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Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

chadfowler.com

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Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

#31

Post by kenjackson »

va_coder wrote: post #24
encoderer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, I recently escaped from a company like this. I'm not afraid to name names: ClickBooth.com, a Sarasota company in the affiliate marketing space. Myself and other programmers that once worked there all feel so grateful, we all get together on a regular basis and feel so lucky to have gotten out. Here's a funny anecodote. They were having a hard time finding new developers. About 9 months ago, if you look throug…

Thanks for the post. Anybody know if there is a good place on the Web where people can be honest about what it's like to work at specific companies?

glassdoor.com is probably the most popular I know of. There's also vault.com.

Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

#32

Post by cake »

rdrimmie wrote: post #11
dev_jim wrote: post #8

I don't know why anyone would put up with this nonsense. The market for tech is amazing right now and has been for years. It's inexcusable that anyone worth their salt should feel trapped in a dead-end job.

I think imposter syndrome ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome ) contributes, and a grim view of prospects combined with lack of knowledge on how to find jobs. If all you're doing is reading monster.com postings or whatever then the majority of jobs postings that are out there are terribly written and deeply discouraging.

Any advice on what could be better than reading monster.com ? (genuinely interested)

Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

#33

Post by belhassen »

SS is phenomenon of structural deficiency, not contextual input.

some will have SS in their job, in their affective life, in their intellectual life. others will use their job, their affective life, their intellectual life to achieve beyond. and sometime they ll even use SS of the first.

Nicolas

Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

#36

Post by jimfl »

The modern corporate structure has evolved to exploit this dynamic, so it ought to come as no shock that most everyone here has experienced it. In fact, my guess is that more than half of HNers who think positively about their current position will eventually look back upon it with feelings of having been manipulated in this way.

Even shops that style themselves as non-traditional will adopt this corporate body plan as they grow, because the new directors and officers have had "best practices" ingrained in them.

One term specifically stands out throughout my career: if you are told by the company that you are "empowered," then you're not.

Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

#37

Post by parfe »

I'm in the process of cleaning up my resume to send out today.

* My responsibilities as a programmer have constantly been increasing. Every year I become the maintainer of more projects as others quit.

* We fired a sys admin and now I'm outright doing his job in addition to my own. Management was slow to get a job posting up and has not brought people in to interview. I feel like my breadth of abilities are being abused to save money. At this point I can't be a good programmer and a good sys admin.

* I asked to telecommute one day a week and the response was actually laughter. After speaking to someone high up the policy was changed and now I need to "Justify why it would be good for the department." Which is literally impossible. There is a key set of words I need to discover that would actually activate the policy, like it's a game or something. Now I'm questing for a new employer.

* I'm working with consultants from a Big Name Firm currently modernizing our X. These consultants send conflicting information and documents which aren't even internally consistent and then bill us while I work with them to clean up their bullshit. These people are earning 5x my pay and can't do their job. Then I was asked to work while I was on vacation this week to check up on the consultants progress. And sure enough they fucked up.

* Salaries are frozen even though we are profitable.

* A majority of my coworkers have no will to learn. I can dictate pseudo code to them to help with an issue and they will actually start typing the pseudo code into the editor and then be confused when it doesn't work. And a week later they will have a very similar issue with no ability to make the mental connection to the work done a week earlier.

Whew, nice to actually type all that out.

Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

#38

Post by pyre »

SandB0x wrote: post #12

Dead end jobs destroy transferable technical skills. I've witnessed miserable scenes. Many people are stuck maintaining large pieces of poorly written software. They forget how to actually program because their work involves very little development, and becomes all about knowing how the specific piece of software works (and the company's admin procedures) so that they can fight fires and make minor changes. Escape in…

Those aren't necessarily untransferable skills. You can always bill yourself as being able to get up-to-speed on a new codebase quickly and pitch yourself to corporations that need someone to battle their existing, horrible codebase. They need people that can be productive within their codebase.

An additional plus is if you're good at pushing incremental change to the existing codebase to get it under control. (e.g. my company has a large pre-existing Perl codebase, some of which mirrors functionality of various modules/packages on CPAN -- some better, some worse -- and there is a lot of internal push to move towards things like Moose, Try::Tiny, etc where possible for newer classes, etc)

Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

#39

Post by parfe »

encoderer wrote: post #7
edw519 wrote: post #2

I once worked at a company that managed to pull off all four conditions with one brilliant but devious hack: The warehouse uniform was a t-shirt imprinted with, "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Perceived Threat This implied that problems were the workers' fault, not the boss's. Subtle, but effective. Small Kindness Believe it or not, many people were actually glad to be given their own t-shirt by t…

Oh yes, I recently escaped from a company like this. I'm not afraid to name names: ClickBooth.com, a Sarasota company in the affiliate marketing space. Myself and other programmers that once worked there all feel so grateful, we all get together on a regular basis and feel so lucky to have gotten out. Here's a funny anecodote. They were having a hard time finding new developers. About 9 months ago, if you look throug…

I'm not allowed to post job openings for my department. That's HR's job! And they don't post on third party sites. I asked about placing some notices up on various sites and was turned down for no communicated reason.

Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

#40

Post by paulbaumgart »

cake wrote: post #32
rdrimmie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think imposter syndrome ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome ) contributes, and a grim view of prospects combined with lack of knowledge on how to find jobs. If all you're doing is reading monster.com postings or whatever then the majority of jobs postings that are out there are terribly written and deeply discouraging.

Any advice on what could be better than reading monster.com ? (genuinely interested)

Meet people who are working on things that interest you and convince them that you can help.
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