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Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

#141

Post by javajosh »

"Unprofessional" is saying, "You guys suck, I quit." Professional is saying, "Well guys, it's been 6mo and it looks like it's not a good fit, and I'll be moving on. This is my 2 weeks notice." (But be prepared to be let go immediately.)

The thing is, no-one really cares about professionalism though. What they care about is working code, good commits, and if you don't feel like you can get there in this org then leaving is the right thing to do for both. Bummer for them spending 6mo ramping up a new dev that didn't work out; bummer for you you spent 6mo learning crap that doesn't matter (unique organizational failure modes scale with N! where N is the number of independent mistakes you can make). A bummer, but at least it wasn't a 6 year bummer. GL

Re: Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

#142

Post by fractal618 »

nomercy400 wrote: post #105

It's not bad to look for something else after six months. Shit jobs exist. Keep looking. Hard questions for yourself: How did I get in this situation? How did I get such a mismatch between your expectations and reality? Why didn't I see this at the job interview? Answering these will help you evaluate future job offerings. Ofcourse I do not know how the interview went. Maybe you didn't ask, maybe you did and they did…

He said it was

> a long period of job hunting

I've also been met with a lot of "You're new" "You'll get used to it" "we know it's a mess, but it's not going to change"

Re: Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

#144

Post by ianai »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #124
_odey wrote: post #118

Q: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess? A: No. Notes: personally I would have either abandoned it during the first month or at the end of the probation period, depending on severity, otherwise I'd force myself to stick around for the year, so I wouldn't get questions during further interviews for why I stayed there only X months. A "hack" would be to endure until somewhere in January ne…

An alternative to hacking your resume is simply leaving the short position off altogether. Your resume doesn't have to be a total transcript of your career. It should just be a highlight of most relevant experiences for your desired job. The same goes for really old jobs too btw - having a detailed explanation of your exploits in Java Swing on page 4 of your resume is likely distracting and irrelevant. Consider makin…

Further, the first few months absolutely are a two way street on “fit”. Hopping out quickly shouldn’t be a red flag. Having 12 employers in 6 years could be a problem or even just standard for certain contractors. Also maybe something better came along.

Re: Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

#145

Post by henvic »

Just leave. It's the professional thing to do, if you can sustain yourself.

In 2012 I've left my hometown and went to the other side of my country to work at a startup. Within 20 days I left because the situation was critical. I was already feeling like I should leave on the second week, but decided to wait just to break-even from my moving expenses.

It was e-commerce startup where the team lead / project manager was actually the only backend engineer.

One of the problems I had was that it was impossible to work with him.

He despised git, so we used svn. Fine. It was in the early days of git, I could understand that. He didn't write proper svn messages (but garbage like... always 'ghnwerigkelrwn'), and told me I shouldn't care about it. Ugh... Okay, I think I can try to change this situation.

Then on my first days of work I noticed that something was very wrong with the repo. Turns out the guy configured his Eclipse IDE to commit to SVN any time he saved any change.

And he'd just type random keys out of boredom in any part of the system (PHP, which is an interpreted language) and break things wildly.

For those that doesn't know: SVN is a centralized versioning system. It's not like git, where you push things 'later'. When you commit, it's sent to a central server.

Re: Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

#146

Post by cessor »

Does your employer pay for your technical skillset and your labor, or do they pay you for sacrificing your mental health? I don't think self-care is unprofessional, and deciding to leave is perfectly fine.

Professionalism means being able to produce convergent results given varying resources, but when the spec is unclear, your employer doesn't provide appropriate resources for you to perform or if your mental health is in danger, I think it's perfectly valid to back off. "Professional" does not mean "sorcerer". A professional photographer can't take a good picture in complete darkness, and even a good architect can't create a distributed system when the environment won't support it. It argue it's professional to know your own limits and reject a job offer.

It's difficult to make the decision to leave, especially when you have been jobhunting for a while and I can't say anything substantial on how anyone should make such a decision, but the other day I found a meme saying (something along those lines):

In a job, you should either earn or learn; either is good, both is ideal, if it's neither: leave. If the job pays ok money, but costs your sanity, I'd argue you should leave.

Re: Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

#147

Post by RhysU »

geofft wrote: post #133
RhysU wrote: post #81

> I'm senior and was hired as such Someone hired you as a senior employee. Senior folks are expected to fix messes like what you describe. Go to the right person and ask for the political capital and support to fix 2 specific things. If you don't get a promise for that support or you don't see that support sustained, leave. If you get that support, fix exactly those 2 things as quickly as possible. Then ask for the s…

Not disagreeing with you, but OP specifically mentions being burned out, and I think for this specific situation it may be better to cut losses and go elsewhere. If you have the energy and enthusiasm for fixing broken things, this is great advice, ideally before the point of burnout / before six months (but after at least a month or so). But not every senior role has to involve cleaning up messes and picking politica…

Burning out is likely due to a lack of focus on concrete, actionable, blessed endeavors. Fixing everything at once is impossible.

Re: Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

#148

Post by whiddershins »

rkangel wrote: post #56

6 months is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to judge a job and leave it. The important thing is to be able to defend it in future interviews, and do so in a reasoned way rather than an emotional one. For example instead of "the team were incredibly frustrating to work with and ignored all my suggestions", instead "the culture made it very hard to do quality engineering, which over time was demoralising". Sweepi…

This … isn’t the advice I would give.

I would personally never say negative things about a previous employer regardless of how carefully worded.

Re: Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

#149

Post by rpmisms »

itamarst wrote: post #54

A company I worked for once interviewed someone who had just started at a different company. We asked why he was leaving so soon, he explained he had some differences of opinion and that it wasn't going to work out well. He seemed great, we hired him, he was indeed great. After we'd hired him, we asked about the old company again. "Oh, it was an utter shitshow" and he went on a long and very compelling rant about how…

Yep, this is how I left my first job. Interviewed at another place, said "not a great fit", left. When I got there I was perfectly happy to explain how the CEO was literally grabbing people by their throats if they didn't meet quotas.
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