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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

#41

Post by bootlooped »

herenorthere wrote: post #19
fancyfredbot wrote: post #6

Being paid a lot of money for not having any responsibility sounds good to me. This guy sure seems angry about it though.

also giving up a $50k severance package doesn't sound as exceptional when you've already collected $660,000 from them. Yeah it's still a lot of money, but apparently being able to promote his blog with anecdotes from Pivotal was worth the $50k to him...

It makes me suspicious of a person who passes up $50k because they would rather write a rant on their blog. What type of personality does that?

Sure the agreement was one sided, and maybe it even had questionable legal basis and would be unenforceable, but guess what, so do many other contracts consumers sign every day, and those don't usually net us $50k!

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

#42

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

kaiabwpdjqn wrote: post #10

I find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little expected work. It’s not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about problems in the sales culture are likely…

Ditto. Taking into consideration average salary in US it is just asking for rather uncharitable read.

And that is not taking into consideration in demand skill set that could land him another like job with relative ease.

I don't often go for dismissive, but cry mich ein river.

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

#43

Post by rvz »

Some people would be happy if their first job was to be at a customer service desk or even stacking files for experience with a decent salary in order to get their foot in the door to a internship at a FAANG company. Where as here we see a very arrogant developer paid top dollar for a less demanding role and yet still complains about their employer and chose to work there for over three years.

Every company has problems and you don't have to stay there even if you hate everything under the sun about them. Perhaps he was too focused on hate-watching his company's culture to even think about quitting.

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

#44

Post by DuskStar »

chrisseaton wrote: post #37
watwut wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of it implies responsibility.

> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects What's more responsible than pushing code to a high-profile project? Responsible for the product's performance, security. Responsible for what the customer sees and experiences. Responsible for keeping their data safe and guarding the company's reputation. Responsible enough to be allowed to work independently from home. Respons…

My reading was that those were to open source projects the company didn't control.

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

#45

Post by metalgearsolid »

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 have a similar story, but it was my first programming job, and it wasn't a cake-walk to get it, so for myself I simply couldn't imagine doing much better. And to be honest, after quitting, I haven't. I'm at least healthy and happy again.

But you're right, honestly the only thing I really learned about that experience was I should have just quit sooner. That's really all there is to it.

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

#46

Post by baryphonic »

I think "Matt" thinks he's a bit cleverer than he is. It's not clear what he's talking about.

He also uses the word "fraud" ad nauseam. One place I worked actually used Pivotal Tracker, and I found it worked pretty well from the end-user perspective. Wasn't ground-breaking software or anything, but it at least worked. I could see my tasks at a glance a lot easier than with, say, Basecamp.

Just another person with an axe to grind.

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

#47

Post by jdmichal »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #42
kaiabwpdjqn wrote: post #10

I find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little expected work. It’s not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about problems in the sales culture are likely…

Ditto. Taking into consideration average salary in US it is just asking for rather uncharitable read. And that is not taking into consideration in demand skill set that could land him another like job with relative ease. I don't often go for dismissive, but cry mich ein river.

> cry mich ein river

That should be "cry mir ein river". You want the dative case, because you are requesting that the river be cried for you.

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

#48

Post by Ecstatify »

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.

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 decide. For example on glassdoor this company has a 4.4/5 rating. I know for a fact my company posts fake reviews on glassdoor, where are we supposed to get real insights about companies from?

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

#49

Post by Moto7451 »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #42
kaiabwpdjqn wrote: post #10

I find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little expected work. It’s not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about problems in the sales culture are likely…

Ditto. Taking into consideration average salary in US it is just asking for rather uncharitable read. And that is not taking into consideration in demand skill set that could land him another like job with relative ease. I don't often go for dismissive, but cry mich ein river.

Agreed. My work had a six month period where they wouldn’t really let me do anything meaningful while they were in analysis paralysis (other than keeping the ship steady) so I found other useful things to do and trained myself on some new tech. Clearly this is not the worst thing that has ever happened to a worker.

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

#50

Post by jcims »

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.
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