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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

#181

Post by yashap »

jcims wrote: post #50
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.

I think this is just a more extreme example of a common psychological phenotype that I've encountered somewhat regularly over 25 years in industry.

Agreed, this is an extreme version, but you’ll find a decent number of developers at most companies with a toxic viewpoint along these lines.

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

#182

Post by itronitron »

Aeolun wrote: post #172
deanCommie wrote: post #117

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 m…

I don’t understand. Does the fact that the author of the project in question is antirez change anything about the authors experience?

Given that they were tasked to contribute to a very popular open source project, the author may have been able to get past their perceptions of mismanagement at Pivotal. But part of their complaint seems to be that they were not able to contribute as much as they wanted. Different people adapt to such a situation in different ways.

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

#183

Post by TeMPOraL »

hobofan wrote: post #72
Ecstatify wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no one calls these companies out nothing will ever change, maybe he still has friends in the company he'd like to help out, nothing will light a fire under a companies ass more than appearing on the front page of HackerNews for the wrong reasons. If I was applying to this company I would like to have this insight to make my mind up, it's another data point, doesn't mean it's 100% correct but that's up for me to de…

To me, the writings of a disgruntled ex-employee who is on a vendetta against the company, is just as worthless as those fake Glassdoor reviews. They have written at least 5 rambling articles with the sole purpose of tearing down Pivotal, which at some point starts to be more of a reflection of the author than the company.

You say disgruntled employee, I say it sounds like a problem company.

I just read this and I can say, I worked with a company that was roughly this but multiplied by 0.25. Main product that never worked but sold as if it did? Check. Weird investor schemes? Check. Sales people lying about the product, or the customers (as if the company had them, instead of a string of noncommittal POCs)? Check. Sales people having no clue what the product did, and just selling the bullshit they invented? Check. CEO rotations? Check. Someone getting entangled in what looked like a different version of Nigerian Prince scam? Check.

I can 100% believe everything the author said, because I've seen a lite version of it. And if all you know about a company comes from their website, press, conferences and their salesmen, you'll never realize how rotten things are on the inside.

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

#184

Post by Robin_Message »

buzzkillington wrote: post #139
aprdm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of fixing corporate culture seems like a weird one, if you remove corporate and go for the generic term, can you "fix culture"? I think what you can do is influence the culture of a company and reap the rewards, having done the devops transformation in two difference companies that were deemed unfixable (both more than 4 offices and 3k people) I feel it is very doable! It just takes time and it is not an…

The type of person who will write blogs about how terrible a company is is not the type of person who has enough empathy to understand why things are as fucked as they are and how to fix them.

That's a really unfair comment on the OP, especially as the blog literally details why things were fucked and all their efforts on different teams to try and improve things.

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

#185

Post by TeMPOraL »

v01dlight wrote: post #87
GuiA wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is experiencing cognitive dissonance because he was expecting professional life to push him to his limits, in an environment designed for maximal productivity and innovation, working with people who care about doing the best work of their life. A lot of overachievers in school have that outlook. There are some jobs that are like this, but they are very few and far between. There are far more companies that…

> The reality is that if you care about your craft a tiny bit more than average, you will most likely end up feeling that you are overpaid for trivial work, that you could do so much more for the company, that your coworkers and hierarchy are apathetic to things that do not directly affect them (and will seek to avoid any change as much as possible). Damn, I've never read a better articulation of how I feel at work h…

This has to stop, or we'll never progress as a civilization.

See all this incompetence revealed across the entire economy and governance in the wake of COVID-19? Apathetic people ticking boxes is a big component of the cause.

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

#186

Post by hobofan »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #183
hobofan wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the writings of a disgruntled ex-employee who is on a vendetta against the company, is just as worthless as those fake Glassdoor reviews. They have written at least 5 rambling articles with the sole purpose of tearing down Pivotal, which at some point starts to be more of a reflection of the author than the company.

You say disgruntled employee, I say it sounds like a problem company. I just read this and I can say, I worked with a company that was roughly this but multiplied by 0.25. Main product that never worked but sold as if it did? Check. Weird investor schemes? Check. Sales people lying about the product, or the customers (as if the company had them, instead of a string of noncommittal POCs)? Check. Sales people having no…

> I just read this and I can say, I worked with a company that was roughly this but multiplied by 0.25.

Who hasn't? You will find the points of that bullshit bingo in any company with some degree on severity, even more so in a young startup.

A good portion of the article is the author realizing that stock options are shit when the company isn't doing as well as they claimed. (Welcome to the club!) Another portion is the author realizing that they don't like working on an open source project with a BDFL that they perceive to be resistant to input. And then they complain about the sales people doing a good job, because they are selling what makes the company money instead of support contracts for what they work on.

In the end, if I were to consider working at the company, nothing of that would tell me if it were a good idea or not.

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

#187

Post by mac01021 »

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…

What happened in 2008?

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

#188

Post by Aeolun »

itronitron wrote: post #182
Aeolun wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand. Does the fact that the author of the project in question is antirez change anything about the authors experience?

Given that they were tasked to contribute to a very popular open source project, the author may have been able to get past their perceptions of mismanagement at Pivotal. But part of their complaint seems to be that they were not able to contribute as much as they wanted. Different people adapt to such a situation in different ways.

If Antirez was an ‘employee’ at pivotal at the time, and was apparently very hard to work with (of course we only see one side here), them I can sort of understand the authors frustration.

If Pivotal hired someone to contribute to Redis who then wasn’t actually allowed to contribute, that’s even more silly.

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

#189

Post by Reason077 »

mac01021 wrote: post #187
HarryHirsch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What happened in 2008?

The GFC.

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

#190

Post by nmca »

VectorLock wrote: post #179
nmca wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually 50k of time off (not made clear other than in the contract at the bottom), which is not exactly the same thing.

What does "50k of time off mean?" They were going to give him vacation time accrued or something else?

irrc 50k at the rate of his salary until he got a job, may be mis-remebering.
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