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Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

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Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#221

Post by maximente »

toop43 wrote: post #69
throwaway29488 wrote: post #2

Not with the job in particular, just want to take a break from tech especially from being a programmer. Tired of staring at a screen for 80% of my awake time and constant puzzle solving. Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough, that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work.

> Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough, that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work. Dealing with this in the heavy right now. I've built a lot in my 10 years as a programmer. Infinitely, and automatically scaled application server based on load. Hasn't crashed or had a single downtime ever since release. I've built mobile applications 100% myself…

i'm going to be honest with you - if you wrote an app that has never crashed or had a single downtime yet is infinitely/auto scalable based on load, it is either extremely simple, you are a legitimate genius, or you exaggerated. there is just so much that can go wrong there that i'm skeptical, ergo i'm skeptical of other things you wrote.

however, if what you said is generally true, then it's obvious you have some skills gluing stuff together. news flash: this is what a large fraction of people in this industry do on the day to day, it's just that nobody wants to admit it. 90% of my previous software engineering jobs was just figuring out how to get things to talk to each other.

key for you i think will be spinning your skills in a way that makes you attractive.

you'd seem like a good fit as a consultant. clients generally don't care about how you'd write a string matching algorithm from scratch and what the theoretical runtime is in theta notation - they typically appreciate contributions, on deadlines, and clear communication. they pay you to figure out how to make stuff work on a schedule you mutually agree to, and you either give them that and get paid, or don't and don't. put up or shut up, so to speak.

so i'd start there. you have a large pool of knowledge, so just pick whatever interests you the most. then what you think you should get paid per hour, and triple it.

expect 80% to not follow up on leads and 80% to reject your schedule/hourly rate/etc. sort of like interviewing, but at least you're not stooping down to a level of desperation. keep your head up: your skills are worth a large amount of $, so don't take it personally, and don't reduce it just to get scrub-tier work/wages - unless you're legitimately broke, but hopefully after so much working you've got some sort of cushion.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#222

Post by sterlind »

chupasaurus wrote: post #156
74847399281 wrote: post #36

This fucking year... So, for starters I'm already really depressed and low energy due to a death of a really close family member. I have particularly low tolerance and high fatigue due to this. So, we shipped a product, successfully on time in a company that has had many years of difficulty of shipping products in our target market. Which was the goal. So the new management decides to disband the team, most of the te…

> Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine. Reminds me one of my past colleagues who worked at some_proprietary_compiler with so many tests for corner cases that it took 6 hours for each build on a top enthusiast grade PC each person in a project was provided. Also the presence in office for 8 hours a day was mandatory, imagine the whole team spread around the place for the mo…

I've had to work in some gnarly monorepos where pulling the dependencies down itself took an hour and a hundred gigs. Local builds were not fast. I usually ended up hacking the build system to build individual projects manually and copying things where they needed to go. sigh much much happier now that I'm living in a smaller repo.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#223

Post by swtrs »

My team runs a mission critical application nearly all of us were duped into supporting. Ops engineering turned into "process champion" and now I yell at people about ticket structure (bane of my existence) instead of diagnosing db performance issues (things I gleefully lose sleep over.) Now I question my passion for IT daily, fall asleep at lunch and wait for the day I do bad enough to be fired.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#224

Post by aussieguy1234 »

bloopernova wrote: post #218
rjplatte wrote: post #100

I'm the sole developer working on my current project, which is overhauling a massive DOS era application, as well as overhauling an early 2000s era CRM/business management tool, that almost all of our work happens through. Did I mention that the DOS application is a HIPAA billing application that must meet all HIPAA guidelines as well as write EDI X12 billing files? I'm very junior, been coding for ~5 years, 3 profes…

You do know that HIPAA violations can land you in jail, right? Run. Don't walk. Vacate immediately. Leave. I'm finding myself hoping that this is a fake, because I wouldn't wish this situation on anyone at all.

This might be why the CEO doesn't want version control. It's extra evidence

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#225

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

bartread wrote: post #191
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #24

Once when I was a recruiter I got a call from one of my clients because they said that my consultant was being irritable. I called the consultant and he told me that it had been a week and a day and he still hadn't been issued a company computer to work on.

I contracted somewhere once where a new full time employee had to wait a month before he was issued a machine. I don't know how he stuck it.

Same happened to me as a contractor, but I was fine with it. Most I've ever been paid to read books.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#226

Post by ggm »

I took a role which relates to a strategic goal aligned with correctness of data held. Its public-trust information. From time to time, pragmatism around "can't we just change this record..." makes my blood boil: Its explicitly not what I took the role to do: fixing pragmatic bad choices time after time, makes me want to go do something else, when the intent was to defend a line of historical accuracy and completeness.

The agency is a community benefit NFP, consensus led policy. The decisions we take off-policy worry me intensely. But realistically not all things can be done by consensus. I do think there are some pressures in this space which are similar to the above: if your own moral compass and how the enterprise is driving don't align well, you really need to talk to yourself about why you are doing things. (I am not so far mis-aligned i have this problem, but I have in the past)

Friends left e.g. the IETF, precisely because of this. If you can't adhere to the norms, you need to ask why you're going.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#227

Post by whateveracct »

rjplatte wrote: post #100

I'm the sole developer working on my current project, which is overhauling a massive DOS era application, as well as overhauling an early 2000s era CRM/business management tool, that almost all of our work happens through. Did I mention that the DOS application is a HIPAA billing application that must meet all HIPAA guidelines as well as write EDI X12 billing files? I'm very junior, been coding for ~5 years, 3 profes…

If you're that young (18??), you can almost definitely afford to quit tomorrow and look for something better.

Never sacrifice your own career for your employer's success (within some time horizon.) Being willing to quit when your boss is a clear bad actor is a core part of this.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#228

Post by technomike »

etxm wrote: post #123
protomyth wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO Did the CEO give a reason? I'm a bit curious based on it being billing and HIPPA. Also, are you rolling your own EDI import/export?

HIPAA

I've work with HIIPA and VC. No issues, as long you do not store patient information within the source code, I cannot think of any reason why you would need to do that...

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#229

Post by zucked »

firstplacelast wrote: post #70
0xDEFC0DE wrote: post #20

After 8 hours total interviewing at one company, I kinda feel like I was hired and fired in a single day

I'm interviewing for the first time in years, totally forgot how degrading it is. For one company had 1 interview/week (each relatively short) for 4 weeks, passed the technical (my third interview) and then the 4th/final interview I was asked 95% the same questions that were asked in the 2nd interview. I gave the same answers. And then I was turned down.

At least you got an answer. I was searching (being picky) for almost a year. I got through numerous phone screens and in-persons where I confirmed the timeline before leaving (ie. you're going to make a decision on 'X' day and notify candidates) and the dickheads just straight tried to ghost me. I persisted until I got an answer, even if it was one I didn't like because you owe your applicants a goddamn answer either way.

My favorite is when you apply for a job and you get there and magically the job title/responsibilities have changed. It's like, y'all don't even know what you're looking for… get bent.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#230

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

blotter_paper wrote: post #189
rjplatte wrote: post #100

I'm the sole developer working on my current project, which is overhauling a massive DOS era application, as well as overhauling an early 2000s era CRM/business management tool, that almost all of our work happens through. Did I mention that the DOS application is a HIPAA billing application that must meet all HIPAA guidelines as well as write EDI X12 billing files? I'm very junior, been coding for ~5 years, 3 profes…

>having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO Well that's really fucking stupid of them. Maybe they're worried about evidence of old HIPAA breaches existing after the system gets updated, and doesn't want to explain that logic? On your local development station: mkdir repo cd repo git init --bare cd .. git clone repo project_folder cd project_folder cp -r ../ /project project Congratulations, you now…

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/505467/can-i-store-the-g... you dont need to copy files, just tell git to store its data in another dir
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