I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane

Seeing millions of dollars poured in projects that go nowhere since they are executed by incompetent workers lead by machiavellian managers is horribly depressing.

I feel that a startup setting would be incredibly more efficient to do what we do. But of course it'd be difficult to fund it, unless it's operated as a charity or it's backed up by the gov't.

In the meanwhile I'm acting as a stoic and enjoying some tiny victories.

I've met devs who only consider one side of the employee-employer agreement -- "don't get fired, don't get fired, don't get fired." What about the other side? "If ___ quits, we are screwed."

This is the reason why we invest in our skills, this is why we read things like HN, this is why we make ourselves indispensable. Because a higher level of skill, both technically, socially and in business, not only makes you a greater employee, but it gives you more autonomy over your own circumstances.

I don't agree with the comments here that encourage people to half-ass their 9-5 because "you owe the company nothing." I encourage you to do the opposite -- become so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. Be such a valuable perspective/contributor/asset that they shudder at the thought of losing you. Be great and the power will follow.

And if they still treat you like shit, leave. If this doesn't apply to your industry, leave the industry. Good, smart devs are hard to find and someone else will pay good money for you.

Bad managers don't care how much you work. A friend of mine works in tele-completions for the health insurance industry. He has the highest rate of completions per day than anyone else in his unit for nearly four years running. He has been overlooked for every promotion and opportunity to move to a better position. The managers don't want him to leave the unit because their numbers will go significantly down if he does.

I've worked an incredible amount of overtime for employers early on in my career. I wanted to show them that I could play the game, get things done, and save the day. I thought that it would pay off. It never did.

So I stopped doing it.

I knew that the calls would just keep coming. I knew that there was no incentive to let me have time off. I knew that I would never be compensated in any way for all that effort if someone higher up could help it. As long as I was convinced that was the way the world worked, they were getting cheap labour and profiting while I was being driven into the ground and made miserable.

You have to make the life that you want. Never let anyone else be in control of you. They have no authority to make you come into work in the middle of the night or stay at work for thirty-six hours straight. I think it's a terrible shame that some people think they have some sort of power to compel others to do this for them. And it often leads to tragedies like the one the OP described.

Absolutely, those are caricatures which would not fully apply to any person or any role - real successful companies probably have a balance of different types in them across a broad spectrum of attitudes to work, profit versus excellence, etc....

What do you suppose we do?

For the long-term, here's the financial structure for the solution that I see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... . Essentially, I think VC-istan and MegaCorps are both dead ends when it comes to genuine technical excellence (which weird people like us care about). I think it's time to have a serious conversation about financing a fleet of mid-growth K-strategist startups instead of these red-ocean, r-strategist, get-big-or-die marketing gambits.

Here's an insane thought that I had that just might work. Find a Midwestern city that has $25 million to blow on becoming a top technology hub and set up an Autonomy Fund. (I'll do the "grunt work" of screening for talent; if this idea has legs I'd drop everything to implement it.) 100 top-notch programmers, $125k per year (out of which their resource/AWS costs come, so no one's living high on the hog), and 2 years. First, these companies are designed to become profitable, not to exit, so compensation is profit-sharing, not the joke equity offered by VC-istan. The city that funds this takes a 37.5% profit-share of whatever they build (it's valuating their work at $333k per year, which is lower than a VC valuation, but the terms are better.) If it works, then add time to the schedule (i.e. more years of life and more startups) and possibly more engineers. This is like Y Combinator, but without the feeder-into-VC dynamic; it's to build real businesses that generating lasting value both to a geographical area and to technology itself.

I seriously think that Autonomy Funds are going to be big in the next 10 years-- VC-istan is essentially a shitty implementation of an Autonomy Fund, except with selection based on connections rather than technical ability-- but there are some obvious problems (moral hazard, principal-agent issues) that need to be solved.