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After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

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Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#181

Post by krapp »

titzer wrote: post #80
sn41 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> classic cargo culting: instead of adopting the important parts, they adopt the visible parts. This is the most succinct description of cargo cutting I have come across. Thanks, will use it :)

I will think of this every time I see a getter/setter pair on a class. The illusion of modularity and encapsulation with net negative in code quality.

I can understand one or the other, and I can understand a setter that does some logic first, but to me, you might as well just make those members public if you're going to do both.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#182

Post by golergka »

Delmania wrote: post #167
golergka wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you don't have to have only one reason to work. I mean, everybody needs some amount of money for basic neccessities, but after that, it's a complicated equation of different priorities. And if you choose money only, then you're spending the best time of your day maximizing only one resources, while letting everything else take the back seat. Why do it if you can get socialization and meaning from work too? Al…

Some context is needed. The goal of Your Money or Your Life was to get more people familiar with financial independence, the idea being once you have saved enough to "retire" early, you can pick the projects you work on and the people you work with. So in that case, yes, you do optimize for resources.

> the idea being once you have saved enough to "retire" early

That assumes that you have a very high natural ability to lay off gratification to pursue your goals. If so, good for you, most people don't, and this quality (conscientiousness from the big 5) is not really mutable above very early age. So, if you do try such a strategy, most likely you will fail because you don't have willpower for it, won't be able to suffer through the job that you hate and took only for the money, and will hate yourself for it.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#183

Post by CalRobert »

adetrest wrote: post #103
stwr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, Dutchies tend to hate overtime and often in the elevator at 16:59. but there are of course exceptions. The Netherlands is a great place to work though :)

How is that a bad thing though? Why would you voluntarily work for free (overtime is rarely paid in tech) and long for it? Giving away your most valuable hours 5 days a week isn't enough, you should aspire to more? Screw that, you're an employee not the owner.

What?? I view it as a wonderful thing.

Overtime is rarely paid, but the reality is the jobs I see in NL pay a lot less than my current one. Enough less that I haven't moved. I might look in to it in a few years when I'm not at a relatively high-cost stage of life (new family, buying first home, etc.)

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#184

Post by adetrest »

CalRobert wrote: post #183
adetrest wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that a bad thing though? Why would you voluntarily work for free (overtime is rarely paid in tech) and long for it? Giving away your most valuable hours 5 days a week isn't enough, you should aspire to more? Screw that, you're an employee not the owner.

What?? I view it as a wonderful thing. Overtime is rarely paid, but the reality is the jobs I see in NL pay a lot less than my current one. Enough less that I haven't moved. I might look in to it in a few years when I'm not at a relatively high-cost stage of life (new family, buying first home, etc.)

I might have replied to the wrong comment by mistake because yes, we're essentially saying the same thing :)

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#185

Post by wpietri »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #175
wpietri wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be confusing the moral discussion we were having with some sort of legal question. Legality sometimes correlates with morality, but often diverges. As an example, slavery was legal.

I'm questioning the truth of your statement. A court of law is a highly effective tool for ascertaining the truth of an argument, and the laws as set up will invalidate a contract that finds truthful the argument that it is non-voluntary. Yet no such working arrangements have been nullified on the basis that a court found them non-voluntary. If a position has never been corroborated by court rulings, despite incentiv…

This is true only if the law interpreted by the court has a definition of "voluntary" that is 100% congruent with what other people mean. Given that even today people mean different things by that, your point makes no sense. And as I said, it's manifestly untrue that historical laws forbid contracts that match any modern definition of voluntary.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#186

Post by wpietri »

gaius wrote: post #178
mdpopescu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this objection. The interface adds flexibility in the present - it allows other classes to depend on an abstraction instead of a concrete class. The future is absolutely irrelevant here, since YAGNI.

Show me a guy who says YAGNI and I’ll show you a guy who has coded their way into a corner that the only way out is a total rewrite. Why do you think webdevs throw everything away every couple of years?

From what I've seen, web devs throw everything away every couple of years due to high technology volatility, high requirements volatility, management idiocy, and outright business failure. As well at lack of automated testing that is exacerbated by the many technologies that make that hard.

And in environments like that, YAGNI makes even more sense. Overbuilding now in hopes it will pay off later is never a great idea. But it can only ever pay off if you correctly predict your business and technological future accurately. When you guess wrong, it's just waste.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#187

Post by wpietri »

fjp wrote: post #108
wpietri wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed the article; I find the description entirely plausible and totally depressing. It definitely reminds me of Dan Lyons' book "Disrupted", which was also perfectly believable. I've been around since Bubble 1.0; I started working in San Francisco in 1997. The thing I find horrifying about this article is the way Vision Critical apparently takes the worst aspects of startups and amplifies them, while taking the…

From outside San Francisco, it looks like SV is a giant circle jerk of these exact problems you're talking about. I'm actually much more likely to believe that a startup elsewhere in the US is focusing on the important things because they're less likely to be influenced by that culture.

From the outside, sure. From the inside, that's not my impression. And given that so many places are trying to follow their perception of what SV/SF is doing, it seems very plausible to me that they will pick up and amplify those visible traits.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#188

Post by sethammons »

Annatar wrote: post #99
sethammons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, ROI and KPIs. Real cult stuff there. And the part against "teammates" in favor of "co-workers." Some of this is really stretching. There were some toxic stuff going on there for sure, but there is a lot of padding going on to get that article long. I'm from a unicorn. Employee lower 30s. Still there. Free beer, trips to Mexico, all that. Stand ups, acronyms, etc. At no time have I perceived the environment as t…

I'm from a unicorn. Employee lower 30s. Still there. Free beer, trips to Mexico, all that. Stand ups, acronyms, etc. At no time have I perceived the environment as toxic. Wow, that is horrid. Why the hell would any self-respecting, experienced and successful professional who loves what they do and are good at it put up with "trips to Mexico"? All that college nonsense is utter bullshit. If I want to go to Mexico, it…

If I said that a company wants to get employees on the same page for company strategic goals and initiatives, would you think that utter BS? What if it were put forth that it was better to do this in a all-hands style but with presentations, and everyone physically in the same venue? BS? I don't think so. Now, what if I told you this was more affordable to do away from the home office due to geography distributed offices, and that it was more affordable to do in Mexico than in the US? Naw, just horrid.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#189

Post by CryptoPunk »

wpietri wrote: post #185
CryptoPunk wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm questioning the truth of your statement. A court of law is a highly effective tool for ascertaining the truth of an argument, and the laws as set up will invalidate a contract that finds truthful the argument that it is non-voluntary. Yet no such working arrangements have been nullified on the basis that a court found them non-voluntary. If a position has never been corroborated by court rulings, despite incentiv…

This is true only if the law interpreted by the court has a definition of "voluntary" that is 100% congruent with what other people mean. Given that even today people mean different things by that, your point makes no sense. And as I said, it's manifestly untrue that historical laws forbid contracts that match any modern definition of voluntary.

The law interpreted by the court that governs contracts is common law, which is society's best approximation of the truth as it relates to justice, that has been arrived at through deliberations by trained legal experts and juries over hundreds of years.

If you're going to make outrageous claims of the courts using an alternate definition of "voluntary", that is inconsistent with the correct or generally accepted definition, you need to provide evidence of that, and no, your own sweeping generalizations about a vast array of complex interactions is not evidence of anything except your own opinion.

Re: After landing a lucrative job at a tech startup, I had made a terrible mistake

#190

Post by Annatar »

sethammons wrote: post #188
Annatar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from a unicorn. Employee lower 30s. Still there. Free beer, trips to Mexico, all that. Stand ups, acronyms, etc. At no time have I perceived the environment as toxic. Wow, that is horrid. Why the hell would any self-respecting, experienced and successful professional who loves what they do and are good at it put up with "trips to Mexico"? All that college nonsense is utter bullshit. If I want to go to Mexico, it…

If I said that a company wants to get employees on the same page for company strategic goals and initiatives, would you think that utter BS? What if it were put forth that it was better to do this in a all-hands style but with presentations, and everyone physically in the same venue? BS? I don't think so. Now, what if I told you this was more affordable to do away from the home office due to geography distributed off…

"If I said that a company wants to get employees on the same page for company strategic goals and initiatives, would you think that utter BS?"

I work at a very large multinational company. I worked at such companies for roughly two thirds of my career. The other one third I worked at a mid-size company which later on became a multinational conglomerate. Based on those experiences, I would absolutely say that it's utter bullshit. You bet I would.

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