Comment by CyberFonic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CyberFonic | Hacker News Reader

Couple of questions to focus your decision making:

Did they pay for your relocation expenses? If so, is there a clause in your employment contract to pay it back if you leave within a given period of time?

Do you want to stay in your new city?

If you are unhappy enough to leave, then why not bail up the manager who hired you, tell them point-blank that they lied to you and you know that the "round the corner" talk is just window dressing. Demand more money for your pain, etc. You should only do this if you are willing to get fired on the spot. But it is what I would do.

Immediately start looking for a new job. I would not put this one on my CV. Just mark the time as time-off to do a bit of travelling and relocating to your great new city and now that you have settled in, you are looking for work.

Don't worry about it being shitty legacy stuff. I have even worked on mainframe Cobol for a while and although I hated it, I ended up learning about a new industry and then getting a job with one of their competitors. Every silver lining has a cloud.

> Don't worry about it being shitty legacy stuff.

This. One of my specialities is unpicking and debugging legacy code bases, often 20+ year old mud balls. It isn't glamorous work, but you do get a few decent war stories out of it to recall in the pub.

My preference is to hire devs who've put in the hours in these environments. I see it as something of a right of passage and indicates to me you've got the experience and self-assurance to work with these gnarly and often fragile code bases (hopefully) without breaking it, fixing bugs and generally trying to make it better.

I'm not suggesting you make a career out of this, though it can be lucrative, but a year or so doing this kind of work does no harm to your CV/resume in my eyes.

Agreed! Seeing it done wrong provides lessons in how to do it right. Probably one of reasons why we read DailyWtf.com.

Relo isn't a problem and I definitely want to stay in this town. I can't really mark it as time off because I already did that a while back, I don't want to end up with a lot of gaps :)

I was thinking I could just apply to other places and be honest with them... But some may also frown upon me saying bad things about my current employer

Not necessarily. If you haven't been there for long (and it's not on your resume) it might not even be necessary to mention them directly. It could take a bit of linguistic technique, but if you frame things in such a way that describes what role you were hired for and what role you were given, I don't think anyone could fault you for being dissatisfied.

I'm looking for a React guy. Remote work is fine as long as you're on USA timezone.

What about remote that will work USA time zone hours? (I work serious question. Considering doing remote next year and wondered if people consider that cos I work better at night time anyway.)

How about someone with no accredited skills or accomplishments?

I'll transcribe your voicemail, I'll answer emails, whatever.

I won't let you down.

As a hiring manager, if you tell me the reason you left after such a short time was as you describe in this post, I would have no real issues with it.

I'd be looking for some insinuation that you gave it an honest effort and tried to work with your previous company to make it better, but in the end if you got hired for a certain role or stack and it was clearly not what you were going to be doing there's no fault (in my opinion) in you being dissatisfied.

There are certainly times when people can come across as chasing only the shiny and new tech, which is a bit of a turnoff if I'm trying to build a product, but not a deal breaker either. I don't feel like this is the kind of situation that would make me feel that, you weren't getting what you signed up for.

If a prospective new employer already has concerns about employee retention or that they're also overpromising on their stack, they may pass on you- but I think we'd agree that would be best for everyone in that case.

I would also make it a point to let your manager know, as well as HR during your exit interview, how you felt you got bait and switched. It's entirely possible it was unintentional- in which case they could use it as a way to improve and clarify how they're positioning the role. Or, if they're actually lying about it and already know- they won't really care, but it could put the manager or team on notice with someone who does to get their shit straightened out. It might be a long shot, but it might make it better for the next person.

>I would also make it a point to let your manager know, as well as HR during your exit interview

Do they still do those these days? The places I've left never bothered.

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