Jumping Ship: Signs It's Time to Quit
madmork.com
madmork.com
But aside from big picture questions like that, I've found that when push comes to shove, by the time you start asking if you should leave a job, the answer is almost always "Yes", otherwise you wouldn't be asking.
But yeah, if you need this checklist to show 7/7, then you've probably already stayed too long, and you're looking for psychological permission to quit
Microsoft in the mid 1990s was not great, but it doesn't hold a candle to Amazon in the mid 2000s (and to this day) which is a highly emotionally manipulative cult with terrible backstabbing politics, stack ranking and incompetent leadership.
One early signal of this is if the company has a book that everyone is supposed to read. (For amazon it was required indoctrination for new employees)... though there are exceptions-- one startup required everyone to read "Crossing the Chasm" and while that company wasn't well run, that book wasn't part of the problem.
OH, the book thing may not be obvious-- a company must be run in a dynamic fashion. If everyone is mindlessly quoting cult slogans (e.g.: amazons "IT's day one!") or citing chapter and verse in a bible then it shuts down reasonable thinking.
The book becomes a source of thought terminating cliches.
I think this kind of cult ideology may be taking root at places like Google and Mozilla and Facebook where they seem to be forming a rigid homogenous ideology (though I haven't worked there, so that's just speculation from an outsider)
Companies try to trap you in this family mentality, almost like a cult, just to drain you like a vampire. I prefer to be a "mercenary" -- I do great work, get paid, the end. I don't want to be a part of the family or drink the Kool-Aid.
In a system that 100% revolves around money, it seems inefficient to heavily prioritize anything besides money.
Can you imagine going to a taco stand and saying to the cashier, "I really need 10 tacos, but before I hire you to make them for me I need to know how passionate you are about making tacos. Also, can you let me know where you see yourself in 5 years, I don't want to hire you to make tacos if you don't think you will be doing this in the future!
Additionally, I don't think the price you listed is fair. How about I give you 80% of what you typically charge, but you will also get the satisfaction that you are helping me change the world! I am building an app to automate business processes and I need to eat, the more resources you give me at a discounted price the more resources I can dump into accomplishing my dream."
I really wish all questions in interviews were illegal other than "can you do this job", "can you prove that you can do this job", and "will you accept this wage to do this job?" Everything else should be illegal and the employment laws should be changed to allow fast firing without detriment to the company.
I don't know why, but when I'm analyzing transactions within capitalism I like to frame them around a taco shop :)
I have worked at a company that literally revolutionized modern tech. Luckily, I was also quite well compensated, but the qualities listed above were an essential component to the success of the project I was with. It can mean the difference between a half-baked product and a mind-blowing product.
Everyone I worked with was excited about what we were doing because we knew we were changing the world (it sounds hyperbolic, but history has validated our thinking).
Money is essential. Indoctrination is soul-sucking. There does exist a realm in between.
It does get abused/overused though and shouldn't be a substitute for an adequate material compensation in the long run. "Vibe" don't pay the bills after all.
Isn't that what you're doing when you go to a hip looking taco stand instead of to Taco Bell?
I live in SoCal, the land of taco shops, and most are manned by wage slaves. I'm sure most are completely happy doing their job, but passionate? No. That's the owners of the trendy taco shop, not the people actually doing the labor.
yeah ditto. My company has tons of these shitty crufty systems that need a lot of work whenever we go in to do anything -- because they were thrown together under unrealistic timelines.
Now here we are doing yet another layer of unrealistic stuff utilizing these systems -- it's brutal.
We start grooming a story and it turns into this sprawling epic of "holy shit this legacy system sucks but we don't have time to rewrite it, nor do an impact analysis of changing it" :(
- "If anyone doesn't like it here, the door is open"
These may sound obviously toxic, but often are taken with a grain of salt by many employees. In my 25 yrs, I have never seen a team or company recover to a remotely healthy state after a high level manager utters either of them [EDIT: to the team; individually it may make sense, but see thread below] (5 times, 2 personally and 3 from the sidelines). If you are an employee and you hear that, jump ship. If you are a manager and you say that, resign. If one of your reports says it, fire them.
1 - reasonably smart dude (probably top tech guy in the team) acting like he was "the hot sh1t", going couple levels above his manager's to constantly complain about things not being done the way he wanted them done;
2 - run of the mill dude with a "I'm going to slack because I can get a better job elsewhere" attitude.
both of them were told to go look elsewhere if they didn't like it. which they both did leave eventually. don't see anything wrong with management telling them that the door was open.
- I was thinking of situation where the manager is speaking to the team-at-large, not to specific people individually. Sorry for not making that clear in my post.
- Sounds like they were already a problem and should have been let go instead of hoping they would do it themselves. "Eventually" can be a long, and painful, time. But I respect that there are circumstances where this may not be possible or advisable.
I was once in a similar position with a report of mine, but I felt important to draw the line at specific behaviour rather than the vague "don't like it". So we sat down, discussed my and his expectations, established some rules and boundaries, and managed to survive the project; not as friends, but as professionals doing our work.
The most unhappy period of my working career was a period where I was micro-managed under the guise of "agile". We had detailed sprints planned months in advance, with very tight deadlines, and with endless meetings where nothing of much importance got done. I especially loved the demo's where all feedback was ignored because the coming sprints were already fully planned and there was no room for extra work.
Luckily the people responsible for that situation are no longer working for my employer, or I wouldn't be. It was a genuine me-or-them situation.
This advice applies to ALL jobs and not just startups. The most valuable employees in almost any organization autonomously grow their value and power by delivering results outside the four corners of the job description.
For anybody who wants to read the article, I just put a text-only transcript in https://pastebin.com/raw/k22WtvmG
We also score a 1 on the Joel test, and that's because I helped setup a version control server soon after arrival. We could score around a 4-5 if the emergency project I'm working on to switch platforms ever hit production, but it's been nearly a year of "it's a month away, you need to scramble to get it done in time or the company goes under".
I wonder if perhaps I should start looking for new employment or something....
The rest is much harder to influence and make happen, but if you can't get a bug database to happen before your new-person enthusiasm / grace period ends then I'd jump ship.
I've a bunch of experience working for places which don't score well on the Joel test. It's not the end of the world but you will have to make adjustments so you don't dream of better while reading about how other people have build systems which spin up instances and run integration tests on every check-in while simultaneously running machine learning over their live logging for early fault detection.
Remember those kind of things are the exception rather than the norm and focus on the things you can change.
You probably have a month or two more before your "I can fix this!" attitude fades and you end up the jaded developer that you saw when you arrived and wondered, "how do they put up with this environment?".
It's a one, it's so bad to get to a one, you might not even get a computer to work on!
If (when, really) the productivity gains come, management will notice and you'll be known as that person who improved things. This will give you good favour.
And if it doesn't work out, next time you get asked in interview, "What are some challenges you have faced?" you can talk about how you introduced Git and JIRA to a company that didn't have source control and bug tracking. You can talk about how you tried to change a company culture from hand-editing files in production to having deployment scripts. You can talk about the challenges you faced. It gives you a clear answer to "Why are you leaving?", you can talk honestly about your expectations in terms of what a company should provide for its developers, talk about how your current company isn't or wasn't meeting those and use that to indirectly talk about how much of the joel test the prospective company can meet.
It will give you a fresh sense of perspective too. In the future when you're struggling with a build system you can think, "well at least we're better than we were at Initrode".
And maybe it's just a really nice place to work, not all work is about being as efficient as possible at all times. Sometimes you can stand back and realise that while other teams could do what you're doing in half the time, you're still getting paid to do this job and maybe your colleagues are warm and friendly.
Management let it get this bad, what makes you think they will appreciate you improving things?
The company simply doesn't value your environment or it wouldn't be like that. You are young and naive to think you can improve things and get credit.
I have attempted on multiple occasions to encourage others to use something, anything with me, but to no avail.
The standard response when you bring up a bug is "we have too many emergencies going on right now, we can't handle that until someone notices it and says something", which is usually the point where it becomes an emergency. :\
I have good reason to work here, but it's quickly getting drowned out by the reasons to run to the hills.
Then our Director (also a developer) told us "this SVN thing isn't useful" and demanded that we stop using version control. Then he saw Mantis (our bug tracker) and complained about how ugly it was. Instead of choosing a prettier one, we had to use his Excel spreadsheets on the local fileshare. It got worse and worse until our 7 went back to a 2 in about 60 days.
Six months later, 8 of the 10 had left. Even the people who hadn't originally been on board with the changes but saw the benefits left.
Similar story here, but it's a problem when most of the Joel points are only held up by one person. Eg only one person is driving the version control (managing the server, making people use it, and making people use it. Also making people use it.) Or only one person can be expected to clean up the project so it builds in one action, and you're then also the only person who can document this build action. Or only one person is running the bug DB, and others are resistant to using it. Or only one guy is reading about new tools.
When that happens, your Joel score isn't really a 7 or whatever. Or it's a very fragile 7.
I do remember an incident where a guy who'd worked for 7 years with us wondered out loud whether there was some magical piece of software that could tell you what the production code was on a given day in the past. That's the kind of thing that makes your respect for the guy collapse.
A few other team members were convinced later because we jsut had a batter clue of what was going on, what we were planning to do, and what was deployed.
This definitely wasn't a lone wolf effort.
> Even the people who hadn't originally been on board with the changes but saw the benefits left.
That must provide at least the feeling you and your co-workers had done good things. Keep it up.
As for the article, I have definitely fallen for Believing your own bullshit.
Any argument that boils down to, "we've done X this way for years, but we should do Y instead" can be shot down with, "but we've been so successful for all those years, clearly we know what we're doing". People who are naturally inclined to always stay the course are given a very powerful rhetorical device with which to argue.
The real conundrum is that in many cases they might be right. It's a powerful argument because it's often true. Correlation does not imply causation, but causation usually results in correlation. Many of these arguments end up being rooted in people's gut feelings about things, and get resolved through org charts instead of rationality.
I'm just really tired of sites pushing hundreds (or even tens, really) of MB of script for text content.
I'm assuming you mean the team dynamic and project management "process". I'm still on my journey to escaping that dumb rat race, but I feel it's possible. Some liberal applications of cryptocurrwncy might enable a large portion of software engineers to become self employed and focus are problems they are interested in.
Yes, quite a few systems. For all of them, the process was essentially, "here's our problem, go solve it."
Changing jobs will probably require a significant pay cut but the alternative is watching my career slowly die.
Why do such people with that vast experience always stay employed, keep critisizing but never start their own company and show us how to run a business the right way?
This is fairly privileged silliness. That capital is how you pay rent and feed yourself and your family while you actually build a business. Those of us (and I am one) who are able to safely and effectively live off of savings to build a business are the vanishing exception, not the rule, in America.
The next person who says "just work nights and weekends" is telegraphing how richly they morally deserve one upside. "Burn everything else in your life to probably still fail at building a company" is gross, nasty advice. And, coupled with the continual throwing out of any temperament filter with regards to whether one should create a business--at best it is a failure of compassion and empathy.
I know business is most of the times an opportunistic game but I encountered often enough situations where people and companies didn't act 100% opportunistic. And you remember and recommend those people or companies.
>As someone who’s lived in 11 countries, worked in 10+ different companies and started a few others over the last 20 years I know the feeling all too well.
You don't owe your employer anything (professionally). If they don't like the fact you left, that is quite literally their problem.
There not their.
If an entrepreneur had 20+ clients over 10 years, does that make them unable to find a client that will work for them?
The author likely has a different view of the purpose of employment compared to many.
Changing jobs is what does work long term for them. In any proffession, why do you have to be at the same place for years upon years? In the tech industry, you will rarely get paid more, learn more, or really 'move up' if you stay.