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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time, I singlehandedly retooled my company's flagship app for an entirely new software platform in less than three weeks, in order to ensure we were available on the new platform when it launched. I worked days, nights, weekends, and even dreamed about the damned thing as I was porting it over.

Six months later: review time. My boss tells me that he was monumentally impressed with the dedication, perseverance, and capability I demonstrated throughout the year, especially on the aforementioned product. And, as a result, he was very proud to give me...a 3% raise. I was deeply offended, and that was the beginning of the end for me there. I quit a few months later. I hear that layoffs have been rampant since I departed, which makes me feel a little better.

Anyway, long story short: fuck those guys. Polish your resume and tell them you're doing it.

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Missing is Aaron's base salary in this reply. 3% at different annual salaries can mean an awful lot to a lot of people.

As a manager, and also as someone who has done similar herculean efforts, it can be 'dangerous' to reward such efforts because it becomes the norm, you are expected to put in this kind of effort on a regular basis.

My take: if this guy was expected to spend three weeks completely rebuilding the architecture of a core system, then (a) his management layer sucks and he should have quit for that reason alone and I imagine that had more to do with the resulting layoffs later on, (b) retooling a system in three weeks of non-stop effort, even with minimal sleep is about 300-350 hours of work -- even spread out that's about 8-10 weeks of "regular" effort, which as a 20yr vet in the industry, doesn't sound like that complex of a system.

Some years, the US cost of living increases more than 3%.

The Social Security Administration publishes numbers[1], although they are arguably somewhat lower than the actual COLA changes.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/colaseries.html

Yup. Money can make anyone into a sociopath.

I'm not sure whether you're talking about the parent poster, or their boss, or both. I kind of agree with 'both'. But isn't that how it's meant to work? Business is business and personal is personal and you keep them separate?

Agreed. Thinking about it any other way is what I would consider insane. Only thinking the "business" is allowed to be a greedy bastard is what leads to income inequality. If the employee doesn't assert their own worth, no one else will. You can't be "business" on one end and "personal/loyal" on the other. You'll get used, abused and see no rewards.

I dunno somewhere out there is a healthy business social structure where employees are serving companies and companies are looking out for them as well, and maybe companies like Google have it. But we are far away in our business landscape from those waters in the majority of companies. It's an assumption from both sides that everyone is out to get the other. And therefore everyone acts as if that's the only way things can be. Though it's not the case. But the problem is that people are trained in this sort of environment so that's all that they know.

In spirit I completely agree with you, but I disagree about your notion that your version can exist. Maybe you, me and a bunch of other people could do it this way, but it only takes a few to break that system, which is how it is now.

Yeah I agree, that's why idealism fails a lot more often than rationalism and that rationalists have been much more successful than idealists in running the world and getting to actually produce.

Nothing spells "hubris" like a little success with a swollen ego.

xoxo

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