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Signs that it's time to leave a company

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Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#151

Post by ska »

closeparen wrote: post #94
ryandrake wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pre-2023 thinking and early-career thinking. Without job title growth, eventually everyone plateaus. There's only so much any company is willing to pay a non-manager individual contributor worker bee. Early in your career you can go from say $45K to $60K to $100K like it's nothing, but the more you job hop, it'll start looking more like $110K -> $120K -> $125K -> $128K and so on, asymptotically approaching your…

Note: the national median for software developers is $127k, don't let anyone sell you that as some kind of career ceiling. Especially if you live in New York, Seattle, or the Bay Area. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm#st

You're both right - you point out the absolute values achievable are a bit higher, but parent is pointing out that early career jumps are typically faster than later career ones (for good reason). So maybe it's 160k (or whatever) not 128k but the argument stands. Asymptoting to some sort of local-to-you maximum is how most peoples career arc will go. At some point there are no more big jumps to be made unless you wildly change what you are doing, and many folks will be ok with that, you continue making good money (globally speaking) for the longer run, but your days of doubling salary are done.

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#152

Post by zmmmmm »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #103
erinaceousjones wrote: post #70

That so many people are so focused on things "having" to be in a constant state of exponential growth makes me feel uneasy. It's like so many people can't see the forest for the trees - we can't have infinite exponential growth forever. Like, little software shops which take on a stable number of projects / contracts / clients a year, focused on sustainability instead of pure profit, lose and gain people at a roughly…

Time and time again job announcements are mentioning fast-paced environments , and exactly those companies like to churn through an immense body count. Loyalty needs to go two ways. Stability seems to be a game for the older folks, whereas younger people prefer efficiency and risk taking. "we can't have infinite exponential growth forever", I agree, but I can create infinite exponential personal growth for my younger…

> Loyalty needs to go two ways

This is one of the more perplexing elements of both working as an IC and a manager. I'm constantly battling the line between treating the relationship as purely transactional and one where work is more meaningful than that. The problem is that whenever you bring other things in - "loyalty", "passion" etc etc you are at very high risk that these are circumstantially dependent on the coincidental alignment of the employee's interests and that of the organisation. The minute that changes, you will find you now have an employee whose motivation is at odds with the interests of the larger organisation and all kinds of dysfunction stems from that. The only true stable basis for alignment is that the organisation needs work done and the employee needs money. It's great if there is more than that, but the minute anybody relies on it they are essentially rolling a dice with some odds it turns against them.

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#153

Post by volkk »

codegeek wrote: post #102
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Like, little software shops I tried those and TBH they never worked for me. Small shops in my experience have not very good processes, rush to gain new projects and customers at all cost by sales/management always overpromising and burning out engineers in the process who strugle with the unrealistic deadlines, promotions are gained trough favoritism since there's no fixed clear and well documented promotion/career…

That's ok. You are just built to work with more structure and processes. Some people like the small company vibe where things are a bit chaotic but also fun and creative. Nothing wrong with either.

and also 10 hours a week of meetings about said rigid process

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#154

Post by irrational »

mike_hock wrote: post #132
irrational wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, some jobs really really don't require much if any collaboration. We've been having to come back into the office since last September. In all that time, I've only spoken to another person a single time. Literally one hour in one day in the past 5 months. All meetings are still over zoom and when I'm not in a meeting, I just find some place in the building to sit and work. Except many people still weren't comin…

> sitting on the floor What the fuck?!

HR frowns on that.

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#155

Post by Aurornis »

codegeek wrote: post #102
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Like, little software shops I tried those and TBH they never worked for me. Small shops in my experience have not very good processes, rush to gain new projects and customers at all cost by sales/management always overpromising and burning out engineers in the process who strugle with the unrealistic deadlines, promotions are gained trough favoritism since there's no fixed clear and well documented promotion/career…

That's ok. You are just built to work with more structure and processes. Some people like the small company vibe where things are a bit chaotic but also fun and creative. Nothing wrong with either.

> You are just built to work with more structure and processes.

For what it's worth, some of the most highly structured and process-heavy tech companies I've worked at have been small startups.

Small companies can be a haven for micromanaging first-time CTOs, inexperienced VPs of Engineering who learned how to "lead" from books and LinkedIn posts, Technical Program Managers who want to control every aspect of everything in the company, and Project Managers who don't have anyone to guide them so they fall back to nagging everyone about progress all day.

I don't think it's accurate to generalize all small companies as being low-structure or light on process.

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#156

Post by 29athrowaway »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #98
29athrowaway wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the largest software projects in history have been implemented by remote workers. Like the Linux kernel. But if you require to read people's reactions and body language and try to figure out if they are telling the truth, or brag about your socioeconomic status or appearance, or if you need to assert dominance over others, or do social engineering like mirroring other's movements, then face to face is perhaps…

You're summing up a pretty wide spectrum of things as "distrust". If a junior engineer says they understand what I'm asking for and will deliver it in 2 weeks, but actually they don't fully understand and will deliver half of it in 3 weeks, I wouldn't typically characterize that as them lying or being untrustworthy. But it's a problem that's a lot easier to detect and solve in person. (It's also, not coincidentally,…

"I give deadlines to junior engineers who don't understand things."

Ding, ding, ding! You have won the toxic bingo.

If you work with 2 week deadlines you've lost control of your project. Like in Tetris.

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#157

Post by tobyjsullivan »

NegativeK wrote: post #100
pacomerh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't collaborate better in person.

I do, probably because of my particular flavor of strong introversion. What's the solution to different people benefiting from different work styles?

People should find company cultures that match their work styles. That's the best way to allow people with similar work styles to work together.

There can never be one true corporate policy to rule them all. That said, I agree with most of the comments here. Hybrid is just bad. A company needs to pick on-site or remote.

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#158

Post by JohnFen »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #103
erinaceousjones wrote: post #70

That so many people are so focused on things "having" to be in a constant state of exponential growth makes me feel uneasy. It's like so many people can't see the forest for the trees - we can't have infinite exponential growth forever. Like, little software shops which take on a stable number of projects / contracts / clients a year, focused on sustainability instead of pure profit, lose and gain people at a roughly…

Time and time again job announcements are mentioning fast-paced environments , and exactly those companies like to churn through an immense body count. Loyalty needs to go two ways. Stability seems to be a game for the older folks, whereas younger people prefer efficiency and risk taking. "we can't have infinite exponential growth forever", I agree, but I can create infinite exponential personal growth for my younger…

Whenever I read that a place is a "fast-paced environment", I take that as a red flag. I think it's usually code for "this is a difficult and unnecessarily stressful place where you're going to be a disposable cog in the machine."

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#159

Post by velcrovan »

polynomial wrote: post #76
velcrovan wrote: post #4

Other signs for me personally: * Sales schedules dictate product development timelines rather than the other way around * Leadership thinks about practical operational/logistics issues only when forced to * The importance of "culture" is brought up without fail when talking about working from the office, and never at other times * Leadership is fond of setting goals and deathly allergic to providing incentives

What are some typical examples of operational/logistics issues that less than great management might otherwise ignore?

Developing (and frequently revising) complicated schemes for things like pricing, discounts, and sales commissions (does the accounting system even track the data required to do these calculations? what would it take for it to do so, and how much training and effort to enter and clean the data... you know what who cares!)

Not noticing the steady stream of accounting people traipsing to and from your IT manager's office to ask *accounting* questions, rather than ask the controller...and then when the IT manager brings it up, still refusing to notice it...

They ask for a web-based configure-to-order tool, so you mock up a quick-and-dirty but very fake interactive demo as a discussion piece to get them to answer questions and make decisions about how the thing should work. When you show it to them and talk about what it will take to develop the real thing, baffled looks followed by “wait, isn't this the real thing? It’s working fine already!”

I could go on...all stuff from past lives

Re: Signs that it's time to leave a company

#160

Post by Aurornis »

OtomotO wrote: post #65
paulddraper wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People collaborate easier in person. Travel is a downside.

Other downside: way more coffee breaks and private discussions.

> and private discussions.

I joined a company that went from in-person to remote and the number of private discussions and politics exploded.

Something about going remote and exchanging faces for screen names was like pouring gasoline on the fire for company politics. The number of private Slack channels exploded and one group even moved to their own private (unofficial) Slack because they wanted a private space where other people couldn't accidentally be invited to their discussions. It was wild.

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