Quitting a New Job • Hacker News Board

Re: Quitting a New Job

#131

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #86

jfk13 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is all on top of the fact that engineers are woefully underpaid. I have finance friends that make literal millions in yearly bonuses. This is virtually unheard of in software, even though we provide orders of magnitude more value. That doesn't necessarily mean engineers are woefully underpaid. It may just be that your finance friends are obscenely overpaid. Though whether all/most engineers provide "orders of…

> Some of the highest-paid engineers, AIUI, devote their considerable expertise to optimising ad click rates. I worked on an ad product with a team of 10 or so data scientists + engineers. I'd wager most of us made between 100k-175k + some tiny bonuses here and there. The product we built was making the company $2.5 million a month . But hey we all got some cool jackets and a pat on the back. Give me a break. Money t…

It typically costs an employer double what your pay is, once including benefits, matching social security contributions, etc. So your employer had 10 people it was spending 200k-350k a month on, so 2000k-3500k in expenses, for a product that made 2500k a month.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#132

Post by vowelless » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #34

At Stripe and each of my jobs before that, I had had a short commute to a beautiful office, and got to experience the instant gratification associated with developing purely software-based products. Now, I was stuck taking a crowded train to a dark office littered with hardware parts, working on a product that would take many years to reach mass-market adoption due to pesky little things like manufacturing and road s…

> This is after he went to a robotics company because it seemed different.

> He may also have felt out of place with people who know computers, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. If all you know is webcrap, you may feel way over your head in a robotics company.

I agree with you, but that is worded really harshly. I was surprised to see it come from you, of all people. I usually love to read your comments.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#133

Post by ramraj07 » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #101

Animats wrote: post #34

At Stripe and each of my jobs before that, I had had a short commute to a beautiful office, and got to experience the instant gratification associated with developing purely software-based products. Now, I was stuck taking a crowded train to a dark office littered with hardware parts, working on a product that would take many years to reach mass-market adoption due to pesky little things like manufacturing and road s…

Pretty rude. I know a few folks at stripe and I actually interviewed the author for another robitics company (which he passed on =)) and i can assure you he doesn’t “just know webcrap”

It's likely this person is good technically, and there might be a place for them in large corps where software engineers are just cogs, but their attitude and their resume suggests some issues: their resume is listed with year long stints in every major company, and their attitude suggests that apparently nothing can keep them happy. And also not interested in solving the most important problems (as evidenced by the knock on what sounds like a reasonable promotion deal), just the ones they might (or might not, even they don't know apparently) be interested in. Sounds elitist as hell and doesn't reflect someone who's genuinely seeking growth in their career.

Which is fine, compared to twitch streamers making millions for doing squats this is still a great career, but if anyone's looking at all for constructive criticism then they should introspect how priviliged all this stuff sounds like and whether it's healthy for their own development to live in such a bubble for too long.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#134

Post by war1025 » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

_9omd wrote: post #128

I'm about a month into a new FAANG job, and I hate it so far. I can't decide if it's better to quit sooner as to not waste the companies time (and avoid suffering more), or if I should give it some more time. My team's work seems super boring, I'm not interested in the tech we use, the setup process has been a shit-show, and I'm feeling zero motivation. I've mostly worked for startup to mid sized companies in the pas…

> I've mostly worked for startup to mid sized companies in the past

I saw an anecdote a few years ago about a hiring manager basically saying, "If you worked happily for a small startup, you will most likely be unable to put up with the bureaucracy of a large enterprise from now on"

I've often wondered how much truth there was to that statement.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#135

Post by amdelamar » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #29

I've done this before. Got an offer while I was still interviewing with a few other companies. Accepted the offer then a few weeks later another, significantly better, offer came through. I have absolutely no qualms about it, and I don't put the tiny stint on my resume. My work and expertise speaks for itself. It's sad that job hunting has become rife with Machiavellian machinations in the past three decades, but thi…

I did this and still feel gross about it even though I don't regret the decision. Accepted an offer for a Java/Spring developer, but a week later I got a better offer for a Scala engineer at Apple that had swept me off my feet. I don't know why I still feel gross having to renege after accepting the first offer; I think its because I annoyed the recruiter. That even if the first offer had salary-matched the other offer, I'd rather be programming in Scala than Java/Spring and that wasn't something they could compete with.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#136

Post by batter » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

> As I noted in a previous post, switching teams is a lot easier than switching jobs. I didn’t do this before I left Stripe because there weren’t any other teams that I was super enthusiastic about at the time. But, in retrospect, I probably should have given this a try before quitting. A few years ago, I was looking for a new job after being laid off. I had two competing companies to choose from, and chose the one t…

I have changed my first project because manager was unbearable. After spending one more year in the same company but different project and almost ideal manager i have realized that company in general has so many problems that make me unhappy that i have started job search outside. It's really hard sometimes to predict what difficulties are waiting for you in new team/company.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#137

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #29

I've done this before. Got an offer while I was still interviewing with a few other companies. Accepted the offer then a few weeks later another, significantly better, offer came through. I have absolutely no qualms about it, and I don't put the tiny stint on my resume. My work and expertise speaks for itself. It's sad that job hunting has become rife with Machiavellian machinations in the past three decades, but thi…

[deleted]

Re: Quitting a New Job

#138

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #131

dvt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some of the highest-paid engineers, AIUI, devote their considerable expertise to optimising ad click rates. I worked on an ad product with a team of 10 or so data scientists + engineers. I'd wager most of us made between 100k-175k + some tiny bonuses here and there. The product we built was making the company $2.5 million a month . But hey we all got some cool jackets and a pat on the back. Give me a break. Money t…

It typically costs an employer double what your pay is, once including benefits, matching social security contributions, etc. So your employer had 10 people it was spending 200k-350k a month on, so 2000k-3500k in expenses, for a product that made 2500k a month.

[deleted]

Re: Quitting a New Job

#139

Post by novask » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

I'll put my experiences down as a cautionary tale.

I've had 3 relatively short stints in tech jobs, but none where I left responsibilities on the table, like leaving in the middle of a project, or promising some work only to bail. Notice was always given, and I made the best effort to transition by completing all work before the end date. My reasons for leaving each are a bit more serious than a lifestyle downgrade, but none-the-less, that doesn't matter to future employers.

There are lots of sectors to jump between that utilize programming and IT knowledge (DevOps, Cloud roles, security roles), so even when you go to try them out, it's being considered a job hop by recruiters/hiring managers. If it doesn't work out, you're now potentially job hopping twice when you try to go back to something you know you can do due to world events.

Not only is this the major take-away from the article, it also applies to switching industries, and in my experience for switching industries, it applies even if you have a recent certification in the new industry which gets requested by a lot of companies:

>It’s ok to quit after a few weeks (just don’t make it a pattern)

Unfortunately, companies won't see the notice you gave or the transition work you did. Those companies likely can't verify that, so they really only have your employment dates to look at. If they don't like it, they just won't put you forward regardless of how much they like your skills.

For some people, there will be companies where they don't fit in with because of personality traits. If you get particularly unlucky, you'll run into 2 or 3 of those companies in quick succession, with the latter positions being even worse than the first, and so you'll have to stick it out and endure more. This unluckiness doesn't do you any favors, though. But it's really up to you if those personality traits need to be fixed or not.

The only thing that seems to count is your tenure, so don't fuck it up. You might not even get to the leetcode step if you do.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#140

Post by hinkley » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #71

whitepaint wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which in my opinion is a problem from an industry perspective. Why? If a person can learn bunch of algorithms and apply them to custom problems they probably can do quite a bit with computers. And it shows that they probably can learn new stuff rapidly as well. I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode. I love it personally, I think it's great. And also, I think people are just lazy and don't want to learn n…

The toughest parts of my software career have been managing relationships with my peers & working on my own attitude. For too long time I thought I could code my way out of any problem and/or win any argument with the technically more correct solution. I was super wrong. No amount of knowledge about how to write a weight balanced binary tree prepares one for the day to day grind of working with actual people.

And even when it's "computer stuff" you find out that there aren't that many n^2 problems to solve, and you'll recall every n^3 problem you fix because they almost never happen.

Mostly what you deal with is architectural problems. And when it comes time to fix slow code, the problem won't be O(n^2) code but a mountain of code where the constant factor C is somewhere between log(n) and sqrt(n).