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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

#331

Post by kvonhorn »

jasonzemos wrote: post #90
iwontberude wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an anecdote, my neighbor is a crazy asshole who started blasting music and having parties at random hours; it can be problematic for sleep and productivity. Police in California are inept at stopping this. Will the company pay to send lawyers or do I have to waste my own time and money to pick up and move my whole life for something worse to be waiting at the next rental?

> Police in California are inept at stopping this

Former long time renter here. I had the same problem with neighbors in an adjacent apartment complex, and police couldn't do a damned thing except come out at 4 am and tell me, yep, we can hear that from the street.

I mentioned the problem to the landlord. The landlord told me to report it to the public health department. I did.

I never heard back from the health department, but the noise stopped within a few days, and the stereo blasting tenant and their onsite manager glared at me ever time I saw them afterwards.

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

#332

Post by evandale »

29athrowaway wrote: post #283
jay_kyburz wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, agreed. Granular tasks of about a day or two, and just talking about it is easier than more process and paperwork. You should try it!

You mean a humiliation ritual? No, thanks. I am not going to build my career at the expense of the dignity of other people. Build the skills, the trust and the enthusiasm and leave people work in peace. Nobody likes micromanagement. If people could get a paycheck without ever having such conversations they would prefer that. It's a cost to be minimized, not a reward. Your only value is how much you empower others com…

You sound insufferable to work with and it's probably best you're a remote only worker. I can't imagine what working with you could possibly be like - you seem to hate literally every aspect of employment.

You seem to have no idea what the word micromanagement means either and it seems like you use it to describe any ritual you personally dislike.

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

#333

Post by 29athrowaway »

evandale wrote: post #332
29athrowaway wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean a humiliation ritual? No, thanks. I am not going to build my career at the expense of the dignity of other people. Build the skills, the trust and the enthusiasm and leave people work in peace. Nobody likes micromanagement. If people could get a paycheck without ever having such conversations they would prefer that. It's a cost to be minimized, not a reward. Your only value is how much you empower others com…

You sound insufferable to work with and it's probably best you're a remote only worker. I can't imagine what working with you could possibly be like - you seem to hate literally every aspect of employment. You seem to have no idea what the word micromanagement means either and it seems like you use it to describe any ritual you personally dislike.

I am the most loved coworker that ever walked the Earth. Because I don't micromanage people.

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

#334

Post by phyzome »

maxlin wrote: post #329
phyzome wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFH is a benefit, and when you cut benefits, your best (and most mobile) employees evaporate off.

WFH is a benefit when you and your boss don't care about the company and are just on the mindset of doing the minimum hours to get your salary, and your boss is just trying to cover his own ass. And would prefer to just get the money for doing nothing while sitting home. And care more about benefits than if the thing you're working on even ever ships. It is sad such jobs exist, I would never work in such a job and th…

If the alternative in this artificial dichotomy would be spending more than 40 hours per week to get my salary, I'll take the "WFH and do nothing" option that you're positing. Why on earth would I do extra work for free?

However, that's not how this actually works. WFH and in-office and hybrid can all be do-nothing jobs or getting-stuff-done jobs. Depends on the coworkers, on management ability to set direction, and on the industry and product. They can all also be a waste of time or worth the time, again depending on what the company does.

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

#335

Post by 29athrowaway »

azemetre wrote: post #330
29athrowaway wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better cultivate meaningful relationships instead of reinforcing a sick institution like the fake office friendship. Your family, friends, neighbors.

If you move, are you upset your neighbors don't travel with you? I sincerely don't understand the point you were making. Obviously having a network of family and friends matters too, but your children will grow up and leave. Your friends might leave too. Do you think those relations were a waste of time as well. Most things are ephemeral in a human lifetime. That's why it's better to appreciate what you have now, in…

I still hang out with neighbors I had decades ago.

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

#336

Post by shiroiuma »

pi-e-sigma wrote: post #301
shiroiuma wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not just experience, it's partly about picking the right people, and not picking the wrong people. Some people are just not good managers, and no amount of training is going to make them a likeable person with good people skills needed to lead a team of people. Many places seem to want to pick someone who has the best technical skills, and then assume he'll magically become a great manager somehow. I thi…

Since when HR has no real power? In most places they can block any hiring decision . That's a lot of power and no accountability

You must have worked in some shitty companies. HR is treated differently in different companies. The ones you worked in sound like companies where the HR department has some incestuous relationship with the C-suite (or more likely, the owner). That's not the norm for all companies; in better-run companies, HR only functions at the pleasure of the departments that actually make money. So if a hiring manager wants to hire someone, that person gets hired (assuming the department head supports the decision), and any problems from HR result in the department head (for instance, engineering) going to the CEO and telling them to do something about HR.

I've seen horror stories about companies like yours on places like glassdoor.com. Those are places to be avoided at all costs.

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

#337

Post by fnl »

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 on principal, but believe it is more nuanced and hybrid can work if you implement it uniformly across the company. For example, I’ve seen places where everyone can WFH Tue & Thu or Mon, Wed, Fri where hybrid have a quite smooth collaboration culture. But if it is “random”, every day ends up being WFH - that’s in effect just the same as fully remote, and you need to act accordingly. And if you work in a global company with globally distributed teams, the company already is de facto fully remote, and the picture becomes even more nuanced.

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

#338

Post by NalNezumi »

000ooo000 wrote: post #257
zmmmmm wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 coin…

Well said. For me, it was a great source of burnout when the true transactional nature of work was thrust on me. I had been giving work 110%. My work ethic and output were part of my identity, and I was integrated well socially in the team/unit. I was motivated, gaining influence, getting interesting shit done, and working with great people. But I was also green, and when all of those motivating factors were eroded a…

I'm curious if you're willing to share more about that experience? I believe that I'm in a fairly similar position atm, and reluctant to let go of the "work ethic and output as part of identity" and therefore career (research vs just a code moneky), and wonder what epiphanies you had to switch your mentality to from one to the other

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

#339

Post by heleninboodler »

iwontberude wrote: post #46
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…

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…

> 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.

Yes. I'm pretty open to the benefits of working in an office. I had a WFH job pre-pandemic that I loved for 8 years, but when I got hired into an office job, I felt like my life changed qualitatively for the better in small ways. Socialization, lunch options, separation of work and home, etc. Nothing earth shattering, but it was ... nice for a change.

Now, post-pandemic, my office job has gone "back" 3 days a week, except the experience completely sucks. They've massively downsized the office so we don't have assigned cubicles anymore; it's just all hot-desks. So you don't have your personal comforts (keyboard, chair, personal effects, stash of handy office supplies at the ready, etc), you don't know where anyone is, and every single day you have to hunt for a desk when you get to the office. There aren't enough conference rooms, people squat on the privacy booths for the entire day, the kitchen isn't well stocked anymore.

If we were actually "returning" to the same office experience we had before, I could probably swallow it. Give me a fucking cubicle at the very least. As is, this crappy facsimile of office life is universally hated and I'd guess compliance with the RTO mandate is somewhere under 10%. When they start actually enforcing it, I will consider it a request to leave.

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

#340

Post by heleninboodler »

29athrowaway wrote: post #327
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, there are many important reasons - it sounds like you're just too isolated from this to understand the context you're missing. You should find one of your customer-facing coworkers and sit in on a call some time if you'd like to learn.

You tell engineers that only you understand the customer, then tell the customer only you understand the engineers. But truly speaking you understand neither. It is just a sweetspot of information asymmetry, pseudoscience and falsehoods. The days of middle management are counted. Everyone wants middle management and their endless excuses for not having hard skills gone. If you are micromanaging you don't understand s…

> You tell engineers that only you understand the customer, then tell the customer only you understand the engineers.

I have people skills, god damn it!

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