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How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

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Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#61

Post by alexjplant »

ktbwrestler wrote: post #8
throwanem wrote: post #7

> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become. Every time. I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that world.) But it will not take m…

genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend. What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since…

Ruby is only just now getting static typing and Rails has a lot of "magic" as part of its value prop. If you're trying to launch something of low to medium complexity quickly and stay on the happy path of the tools in the ecosystem then it works great. The lack of rigor from dynamic typing and latitude afforded by Ruby's expressive syntax can quickly become a footgun though.

My pet theory is that LLM coding is going to give the upper hand to more verbose languages like Golang or Typescript because more of the execution flow will end up explicitly in the LLM's context. Convention over configuration-type frameworks ruled when one-person code bulldozers shipped MVPs but Continue is upending this paradigm.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#62

Post by yieldcrv »

farts_mckensy wrote: post #42
sour-taste wrote: post #38

This isn't at all a rebuttal of the post, more a different perspective. I started a new job while basically deeply depressed. It colored all my opinions of the company and my coworkers. As I'm coming out of that through a combination of medication and intensive CBT I'm realizing that a lot of the negativity I felt towards my job was the result of the depression. As things improve I'm realizing that the job is mostly…

On the other hand, some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more accurate model of the world. So what if you were right about your job initially, and the CBT is basically just gaslighting you into spinning things in a positive way?

That may be a subset of people, you also don’t need to be depressed to have an accurate view of the world

There exists another subset of people that merely tolerate the overly optimistic general populace and don’t need that as a coping mechanism to understand and mold the world

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#63

Post by lelandbatey »

throwanem wrote: post #46
randmeerkat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must be a god level troll post.

I was asked for an opinion and I gave one. Don't make too much of it. Rails devotees can't stand hearing a bad word about their baby, they always make a fuss.

I've seen poorly-built code on rails circa 2014, and I've seen Rails done pretty well circa-2025. I'd say rails is pretty neutral. Saying it's PHP bad seems a bit much, but hey.

The worst code I've ever seen by a country mile though was a huge Python 2 code base written on an old version of Tornado circa 2012, a library that basically hacked the Python language to get code to run asynchronously, but you had to contort yourself into knots to get it. You couldn't just call other async functions/methods, you had to `yield func()` when calling them. To return from a function, you couldn't use `return` you had to throw an exception of type Tornado.Return. Absolutely insane way to write code.

Then all the business logic written on top of this bizarre framework was terrible. Half of the code broke the rules I just mentioned but still half-worked sometimes, but would perform terribly or have mysterious problems.

One of my greatest accomplishments was getting it all to Python3 then onto more sane async-style code.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#64

Post by throwanem »

alexjplant wrote: post #61
ktbwrestler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend. What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since…

Ruby is only just now getting static typing and Rails has a lot of "magic" as part of its value prop. If you're trying to launch something of low to medium complexity quickly and stay on the happy path of the tools in the ecosystem then it works great. The lack of rigor from dynamic typing and latitude afforded by Ruby's expressive syntax can quickly become a footgun though. My pet theory is that LLM coding is going…

I wouldn't really call it a pet theory at this point; HN's front page daily further shows that LLMs suck at magic and excel at boring code, seeming quite immune to boredom. But I would argue what makes the difference for LLMs is not verbosity but locality, whether syntactic or analytical ie whether the type is just written here or you have an LSP server to query for it, the distinction is, being able to point to an arbitrary symbol and get lots of rich context about it.

It's a game changer for human devs also, and not really one I would expect a serious Rails habitué to necessarily evaluate in a way that's reliable. What did someone call that once, the "Blub Paradox?" Silly name, but that's this industry for you.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#65

Post by geocrasher »

If the real job doesn't match the interview, then it's the wrong job.

Simple as that.

I once took a position at a company that I had known because they were a customer of my then current employer. We'd always gotten along, they were nice folks, had a good interview.

In a very short time, I wondered what the heck was going on. There was so much drama, infighting, and backbiting, and it was the complete opposite of the company's external persona. People were constantly being moved to different desks with no rhyme or reason- as in, a whole department rearranged 4x in the 8 months I was there. I had 3 or 4 different desks in that time.

People were regularly worried about their jobs and whether the company would even be around after family fights. And when they no longer needed me they started playing games with me, writing me up for things I hadn't done etc. Anything to avoid having to pay unemployment.

I knew in the first couple of weeks. But a bit of me died at that job. Eventually they fired me. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't given them the opportunity and fired them instead. But I had mouths to feed besides my own.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#67

Post by throwanem »

lelandbatey wrote: post #63
throwanem wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was asked for an opinion and I gave one. Don't make too much of it. Rails devotees can't stand hearing a bad word about their baby, they always make a fuss.

I've seen poorly-built code on rails circa 2014, and I've seen Rails done pretty well circa-2025. I'd say rails is pretty neutral. Saying it's PHP bad seems a bit much, but hey. The worst code I've ever seen by a country mile though was a huge Python 2 code base written on an old version of Tornado circa 2012, a library that basically hacked the Python language to get code to run asynchronously, but you had to contor…

I didn't say Rails was PHP bad, but if you'd asked I would say it is worse. Both have awful ergonomics that make mistakes easy, but at least with PHP it's hard to be foolish in a way that's very clever. Ruby meanwhile will happily hand you more than enough rope to David Carradine yourself before you really even notice, and the DHH/Katz crowd took full advantage.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#68

Post by pianoben »

throwanem wrote: post #11
ktbwrestler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend. What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since…

If you mean about Rails specifically, it's that the total lack of discipline in both language and framework makes it impossible to build a product maintainable by more than one person, so every "successful" project has one or a few covert empire builders running it, usually with more political than technical success. That's not a kind of project that pays enough to be worth the trouble, even before we talk about oppo…

One of the largest codebases I've ever worked on, generating billions in revenue every year to this day, is in Rails. Over a thousand hands have touched it, and none of the original people are still around to hold an empire.

I'm with you on the general lack of discipline enforced by Rails; this codebase isn't fun to maintain, precisely for that reason. All the same, I don't think your critique is fair or even that accurate.

But that's from my POV working at bigger companies. Maybe it looks different as a freelancer for smaller shops.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#69

Post by throwanem »

pianoben wrote: post #68
throwanem wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean about Rails specifically, it's that the total lack of discipline in both language and framework makes it impossible to build a product maintainable by more than one person, so every "successful" project has one or a few covert empire builders running it, usually with more political than technical success. That's not a kind of project that pays enough to be worth the trouble, even before we talk about oppo…

One of the largest codebases I've ever worked on, generating billions in revenue every year to this day, is in Rails. Over a thousand hands have touched it, and none of the original people are still around to hold an empire. I'm with you on the general lack of discipline enforced by Rails; this codebase isn't fun to maintain, precisely for that reason. All the same, I don't think your critique is fair or even that ac…

By the sound of it, your POV working at one big company. The codebases I've worked on that did similar ARR numbers with similar depths of commit history were in Javascript and TypeScript, so "your argument is invalid," right? Why not? It's just what you said and my credentials are better. What's the most in revenue one second of your life was ever worth? For me that's about $35k. But no, you go ahead, try to big league me with numbers some more.

If you think my critique is unjust or inaccurate, then attack it, not my standing to speak on the subject. Especially not when I'm the more forthcoming of the two of us when it comes to professional history, anyway; mine is findable from my HN profile, while you prefer true pseudonymy. To argue from authority as you've tried is quite risible with none of that even in evidence, don't you think?

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#70

Post by jll29 »

crowcroft wrote: post #19

You can usually find out if a job is wrong for you within days, sometimes hours. You might never know for sure if a job is right for you though.

A good smell test for a job that isn't right for you is whether you ask yourself if it is the right job early on, or if you even have thoughts of quitting in the first year/month/week, apart from being overwhelmed by all the new faces.

The only "bad" job that I had was with a very good company (wonderful people, great benefits, just the code absolutely sucked), so that was making the decision very hard to quit. In larger corporations, one might be able to engineer moving departments if that helps.

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