121–130 of 197 posts
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Working at a single place for 10 years and having 0 connections to other companies is not going to put you in a good place to find a job. I imagine they would struggle to find a job regardless of whether or not they quit.
Yea, you really need to change job every 2 years at least. Otherwise you become unemployable. Unless you manages to get on the gravy train, in which case, congrats!
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"Just quit" doesn't always work out so well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5778653 If I've learned anything about working, it's that you never quit without another job lined up. Employment seems to be a prerequisite for finding employment.
Working at a single place for 10 years and having 0 connections to other companies is not going to put you in a good place to find a job. I imagine they would struggle to find a job regardless of whether or not they quit.
If you find yourself repeatedly bored, take the test at JOCRF.org. Best ~$700 I ever spent on my career.
That's interesting. What did you learn about yourself from the test and what changes did you make after that?
I have followed their advice, and while it's difficult to turn one's career on a dime, I'm happy with the results so far. What I'm doing "feels right," and I'm much better at it. I think about this every day.
Your aptitude profile will be different than mine. At this point, I've referred about a dozen friends to the center. Some have got value from it, others haven't. The ones who benefited the most were those who were open to making changes. (Some people will spend $700 and then throw away results that don't fit their self-image. That's a waste.)
I specifically recommend JOCRF to apparently intelligent people who have a hard time settling down in a career, or say they are bored. Perhaps they don't "know themselves" well enough - that's where the test helps.
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But at the end of the day, I was just another dev. This. A thousand times. At every company I've EVER worked for, I eventually had this exact same feeling. Even as the lead engineer, team lead, tech lead, or whatever other "top developer" role I've held, I always feel like this. And I always eventually quit too. It's gotten worse in the past few years. I can barely make it one year before I feel like "just another de…
You're not a "shitty employee". Maybe you are just not in the right role. Most companies I've worked for consider developers to be just cogs that type code into computers all day. Many developers are just fine with this, but some of us want to do more. Like I said in another reply, the way I fixed this was to change careers and move over to the product management side. Unfortunately, I kind of had to leave developmen…
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Careful, if things get ugly the company might end up owning anything you put work into while they were paying you.
In California there's recent law that makes it clear how you can avoid this (from memory, the obvious of using your own time and resources).
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> there is little creative way to explain why you left that either doesn't make you sound hard to please You solve that by not explaining why you left :) but instead focusing on where you want to go, and how the prospective company is the ideal place to achieve that.
The company neutral "I got tired of the commute" is frequently also true and can be useful if the potential new company insists on knowing.
This had the added benefit of likely being true, and it complements the company without being sycophantic.
Even for employees, startups are hard and take commitment. It's not for everyone, in fact it's probably not for most. People seem to have this idea of lavish Zynga style life styles. It's not. It's really really hard work. You still have to do as you're told. Everything is always going wrong. You still have to be responsible for your productivity. In fact you have to do a lot more. You cannot just hide. As startups a…
> People seem to have this idea of lavish Zynga style life styles. It's not. It's really really hard work. Yes, I absolutely agree with you. But in this particular case, I didn't leave because it was hard. I left because it was easy. Too easy. I wasn't challenged. The work I was doing was mundane and repetitive, and I didn't feel like what I was working on was important (or fulfilling). My productivity was great. I e…
I was "just another dev".
I think this is an important lesson for any company building software, you'll lose top talent if you just treat them as some kind of fungible code churning cog.
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I'm actually fairly serious. I've been bored before, so I hear you. But, I guess I'm kind of surprised that you chose to jump into nothing rather than parlay your way to something else. Seems a little impulsive. Impulsive is a red flag, despite what many on HN think (you can be impulsive, but you better be brilliant too). Now you've got to explain a gap in your res to a potential employer (should you choose to go tha…
An experienced developer does not lack for job offers. You can spend your entire life taking people up on those offers and never get around to doing your own thing. For most people on Earth, historically, that's not a bad place to be: it beats the hell out of starving. But if you have the luxury to do it, I think it's less impulsive than you imagine.
I won't suggest that I know whether or not the original poster made a good decision, but assuming that an experienced developer will have job opportunities on tap is naively short-sighted.
The current market in the Bay Area won't last forever. A lot of people today either weren't around in the late 90s or have chosen to forget what happened. In a matter of months, lots of developers went from having a seemingly unlimited number of high-paying jobs to choose from to collecting unemployment.
Even if the next down cycle isn't the same as Bust 1.0, a lot of the angel and VC-backed startups in the Bay Area currently eager to pay six figures for even mediocre talent aren't going to survive, and when they're replaced by fewer and fewer startups, many developers will be ill-prepared.
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But at the end of the day, I was just another dev. This. A thousand times. At every company I've EVER worked for, I eventually had this exact same feeling. Even as the lead engineer, team lead, tech lead, or whatever other "top developer" role I've held, I always feel like this. And I always eventually quit too. It's gotten worse in the past few years. I can barely make it one year before I feel like "just another de…
it's also possible that you (and Loren) are victims of Dunning–Kruger. How do you know that you aren't? I only ask because I am in a hardcode engineering lead role and have never been made to feel like "just another dev"
That said, I don't think my unhappiness working for others has anything to do with other people making me feel that way or with my competence or the competence of others. Heck, I'm VP of Engineering right now at a company doing 10s of millions in revenue and growing like crazy and I still feel like something is missing.
My realization is that it needs to my skin in the game to not feel like I'm "just another dev" or perhaps more generally, "just another cog in the machine".
Working for someone else, I don't see how I could ever reach the level of personal risk, reward and gratification that it has taken me a long time to realize I need.
I can't escape it at someone else's startup or someone else's big company. I bounced from job to job, year after year, thinking it was just culture or not enough responsibilities, or too many responsibilities, not enough money, or too much money. These were all wrong.
I know this is _wrong_, but that's the point where I start writing side projects at work. If I'm finishing all my rote work within regular day, at previous jobs I've started working on stupid side projects. A physics engine in Lua, a maze generator in PyGame, and so on.
Careful, if things get ugly the company might end up owning anything you put work into while they were paying you.
Regardless, I never write anything of worth for those side projects -- mostly experimental things, or using new languages/frameworks I had never tried.