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How I survived being a $220k/year intern

matt.sh

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Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#111

Post by austincheney »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #6

Being paid a lot of money for not having any responsibility sounds good to me. This guy sure seems angry about it though.

When I was in Kuwait on military deployment last year one of my three roommates was a pediatric cardiologist. I remember hearing a conversation between him and another of my roommates who was disgruntled because they couldn’t get a real job. I butted in saying I have a six figure job in a low cost of living economy and I don’t do shit. I hate it so much they could take my job. I would happily give it to them. They were both envious, but surprisingly the cardiologist voiced the greatest envy.

I am home from deployment working at the same employer, one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the country/world. This employer is one of the best employee friendly companies I have ever seen and pays well. I still hate it. It’s not really the employer I hate, but working in corporate software.

If I could get any other job at a vaguely similar income level I would take it happily, even if it’s digging ditches or shoveling shit, and this is even though I really enjoy writing software. Corporate software is grossly dysfunctional.

* In software I am frequently surrounded by people who are afraid to do their jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22478996

* It could be that I am frequently surrounded by people who lack confidence because they have no idea how to do their job - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412477

* Or maybe software just allows people to be less than competent because there is not an agreed upon definition of competence. Maybe software is a blue collar industry with an identity disorder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22391509

* If you needed an example of that identity disorder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22360326

* It seems other developers have similar observations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22345702

* Often times it’s easier to do nothing, because when you try people cry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22194297

* Since there are not industry defined norms and ethics you too can attain a do nothing job recognizing the bias that goes into hiring and manipulating it to your favor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22164138

* For the longest time I had incorrectly thought the corporate software directly encouraged incompetence in a highly competitive way. A HN comment convinced me it was just mental laziness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116659

* Sexism is just a symptom of that bias and mental laziness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098101

* If you want examples of mental laziness in practice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21965539

* Everyone in software is an engineer right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21905285

* People actually seriously trying to justify being paid for other people doing theirs jobs for them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21885691

* If you actually do your job you might fail, so better play it safe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21884188

* Blue collar work work, as evidenced by the expectations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21739708

* Originality is scary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417450

Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#112

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

lawlorino wrote: post #21

> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects, all the while never being granted responsibility greater than what you’d give a middle school intern Am I being a bit dim or did they immediately contradict themselves here?

A lot of people, I suspect including the author, consider "responsibility" to exclusively mean the power to tell other people what to do.

Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#113

Post by watwut »

chrisseaton wrote: post #37
watwut wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of it implies responsibility.

> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects What's more responsible than pushing code to a high-profile project? Responsible for the product's performance, security. Responsible for what the customer sees and experiences. Responsible for keeping their data safe and guarding the company's reputation. Responsible enough to be allowed to work independently from home. Respons…

That sounds more like rhetorics and framing to me, not responsibility as normally used in English. Especially the work from home and travelling - calling work from home responsibility is ridiculous. Pretending that every work travel implies some kind of "guarding the company's reputation" is making too much from nothing.

Being responsible for product's performance and security means something completely different then "having commits". Having commits does not make you accountable for either nor able to influence either. Except maybe by making it worst - if you work on part of the software that is actually influencing either.

I can fix tons of bugs in open source software without having responsibility for anything. The fact is, modern software development is oftentimes factory where you get task, you do task and then forget about it all. If you had not done the task, nothing grave would not happen except that you would loose job over time. And that is all there is to it.

Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#114

Post by _bxg1 »

meowface wrote: post #64
kaiabwpdjqn wrote: post #10

I find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little expected work. It’s not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about problems in the sales culture are likely…

I don't read it as bitterness over his personal situation. Clearly it was pretty comfortable for him. It seemed to me more like bewilderment and amusement over the whole Kafkaesque abomination. If I were in his position, I would've kept taking the paycheck without complaints, but once I was no longer there, I'd definitely consider writing something like this.

The fact that he turned down $50k to write this post makes me think it's more than just out of amusement

Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#116

Post by j45 »

Having grown up in and around both, it's interesting how many people who complain about mental jobs would fare in physical jobs that are far worse.

It's good to work thru your feelings, but for many people feelings are a luxury, having access to opportunity to improve yourself in anyway is a privilege.

Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#117

Post by deanCommie »

Something smelled fishy, so I did a bit of follow-up. This dude is leaving out a huge detail to make his employment troubles be a pivotal problem when...it's not.

Let's footnote a coupleo f his "Story of Pivotal The Employment"

> Hired

To contribute to Redis

> All My Work Is Owned by Another Employee? What?

The primary redis maintainer, not a pivotal employee?

> Let’s Organize Instead of Being A Hobby Project

Let's misrepresent the philosophical position of the OS project maintainer on the best way to move the project forward.

> Two Days of Work to Clear 4 Years of Issues Ignored By The Creator Because Laziness

A bunc hof those issues have fundamental problems that the creator explicitly drilled into and explained (https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906#issuecomment-5145...)

Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#118

Post by closeparen »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #60
tracerbulletx wrote: post #11

I don't understand people who write things like this. If you're unhappy leave, if you think the corporate culture is wrong, either participate in fixing it, or get out. I honestly can't stand people who self righteously sound the alarm about how they can see all of the things wrong with everybody else. It sounds especially childish when you are making so much money.

Rachel had something about fixing corporate culture recently (hint: you can't), and sometimes really you can't leave. Some are shackled to their jobs through their visa, others because of healthcare needs (their health insurance has favourable terms, and they need to care for a family member), and others because of the nature of the industry (university faculty comes to mind, especially post-2008). The fact that you…

If you have the political capital to spend, you can, for example:

- Model the behaviors you want to see.

- Thanks and recognize others when they do the behaviors you want to see.

- Use your Comment and Reject buttons when formal processes ask you to sign off on behaviors you don't want to see.

- Propose initiatives to influential people you trust and identify as likely allies.

Of course if you're wrong about having the political capital, and especially if your own manager is not on board, swimming upstream can be dangerous.

Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#119

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

throwawayjava wrote: post #59
bootlooped wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me suspicious of a person who passes up $50k because they would rather write a rant on their blog. What type of personality does that? Sure the agreement was one sided, and maybe it even had questionable legal basis and would be unenforceable, but guess what, so do many other contracts consumers sign every day, and those don't usually net us $50k!

> passes up 50K If the author had another job lined up already, the severance package wasn't worth much of anything -- it only paid out until he had a new position. So, probably closer to passing up $0 than to passing up $50K. Still a bit of an annoying personality. If you know you won't get any $ from the severance package, just send a "thanks but no thanks" message to the person off-boarding you. Don't harass some…

I think you're giving the system too much deference here. If an individual contributor is important enough that the company wants to give them a gag order, they're important enough to ask for preferential terms about it.

Re: How I survived being a $220k/year intern

#120

Post by throwawayjava »

mamcx wrote: post #52

If anyone is tired of getting $220k/year, i could take it!. --- I think sometimes developers have drink so hard the kool aid of changing the world and all that, and if is not happening, then get sad. But why? Maybe because I have a long time in this industry, but this is what I do: If see an opportunity to improve things (without need to convince others) I do. If need to convince others, and succeed, great. If not, b…

> If not, but the environment is okey, I keep going.

If you're a strong developer and willing to live in certain areas -- at least for a couple years before you're trusted enough to go remote -- you can make $200K/yr. It's mostly just a matter of telling yourself you are worth that much, applying to companies that pay that much, and not being afraid to be on the job market every few years.

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