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

charity.wtf

141–150 of 235 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs said it most profoundly: "love what you do". This is the opposite of "do what you love". I wish I understood where he learned this. It's very profound (and true).

It is not the opposite. If you do what you love, you love what you do. So its more of, "love what you do" is what to aim for, and "do what you love" is one way to achieve this.

A very common example is art. Most people love to draw things like characters or landscapes. But the real world application of art is usually ads, logos, and posters.

There's significant skill overlap, but little passion overlap.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ex-girlfriend [1] did this with us and household tasks, especially cooking. I've gone from hating household tasks to being slightly positive about it. I've gone from hating cooking to loving it. I've tried this with programming. After 15 years, I'm only mildly positive about programming. That has more to do with the culture though, not the activity. I wish there was a business analyst/entrepreneurial programmer hy…

Those roles exist but they’re really senior staff+ into director level roles (at a smaller org). The problem is that they’re really two roles bundled into one - discovery and development . You need to be aware of business impact, pain points, upcoming tech, your competitors, and you need to be able to execute to just the right level of finish. The bad ones identify solutions that work for huge orgs and try to apply t…

Maybe I'm suffering from the Dunig Kruger effect but I think I'd be pretty good at it. I guess the only way to show that is by setting up my own company. I'm just afraid of the risk. Finding product market fit seems extremely hard.

Companies that gave me the chance a bit, it seems that I always fulfilled those expectations.

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

#143
> It’s only been six months, but it’s starting to feel like it might not work out. How much longer should I give it?”

It takes a lot longer to tell if the job is right than if it's wrong. Six months is orders of magnitude longer than you need to give a bad job. Don't rage quit, but if it feels wrong it probably is, so start looking.

Had one job with a guy I had worked with for years elsewhere, and within my first couple weeks we sat down for a coffee and I said "so this isn't it a 5 year gig is it?" and he shook his head in agreement. Unfortunately COVID & life caused us to both overstay a bit.

You early don't owe anyone anything to stick with a bad gig.

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

#146

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…

I've recently had a job that started out reasonably good, but after a year and a half, I started wondering what I was doing there, was I really in the right place? Some of the tickets I worked on went nowhere, and I didn't enjoy the stuff I was working on. That lasted a couple of months, and I was seriously considering quitting. And then came a complaint from a user that opened up a whole cesspit of necessary improvements, optimisations and bugs for something I'd previously worked on, and that turned into 9 months of the best fun I've ever had at work. Made a factor 20 improvement to a hideously complex algorithm that nobody understood, found and fixed a bunch of bugs in the algorithm that we had always thought was perfect -- you know, fun stuff. And then my contract ended. But on a high note.

This isn't general advice or anything, but I'm glad I didn't quit a year earlier.

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

#147

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…

Can confirm, I'd charge a laaaarge premium to ever work on an existing Rails codebase again.

Did it several times over a period of 15 years and they were always a wreck and unreasonably painful to work with. Every single time.

I'd start a green field one, no problem, provided I get veto on gem choices ("Let's use some twee fucking template language that's a ton worse-performing than the default and doesn't let you programmatically control nesting levels / end tags because it's terribly designed" yeah how about we don't do that because it's going to make my life a living hell) without charging a premium. But no more onboarding to rails codebases without enough money to make it worth my hating every second of work for the (assuredly short) duration.

... and I like Ruby!

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails is uniquely compromised by its history and by its language of implementation. Ruby is good for many things. Writing maintainable software in the absence of conventions enforced by shotgun is none of them. And Ruby's American fanbase gets off way too much on holding the shotgun.

Worse than Python (without Typing)?

The thing about Rails is that it does one thing really well and beyond that you are completely on your own. Without incredible discipline, this becomes a problem because people tend to fall in love with how well it does that one thing and start dreaming up how their other problems that inevitably show up in a project of any meaningful complexity can be solved with the same kind of 'magic'. But they don't have the multiple decades of refinement and literal thousands of developers supporting their solution to give it the same polish that the Rails core has. Which means that, with almost certainty, what they come up with is going to be a nightmare.

The best of the best developers may have the resolve necessary to ignore their emotions and stick to writing 'magic-less' code when they move past the one thing Rails does well, but most projects are going to land in the laps of most developers who aren't that. I am sure we can find counterexamples of where exceptionally skilled teams have been able to wrangle Rails, but the exceptions do not make the rule.

On the other hand, when beginning in a place where writing ugly, boring, but at the same time usable code is the norm, even the average developer tends to stick with it when they need to do things that are "off the Rails". They don't have the original enamourment to get caught up in. There are plenty of developers who can still manage to screw this up too, but, again, exceptions do not make the rule.

Rails is just a tool, of course. The outcome ultimately is down to the operator. But there is a certain psychology at play that introduces difficulty. It is kind of like giving the average daily commuter, who is a perfectly fine driver under normal circumstances, a supercar with features they can fall in love with. In theory it's just a car to drive as they normally do, but they're bound to do something stupid with it when the emotions take over.

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

#149
post #26

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…

First, props for your candor. It’s refreshing. I do wonder if Rails is so bad compared to other frameworks that it deserves such a distinct treatment. Over the decades I’ve worked with at least half a dozen popular frameworks that fit this description, is the same for you or is Rails truly unique in this regard?

After a lot of consideration of this question (I have also all-but written off Rails work, after doing a lot of it) I think it's a combination of two things, one technical, one business-social:

1) Rails and Ruby will gladly let you make an absolute garbage fire out of your codebase, while it still technically works, and discovering how exactly the garbage fire is structured so you can start trying to put it out is unusually difficult in Rails. You don't have to make it a garbage fire, but they won't do a single thing to discourage it, and once it's bad, it's hard for an outsider to show up and figure out how to fix it, because of how the framework and language are designed.

2) Rails is often chosen by very price-sensitive companies trying to move fast, as cheaply as possible. This means high turnover, lots of enthusiastic juniors, outsourcing (often passing through multiple outsourced teams...) and often mediocre or poor management oversight.

The result is that a high proportion of Rails codebases in the wild are both remarkably terrible and impractically difficult to restore to some non-terrible state (i.e. they're the kind of cases where the right call really is to just start over—one of the things that makes them hard to work with is that a bad rails codebase is especially hard to rewrite-in-place, it's just a ground-up replacement job usually, but you won't actually be allowed to do that because see again: price sensitive, so you'll just live with an awful pace of development and poor application performance while management gets increasingly frustrated by the outcomes of their own choices)

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

#150

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?

CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But then, if it helps you cope, so what?

It is the same with religion. Even though gods objectively do not exist, at least not in a literal sense, it can still help people to cope better with their life and be an overall positive force. Or extremely harmful when abused.

The world is pretty depressing. Everyone is telling themselves little lies one way or another just to be able to function. And no, Atheists are not more rational than religious people per se, they tend to have other delusions.

Personally I think striving to have a realistic model of the world is still the best long term strategy and that those little lies are like drugs that will help you in the short term but wreck havoc in the long term but who knows. It is complicated.

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