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How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

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Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#191

Post by LtWorf »

nkotov wrote: post #157

Shortest I've been at a job was 3 months. I knew around the end of the first month that I needed to get out for two simple reasons - I didn't match with the company culture and the company was a sinking ship. I ended up completely leaving my time at that company off my resume because I realized it's not worth going into details. Ironically, the skills (devops / cloudsec) I picked up in those three months have helped…

Wow 3 months! I stayed 2 days!

I was still a student and I immediately had to fix a bug they had about hitting the memory limits with an awful SQL query. I fixed the query and they said "no we will just keep patching sqlite to increase the memory limits forever instead". So I quit because I didn't want to be the most senior person when I was still a student and I didn't want to be ignored.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#192

Post by parpfish »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #179
LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't feel down on yourself in the least. Two to three years is a good run in the tech industry. If I'm not learning new things that will get me the next better job that's a rung up the ladder, there's no point in staying. I've never had a job where that's the case three years in.

I hear this quite a bit, and I appreciate it, but it is still difficult to shake off the feeling I'm defective. My Dad worked at a Tool Store for 25 years, you know? Also the company I'm currently at boasts a lot of engineers who have been with the company 10+ years, some who have for 20+. It's an abnormal software company for sure

I feel this.

I can’t help but feel like I’m being some soft and prissy when I switch jobs after a couple of years. Previous generations worked jobs they hated for decades and got paid way worse than I do. Why can’t I just deal with it? It’s a job, it’s not supposed to be fun it’s supposed to be a thing I do in exchange for money.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#193

Post by paulryanrogers »

lurking_swe wrote: post #185
paulryanrogers wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of many platitudes that kept me in working conditions and religion which were detrimental to my career and mental health. Maybe it's useful to some who are in objectively good circumstances which they haven't learned to appreciate. I'd still advocate for getting other perspectives from trustworthy folks about ones specific situation. And not taking advice from billionaires who think their fruity diet will cure th…

to play devils advocate, you can try to “love what you do” while continuing to better your circumstances. No? The quote doesn’t suggest “the job/career you have now is perfect for you, ignore all red flags”.

The advice is reductive and wide open for interpretation. Also rich coming from a lucky sociopath who cheated even his closest coworker for (relative) pennies.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#194

Post by jdlshore »

fn-mote wrote: post #9

I think the depth of relationship with a job is more complex than comments and the article talk about. What is you reaction to the kind-of-shitty company that gives you an opportunity for great personal growth and creativity? Great colleagues but a real monoculture? /// I liked most of TFA but the end where the author claims that management is more committed than IC's seems really strange to me. Is that something peo…

I think the point is that, as a manager, you can’t fake it and still feel good about yourself. Whereas an engineer can just feel good about doing a good technical job even if you don’t buy into the company direction.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#195

Post by lurking_swe »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #193
lurking_swe wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to play devils advocate, you can try to “love what you do” while continuing to better your circumstances. No? The quote doesn’t suggest “the job/career you have now is perfect for you, ignore all red flags”.

The advice is reductive and wide open for interpretation. Also rich coming from a lucky sociopath who cheated even his closest coworker for (relative) pennies.

i try not to judge people holistically when listening to them give advice in a very narrow area, like work in this case. We all have faults, some more than others obviously.

Example: a rapist could be an EXCELLENT plumber as his occupation. One has nothing to do with the other. Pretending like they have no useful plumbing advice to give just makes one look silly.

Steve jobs was a shit human being. But i won’t sit here and pretend he wasn’t a visionary product person, or a person that thought deeply about work, our relation with technology, etc.

For what it’s worth I agree it’s reductive. Most 1-2 sentence life advice is…so not too surprising. :)

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#196

Post by sidewndr46 »

zbentley wrote: post #136
sidewndr46 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analyze the whole program? I steadfastly refused to ever attempt do that. "method(:foo).source_location" from the Rails console and I've got the only answer that matters. Most functions were monkey patched at least once anyways, so you'd never know by searching for the implementation where it was.

But like…this is very telling, no? If major conventions in a language involve runtime debugging/printing actions to just find out where a method is defined (and your approach here is the norm in every Ruby codebase I’ve worked on; this isn’t an attack on you in the slightest) that doesn’t say anything good about the Ruby ecosystem. Hell, just finding out what methods can be called from a given code location is someth…

I think it is just the result of a community that views metaprogramming as the normal solution to a problem.

I can write perfectly legible and readable Ruby if I want to. But I also could just write Python and it would be easier to maintain.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#198

Post by randmeerkat »

throwanem wrote: post #67
lelandbatey wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen poorly-built code on rails circa 2014, and I've seen Rails done pretty well circa-2025. I'd say rails is pretty neutral. Saying it's PHP bad seems a bit much, but hey. The worst code I've ever seen by a country mile though was a huge Python 2 code base written on an old version of Tornado circa 2012, a library that basically hacked the Python language to get code to run asynchronously, but you had to contor…

I didn't say Rails was PHP bad, but if you'd asked I would say it is worse. Both have awful ergonomics that make mistakes easy, but at least with PHP it's hard to be foolish in a way that's very clever. Ruby meanwhile will happily hand you more than enough rope to David Carradine yourself before you really even notice, and the DHH/Katz crowd took full advantage.

And yet he double downs on the troll… Style points for the David Carradine reference though.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#199

Post by bigtunacan »

throwanem wrote: post #80
bigtunacan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. I work on one of the largest Rails codebases out there. Millions of lines of code running in a monolith. I have learned more in this shop about scaling, observability, mature system designs, zero downtime upgrades, deploys, etc… I been in this field for almost 30 years and have worked with whatever tech the job required. Still I learned more at a Rails shop with more than 200 engineers all working in t…

I'm well aware there is a large Rails shop with famously strong engineering practices, which I believe deserve much credit that accrues for some reason instead to the framework.

Yes, yes, yes, everyone knows about Shopify and no that’s not the multi billion dollar monolith shop I’m referring to, but we definitely have taken some inspiration from their excellent practices. We also brought in a lot of best in breed from Microsoft and Amazon.

Bottom line is it’s about the talent and the discipline. At the end of the day it’s not bad languages that are the problem it’s bad engineers.

Re: How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

#200

Post by mock-possum »

marklubi wrote: post #183
haraball wrote: post #103

A couple of rules I have that have worked for me so far is: Colleagues, tasks, compensation - if at least two of the three are good, it's fine to stay. If not it's time to look for something new. The first year is a learning year, the second is a productive year, and the third is a "what else can I get out of this place" year. If nothing changes in the third year, then there's not much more to learn from the company…

Culture is a fourth one. Currently working towards the end of a contract/earn-out at a company where people just toss stuff they don't want to deal with over the fence for others to handle with usually zero communication about why/what/how. Just suddenly get a new project with no context. Also, three different bosses in two years because they keep leaving. Second worst company I've ever worked for. The worst one invo…

Sounds like culture is colleagues
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