The team player thing was a huge lesson I learned recently. If you just defer to what other people say you’re likely to get things wrong, people hire you as a software engineer because they expect you to share your thoughts and that sometimes means disagreeing with the team.
Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
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Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#12« I don't send out e-mails that are like this: Please get on your phone, turn off your wifi, and then navigate to HN, then to new, then find the post, THEN upvote it. Don't upvote it from the post itself. The company, however, does. A LOT. (Explains a few things, doesn't it?) »
Yikes!!! I’d like to know which company this is.
Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#13To OP: I wish you all the best. I didn't read or comment on the original article. One thing to consider is to not engage with the critics. It's hard, I know -- really I know. An engineering mind set might make you not want to "flip the bozo bit", and to learn as much from your detractors as possible. There may be strategic reasons to get your story out -- e.g. if your co-workers or potential clients are getting a dis…
Ignoring the critics allows them to swell in self-importance and gather a crowd around them.
Why did you choose to pressure someone else here to ignore “HN’s mental illness” and let it fester, rather than to pressure HN’s commenters here to stop being poisonous to others?
Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#14It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the…
> What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter?
I suspect tone to be the secret sauce. You can rewrite most things in ways that at least some people will dislike without changing the facts. You can also rewrite them in a way that will solicit sympathy from those same people. Tone can change a lot.
Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#15It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the…
I generally enjoy Rachel's posts and I never support vitriol, but I read the first couple paragraphs of the original post just now and my impression was, "all of this sounds very normal". I don't know if that holds for the entire thing or not, but I would guess that many of us have gone through much of this stuff and barely even been annoyed by it. So I think maybe that's the difference.
Now, whether that comes down to "things used to be less stupid and we're just all younger and don't know any better" or whether it comes down to "the author just got really frustrated and impatient about things that didn't bother most of us" I don't know. But I will say that I've gotten unreasonably impatient about different things before, so I get it, and I think a person has the right to rant about work without backlash even if it doesn't make for the world's most insightful piece.
Edit: I read the rest of it, and yeah, after the dev env stuff things got a bit weirder. However, in my limited experience, it's not outside the norm for large tech companies to treat their employees like children (which is one of my pet peeves too, which is why I don't work at them). It's also not outside the norm for "new-wave" tech companies to be a bit haphazard when it comes to office/workstation setup and such. But generally you're picking one poison or the other. Given that I'm pretty sure the author was talking about Lyft, I can see how in this case they ended up with both.
Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#16Oh boy. I don’t think this is a good idea, writing it nor taking such comments too seriously in the first place.
Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#17It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the…
> What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter? I suspect tone to be the secret sauce. You can rewrite most things in ways that at least some people will dislike without changing the facts. You can also rewrite them in a way that will solicit sympathy from those same people. Tone can change a lot.
Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same: I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid.
And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory.
Except here.
Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#18I've left new jobs over things much less annoying than this. That she stuck it out is incredible.
If you start at a company and they can't have a computer/desk/whatever you need ready without a good reason, that's a terrible start. I've worked with people with very little money or resources who still manage to create a quick, sane, respectful onboarding process. There's no excuse for anything else, and in my experience it's a great indicator of things to come.
Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#19To OP: I wish you all the best. I didn't read or comment on the original article. One thing to consider is to not engage with the critics. It's hard, I know -- really I know. An engineering mind set might make you not want to "flip the bozo bit", and to learn as much from your detractors as possible. There may be strategic reasons to get your story out -- e.g. if your co-workers or potential clients are getting a dis…
Ignoring the critics allows them to swell in self-importance and gather a crowd around them. Why did you choose to pressure someone else here to ignore “HN’s mental illness” and let it fester, rather than to pressure HN’s commenters here to stop being poisonous to others?
Focusing on personal behavior is a bit more productive than trying to shape an internet community that's open to the public to some arbitrary standard of toxicity.
Re: Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
#20It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the…
> What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter?
Being a woman. The dogpilers are most likely cluing in on her name.
