayed at my then-current job until I relocated back to New York and changed careers (into development).

Re: Ask HN: Did you ever resign from a company on your first day?

#19

Post by stcredzero »

I resigned on my second day. On the second day, it came out that the founder wanted to review my code every 30 minutes. What!? Apparently, he was traumatized by some prima-donna self-proclaimed genius who went off by himself for two months and built entirely the wrong thing. I suggested that he at least give me a day or the afternoon or something. Nope. So I became the Sofa King and I was Sofa King outta there!

Another thing about that founder: He wanted me to write everything by scratch, ground up, nothing outside of Apple APIs, out of fear of patents and copyrights. I'm sorry, but that's just technical ignorance. In that case, go ahead and use 3rd party libraries, but do it mediated through a facade or some kind of adapter library, so you can rapidly switch to another one. This gives the best of both worlds -- more rapidly put together a functioning App, but still be immune to people changing licensing terms.

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