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Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

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Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#351

Post by fearingreprisal »

jl2718 wrote: post #320

So many ideas in my head that I really want to be working on, and I can’t seem to separate myself from the mental model of having a set position in a heirarchy, taking confused and/or hostile direction from seemingly arbitrary sources of authority. Some kind of fear, not even financial, more like the idea of getting lost, losing touch, never finding my way back, being abandoned and undesirable, dying alone. And beyon…

I've always wondered the same thing. I've lived a reasonably stressful life, living through much worse things than the daily monotony of office life as a software engineer. However there are some days where it truly just crushes my spirits and leaves me completely spiritually depleted. There's truly something to be said regarding the elasticity of our mental health and how large a role expectations and norms play in our mental well-being. Not to mention there may be something particularly dehumanizing about the profession of software engineering.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#352

Post by [deleted] »

seizethecheese wrote: post #285
whatshisface wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a third world sweathop worker. I was forced to make clothes here ever since I could walk. There are hundreds of people packed in to this tiny windowless room, and every time there is a fire I die. My coworkers can't even afford alcohol. Every time I hear decadent American line cooks complain about their working conditions, all I can think is, they have it so easy.

Yes, this illuminates the point even better. Software devs are among the best treated first world employees. In a global perspective, most (but not all) complaints are laughable.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#353

Post by askmike »

throwawaymyjob wrote: post #37

Please sign me up! I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed state, then canceled. I'm on a very small team, I am the only expert in infrastructure, but all infrastructure code is reviewed by the lead engineer who is a complete novice at AWS/GCP. I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind…

It sounds that your additions aren't values by your team. It might be because (like you say) you are the only expert on X. If you are in such a situation you should be in charge for X, if not you'll be fighting these battles every time.

> I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.

Great that you were writing all of that, but it sounds like even before that wiki reorg your docs weren't read or used by anyone else. Especially if you are the only person who understands what you're writing, why are you writing it? The only possible reason I see for spending all that time is for the situation where they hire someone else who knows about cloud as well.

> I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default.

Note that if you give common-sense suggestions about not X (backend code, or databases for example) but you are not the person who is responsible for it / in charge of it, you are telling people (who think they are more expert in that topic) what they should be doing. I'd probably fight that to. If you are given common-sense suggestions about X that impacts how they need to do non X, well that's work they don't want to do. I don't like lawyers or compliance guys telling me how I need to arch my code either (if I could ignore them I probably would ;))

Look at it from the other side: here is our colleague throwawaymyjob who is our cloud guy, whenever he is in whatever meeting (that's not purely about cloud) he is telling everyone else how they can do things better. But he's not responsible for doing that nor how that turns out.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#354

Post by thrower123 »

jpeg_hero wrote: post #304
tayo42 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On call is shitty and I wish it wasn't accepted they way it is. Either hire people to work around the globe, or people that want to hire in shifts or accept that your product isn't going to be on 24 hours a day.

Even Facebook does on-call. So money can’t solve it. If you wrote the code and it breaks you’re kinda the only one that can fix it (in a hurry)

Any time you're called in for an emergency off-work hours, you should get time and a half, minimum of four hours paid.

Blue collar industrial jobs treat their people better than software usually does.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#355

Post by house9-2 »

marrone12 wrote: post #242
house9-2 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO Version Control is a basic requirement of professional software development in this day and age. You could try explaining to your CEO it would be like telling a carpenter they can't use a hammer to build your new house. Or just take the initiative and use Version Control without telling them. In my mind it isn't som…

This is bad advice. If you accidentally leave personally identifiable healthcare information on some random stage server and that server gets hacked, that is a federal crime. If the data and application code are very intertwined (likely in a pre-SOA era), it can be very difficult to version control code completely isolated from PII.

> If you accidentally leave personally identifiable healthcare information on some random stage server and that server gets hacked, that is a federal crime.

Not sure how that relates to Version Control? I personally don't put production (real) data on staging servers to begin with; always scrub your production clones or generate data for testing instances.

> If the data and application code are very intertwined (likely in a pre-SOA era), it can be very difficult to version control code completely isolated from PII.

Maybe I am naive (never had to work on DOS), but shouldn't the data be in a database/datastore/data directory that can be ignored by source control?

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#356

Post by Apocryphon »

seizethecheese wrote: post #305
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is room to recognize that line cooks don’t get treated as well as software engineers while also discussing unfair treatment of workers in any field. Abuse of software engineers is not unimportant simply because other workers have it worse. We as wage workers can work in solidarity with others to fight abusive labor conditions in all fields. Absolutely the service workers need representation and fair tre…

Yes, good point. There should be room for any field to advocate for improving their collective well-being. I still hope this type of thread doesn't catch on. The comments here skew negative and entitled, in my opinion.

There are certain anonymous communities and subreddits where IT workers come together to complain, attack, or boast in very toxic ways, and it is understandable to be concerned about a similar situation arising. That said, any industry, even the well-paying, can have room for awful, nonsensical, and oppressive working conditions. Why would you deprive people the chance to commiserate with each other? You don't know the extent of their suffering.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#357

Post by woutr_be »

dash2 wrote: post #349
woutr_be wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a cozy job in the US? Software Engineers face horrible working conditions in a lot of parts of Asia, far worse than your line cook example.

Got evidence?

There's the whole 996 culture in China, for one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#359

Post by proc0 »

seizethecheese wrote: post #267

I sure hope this format doesn't take off. Having worked as a dishwasher, line cook, pool manager, business analyst, software engineer, and startup founder, I have to say software engineer was, by far, the most coddled job. How about this: I'm a line cook, and I can't afford to be fired. I make minimum wage, and burn or cut myself badly at least once per week. I'm not allowed to take the day off and have to work throu…

Yes but that job is easy to execute, and there is no risk of falling behind and one day not knowing how to do the job because things evolved so quickly and you slacked off on weekends instead of trying to keep up. Additionally, it's not a job that in order to do better requires you to isolate yourself more and more. The better code you want to write, the more you need to practice, which may mean more hours alone. This pace kills your social life much quicker than many other lines of work, imho. Just saying it's really more subjective than anything else, not to mention all the other possible variables which combined make it hard to say whether any line of work is harder/easier than some other one.

Re: Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

#360

Post by whateveracct »

protomyth wrote: post #290
whateveracct wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're that young (18??), you can almost definitely afford to quit tomorrow and look for something better. It very probably is the opposite. A lot of people who end up working at 18 are doing it because they need the money and their support network is poor.

That's a good point. If things will go to shit if you quit, by all means don't. But regardless look to secure a job before quitting.
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