Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

The great thing about being given 6 hours to do a 6 week job is that you know it's impossible. So you say "I'm going to need to work from home". Then off you go to the beach. Or a job interview. Pull a Paula [1]. Then come back and say "Oh it's waiting for app store approval".

[1] http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean

The learning curve isn't too bad? Do you actually use Git? Like, from the command line?

I have no issue with a friendly wrapper in general, but after starting with the basic interface, I don't trust a wrapper to be logical, complete, and well thought out, given the foundation.

There are other good replies for where to visit in Seattle, but one more: I went recently, and we went to this Starbucks Reserve. Sounds really dumb, but it was really cool and unique relative to any coffee shop I'd been in. Nothing to go out of the way for, but if you end up nearby (there's stuff nearby), drop in.

Otherwise for Pike Place, we did a food tour. It was overpriced, but looking back we both felt it was worth it. Kind of get to skip lines and try a bunch of really great food. Touristy of course, but so what.

It all started with Brainbench in around 2000, when I did some testing on them, when they were still free and even sent you hard copy certificates for free. So I had fun with testing myself online and got those certificates. Fast forward to 2007 when out of boring I wanted to do some more test and I found out that Brainbench was now a paid platform for tests and the hard copies were actually around $50 to get, so I wanted to find something else that had free tests. And I stumbled upon oDesk this way - back then they were called that, now they are Upwork. So I made an account with them, filled all the fields there with my mind wandering around, including all the fields that were not required - and this was actually crucial later, out of pure luck. Then I started to do tests to see how I grew meanwhile vs. Brainbench. Then I forget all about for half an year, when in September a notification from oDesk came into my e-mail about a potential client wanting me to work on some component but for very little money - he figured I was good enough but without history of jobs and wanted to take advantage of it. I outright refused the job but this opened my eyes to what oDesk really was - a freelancing platform. So I started to tinker with this idea to have some side projects and do them on my free time. At that time I was over an year employed by a German company and I was support/programmer for anything the technicians of said company was need it. Their main job was carpentry repairs and the technicians were using laptops to record the entire job at client site. It was a successful company hiring hundreds of technicians but was having only us 3 as IT support/programmers. So one day the leader quit, he found a way better lucrative job in Switzerland, the other guy was never good enough in the eyes of the company owner and when he asked for a salary raise was denied and he quit too. So I was solo and I started to not care at all about the job anymore. I was just like in "Office Space", coming at 11 or even noon, leaving after 2 or 3 hours, during this time I was completely only browsing internet and procrastinating heavily. 3 months later, in February 2008 I was like at already 3rd client from oDesk and this one was a heavy project with long term relationship, so I just started to actually work via encrypted VPN from work for those projects at home as well. I believe that was the final straw for them and they kinda fired me. I mean, was not a firing per se, but more of a situation where they asked my resignation and I just stopped going to work. My contract was bullet proof and anything less then actually committing murder or arson (like in Office Space) could not fire me from work. So no bug in software to steal money or arson like in Office Space, but everything else was point on - coming at my own hours, heave(n)ly procrastinating at work, leave early, got promoted (sic!) also, even had sex at office with a girl I picked-up one day on my way to work and she was a screamer, the entire lower floor where some paper pushers were working heard everything despite multiple attempts on my side to quiet her by putting my hand on her mouth. Yeah, not even that was good enough to get me fired, the owner when called me later that day didn't said a single word about this and he definitely was informed about it by the paper pushers. Oh yeah, we had a table tennis in the yard, I started to get kids from street to play with them, for hours and I was still promoted. So totally Office Space. Hope you enjoyed ScottFree - have a nice day

Disclaimer: current amazon sde

I was shocked at the end of your story that it was Amazon you were talking about, but I'm assuming this story happened at least a few years ago. I know of one friend who was put on a PIP around 2013 or 2014 - he is still with the company, has been trusted to be the technical lead for several large and important projects, and the only thing standing between him and a promotion to L6 is laziness in preparing the paperwork.

Amazon seems to have changed the process to what they call the "pivot program" - when previously you would have been put on a PIP (and given severance if you accepted it and failed it), you are now given the choice of

1) take severance

2) appeal (you will almost certainly lose, I don't have data for this but have heard about many of these appeals and exactly zero have gone in favor of the employee)

3) do the PIP, and if you fail it you are fired with no severance

Given that you are now offered severance as an alternative to a PIP and don't get a penny if you fail it, being put in the pivot program is unambiguously a pink slip. Sad to be reminded that Amazon used to be good at this, I don't think they are anymore