New job time.
>My salary has been the same from the day I joined in 2019.
Have you not pushed for one at all? If you don't even get an inflationary raise, you shouldn't stay for one year, let alone three.
Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
31–40 of 108 posts
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I did also come to them with a job offer from another company that had a larger dollar amount associated to it. As far as I know, this negotation strategy is orders of magnitude more effective than voicing feelings about being treated unfairly. Unless OP comes with better competing offer, there is likely nothing that can be changed in his situation.
Its even more effective — usually — to just take the better offer and leave. OP - you owe these people nothing.
In my case I preferred my current employer despite some more money from the other.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#33Have a discussion. Present your case and listen to your manager's response.
I can't speak for all managers, but I've never met a reasonable manager who wanted to drive our a good engineer even in this economy.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding along the way?
Don't listen to the people who presume all managers are bad, have bad motive, want to screw you for stochastic reasons, or are 100% willing to execute their manager's bad plan.
A lot of managers are ex engineers just like you that want to build great products, enjoy work and their engineering brains still exist and don't want to be a*h*les.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#34I’m blown away by some of the other comments here. There’s no value in having a victim mentality. Have you openly spoken to your manager about your concerns? How it doesn’t feel fair? How you feel you’re being treated? There’s a chance they have no idea. Maybe they’re not that experienced and are just working things out themselves. Or if they seem like the wrong person, is there someone above them you can voice your…
> Last time I had an employer I had feelings of being treated unfairly and voiced it Did you raise it with your manager or his/her manager? Just trying to understand at what forum did you raise it and how?
Raised it with my manager, and he pulled in his manager/executive whom I had the real conversation with. I think my manager may have felt inexperienced dealing with this situation, plus did not have direct power to make a change himself, but wisely did realize the importance of the situation and the importance of listening and acting.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#35> This is top 5 tech companies in Canada. If this is the kind of culture promoted here, how are other companies doing?
I wanna address this point. Even amazing companies will have shitty teams and managers. Conversely, companies with generally toxic reputations (like Amazon) will have amazing teams. Also: many startups kinda have to have a good culture since they lack the means to compensate you as well as bigger firms.
All of this to say: humans are very loss averse. There will be better/worse teams everywhere. Try to invest some effort into finding one that works for you.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#36I’m blown away by some of the other comments here. There’s no value in having a victim mentality. Have you openly spoken to your manager about your concerns? How it doesn’t feel fair? How you feel you’re being treated? There’s a chance they have no idea. Maybe they’re not that experienced and are just working things out themselves. Or if they seem like the wrong person, is there someone above them you can voice your…
This is good advice in general but the big give away with this issue is the “hired a friend” part. Unfortunately this person has been relegated to the “out” group and no logical business practices will change that.
Your boss/manager hired their friend and unless you go over their head and can call this behavior out and demonstrate that this is clearly nepotism then you’re out of luck.
Get your your resume together, start contacting your network, make note of any wins/progress/etc for future interviews and start looking for other jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#37I’m blown away by some of the other comments here. There’s no value in having a victim mentality. Have you openly spoken to your manager about your concerns? How it doesn’t feel fair? How you feel you’re being treated? There’s a chance they have no idea. Maybe they’re not that experienced and are just working things out themselves. Or if they seem like the wrong person, is there someone above them you can voice your…
You have valid points. But look at the messaging. Great reviews, no raises , then "here, train your replacement" followed piping him to /dev/null. This isn't a recoverable situation. He's been had.
The harsh reality could be that they are not happy with the op and their performance, and in a cowardly fashion not expressing it honestly to them. That could be the case and it could be worth introspecting on that.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#38To validate your gut feeling here, it is very strange for a manager to stop having 1:1s with their reports just because the team has a new lead.
As others have said, your best option is to do two things at once: look around, and voice your concerns. You clearly don't like the environment; even in this market, there are lots of other options; why not explore those options? Reach out to friends, ex-colleagues, whatever.
In the meantime, make it clear that you feel unsupported and unrecognised, and that these are dealbreakers for you if not fixed quickly and decisively. If your manager doesn't listen, set up a skip-level meeting. If your skip-level doesn't listen, well, that's an even better sign that you should be planning your exit. If either of them do listen, you have a strong chance of either a) getting a raise and renewed support or b) understanding the situation better (which, though it doesn't always solve the situation, can remove some stress / toxicity from it.)
If you feel you deserve the lead role, say that directly! Provide evidence to support your position - not just technical things you've built / shipped, but also (especially?) anything where you've helped organise work for others, or communicated changes outwards, or worked with Product / Design effectively, etc.
As a small counterpoint: if you feel that you've been doing an extraordinary amount of effort, and they just cut a bunch of people, it may be that the team does need an extra person! No one should be in the position of needing to put in extraordinary effort for 3 years. For the vast majority of people, that leads to burnout; this is especially true in the stressful environment of mass layoffs, where people are often asked to do extra work to cover for their coworkers who were fired.
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#39I’m blown away by some of the other comments here. There’s no value in having a victim mentality. Have you openly spoken to your manager about your concerns? How it doesn’t feel fair? How you feel you’re being treated? There’s a chance they have no idea. Maybe they’re not that experienced and are just working things out themselves. Or if they seem like the wrong person, is there someone above them you can voice your…
May I ask What sort of business do you have? Your posts are very insightful
Re: Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?
#40> How to handle this situation best?
You haven't explained what you'd like to see change. What are you after exactly? A raise? Higher social standing within the company?
When you know what you want to change, you'll be in a position to consider how feasible that change will be based on your 3 years of experience at the company.
If your desired changes are not feasible, I'd say find another position immediately.
Actually, I'd suggest doing that regardless of how feasible the changes will be. It's a lot easier to negotiate with another job offer on the table. If you can't find another offer, then you may have to re-evaluate your asks.