I feel another rant about terrible marketing practices coming on after a minute on that site. No, I don't want to sign up for yet another email list for a site that I've read zero content on so far. No, I don't want to like you on FaceTwitInstaLinked yet. Let me read a few things in peace, and maybe if they're good, I'll like your stuff then. You're already starting off in a bad hole asking me for that stuff in a way that interrupts what I'm trying to do before I've read one word of your content.
The Art of Quitting
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: The Art of Quitting
#22I'm not sure what to make of this blog post. The author writes: >By resigning from Reddit, Behind the scenes, Ellen Pao could have been forced out (also known as being "fired") but presented publicly as a resignation. I thought we don't really know what happened? Therefore, it seems biased to frame a thematic essay about "quitting" around Ellen's circumstances. If she didn't voluntarily separate, it's not "quitting"…
Agree. I think it is actually a good post, and I agree with it conceptually. But I don't think it has anything to do with Pao's resignation.
> But I don't think it has anything to do with Pao's resignation.
I agree. When I read the post, the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place, with respect to the flow. The meat of the post was interesting, but the attempt to connect it to Pao's departure felt like a big (and unnecessary) stretch.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck. Tell us more about your startup someday.
I'll be back with a "Show HN" once I get the beta running. I took several months last year to work on it full-time and got an alpha version working, which taught me a ton of things I didn't know I didn't know about the problem I'm tackling. Now, I'm working on a beta based on lessons learned from the alpha. The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the prima…
As someone who has worked on larger enterprise stuff this would be incredibly (like a salary a year incredibly) useful tool.
It would do in software what a really good reliability engineer with years of knowledge can do "Foo has broken" "Nah foo is fine, someone changed Bar again without reading the wiki" stuff.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#24People born between the years of 1957 and 1965 had an average of 11.3 jobs between 1978 and 2010
Lightweights! I've had 88 jobs since 1972.
Once a recruiter told me that everything on my resume was excellent except how often I switched jobs. How could that be?
I told her that was because as soon as anyone gave me undue shit, I quit.
No regrets. On many of them, I probably exercised too much patience and should have left a lot sooner.
(You get one life to live. If it's not the life you want because of your job, do something about it. Time flies.)
Re: The Art of Quitting
#25Although in this case, Pao isn't resigning from anything she put blood, sweat and tears into. Rather she showed up to a fully functioning project, kicked a hornets nest she had no right to kick based on a personal worldview of how people should be nice and more notably, profitable for her shareholders on the internet, then she got stung and ran away crying. I'm all for the type of quitting that this article talked about, but I doubt that "routine career failures recast as 'damsel in distress harassment', stemming from rather dubious claims" is what we should aim for. Pao is no role model for me.
Separately, this is just bad writing. If a college student turned this in to me I would write 'good start, delete all the irrelevant stuff about Pao and either use an example that supports the main thesis or don't use an example at all'. The threads linking this paper together are very weak.
I'm guessing 'Pao' and 'reddit' are to drive traffic. Ugh.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#26I feel this. I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, and ops. It's a secure, good paying, stable career. And I grew to resent and sometimes hate it. Then I started building something for myself, discovered the idea of creating my own startup to solve problems I experienced doing enterprise software projects in a g…
Well said. I've also reached the point where my job - or any job - feels more like it gets in the way than anything else. In some ways my current gig is a dream job. I get to work from home, part time, doing stuff that's in some ways the culmination of stuff I've been working toward for a long time. As the tech lead for the next major release, I get to explore the best that the project has to offer. Nonetheless, I can only work up a few rare moments of genuine excitement about the whole thing. Working on a large and old codebase, on an infrastructure that's in even worse shape, still subject to someone else's priorities and schedules, is still more draining than energizing. I look forward more and more to the day when I can toss it all and do my stuff my way on no particular schedule at all, without having to worry about whether it makes me any money. Soon.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#27I'm not sure what to make of this blog post. The author writes: >By resigning from Reddit, Behind the scenes, Ellen Pao could have been forced out (also known as being "fired") but presented publicly as a resignation. I thought we don't really know what happened? Therefore, it seems biased to frame a thematic essay about "quitting" around Ellen's circumstances. If she didn't voluntarily separate, it's not "quitting"…
Ellen Pao was one of the examples. There are many other examples mentioned which the author uses to support their argument which is not whether Ellen Pao quit to pursue other interests but Everyone should quit something that really matters to them, at least once. We all need to feel what it’s like on the other side of a big success story. Only then will we all understand that quitting isn’t "giving up," but setting t…
Where 'quit' == 'being asked to resign' :-)
Re: The Art of Quitting
#28People born between the years of 1957 and 1965 had an average of 11.3 jobs between 1978 and 2010 Lightweights! I've had 88 jobs since 1972. Once a recruiter told me that everything on my resume was excellent except how often I switched jobs. How could that be? I told her that was because as soon as anyone gave me undue shit, I quit. No regrets. On many of them, I probably exercised too much patience and should have l…
You're resume would only be a problem if the company was looking for good little worker bees who don't ask questions and who will take shit all day long and ask for more. It's almost the perfect filtering mechanism for crap companies hahah.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck. Tell us more about your startup someday.
I'll be back with a "Show HN" once I get the beta running. I took several months last year to work on it full-time and got an alpha version working, which taught me a ton of things I didn't know I didn't know about the problem I'm tackling. Now, I'm working on a beta based on lessons learned from the alpha. The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the prima…
opsmatic.com ?
Re: The Art of Quitting
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll be back with a "Show HN" once I get the beta running. I took several months last year to work on it full-time and got an alpha version working, which taught me a ton of things I didn't know I didn't know about the problem I'm tackling. Now, I'm working on a beta based on lessons learned from the alpha. The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the prima…
As someone who has worked on larger enterprise stuff this would be incredibly (like a salary a year incredibly) useful tool. It would do in software what a really good reliability engineer with years of knowledge can do "Foo has broken" "Nah foo is fine, someone changed Bar again without reading the wiki" stuff.
It's funny, the reactions I get. A lot of startup programmers who have never worked on large systems don't understand why it's so valuable. But those who have done big enterprise use phrases like "holy grail".
But this is a HARD problem. Man, abstracting change in an actionable, readable, efficient way has been difficult. Not to mention the security issues and other headaches.