171–180 of 505 posts
Working for a company that exploits [mostly] kids/teens' attention while being aware of the long term negative psychological effects of such.
We all hate it, but it pays the bills. It's ultimately better to be in this position as a thoughtful person aware of the consequences of your work, since they would just replace you with someone less conscionable otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last I checked, nearly everyone in tech hops jobs frequently. In fact that’s common advice for comp advancement. In my personal experience that advice holds true, even though I change jobs much less frequently than most of my peers (which means my comp tends to lag behind theirs).
I've refused to hire people who job-hopped every year or two. With a record like that, there's zero reason to expect they're going to stick around. Why invest in bringing them up to speed if they're just going to leave?
Even aside from the FAE, this kind of attitude also systematically reinforces structural discrimination within an industry, since candidates from unusual or unprivileged backgrounds are less likely to have been offered major career opportunities, or been obliged to juggle many life priorities along the way, and thereby more likely to have taken whatever they could get, or could realistically manage. Yet these can be some of the most interesting hires, thanks to their diverse/alternative perspectives, and may also be top-tier outliers when it comes to resilience, self-management, and self-directed learning.
It’s also a failure of values since there’s an underlying assumption that people are interchangeable widgets, which is both false and dehumanising.
For my own account, I hopped a lot in my early career before finding places where I felt I could belong and stay for years, and this pattern has repeated. So you’d likely have taken a pass on me whilst I went on to become senior this and principal that elsewhere, en route to starting my own firm. Go figure.
My biggest mistake, that I made again and again, was not leaving a job when it was time. I thought I had something to prove, but there was never any point to it. You don't owe anything to an employer. You can't prove anything to an employer. They have absolutely no loyalty to you, and care less than nothing about what is right or wrong, wise or foolish. So: If you ever think things might not turn out as well as you h…
I agree, but just a note: it doesn't do your career any good to hop a lot. I won't hire someone that looks flaky. If you find yourself at a bad job, sure, move on. But work on sussing out the good from the bad so you don't put yourself in a bad situation repeatedly.
In the end, I realized I need to be doing interview prep pretty much all the time. Maybe give it up just before you start the next job and while you’re ramping up but it should just be routine once you hit 6 months or a year. There’s no reason to not do it because in all likelihood, you’ll be switching jobs.
I’m going into my sixth job in about 8 years now. I shouldn’t expect to stay at my next place longer than 2 years and thus should be prepping well before my planned time of exit.
Not going to to a software engineering heavy organization. Instead I went to a place where we had to justify using Java 8 instead of Java 7.
I would say not prepping enough for technical interviews. I did a lot of prep (hundreds of hours) but it wasn’t enough. I needed more because I was always being compared to senior engineers with 10+ years of XP who had been through the gauntlet a lot. Very few companies were ever explicating hiring for a junior or “mid” level role when I was looking. (Less than 3 years xp) In the end, I realized I need to be doing in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t feel too bad. My grandfather had the opportunity to buy some land in Atlanta in the late 60’s/early 70’s and turned it down because it was shanty town and the guy offering him the opportunity was a known crook. Shortly after that it became CNN Center.
As my grandfather told my Dad one time (California) “Why would I pay good money for worthless dirt in La Jolla?”
I worked in a large corp you know about in California.. as a loner with few colleagues, I was deep in some assembly language and other nerdy topics, and not great with culture and certainly still a visible rebel. Meanwhile, my colleague from Big School Nearby was hired as staff engineer. There was serious IP on the table and security was an issue always. It turns out that my colleague had an appetite for money beyond…
Taking a year break in 2014. I lost potential to earn a few millions from continuity of my career. I also discovered I like coding and don't really enjoy traveling. Traveling is romanticized too much in our culture.
How can mere continuity be worth millions of dollars? Or did you skip a particularly lucrative opportunity? You're right about travelling. Unless you're travelling with a reason or at least knowing people at your destination, it's usually fairly unfulfilling.
If you are at tier 1 non-FAANG like Square, Stripe, yes, it is very lucrative.
Back then I was a junior that got luck with IPO ~2011 and went up to senior fairly quickly.
If I stuck to that company, I could have been staff/senior staff by now. Imagine being staff eng since 2015. That's a lot of millions probably.
I regret a lot. I came back and join tier 1 non-FAANG and still hit a few millions. But I could have had ~10 millions instead of a few millions.
This is a lifetime money that is worth sacrifice a few years of my life. Also, working at these companies are not bad. It's actually great and enjoyable as well. You live like a king (e.g. spending 20k for a 2 weeks vacation is kinda meh.) and still save like 200K-400K a year or something.
For me, this kind of money is just crazy. I made like 10x more than my parents. This was why I took a year break. I thought I was already too wealthy (oh boy I was so wrong).
Deciding to take a year break and traveling at the height of tech is one of the worst decisions I have made.
Taking a year break in 2014. I lost potential to earn a few millions from continuity of my career. I also discovered I like coding and don't really enjoy traveling. Traveling is romanticized too much in our culture.
I've never taken a break year but I have taken full advanrage of travel opportunities. I took a few one month vacations at one company. Certainly didn't cost me millions though unless it would have been it discouraged me to make a big change regardless of changes in vacation time maybe. But I doubt it.
Traveling for a year is just tiring...