Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

I lost it at "What the fuck is HIPPA".

Who the fuck buys a healthcare company and doesn't know what the fuck HIPPA is?

Great read.

That would be considered passive aggressive messaging. People easily see through the intent. Just copy paste the content from the manual and link to source.

I’d recommend trying the graded exercises in https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-alg... or https://www.edx.org/course/data-structures-an-active-learnin... — unfortunately, for the most benefit (online automatic grading), you’ll have to pay either EdX or Coursera, but EdX offers a small sample of exercises to start, if I recall correctly. And there are a few more courses after those.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll learn better if someone doesn’t ask you to do the impossible, but instead leads you through enough solutions that you can get an immediate confidence boost from the first few easy ones, then the intermediate ones require more thought, and if you really get stuck, there are discussions about how to solve some of the problems. Usually you have to think algorithmically, not just write code, and some problems might just be harder for you to understand because you haven’t done as much work in that area. I won’t say it’s a complete look at algorithms—there’s a whole other course on strings if I recall, but it’s a good start.

Also, here’s my cheat to pass those employer questions — if they let you use JS, do EVERYTHING you can with ES6 Map and Set classes. Folks rarely look at the code and don’t care if you’re using for loops or advanced classes, but it’s way easier to use a Set than to worry about how many times you have to loop over some result to reduce duplication, or sort things, or what have you. If you need a unique sorted set, there are faster algorithms, but a simple (new Set(arr.sort())) gets the job done, because Set is insertion-ordered by default and any native JS function is generally faster than you writing your own code, so it’s impossible to mark this solution as wrong unless you exclude native functions (but who does that?). A bonus tip, if you need to figure out the difference between sets, just get creative with .filter and .map. There’s not much to memorize beyond that because there’s not much advanced functionality, just building blocks flexible enough to do anything, relatively expressively. https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/ch_sets.html#missing-se...

A follow up, if ES6 JS doesn’t come easy to you — pick a language you like best and look for its equivalents to Set, Map, .filter (or select) and .map (or collect). Bonus tip, look for .find or .first, to short circuit looping and stop at the first thing that matches. Yes, you can memorize for loops or why one thing is more efficient than another, but if you start with Set and Map where each makes sense, you’ll solve 80-90% of algorithm questions pretty easily and usually in a way that’s straightforward to read and understand later, especially if you start naming some of your functions to make them a bit easier to read. (Like naming selectors in Redux...)

If writing SQL as part of a quiz, learn the different joins because usually the question is worded in a way where picking the correct join will deliver huge performance benefits by reducing how much data you’re going through or making things more efficient than looping through multiple subqueries. Left vs Inner vs Right vs Outer vs Cross... remember that the less data the server has to go through (the fewer records in the earliest sub query), the faster everything will run, in these quiz scenarios. Yes, in real life how you store data matters, what you index, but it’s rare you’ve any control over the index or schema in these tests.

I've shared parts of this before but it seems apropos of the topic at hand.

I was working a Fortune 500 corporation. Been there 5 or 6 years. Pay was ok. Culture was meh. Technology was open source. I was happy enough but figured it was time to start looking around for other opportunities. Coincidentally, just about this time I get promoted to senior and the senior gets promoted between me and my current boss to be my new boss. He was not really prepared to manage people, was not given any training or preparation for the new role, was still expected to mainly write code, and probably preferred it that way. Because I'm pretty good at expressing myself and he wasn't so much, I think he also felt threatened by me.

We had had a perfectly fine working relationship before this. But I started to hear from other team members that new boss was badmouthing me behind my back. Didn't make me feel good, but shit I'm doing my job and, you know, you can count up my story points at the end of the sprint if anyone's worried.

Things came to head during my first annual review under new boss when boss gives me a mediocre review. Tells me I ask too many questions, and says I don't have adequate knowledge of our applications. I'm kinda dumbfounded. I point out to him that, besides having worked on most the applications for several years, I'm the one who set up the wiki and has written most the application documentation found therein. His reply: "That's not knowledge. Knowledge is what's in your head." I'm at a loss. I felt like I was being gaslighted before that word had entered the popular vernacular and provided me just the word I was looking for to explain the strange feelings I was feeling.

I made the mistake of challenging the review with HR. It immediately became a shitshow and I quickly learned what people mean when they say HR is not your friend. Put on a PIP. Everyone I knew told me to put my head down and get the hell out of there as soon as possible. So that's what I planned to do. Problem was every other company I interviewed with seemed like it was the subject of another post in this thread. Besides, my commute was only 10 minutes with no freeways involved at current employer and I was being kinda picky on that point.

Six months drag on. About everything that could go wrong while I was looking for a job seemed to go wrong. At one point I had a couple decent offers in hand I was ready to accept and then fumbled them both by trying to play one against the other. Meanwhile, I am keeping my head down and doing my job. I mean, my take on things is probably a little biased, but I'm pretty sure I was the most productive and reliable member of the team and the objective data, if management could have been bothered to try to collect any, would have backed me up. After all, in the not so distant past, they had promoted me to senior.

So the period assigned to the original PIP expires. I'm ashamed to still be there. But at least I figure they'll let that go. Nope. Boss comes back with new PIP. Totally fabricated stuff. Like "On project X, Klenwell did work to which he was not assigned." I point out that I was updating everyone on the project every morning on what I was doing in the daily daily standup. Including my boss. "You were standing right there!?" I'm furious, demoralized, ready to quit. On advice of a family member, I talk to an employment lawyer.

Best $300 I may have ever spent. "Yeah," he tells me. "You're fucked. They're papering your file. But don't quit. You'll sacrifice any benefits, including unemployment." I learned something that day. And the screw turned. That point forward, I'm not taking shit from anyone or anything. My boss. My boss's boss. Fire me? Cool! I'll take my unemployment checks and have my new best friend lawyer be in contact with you!

It was a very satisfying two weeks. I was like a kid peddling around on over-inflated bicycle wheels. But all good things must come to an end and the final straw came in a sit-down with my boss when boss said boss's boss (my old boss) was questioning why I was writing tests for a critical piece of ancient real-money-processing infrastructure that we needed to upgrade. My response: hey, is Boss's Boss writing code again for us? Great. Let him take over this story and I'll move on to something else.

I was fired the next morning. Walked out of the building with my belongings in a garbage bag. And a shadow was lifted off my little world.

Lawyer never returned my call. Took me exactly 6 months to find a new job. Things have been much better since then.