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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

#221

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

iamthirsty wrote: post #37
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

I agree with all but the last, as I think it's debatable. > Leadership is fond of setting goals and deathly allergic to providing incentives Goals are good, in any way, as long as their portioned right. And at the level most people this is targeted to are working at, is the rather large salary supposed to be the incentive?

An incentive isn't an incentive if d/dx = 0 for behaviour x. Salary is how you get someone to work for you instead of a competitor, and keep them from spending their time worrying about mortgages, but it's not really an incentive unless someone is at risk of being fired. Performance bonuses, stock options, recognition, raises, promotions, and interesting projects are incentives.

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

#222

Post by closeparen »

mlhpdx wrote: post #182
ryandrake wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone on HN knows someone's brother's nephew's wife's cousin's former roommate who makes $600K at MegaCorp FAANG but those kinds of opportunities aren't (and have never been) common. Especially now during our first tech bear market in what, 13 years?

What’s the unemployment rate for software developers? Still basically zero. It’s never moved, but for some reason people seem to think it has. That’s weird.

WSJ reported a few days ago that IT job growth is down year-over-year from 279,000 to 700. It's not contraction yet, but it is effectively the end of a long run of rapid growth.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-employment-grew-by-just-700-...

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

#224

Post by lazide »

pm90 wrote: post #214
lucidguppy wrote: post #34

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…

Taking the most generous interpretation of this desire: It might just be because management is just not used to fully remote. Most workplaces aren’t healthy and satisfying, they’re somewhat toxic and in many cases incredibly so. The adaptable managers that have a consensus based management style find a way; those that are used to doing things by decree find themselves ineffective in controlling the direction of their…

If you think those toxic managers are going to get less toxic when they don’t need to worry about death stares from everyone if everyone sees them doing toxic things to people in person, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

And those folks aren’t like that because of lack of training, generally.

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

#225

Post by FireBeyond »

geocrasher wrote: post #63
JohnFen wrote: post #31

For me, the main sign that it's time to leave a company is when I start fantasizing regularly about leaving the company. My gut seems to be wiser than my head on this stuff. Nearly every time that I've moved on, it's turned out to be the right call in hindsight.

And the one time I actually followed my gut and got a new job, I let my boss convince me to stay on (I really loved the company) and then he sold it shortly after to some jackasses that ruined it. And then when I did leave, I left without a good plan and ended up in a family owned company whose infighting left everyone wondering if they'd have a job the next day. Pure hell.

Had a partner who was looking at a vet tech role to provide some income while she planned for veterinary school in the next 12 months or so.

She was essentially assured the job, but was concerned about the ad. "We want someone who is committed to us and this, who wants to stay with the clinic and be here for the long haul."

She was pre-emptively feeling guilty. "I know that in about a year I'm going to move on, they want commitment..."

I simply told her, "What happens if they have a massive business downturn next week, or one of the doctors retires, or COVID lockdowns, etc. How do you think they're going to react?

1 - 'we dont have the revenue or workload to support keeping you on, but, since you made a commitment to us, we are making one to you and will keep you on payroll', or,

2 - 'revenues are down or workload doesn't require the level of staffing we have, so thank you for your service, today will be your last day at the clinic'?"

We all know which is going to happen in 99.9%+ of cases.

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

#226

Post by lttlrck »

hibikir wrote: post #18

Hit the nail in the head. A growing company has plenty of opportunity for learning, promotion, making new things, and retooling old ones to match the growth of business. This means there are very few zero sum games, either at the IC or management level. When growth stops, there's little chances to gain status by solving problems: Someone already has status, and really doesn't want to lose it. Those frustrated with th…

Not everyone is chasing status. IME a good portion of those that are seem to the most toxic and I'd prefer they did leave.

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

#228

Post by 29athrowaway »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #207
29athrowaway wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It's quite rare to have the degree of control you're envisioning over a project. Most software teams are building products to sell to customers, and most customers aren't going to accept "IDK whenever we're done" as an expected delivery date. Companies can and should provide some degree of wiggle room, but it's not realistic to expect that you can avoid ever thinking about how long a task is going to take.

That sounds like you are totally winning!

If everything is urgent, that is a strong symptom that you completely lost control and you should not be running a project.

The value you add as a decision maker is making decisions that mitigate the risk of being in a scenario where everything is urgent, that is, a crisis. If you are constantly in crisis mode running for your life because you failed catastrophically.

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

#230

Post by fuzztester »

972811 wrote: post #58
opportune wrote: post #13

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…

i agree with all of what you said, but i think the main change is just that these companies aren't growing the same way they were pre-pandemic. everything feels resource constrained in a way it didn't in the mid-2010s and this makes everything inherently political and negative edit: to give an example, you probably don't think at all about an exec's value when you see him once a quarter in an all-hands explaining the…

what is that warren buffet about "when the tide goes out, something something naked"?

searches ...

One of Warren Buffett’s most famous quotes is: “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.”

from

https://fortune.com/2022/10/03/warren-buffett-famous-quotes-...

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