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

What's uncommon is the period after. Most employment contracts have a 4 weeks to 3 months notice period, both for the employer and the employee. This is very different from the US and Canada, where people give a 2 week notice.

Sure, there are things the former Playboy programmer could have said to explain why he left that job that wouldn't have raised red flags. But he didn't. Our perception was that he thought taking an anti-porn stance would make him seem more virtuous. Once he started bad-mouthing his former manager and co-workers we had to wonder whether the workplace was the problem, or if that guy was the problem.

When someone is looking for a new job the prospective employer understands implicitly that the candidate is not completely happy with their current situation (or else they wouldn't be looking to leave). Every workplace has its share of dysfunction. Usually the reason is "more money" but candidates will rarely come out and say that.

By the way, I didn't write that "you should always be positive." I wrote that bad-mouthing your former employer is never a good idea when talking to a prospective future employer, and you should have an answer to the inevitable "Why are you looking to leave?" or "Why did you leave?" questions that doesn't involve saying "That job sucks."

Senior programmers with certain skills and experience may be in the position to walk out of interviews or shop around for the job that best aligns with their personal goals and wants. Most people don't have such a range of options. We're a fairly privileged group in the job market. If you spend any time reading HN you know a lot of people struggle to get any interviews. Most people in the job market are not in a position to put their needs over the needs of the employer, and most employers expect a different kind of relationship somewhere between catering to every need and whim of their employees and "slave driving."

Interviewing is all about judging, that's what both parties should be doing -- making judgments before committing to a potentially expensive and significant relationship. A person who walks into the interview with a list of personal demands and needs (yes, I have experienced that) makes a different impression than a person who is ready to negotiate their desires while taking the employer's needs and priorities into account. How that negotiation goes depends on relative strengths of each side's position. A senior developer in this job market may be in a very strong position. Someone trying to get a job as a retail manager may not have such a good hand.

I have interviewed people for senior-level jobs who didn't even know what the company did -- they hadn't done any research at all as far as I could tell. It may be hard to learn about internal processes and team dynamics in advance, but it's not impossible, especially now with so much information online. Most people won't commit to a restaurant meal or a pair of shoes these days before reading pages of reviews, so there's no excuse for not researching a potential employer. A perceptive person can ask questions and gather information in the interview process, though it's better to walk in the door with as much information as you can get. If the employer is evasive or secretive that itself is a red flag.

> If you don't like their demands, you have the choice to meet those demands or let them go. The employee has the exact same choice. Either your demands are reasonable or they can let you go. This is the most professional perspective because anything beyond that enters the territory of slave driving.

That's a false dichotomy. Both sides have room to negotiate. I may ask for full remote, the employer may counter with three days a week. I could quit at that point, or the employer could let me go, but that's probably not the outcome either side wants. What one side thinks reasonable may not seem reasonable to the other, which is why you negotiate. Having to compromise a little is not slave driving, it's a normal part of any relationship, including an employer-employee relationship.

The point of the interview is to get an offer. The candidate and the employer should have done their homework before getting to face-to-face interviews, so by that time neither side should be getting any big surprises. I wouldn't wait for an interview to find out that the company doesn't allow remote, I would already know that. If I'm committing my time and effort to interviewing I already have some idea what the company will and will not consider reasonable, so I'm going to wait until I have an offer before negotiating demands, or even the salary and perks.

In principle, you're right, but try telling that to literally any recruiter or hiring manager. What really blows my mind, is how a couple of 6 month contracts on a resume can invalidate a candidate for future 6 month contract work. To be clear: recruiters hiring candidates for 6 month roles, do not want candidates with 6 month contracts on their resumes. Is that because they're a 'crap hiring manager'? Maybe, but then many hiring managers must be crap, because it's a question I get every time someone sees that I took a 3 month 1099 and two 6 month contracts between 2019-2020. And there are a couple of 6 month full time roles in there, from startups and projects that went sideways. Try explaining that to a nontechnical person.

Personally take a lot of phone calls just to stay abreast of the job landscape, and that's what I see every week. Not that anybody would want a 6 month contract. Just one data point, of course. Would love to be proven wrong. The culture has to change, and it's entrenched.

EDIT: Some (technical) hiring managers can interpret a resume well and will have no problem with your short stints, and will see you for what you are worth. These are the people you really want to talk to in the first place. Just ignore everyone else.

> what did you learn from this experience?

Basically, you need to be able to recognize your pain points and accept that you will need to periodically pay down technical debt.

Specifically, you need to pay down technical debt that has negative productivity.

For example: When I joined my current job, there were 1000s of compiler warnings, and the code was spread among 4 git repos. It is a C# product, and it had ~200 projects.

During my first project, one of the founders micromanaged me until I realized he was in over his head in the design. So I redid the design, and then said that my next project was cleaning up the warnings, and merging all the repos and many of the C# projects.

It saves HOURS each day; but it only worked because the founder recognized that he had to let go of some control to me. (Refer back to my point about paying down technical debt that has negative productivity.)

(I didn't tell him at the time, but if I wasn't able to clean everything up, I was going to walk away. I didn't want to spend every day juggling changes across repos.)