421–430 of 505 posts
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What is an acceptable duration for someone to stay at your outfit?
Plenty of career people at this consultancy. Also transplants. I just passed 5 years.
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…
Extroverts can be incredibly ignorant and dangerous when they encounter introverts. They seem to operate on very simple heuristics.
When doing so I would typically run "TRUNCATE items;" on my local and repopulate it with the content from the not-yet-live production copy. This worked great until the afternoon where I was doing a demo for my boss in the office, realized my local datastore was in a bad state, and then got my tabs for "production" and "local" mixed up in my terminal. I truncated the entire dataset on production while my boss was standing behind me.
I got to learn a lot about how to export from Microsoft Access and import to MySQL that month. Lol.
I worked at a really toxic job at a hedge fund where I let them burn me out in a year and then they fired me. Several mistakes were made: 1) I failed to realize the importance of face time/asses in seats time. I was spending tons of ime working late nights and weekends solving hard problems outside of trading hours where nobody could see the hard work I was putting in. Also, being the only hourly, all of my coworkers…
Did you think that perhaps World of Warcraft kept you sane under those insane working conditions, ina. therapeutic way? Perhaps it was a form of escapism; gaming helped my numb brain find motivation to look for a job later in life
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Telling the uncomfortable truth plainly is a reward, a grace to someone. Why would give this favour to a bad employer? Don't lie but let them sort out why you (and other valuable people) left. Find a friend to vent to.
Because that's not compassion. The mercies we offer are chances for redemption. My team lead was young and inexperienced. I hope, with wisdom, he learns that telling the truth maximizes good outcomes.
When the compassion & effort of providing the info looks like it may possibly have a good effect, and is likely to be reasonably safe (e.g., minimal retribution/fallout effects, and is delivered with kindness - it can be good for all.
But one should first consider the consequences. Sometimes it really is best to just get away while the getting away is good.
At my first real technology job I worked at an early web hosting company. Cutting edge stuff in 1996. We hosted full domains for $60/mo and tilde domains (e.g.; domain.tld/~myname) for $25 or $30 per month. We hosted on BSDi, a proprietary BSD and every domain customer had their own sub-directory with user and group ownership. As an aside, BSDi would happily let you run `rm -rf . ` and would walk up to root and back…
I had a similar screwup, different outcome. Was working for a brokerage as an intern, IT gopher stuff, pretty much my first office job. A month in, I’m told by my boss to delete a directory on the file server. Which I do. I scurry off and rm -rf it, think it’s taking a while, so saunter out for lunch. Turns out that that directory was an active mount point for the root of the filestore on which they kept all of their…
Did you misunderstand? I don't see the logical conclusion
Commented out the credit card charging part of the order processing pipeline during testing and pushed it to production.
Ah, almost like a colleague's story. He entered the payment provider's test backend credentials and pushed to production. A few months later, the high-end-ish fashion company whose shop was outsourced to us said a customer of theirs called to ask them when they were going to bill her credit card for a purchase made weeks earlier...
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Yep, never ever quit with a list of what you did not like. You gain nothing from it.
I don't know about this one. Sometimes it's important to take a principled stand. I was at a stocks company for all of two weeks, hired by a former friend. The very first day I was told not to email the security team directly and that all my emails from then on must be approved by my team lead. Within a week, I was told to lie to the security team. I spent most of those two weeks either in meetings or as a glorified…
The remaining people/mgmt will either do nothing, see it as a squeaky wheel thankfully now being gone, or maybe even add "we need to do something about attrition" to quarterly goals but not actually change anything meaningful.
So even if you get past the "oh they were just disgruntled" justifications, I find that companies are more likely to add ping pong, beer fridays, or even bump compensation before significantly trying to change the culture.
Staying in the first company of my professional career for too long. I would have learnt more and earned more if I moved companies regularly early on.
What if you're happy where you are, you're perfectly satisfied with your salary (above median income right after leaving school and increased ~35% since then), and there is basically 1 alternative company nearby (where you'd have a lot more travel) and the rest is either a leap (hoping that you'll like a different kind of work) or more than doubles your commute time (to >1h one-way)? I heard this advice before and at…
At the very least, preserve the option to come back. Be honest with your employer, tell them you enjoy the work but are just curious what else is there.