201–210 of 354 posts
Here's a bizarre story about quitting. When I was at Microsoft, I had a manager who, despite good intentions, led through fear and paranoia. I had gotten yelled at for causing a production incident, which was not the first time, but that week I started having some very strange dreams involving seeing the number "69" in different places. Just some juvenile humor maybe, I just dismissed it. In the meantime, gradually t…
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…
>Like, little software shops My first dev job was at one of these. They didn't even use version control.
store_v1.js
storev2.js
store4.js store_new.js
store_newest.js
I got their head engineer fired by explaining to the CEO what industry best practices were and how incredibly common and valuable they were (and honestly, the engineer got himself fired by refusing to even consider changing his ways). I introduced concepts like "store your products, sales, and user data in a database instead of a flat file" and "use version control" and "use a deploy script that supports rollbacks". Then I quit for a better paying job.
The CEO complained that I convinced him to change everything in the software stack and to get rid of the guy with 15 years of experience there, and then bailed on him. I pointed out that $40k/yr is not enough to buy loyalty. Last I heard he got acquired by a bigger company who threw out our entire estore anyway. He's doing great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. From first hand experience, let me explain why I need this. It's because when the growth stagnates, management starts to attack their own reports. This is an effort to squeeze produ…
> From first hand experience, let me explain why I need this. It's because when the growth stagnates, management starts to attack their own reports. from my looong experience (I'm retired), perhaps more second hand than first depending on your definitions, of all the people I have known, who got rich rich are primarily people who stayed at one company a long time, and their career/responsibilities grew through promot…
Maybe times have changed. But engineers today are too smart to listen to leadership that will throw them under the bus to hide their own incompetence.
I know it was only one piece of the article that talks about RTO, but as an aside, I don't think I've ever once in my life, in person or online, seen someone arguing for remote work that provided even a single piece of data, a single number, to back up their assertions. Their arguments instead just presuppose that RTO is awful and remote work is amazing, as if everyone "just knows" it. And apparently everybody that's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. From first hand experience, let me explain why I need this. It's because when the growth stagnates, management starts to attack their own reports. This is an effort to squeeze produ…
> From first hand experience, let me explain why I need this. It's because when the growth stagnates, management starts to attack their own reports. from my looong experience (I'm retired), perhaps more second hand than first depending on your definitions, of all the people I have known, who got rich rich are primarily people who stayed at one company a long time, and their career/responsibilities grew through promot…
I stuck around for six years at my previous job, and my boss was there for 13 years. I dealt with a lot of bullshit from the corporate higher ups for four of those years, frozen salaries, no promotions in the department, company 401k match removed, worse health benefits, not replacing coworkers after they left so I (and my boss too) kept having more responsibilities piled up, etc. And I was very reliable at my job (read: let myself be taken advantage of). I even got call outs in town halls for some things I helped accomplish, and when I left I'd be referred to as one of the few phone systems SME in the company.
I finally got sick of the stagnation and left for a different industry and a hefty raise in 2021. My boss stayed. And then two weeks ago I heard they shut down the department and let everyone still there go (we were a skeleton crew in engineering when I left, but we supported 90 other employees). If I had stayed there, I would have still been making barely more than I was making when I left, and would have been let go with the rest of the department.
While there are undoubtedly people like the ones you are describing out there, there are probably far more people that get into situations like mine, especially when the company starts to stagnate.
> ” As an employee, it’s usually best to leave in the first wave of cuts.” That’s only valid if you can very easily find another job with similar salary and better work environment, right? If I am a regular IC that will have to go through a lot of interviews to find a new job it is best to just wait until I am fired (while looking for a new job without leaving the current one).
In the third wave of cuts, you've had 3 managers in 6 months, everyone hates life, you're having all hands meetings biweekly, and when you get let go quietly, your severance is shit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Definitely feeling this at another FAANG I think there’s something about post-pandemic work in software that just isn’t working. I don’t think it’s just interest rates or a hiring downturn, nor immediate causes like founders leaving (because I see this sickness at most big tech companies these days). Personally, I believe that hybrid work is not going well. Fully remote teams are good, fully onsite teams are good. Wi…
Sounds like you're describing Amazon, at least it's very clear this was the case when I worked there, and it contrasted with several happy healthy years engineering in a core group at Apple, which was exactly the opposite description, partly because of keeping hierarchies very shallow, so everyone was involved in real work, not posing as valuable.
A few years after quitting to work on cancer research at a startup which soon failed, i found Amazon's 13 or whatever levels to be a complete joke, and didn't need to put up with the corrupt bureaucracy, so left.
I don't understand this fascination with central offices. We live in the year 2024. We should be able to look at our workforce, find small offices, and have hub and spoke networks of offices - and work from home as a fallback. Rent a condo, do a communal office, if you want more close collaboration - shuffle your teams to colocate them - not force them into 1hr commutes into a fucking empty office. Our infrastructure…
I wish they would stop trying to force us into shared working spaces. They can make me work from home, a close office, a far office... I don't care. Just give me a private office and I will do my best work. At home, I don't have room for a private office, so they would need to relocate me and cover a portion of the rent for their office. I am not a contractor. I am an employee. I don't control any of my working condi…