Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

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Each of us have limits as to the things we're willing to put up with at a job. What's taking you near your threshold?

On my last job, a new manager called me for a meeting on Friday 4PM. I spent the whole month on an extremely stressful project.

The meeting was about an app that integrates credit card payments, billets and bank account on a terminal that is going to be available to the general public.

The deadline? 11PM of the same day. Final version. From 0 to 100% in 6 hours.

I said that it was impossible. He said that I was incapable.

I remember coming back home with a feeling that I was incompetent, even with my 11 years of experience with JavaScript. I didn't sleep that night, trying to build it even with delay.

Saturday morning I had a burnout. I was afraid to lose my job because I sustain my family. I thought throwing myself from my apartment window. That was one of the worst days in my life.

I got fired on Monday morning.

Got another job on the same day. Almost twice the salary.I told them that I need a little time to cleanup my mind and they gave 2 weeks to recover from that situation.

I'm happy now.

What an absolute joke. I suppose that just meant the new manager wanted you gone. Glad you got out of there and into a better place.

Sorry to hear you went through that and glad to hear you made it through. Wish you all the best.

One of my goals in life is to never be susceptible to this kind of situation (been there some years ago). So far I manage to have as big a financial buffer as needed to be able to quit instantly in that situation without batting an eye.

Indeed I never hide my ability to do so and I try to make very clear the things "I won't do" at any gig I take. Either before I start or very early in the process. At my current job it is "I won't program in a language without both types and IDE". Because of this I only work on the parts that are in TypeScript and the the JS, Ruby and Python parts are other people's problems.

I may seem like an asshole, but so far it works. Almost a year later I haven't been fired. And they seem happy about my work. And I am definitely not near burnout. Stark contrast with the older days.

You don’t to me, I spent the last 4 months saving every penny to so that I had 7mths runway in the bank as I was approaching the inevitable “fuck this point”.

I accepted an offer for a new job yesterday and so I won’t need that buffer but I’m keeping it, ISA’s and pensions are all good but I didn’t leave myself enough readily accessible cash to just say fuck it and walk if I needed to.

Smart person. Now don't stop saving and increase your runway even further. The difference between having a few years worth in the bank and not is incredible.

New offer comes with a big salary increase (and me and my partner are saving for a house) so I'm going to be able to save about 70% of my salary after all outgoings - outside of work my goal now is to max out ISA's and then save the rest until I have enough to cover at least 2 years - I noticed there is a peace that comes from having immediate access to enough money to quit (even if you have no intention).

> I may seem like an asshole, but so far it works

I do the same, it's amazing how well it works. As long as you genuinely try putting (what you think is) the company interest first, people actually appreciate you more if you don't do what you're told, but what you think is best. At least that's my experience so far. And it makes sense - because not everybody can afford to challenge the status quo & conventional wisdom, people that can do it can become very valuable.

Depends on the people so. I usually fail at the point when personal interests and politics come into play. Which is my most common "fuck this" event.

I actually think this is a fair enough approach: better to be doing something you're happy doing than to be miserable and complaining, that's for sure.

There is, of course a trade-off, which I'll illustrate with our situation. I'll only hire full stack developers, by which I mean people who are willing to turn their hand to anything in our systems, because it gives us more flexibility in terms of building teams, working across sytems, providing support, and so on. But we're a relatively small tech organisation with a lot of demands on us and so need that flexibility. People obviously have areas of specialty, but broadly they'll poke around in any system they need to.

I'm not saying you're wrong: not at all. Just that the trade-off is perhaps more limited options. That may not be a bad thing if they're not options you want though.

With out an IDE is a bit of a redflag - all developers need to be able to hack with just a cli, yes its not ideal but some times you have to do it.

A very experienced dep/ops in extrimis should be able to hack code even if there is no installed editor - I have recovered a stuck systems by editing config files with awk.

Used to do this when I was young, not any more. It's not that I can't I just refuse work with "hackish" languages, tools and projects.

Happy for you it turned out well, but the whole story is quite weird.

It's obviously impossible and the timing is awful, so it has to be voluntary and there's something behind it. Did he need a reason to fire you? But that seems like a really bad reason that could backfire in a court.

There was no internal grievance procedure you could have used.

Court? You must not live in the US. We got rid of any wisp of legal protection from job termination years ago... It has a catchy name invented by the lobbyists that wrote the laws... “Right to Work”

The only part of job termination covered by "right to work" laws is that one cannot be fired for refusing to join a union.

I think the only legal protection you get from the US government is on the basis of race/religion and what not, as well as some of the original Union terms like 40 hour work week and overtime. Right to Work has to do with whether you are forced to join a union or not. And if not, then don’t get the supplementary legal protections of whatever is in the union’s agreement.

You become “fire at will” not because the law says so, but because you are not in a union. On the other hand, most unions will still protect nonunion workers.

I’ve never really heard of programmer unions though. Would be curious.

My thought was that if there was a need for a reason to fire him, maybe he was in a place where there are some legal protections. Usually if you are in a place where you can't be fired at will, firing you for a bad reason is something you can fight in the courts.

If you can be fired at will, why even bother going through the whole thing in the first place, just fire him.

This is one of the reason I hate about PIP( performance improvement program). They set ridiculous goals for you in very short amount of time that nobody can possibly complete, then fire you on grounds of incompetence. A friend of mine who works in Facebook told me that an employee committed suicide due to the pressure of PIP. I suspect that guy was put into PIP due to poor rating (meet most), then was given a ridiculous task which is impossible to complete. That guy was stressed out and that eventually lead to depression and suicide. RIP

I can't speak for Facebook, but I know that in some companies, it really is possible for individual contributers to successfully complete a PIP. I've known at least 3 coworkers at my workplace who have been put on PIPs. They were given realistic expectations that didn't require them to work 50+ hours per week, and they completed the plans successfully.

Of course, a manager who's put on a plan is generally gone in a few months, or they're allowed to step down into an individual contributor role.

that just seems weird though. for it to get to the point of a PIP being necessary, a lot has had to gone wrong until then. feels like it's a blunt instrument, used when usual communication has almost broken down. are expectations not normally discussed more informally in regular 1:1s already?

i do know people who have successfully completed PIPs and stayed. but every person who's taken the PIP as a signal to look for another position has done better in their careers and been happier than those who stayed. i get not everybody is in that position, but even if the PIP itself is reasonable, being PIP'd is not. it's a symptom of an underlying issue of poor management and should be interpreted as such.

In one example, I think the poor management was with a previous manager who allowed the person to get away with not performing at the level that he should have been. When that manager finally left, it took a PIP for the guy to understand that the new manager expected better performance, and that was after months of warnings.

> but even if the PIP itself is reasonable, being PIP'd is not. it's a symptom of an underlying issue of poor management and should be interpreted as such.

That's a very broad statement but, whilst the sentiment is no doubt well-intentioned, it's also misguided.

Sometimes no matter how much feedback you give, how directly you express it, or how many ways you say the same thing in your weekly 1:1s it just doesn't get through. Occasionally people don't get it. Occasionally they don't want to hear it. Whatever the reason, you're not seeing the results you need, and whilst performance issues are often a result of some mitigating circumstance (divorce, bereavement, illness, and many others), sometimes they're not.

At that point a PIP may be entirely reasonable, whether it looks that way to the employee or not. This is especially the case if the employee's behaviour, performance, and/or attitude is having a detrimental effect on the rest of their team. Unfortunately, it often is.

Contrary to what you've said, a strong indicator of poor management is a failure to effectively manage performance, and to develop and maintain high performing teams.

Managers are held to account on their effectiveness in delivering against company goals. Effective managers sometimes have to work with an employee to correct performance issues. Sometimes the needed improvement doesn't occur. As cold-blooded as it sounds, this will probably lead to that employee being shown the door.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that every manager who uses PIPs is automatically right or some kind of enlightenened management genius. Like any tool, they can be used ineffectively or inappropriately. But if they're never used at all that's as big a red flag as if they're used too much.

i have worked at places that never used a PIP. they were fine. they did due diligence when hiring and helped employees grow. maybe i live in a diverse area, most people are socialized pretty well after university and a few years of employment. so disagree about never using them being a red flag. maybe at megacorp inc, when you're hiring thousands, it's a fact of life. with terms like "unregrettable [sic] attrition", you'll forgive me for being cynical.

none of the PIPs i've seen have been reasonable, but small sample size. i have also luckily never been on the receiving end, only observing from afar. hell, sometimes idiot managers have put their best, most helpful employees on a PIP because they're... spending a lot of time helping other members of their team! so their individual performance goes down, but the team performance goes up. but when you view people as "individual contributors", you don't see that.

i'll happily agree with you on "a strong indicator of poor management is a failure to effectively manage performance", and go one further, a stronger indicator of poor management is a failure to effectively evaluate performance. unfortunately, that is exactly what makes PIPs so tricky. ignoring who's perspective is most "correct", there's still a divide in either performance expectations or perception. the better strategy is still to leave, not see the PIP through. which makes PIPs a good signal for "you're about to be fired", but a bad signal for "we disagree on performance", simply because that difference in perspective exists. putting it on paper is again not necessarily helping the employee. if "it just doesn't get through", is a PIP going to change that? if they aren't performing, if "it just doesn't get through", why not fire them? a possible answer: passive aggressiveness ("work with an employee to correct performance issues") and leave a paper trail aka. ass-covering ("the needed improvement doesn't occur").

but look, i'm not a manager, and don't want to be. could i fire someone? probably not. so is a PIP more humane? i think so. at the end of the day, it sounds like we both agree what it's for, just that you didn't agree with my phrasing. fair enough, although i still maintain from an employee perspective, assuming poor management if you get PIP'd once is a good plan. if you start seeing a pattern, then it's time to look in the mirror.

PIPs are merely an escalation. Ideally yes, there would be communication before you reach that point about expectations, how they're not being met, and how to improve. That's not going to fix every problem though, so you modify your approach as the problem persists. The alternative is to just fire people if more regular, casual communication hasn't done the trick. I think it's more humane to give people clear notice that it hasn't been happening though, and it's either time to really get serious or leave.

I do think it's close-to-analagous to an altimatum in a relationship, though. Sure, there's probably been communication up to that point, but now it's decision time and it's time to get things sorted out or part ways. It's probably headed for parting ways regardless.

It's a sad story; but PIP is really the pink slip; you take it as an advance notice that you're going to be fired, and start looking for jobs. I've heard stories of people completing PIP programs successfully, but quite honestly, I don't get it. Once you got to that point, you're not a good fit to the team and/or they don't appreciate you. Makes no sense to stay. I could understand staying with the company & switching teams/departments, but staying in the same place makes no sense to me.

Circumstances sometimes are not that clear. Being put on a PIP where I'm employed is at the discretion of the manager, and sometimes it's just the combination of the report and the manager. One of my colleagues was put on a PIP, switched teams, and is now doing much better. However, some companies limit mobility during a PIP so it's not always possible to achieve this outcome.

Good for him. Usual SOP for a pip is to nail their feet to the ground.

As a manager, can confirm. By the time you get to this point you are being "managed out". There is a basic expectation that you will either leave (preferable) or be fired at the end of the PIP process.

I've heard of people coming back from it, but it's rare. And I think it would need to be the trigger for some kind of personal epiphany that completely changed behaviour for that kind of effect.

I only have a data point of 1 on this so it may be different than other companies, but by the time I'm implementing a PIP, I've already made up my mind that I want the employee out. I've already worked on coaching them and identified that it isn't a temporary issue or something personal they're going through outside of work. HR is my last resort and a PIP is merely a formality I'm forced to deal with. There is a world in which they kick things into high gear and turn things around, but I've usually given up hope and the onus is on them to prove that they are capable.

PIP isn't a pink slip at all companies. I once got a PIP when working at a mid-sized corporation. Fortunately my performance wasn't an issue, they just didn't like that I was frequently late to the daily morning standup (which upper management refused to allow us to reschedule to later in the day despite my insistence), didn't appear attentive in meetings, and was working from home too much. I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.

Of course I took this as a sign to gtfo of the company, so I started applying, left for a massive promotion and 40% raise, and now I work remotely at a company where we only have standup once every couple days and it's not first thing in the morning. Nobody's micromanaging my work schedule or nagging me for not clocking in at a certain time, and I'm making way more money especially since I don't have to live in SF/NYC anymore and pay nearly half my compensation in taxes and cut a third of my paycheck to a landlord. Funny thing is that I'm actually more responsive/available now because I value my job more, enough to enable Slack notifications on my phone and respond asap (within reason). Couldn't be happier.

Companies want to look 'Agile' so they will treat it as though it is a religion. The daily stand-up bullshit gets taken to such an extreme that it becomes counter productive. If you work at such a place, simply get out. There is nothing that spells long term disaster more than rigid adherence to voodoo process.

The daily stand-up is entirely reasonable and productive if you do it right. The problem is people who insist on doing it wrong. Upper management has no business deciding when a team has their stand-up. Agile means "people over process", after all.

Sure. But the real reason management loves the 'morning standup meeting' is because it enforces morning attendance of all employees. So much for those flexible work hours. Oh, you do get to go home late to finish your work of course.

My team has morning standups. We first changed the time, then agreed to make my participation optional, when it became clear that (due to personal reasons) I was struggling to make it to the office on time. It's a shame, too, because they're some of the best standups I've ever had. Our flex time is actually a thing, with some of my team mates showing up early and usually leaving around 17:00.

I think I was asked, at every interview I've been to in the last few year, how I handle receiving difficult feedback. This is the only place I've ever interviewed at where I was asked how I handle giving difficult feedback.

In my team, when someone can't make it, they call in to the meeting. It's a short meeting, just a few lines per person. Doing it over the phone is totally fine.

Management shouldn't even be at standups. Its for syncing with your peers, not an instrument of control. But I guess this is what you're saying, right?

Eh, the first place I worked didn't claim to be agile or anything. The daily meeting wasn't a stand-up (we sat and usually ate breakfast at a cafe or chatted in the lobby). It was still a really useful meeting.

I sit during my teams standup, it’s a standup because it’s a daily sync not because of literal standing.

actually it is supposed to be a literal standup. standing encourages very quick and to the point updates.

Yes but the act of standing is a crutch, if you pardon the pun. What matters is brevity.

Agreed, I don’t need to stand to ensure my teams concise in their update. The parking lot concept is a great way to shorten meeting and politely interrupt people when they are long winded.

You are missing my point entirely. Yes its called a standup because standing encourages brevity. Just because you sit or stand doesn't mean its a standup in literal definition though.

it's a literal stand up so people don't dither.

lot easier to become restless standing around than sitting down.

I guess if you drop the facade that it’s supposed to be fast and allow people to sit down, eat breakfast and drink coffee it doesn’t sound that bad (even if it’s still not a productive meeting).

Well, it's supposed to be fast because it's supposed to be done by a small team, of fie or six engineers. If you got fifteen people taking turns it doesn't really work. Even worse when the whole point is for middle management to check your progress, rather than an engineer-only meeting where you can discuss actual technical issues you're having so the more senior members can give you a pointer etc.

The funny (or tragic) thing is, treating a version of Agile as a religion that's right for all teams all the time is against everything that Agile actually is.

Sure, just like actual existing Communism is against everything that Communism actually is.

Both Communism and Agile are at odds with reality (current productive forces and human nature) so they tend to devolve into tyranny.

First, I don’t have my teams do daily stand ups.

But in the rare times that I have, it’s mostly because the team tends to get pulled in a lot of directions, and the standup is a reminder to focus.

There is usually a larger organizational issue that leads to a team pulled in so many directions. But that’s a lot harder to fix.

>I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.

So, you were consistently late for work, didn't pay attention in meetings and were admittedly inattentive and working from home "too much". So you were put on PIP and you took that as a reason to leave the company?

What did you expect them to do? You sound like a nightmare employee. I'm sure the company is equally glad you're gone.

You have a very weird definition of "nightmare employee". Nothing there says he was toxic; nothing there says he wasn't productive.

I had a job where I put in longer hours than any other person on the team and was the most capable of handling the widest/diverse workload.

My manager was obsessive about when I showed up at work- despite never missing a meeting. If I got in at 7:30 one morning and 9 the next, it drove him crazy, regardless if I was putting over 9 hours a day every day.

He valued predictability over production because he was an obsessive control freak not because it made anything better from the point of view of the company or my actual output.

I may have been a nightmare for him, but I don't think I was the problem- a manager should manage for productivity/outcomes not for his pet peeves. My current manager (at another company) understands how to maximize output and is comfortable as long as work gets done and everyone is much less stressed.

Yea I didn't even mention my prior job. They had a mandatory 9:30am attendance meeting that they called "standup", and if I showed up 5 minutes late my manager would joke about it coming out of my bonus. Despite this I don't think he actually cared, but the President did, and ultimately he answered to him. I quit that job soon after and my only regret is not leaving earlier.

Some people aren’t cut out for being on time to late morning meetings (930). It’s a culture mismatch and there are companies that do perfectly fine with no meetings before noon and whatnot.

I wish there was an easier way to learn about this culture as part of the job search. I like to have candidates shadow for a day or two to meet the team and see how days go.

People who are into being on time have it as part of a larger philosophy, I think. Being late for them means something specific. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone change modes on this but it’s probably easier to change their philosophy than be late to a bunch of their meetings.

The only nightmare i see is a company that values a warm body being in a specific seat for a specific range of hours over actual productivity. Physical presence is not really required most of the time for most engineers.

Presence based management, colloquially known as "Butts in Seats Management", is the opposite of results oriented management, IMO.

I hate it when a company says it's "results oriented", but turns out to be mostly "butts in seats" that demands results, too.

It might be an unpopular opinion, but once you are on $250k+ a year like most of the readers here, it is reasonable of the employer to demand both your butt in a seat and results.

I my personal experience the guy who turned up at 8am and started getting shit done, always was far more productive (and indeed ended up a much better coder very quickly) than the “judge me by results not hours” guy turning up at 9:45. Even despite the latter guy being smart and more experienced.

Yes, I was consistently late for a software engineering job where 95% of my productive time was spent in front of a computer and "lateness" was arbitrarily defined by upper managers who moved the standup time 1.5 hours earlier to passively start enforcing attendance. Standups went from being a team thing to being mandated top-down by executives completely uninvolved in the day-to-day of our team's work.

Notice I said "didn't appear attentive in meetings". Yes, I was not very enthusiastic about our 15-20 minute morning daily standups where every employee goes around justifying their own existence and reitering what is already on the Jira board.

Yes I was working from home "too much" in a job where I was working from home 1-2 times/week, and for the first 6 months it was never an issue, but then when a new manager took over (with no involvement in our team's day-to-day activities) all of a sudden he had an issue with it. Not because my/our output was any lower than before, just because some marketing executive noticed that my team was working from home more than the others (made more apparent by an open office), and assumed this meant we were probably slacking.

You sound like one of those nightmare "managers" I worked with who destroyed the company's culture and caused the company's enormously high attrition rate with most employee's only averaging ~1 year before quitting for greener pastures. I'm glad I no longer work at companies with corporate drones like you.

One of the benefits of completing a PIP might also be signing off an internal transfer to a team with better fit. There could be times where it's worth going through it to get something better - as long as you're quite far detached from the previous team.

Almost nobody wants to receive via transfer someone with a PIP.

That depends entirely on why they're in a PIP. My team might have completely different needs than the other team.

That unfortunately depends on people being rational. There are those stupid enough to not want to hire the unemployed because of their own prejudices.

There are plenty of idiots involved in hiring, that's certainly true. But I was recently (for the first time in my life) had to hire a lot of new people for my team, and I noticed I hire people on probably very different traits than some recruiters and managers do. I don't like candidates who just give socially acceptable answers, I do like candidates who give creative answers, who are vocal, opinionated, weird, outside the box and against the current. And I'm well aware people sometimes get fired for really stupid reasons. I doubt I'm the only one.

With that criteria, I would never be able to get my team complete. Most of the time I get existing employees transferred to me, I have to accept what I get or do the work myself (which is not possible). With new hires it's not easier, I interviewed candidates for 6 months without finding anyone (we don't pay so well, even if we are in top 50 in Fortune 500) and some director simply transferred me someone to fill in the role. I am just a senior manager, I said no but I was overranked and overruled.

I'd disagree that a PIP is a blanket pink slip.

At my current employer, I've personally seen (and mentored!) people on a PIP who've been given reasonably concrete feedback on how to improve their performance in terms of the parameters set by the organisation. (The last part is key!).

People who've responded positively to this have seen reasonably good upward trajectory, and those who've responded negatively have been managed out.

> Once you got to that point, you're not a good fit to the team and/or they don't appreciate you.

Or you haven't yet figured out the parameters by which you're being evaluated. Once you figure this out, the next step is deciding whether you want to subscribe to those parameters or not, and acting accordingly.

> "At my current employer, I've personally seen (and mentored!) people on a PIP who've been given reasonably concrete feedback on how to improve their performance in terms of the parameters set by the organisation. (The last part is key!)."

I think the mentoring is also a really important part.

so, what are some of those parameters set by the organization?

At one job I was working late in office and no one could see it. I wasn’t good about my weekly activity report.

No pip, but I fixed those issues and wow - I worked less and org was happier

PIP is usually the pink slip with 2 exceptions: 1. forced ranking. Even if you have the best team in the world, someone will be the last in that team. It can be avoided by rotations if the manager is smart enough. 2. Edge cases. I personally got via transfer a direct report already on a PIP from the previous manager. The short story: the previous manager is a moron (still working in the company, promoted since, failing upwards), that person is fine, working in the company 8 years later, mid-rated.

Well it could be that you've reached a certain age and aren't confident that you'll be an attractive hire to anyone else. It's just an anecdote but I remember chatting to someone who worked for Microsoft in Ireland and was going through a performance review / PIP like process. He was in his early fifties and said that it inevitably seemed to happen to people once they reached a certain age / salary point.

Age discrimination in hiring and retention is a real thing. This seems like a systematic way to cover over it to make it look like something else. Smarmy, at best.

An honest performance improvement program should come with some guidance on how to actually improve your performance, what the are, if any, and whether the expectations are realistic at all. Simply telling people "work harder or you get fired" has never worked.

A lot of companies put everyone who screws up (in a big enough way) on a PIP so they can fire them at the drop of a hat if they screw up again. Not that you shouldn't also look for other jobs but it's very much a box checking exercise in that case. Just don't screw up for 30/60/90 days or whatever and you're fine. Often times your manager will re-arrange your job duties to help you out with this (assuming they want to retain you).

This points to another problem with toxic management : pathological duplicity which makes it impossible to take them at face value because everything is done under pretenses and leaves not only them but the whole market crying wolf when they ask for something that they are actually saying. Human Resources to help with disputes? Everyone knows they are all about ass covering. Team player means they want unpaid overtime, etc.

It may be harsh but fair to attribute to being infested with sociopaths or their culture.

I was given a ridiculous PIP once (two weeks after a receiving an outstanding annual review -- politics, eh), and actually completed it successfully (driven by rage, I knew I was going to be let go regardless).

Boss acknowledged I completed the PIP and then fired me for my "bad attitude during the process."

Well, he wasn't wrong about the attitude, I suppose.

I've never been on one, but I imagine if I was my performance would drop to the absolute minimum. I love my job, but I come first. Hell, I'd even be applying elsewhere and taking interview calls from inside my cubicle.

I was fortunate enough to be part of a couple startups when I was younger that went belly up. I've lived through the fear. I don't have any now. Happiness and work/life balance above all else, even pay; not some manager's unrealistic deadlines.

I generally agree- its a clear shot across the bow that the company no longer wants you there.

A funny story though from about 10 years ago (IE financial crisis): A sales person my wife worked with was put on a PIP. It had very clear revenue goals, modified his commission plan to be more performance based, but he could make more if he exceeded those goals, etc.

To everyone's astonishment, he started selling like crazy. There was only one problem- his boss forgot to "unfire" him with HR. Right after the PIP period expired, he gets a big deposit that isn't his commission check in his bank account- it was supposed to be a severance payment.

The guy immediately withdrew it from his bank account, and kept as little in there as possible so they couldn't get it back without confronting him, and later claimed he thought it was a commission and claimed to have spent it. They made him pay it back on a payment plan in the end, but only after forcing them to admit it was a severance and all that. He left as soon as he could find a better job.

Treating PIP as a pink slip is toxic. It might have become acceptable, but it's still toxic. I've only been placed on a PIP once and it's my go-to story for explaining what a PIP should really be.

I had just moved to United States with my wife and my 7-year old son. Since this was the second time I had moved from one country to another, I expected to be able to handle it reasonably well. Instead, I got seriously depressed by the absence of my friends and the cultural paradigm shift (i.e. the Seattle Freeze). I also had to deal with my family's emotional fallout -- both my wife and my kid got depressed and I was trying to help them as much as I could. On top of it all, I got an abscess and had to go to ER. As a result, my productivity dropped to zero.

The problem wasn't the productivity itself, but that I had mismanaged the situation. Instead of trying to talk these things over with my manager, I kept pushing myself, promising to deliver and failing to do so. It came to a point where my manager scheduled a 1-on-1 with me and told me he had no option but to put me on a PIP. He said he was extremely perplexed, because he had formed a completely different image of me during interviews and thought I would perform much better. During the 1-on-1, he kept prodding me to explain what was going on, until I broke down and explained the situation. He asked me why I hadn't told him any of that before. I explained that I had thought the American corporate culture was that you're expected to leave your baggage at the door and that nobody else should pick up your slack -- you're here to work, not to be babysat. He was appalled by the idea and explained that I should've talked to him and we could've organized things better. He reiterated that, because my lack of performance had percolated up the food chain, he had no option but to place me on a PIP; it wasn't merely up to him anymore. He explained that a PIP was a chance to prove that I really was capable of fitting my role and that if I met the PIP goals I would be in the clear, not just with his team and at that moment, but in the future too - managers aren't allowed to hold your PIP against you.

We then sat down and worked out a PIP. During the following 6 (or was it 8?) weeks, I met all the goals and that was that. After 2 years of working on that team, a much more exciting opportunity for internal transfer opened up, I applied for it and it worked out great. Nobody even mentioned my PIP.

In my opinion, that's how a PIP is supposed to work. For anyone interested, the company in question was Amazon. There are lots of things one might criticize about Amazon, but this is one thing they did absolutely right.

Disclaimer: current amazon sde

I was shocked at the end of your story that it was Amazon you were talking about, but I'm assuming this story happened at least a few years ago. I know of one friend who was put on a PIP around 2013 or 2014 - he is still with the company, has been trusted to be the technical lead for several large and important projects, and the only thing standing between him and a promotion to L6 is laziness in preparing the paperwork.

Amazon seems to have changed the process to what they call the "pivot program" - when previously you would have been put on a PIP (and given severance if you accepted it and failed it), you are now given the choice of

1) take severance

2) appeal (you will almost certainly lose, I don't have data for this but have heard about many of these appeals and exactly zero have gone in favor of the employee)

3) do the PIP, and if you fail it you are fired with no severance

Given that you are now offered severance as an alternative to a PIP and don't get a penny if you fail it, being put in the pivot program is unambiguously a pink slip. Sad to be reminded that Amazon used to be good at this, I don't think they are anymore

I'm really sad to hear that. For the record, my case was in 2013.

As far as I understand the PIP means the company wants to fire you. They just want to do this to mitigate liabilities and you suing them.

My country most developers are freelance contractors as we don't like to work as employees. During good times you can switch easy to good projects and more pay. Contracts are 3 months with extension so every 3 months you can re-negotiate. off course during down turns it can be more difficult to find work. Just build a nest egg for those periods.

Wait till the taxman twigs there is $ going begging

My manager's manager told us publicly that whoever sets the goal must also do the work.

Practically he implied that we don't have to agree to any objectives that are imposed on us.

It took me more than a decade learning how to estimate a task realistically not based on expectations. Due to pressure I always underestimated before which led to mounting troubles on the end despite of working hard.

TechLead, a youtuber that worked at Facebook, has covered this story [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbEQriZEfoI

Everytime I see one of this guys videos pop up I can't help but this he's a bit of a parasite. Leaching off anything for views. He doesn't seem to provide any valuable advice in any video I've watched, yet people lap it up (although his following have a very distinct demographic)

What's the demographic?

Developers who want to work for FAANG companies.

I've tried watching him a few times and got the same feeling. He also goes to great lengths to remind everyone (all the time) of how much money he makes. Is that normal for people in Silicon Valley?

Yeah, that guy has some kind of personality defect.

But, more sadly, it just goes to show how desperate his audience is for someone they can look up to and who will, authoritatively, give them some kind of guidance.

He's part of the self-help-vlogger-industrial-complex. There's A LOT WORSE than him out there too.

I always assumed his videos were satire.

Yeah me too. I mean, he is building his channel around this character of being 'the tech lead'. It's a youtube personality. Don't take it too seriously :)

Well, not satire, by his sarcasm can be easily confused and misinterepreted. I don't think he's intentionally showing off how much money he's making.

I like him and I like how he's projecting the life of a regular developer from SV in his videos.

That's how I take it. I find his videos hilarious. No more a parasite than any other YouTuber.

Performance improvement plans are a way for companies to keep a paper trail for legal purposes, rather than a effort to improve performance.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/facebook-employee-suicide-be...

That entire concept is in response to the high costs of frivolous employment lawsuits. It's to have a paper trail of evidence to show that the termination was with cause.

what kind of company takes 1 morning to fire an employee? that does not sound realistic.

Maybe they needed or wanted a reason to fire them. If that’s the case, it was all ready to go on HR.

I mean it only happens in movies when an employee gets fired and immediately put his stuff in the box and leaves the building. In real life there are labor regulations that don't allow this, there is the notification period et cetera

Depends. Even in Germany the company can simply decide to get you physically out right now as long as they keep you on the pay roll for the legal notice period.

I saw this go down right in front of me once. She technically still worked for us for 2 weeks I believe, but I saw HR approach her, bring her out of the room for a few minutes, then she came back and started quietly packing things into a box, and left within the hour.

I don't know the full details, I think she did have some kind of warning weeks before, but ignored it because she thought she was immune to being fired. She was the worst developer I've ever worked with so far though, personality-wise and skills, she definitely lied in her PHP interview. That's also on that company though, I have no idea how she passed that interview (okay, I do have an idea, no programmers ever spoke with her).

That's simply not correct, at least in the US. The process I've seen is the employee is taken to a meeting room, they're told they've being let go, they're walked to their desk to retrieve their personal belongings, and they're walked out the door. From the employees perspective one minute they're working like normal, and perhaps a half-hour later they're standing outside unemployed.

I’ve seen this before.

Get an email the day before to deactivates someone’s access at X time. Next day they get called into a meeting 10 mins before X and then escorted to their desk and out a couple mins after.

I've had similar experiences, where I'm told in the morning to be available to handle an account deactivation immediately at X time, and then at X time I'm given the name.

What really sucks is when you have to do it for one of your teammates. :-(

> I mean it only happens in movies when an employee gets fired and immediately put his stuff in the box and leaves the building.

It's not only in the movies. I've seen it done in real life a number of times. In the US, anyway, this isn't prohibited by law.

I doubt that firing on such a short notice properly followed the correct procedures, in the UK that's an automatic loss at tribuneral.

Nossa senhora! Parabéns pelo novo trabalho! ... que fique tudo tranquilo.

Next time this happens to you, write down minutes of the meeting and send the doc to the guy asking to confirm that this is what they ask. When they fire you on Monday, sue.

Is this actually possible?

Yes, sending an email is very easy these days.

Shades of Leslie Nielsen.

Thanks for enlightening me on the technologies of the 21st century. Maybe I meant if it‘s actually possible/makes sense to sue him because of an impossible deadline? Who knows

To answer your question (sort of): in my state it is not possible. It is state by state; my state is "at will" employment. This means, in my state, you can be fired just because. Employers in my state can't violate federal law of course -- they can't discriminate etc -- but they can fire you because "you're just not good enough" with no details or documentation.

That said, it is likely CA has it's own set of protections that make it harder to do.

Usually, it's the company's internal policies that require a PIP and all the documentation even in an "at will" state. This is to maintain the appearance of fairness and to avoid the possibility of employment litigation (companies of course often operate in many states and federal law is always a concern). If you document, you avoid all this. The firing though is usually a _fait accompli_; the PIP is CYA.

Every state is "at-will" except for Montana, which has some additional protections. There's no winnable lawsuit here unless you have a contract that's being breached.

Depends where you live. In America, no chance. In the UK, easily.

sucks you can't take the severance though. its usually a don't sue us card

This is actually a great advice.

I would also add that if it is legal for you to do so - send a BCC to your personal email just in case, or keep offline copy of correspondence.

Yikes. You should send his boss/ceo/investors a spite email telling the story about how he lost a worker who was working for 1/2 market rate by setting impossible deadlines.

> You should send his boss/ceo/investors a spite email

That is a horrendously bad suggestion.

A spite email sounds like a bad idea, but this manager sounds very harmful to the company, and the boss/ceo/investors might want to be aware of that.

And why would he care anymore about it? The company failed him, so why would he be helpful for them anymore?

He did his job, he moved on, whatever happens there should not be expected to be his problem anymore.

To help other people who end up at said manager/job.

That manager is toxic and should be reprimanded and/or fired. The employee certainly has no ethical obligation to do them any favors, but it could prevent that manager from abusing current and future workers in this way.

This is a situation where the interests of the workers aligns with the business's ability to succeed. Why not leverage that to try to improve working conditions there? Seems like a win-win for everyone but the toxic manager.

Because if the CEO is smart, they'll fire that manager before he does any more damage to the company, and maybe hire the developer back.

Glad you got out and best of luck!

The world is filled with incompetent managers who have no clue about the requirements or conditions and are afraid to ask, they play authority card or even intimidate instead. Very dumb.

I feel unlucky never being fired and leaving 4 out of 5 cases because of bad management (poor task allocation, inadequate yet wasted resources, focus on appearances instead of essence both in steering and execution, poor communication or attitude, misuse of authority - including not using authority where necessary). I almost wish of having a (real, not induced!) feeling of incompetency, the feeling of the need to improve, instead of the feeling of wasting my time at work.

Good God, what a terrible situation but an even better outcome. So glad you didn't take your life.

Dirty HR tricks when they want you out of there, but have to justify it legally. Funny thing is that you could probably still win them in court as any expert would confirm that task was unrealistic, so it's such a bureaucratic nonsense...

That is just awful. I'm glad you got out and got something better.

When someone tells you to do something that's both impossible and utterly unreasonable, just stick to telling them it's impossible.

If he tells you you're incapable, tell him he needs to use a realistic planning for these things, and if he can't do that, then he's incapable.

There's no angle from which this is even remotely acceptable. Even more so because it involves financial transactions: writing anything related to that in such a hurry is a recipe for disaster.

This manager needs to be fired hard, or he's going to bring that company down.

This. Also separately I really wish there were better legal courses for situations like that. Forcing someone to forgo their personal plans on a Friday night and suddenly work on moment's notice should be considered unethical and inhumane, and wrecks society, peoples' mental health, childrens' well-being, and much more.

The need for overtime work should be communicated in advance, or there should be an explicit, voluntary, paid on-call rotation for things that occasionally need immediate attention, and on-call should be limited to things that break and need fixing, not things that need to be built.

"No." is a perfectly reasonable response as well, especially since in this case, GP was fired on Monday anyway.

All relationships need healthy boundaries, in this case, their relationship with work, and work's relationship with them, is unhealthy. If online research about healthy boundaries isn't enough, I recommend seeking a professional's advice (like a licensed therapist or psychologist).

No psychologist is going to right wrongs that need to be addressed through legislation.

Rights have been stripped from individuals and workers. We need a massive redressing of the “corporate” world. Workers rights matter. We’ve got companies that are too big to fail being bailed out by the government meanwhile companies can schedule you for just under the minimum requiring benefits but still take up as much or more of a commitment as a full time position.

"A lack of planning on your end does not make it an ermergency on mine"

Thank you for this! I'm about to go through a forced job transition and this has helped me feel a little more hopefully that it will all work out, possibly for the better. Glad to hear you're happy now!

I'm so happy to hear you found a better path forward.

If anyone is feeling burnout for doing impossible or hero work, please remember your job is _not_ your life. You can escape the toxic situation.

Do not be some other man's squirrel.

BTW that was probably an illegal act by your employer. They gave you a clearly impossible task then fired you when you couldn’t complete it. That’s unreasonable.

You might want to contact an employment attorney in your state for a consultation. Your state Bar association can give you a referral and probably a free consultation. They will be particularly interested if this was the culmination of a pattern of bullying behavior (consequences vary by State) or if there’s some kind of protected class involved (eg you are over 40 and the manager wants a younger team).

It might seem like an unnecessary hassle, but legal action can help your remaining colleagues and possibly put some money in your pocket.

For at-will employment, employers can legally fire employees for unreasonable reasons, including unrealistic expectations of work performance.

I believe that this sort of thing usually isn't worth the trouble. Acts of revenge are rarely really satisfying. Just find a new job at a better-run place. Then email all of your old colleagues about how much better the new place is - maybe you can recruit some of them and get a bonus for that too.

way strong, this one's long game is

"I thought throwing myself from my apartment window." You got it backwards. You think of throwing your manager out the apartment window.

The best Defenestration is a good Offenestration

Stealing that!

>If you are wise, however, this is precisely what you will avoid doing because the average Vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born—or (if you are a clearer minded thinker) that the Vogon had never been born.

— Douglas Adams, H2G2

My aunt had a terrible job in an office building downtown Chicago. One of those jobs where the boss was a maniac and made them work crunch time month after month.

Across the street from her building is a ~10 story jail with an exercise yard on the very top. My aunt said she used to fantasize about how if she could throw her boss out the window, they'd put her in jail and at least she could go outside sometimes.

And right across the street from that jail, were jail tacos. The first place you would go when released from jail.

I miss jail tacos.

(Here is a picture of the basketball court on top of a 10+ story jail, very weird fixture of the Chicago loop: https://www.google.com/maps/search/corrections/@41.8764071,-... )

If I was in that situation, I'd do some form of:

What do you want by 11PM? A design?

Really, you want the whole thing completed?

Is this some kind of a joke?

(Depending on relationship) Walk out the door without saying a word, "I quit," or even better, just stand up and say, "Everyone who thinks this is absurd walk out the door with me right now."

Why: What I've learned is that employees ignoring an unreasonable boss sends a rapid signal to upper management to get rid of the unreasonable boss.

You lose benefits and the possibility of taking legal action against the (former) employer if you quit.

Even in "at will" employment states you can sue for unlawful termination.

In this situation it would add up to 'constructive dismissal' so he wouldn't necessarily lose any rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

Sounds a lot like at-will employment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment)

A shady personnel manager at a former job explained the difference to me: If someone is terminated as an "at will" employee, they can collect unemployment and possibly other benefits as well such as severance.

If they are terminated "with cause," no benefits. I have never seen a PIP, but it may require you to sign away your rights as an "at will" employee.

you should have quit on the spot.

I'm sorry about the stress you must have been under.

I am, however, looking forward to the absolute crud an org like that will have to eat when they have managers like that. No org can last long with such levels of incompetence... Chapman's In Search of Stupidity is a chronicling of that.

Not implying anything, but perhaps they wanted to fire you or wanted you to resign for whatever reason (including those that have nothing to do with you personally).

I am very glad you managed to parlay a bad situation into a better one.

Fuck incompetent management. It is a virus that eventually ravages the entire host (organization).

> The meeting was about an app that integrates credit card payments, billets and bank account on a terminal that is going to be available to the general public. > > The deadline? 11PM of the same day. Final version. From 0 to 100% in 6 hours.

That is not only impossible, it is reckless. A good way to lose not only money when things break, but get your access to credit cards and bank transactions eliminated when they learn their procedures were not covered.

It's amazing how much overlap there is between jobs where they treat you poorly, and where they don't pay you enough. You'd think it would be the opposite, but it's all part of them not valuing you.

Poor pay is often a result of a downward spiral of dysfunctional/failing organization. Your manager gets paid poorly, your coworkers, other teams. Best people leave first and new good people don't want to join. Demotivated teams lacking any talent produce bad product. Poor product looses customers, which forces management into freezing/cutting salaries. Everything compounds. After certain threshold there is no way back, but it is surprising how long can organizations with no hope stick around, and just keep people miserable.

I wish I could +1000 this... so true that poor pay is a result of a downward spiral!

Interesting how it's easier to have talented people eat microwave ramen for a year while you're energized building something new. Once the salaries go up, then drop, you start to spiral down the drain.

Isn't the "building something new" job somewhat of a gamble though? To get in on the ground floor of something big for a bigger payday down the line? The same can't be said for a struggling company cutting salaries.

Kudos for landing a better job. I guess you were quite young at the time and I hope you matured more than to put yourself in such a harmful situation again. If you deem that something is senseless, impossible or on the verge of abusing you must say so and stand your ground. It is the right thing to do not just for you but for your coworkers and the larger ecosystem you are moving about. It's what that general said about 'The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept' only this time it was about the standard you put up with.

All the best

Sounds to me like constructive dismissal

The problem is. People think that when you don't live up to unrealistic expectations that it's their own fault, when really it's just egregriously poor management. In my experience, whenevever someone isn't meeting expectations, it means 95% of the time the problem is the manager. the solution as you found, is to leave and find somewhere else that values your hard work.

That's so stressful. We've asked every new hire to take a week of PTO during their first month. I wish more places did that - you need time to adjust while switching jobs. But, you're typically stressed while looking for a new job, so you can't really relax until you have a new job and steady income + benefits again.

Is it possible they wanted to fire you anyway and gave a task to you that they knew was impossible so that there would be a reason for it?

The great thing about being given 6 hours to do a 6 week job is that you know it's impossible. So you say "I'm going to need to work from home". Then off you go to the beach. Or a job interview. Pull a Paula [1]. Then come back and say "Oh it's waiting for app store approval".

[1] http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean

I guess they wanted a reason to fire you?

Regarding twice the salary - seems like you got as much respect as pay. That's usually how it goes.... :(

Absolutely insane you had to go through this, but happy to see that you're happier now.

I'm the sole developer working on my current project, which is overhauling a massive DOS era application, as well as overhauling an early 2000s era CRM/business management tool, that almost all of our work happens through.

Did I mention that the DOS application is a HIPAA billing application that must meet all HIPAA guidelines as well as write EDI X12 billing files?

I'm very junior, been coding for ~5 years, 3 professionally, but this is my first real dumpster fire. We were about to hire a second developer, but turns out he had a record. Not for just anything, which we don't really worry about, but for embezzlement on the healthcare billing application he used to own. So, no. No can do.

So now poor 18-year-old me is knee-deep in a ton of shit I don't understand, working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO, and trying to get details out of my older supervisor who built the code we're using, but he's near retirement and has so many vacation days saved up that he spends maybe 10 days a month in the office. I honestly can't blame him, but I either need resources to help me deal with legacy code, or a nice entry-level rails job, because I want to finish learning rails.

> working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO

I've been there. Run.

I'm studying hard, but learning new stuff while learning other new stuff is hard.

Listen. If not using version control is a problem for you, you're already more hirable than a lot of developers I've seen. Learning is always important but don't use that to procrastinate.

You don't have to go straight to the best job in the world. Just find something better (and do your homework to verify) and take it.

I'm in a small city, where not much work is available. I need to pad my resume a little more to make the work I do more attractive, but the reality is that LAMP devs aren't in high demand near me. I apply to several jobs daily, but not much is around. I'd appreciate pointers on how to improve my prospects, but the last place I interviewed was a seedy adult entertainment company, and I wouldn't have taken an offer if they begged, simply for personal reasons.

You said you're 18, you're young and hopefully don't have kids, so apply in other cities as well.

Yeah it's scary. But if the job is good enough, and the pay is good enough, then you've got to figure out why your bullshit reason for staying where you are outweighs both your mental health and your career prospects.

EDIT: And don't forget remote options.

God, at 18—or hell, at 22—showing the fuck up and not seeming entirely incompetent is a big deal. Show up, be engaged, do both consistently, and anyone who's not a total piece of crap will be all over giving you more responsibility and mentoring you up to bigger and better things. Total pieces of crap may still be interested, but it'll be in exploiting you (as in current situation). Oh, and ask questions. No one expects you to know diddly-squat, so ask away. Ask about stuff that's not part of your job description at all. People will tell you all kinds of stuff, and, incredibly, the whole exchange will make them like you more.

Phenomenally small amounts of give-a-shit go a long way for youngsters. It's basically their superpower, if they're willing and able to use it.

I know a bunch of remote-hiring places and if nothing else I'd be happy to help you figure out what to learn (and, probably, how to approach it) to GTFO. Email is in my profile.

List of Remote Jobs or Gigs Platforms

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...

If you're 18 and already know why version control is a good idea, you're very hireable in any number of cities/remote!

> I need to pad my resume a little more to make the work I do more attractive

A word of caution: One of my objectives as an interviewer is to drill into a candiate's resume to see if they actually did what they said they did. Its OK to talk up your accomplishments. But don't claim expertise in language X or technology Y unless you are prepared to answer some questions about it.

I interviewed a guy who's masters work was in the field I did my doctoral work in. I think I'm the only one in the company who knows anything about the particular topic, and considering that the role was far removed from that topic, it was a very unlikely coincidence. However, when discussing his research, he mostly missed the mark. It wasn't enough to sink his application as at the masters level I wouldn't expect him to know it nearly as well as I do, and he was ultimately hired. But, you never know who you're talking to.

Taken out of context, I agree with you.

But this conversation has been about them saying they need to learn more before they can get a new job, and me replying that they shouldn't use that as an excuse to procrastinate. Thus the `need to pad my resume` comment.

Leave the city. It doesn’t end well if you stay... unless you can get remote work (even then it’s risky), but you definitely have to leave the company ASAP

Magento shops are always looking for LAMP devs. A national recruiter told me they place PHP devs at the big Magento shops without the job ever existing.... There must be a Magento agency in your city?

When this goes sideways, and it will, they will try to pin it on you. You need to GTFO.

This is called rationalizing. Get out. Strategically, not on a whim. Hunt for another job.

I'm bewildered as to why a CEO would have any opinion on version control at all. Or why you'd ask a CEO whether you could use one. It's like a builder asking a construction company CEO if he can hold a hammer lower in his hand and that CEO forbidding it. Can someone explain?

A good friend of mine worked for a small company whose CEO also tried hard to convince him that introducing version control was wrong.

Of course, this same CEO also didn't see any problem with the fact that the password field in the login form was never checked against the database, because who would know someone else's login name?

Why is a CEO even getting involved in an issue on that low a level?

Unless these are 'CEOs' of 3 people tech companies, I guess.

OP said they are the sole developer on their project, so it sounds like they are.

Gotta love those companies where there are more board members than employees.

I'm not exactly at a fortune 500. I'm one of two developers at my company and it would be hilarious to me if my CEO (who seems like a nice enough guy) even knew what version control was.

Then again, this isn't a tech company.

Small company, maybe a dozen people total, only tech-adjacent, not a strictly tech company. The CEO (which, for a company this size, probably also meant owner and perhaps sole board member) and maybe a fee other people at most had built the site in question.

Why a developer would be asking a CEO for advice or opinions on either of these things?

The dev says himself that he is a junior, and it is very likely that the CEO of a tech firm has more than junior-level experience in technical matters. Even if he doesn't, it is still fine for a junior to ask his superiors for advice.

  - Hey Joe CEO, which version control do you think I should use?  
  - None, that's an order!

It was a small (tech-adjacent, not strictly tech) company, and if memory serves right the owner built some of the site in question himself. I dont know that my friend reported directly to anyone inbetween, at least not when it came to technical matters anyway.

Also run for all the other stuff you said before that.

> having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO

You can run a local git repo, no code would ever leave your PC. I'd do taht, and damn the torpedoes. If he is dumb enough to say no versioning, he'll never know you run it locally.

What are the arguments against version control here (if any)?

Honestly the project sounds quite interesting, but I can imagine the circumstances make it painful.

> What's are the arguments against version control here (if any)?

* I don't understand it

* You're overcomplicating things

* We're not using any of that free shit here

* It doesn't say Microsoft or IBM

* The last guy we hired that tried to use it was smarter than I was so anyone else who tries is a threat to my leadership. (because everyone knows you can only manage people who have a strict subset of your own knowledge. If one of your peons dared learn something before you, that would be the end of your reign.)

the list goes on...

> It doesn't say Microsoft or IBM

GitHub does, now, though I really hope that isn’t necessary for a company to adopt version control.

And Visual Source Safe and TFS did previously.

Why didn’t you just recommend Azure Repos? It’s a great product and fits what you need.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/devops/repos/

* Azure means cloud and cloud means no

* It didn't exist at the time, but there was an on-prem that MS offered a few years back. It was forced on another department with no version control experience. It lasted about two weeks.

There are self hosted Azure products also.

On prem gitlab then? Just throwing out ideas.

Oh and this is on prem...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/server/

I'm not sure what the answer is for version control, but I refuse to accept it's Git. I don't understand how it became so popular - did nobody say "wait, there might be a reason why Linus is known for cloning an OS and not coming up with a brilliant design for one from scratch?"

OK.

> I don't understand how it became so popular

Git follows in spirit the model of BitKeeper, a software that already worked exceptionally well for Linus and other kernel devs. So Git had both a known good design from the very beginning and a decently sized installed user base (kernel devs) with an important project (the kernel).

IMO there's nothing wrong with the cloning of software. You make it sound bad, can you give reasons?

Git is great. Lightweight, scales effortlessly, learning curve isn’t too bad, decentralised by design and because it’s so widely adopted it works pretty much everywhere.

What else are you gonna use? SVN? shudder

The learning curve isn't too bad? Do you actually use Git? Like, from the command line?

I have no issue with a friendly wrapper in general, but after starting with the basic interface, I don't trust a wrapper to be logical, complete, and well thought out, given the foundation.

Yes, I use Git mainly from the command line and I've used it on Linux, OSX and Windows. I've also used quite a few GUIs including SourceTree, Github Desktop and GitKraken. I've been using it for a while now!

In the end it really boils down to a few commands that you use often, checkout/push/pull/commit/clone/branch/diff/status etc. It can definitely get confusing at times when you get merge conflicts and want to start playing with rebasing and stuff like that.

I've used it with teams with no experience with Git whatsoever and they're usually fluent at the basics within a week or so.

If you get stuck the command you need is usually a 2 minute Google away.

There's also this which is fantastically named! https://ohshitgit.com

“We’ve never needed it before, so why do we need it now?” (actual argument against it at my current workplace)

My response:

You've never looked at a piece of code that you wanted to see the history of?

You've never needed to revert a single change a few hours/days/weeks later?

You've never needed to track down the person who wrote a piece of code in order to ask them for clarification?

You've never needed to see the original change reason for a line of code that is doing some weird, specific thing that seems out of place?

You've never needed to have two people edit the same file at the same time?

I've got these responses on a similar question: "we don't need to see the commit logs so who cares about them or the history being pretty and clear? Nobody is looking at the history!"!!

The question was "Let's submit pull requests as a clean job not as a homework draft. Why don't we allow push force on work branches so that we can squash fixup commits after review?"

Blows my mind that those are senior developers that are otherwise seemingly competent at what they do. There is some pinch of job security there though.

There are valid reasons for a "never rewrite history" policy, but their validity pales further you go from the master branch.

The thing is that in a lot of scenarios people need to do huge chunks of work in feature branches. Sometimes a 3000 line "refactor the world" squashed commit is really unhelpful. The best policy is always well thought of weighted case-by-case decisions.

However, on projects with a lot of hands on the keyboard such policy is unrealistic and someone will do the opposite of what they should and wont ask or discuss. People, especially in our business, hide incompetence behind aloofness and silence.

So in that case, with a lot of people that are hard to manage, stiff policy is the best choice and there probably are reasons why people want to preserve history, no matter how hairy it looks, at least it's there and you can find stuff in it.

I bet they are willfully blind to that difference.

* Someone used git to publish a HIPAA violation on github.

If HIPAA is a concern host your own server.

If you can't trust your employees to adhere to HIPAA or other mandatory regulations, you need better employees.

If your source code contains personal information, usernames, passwords, etc that should not be exposed to the public, you need to address that immediately regardless of any irrational stances on version control.

> "If you can't trust your employees to adhere to HIPAA or other mandatory regulations, you need better employees."

You need a better process. Developers aren't lawyers. Of course they should be aware of HIPAA requirements, but better is to ensure they simply don't have access to sensitive production data except in very controlled circumstances, while making safe anonymised test data available for anything they need test data for.

I've learned there are arguments that are not worth winning, and if you find yourself in one, your priority should be getting out of the situation that created the argument.

He thinks it's all cloud based. It's sad, yes.

I honestly enjoy the work when I know what's going on. We have a lot of unique problems to solve, and I have gotten positive changes made, as well as some really good weeks where I pounded out some good code, but other times it's slow, sad, and frustrating.

https://gitea.io/en-us/ (and its parent https://gogs.io/ )

https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed

https://github.com/enterprise

Big +1 for Gitea/Gogs, that thing will run on a toaster. Super low memory footprint and great for small shops.

?? Git works just fine without any of that. CVS has been around since 1990, RCS since 1982. And SCCS is old enough to be OP's father.

> ?? Git works just fine without any of that.

I echo your ??. Sure you don't need a central repository to use git. What does that have to do with suggesting some git hosts that aren't cloud based?

You can have a git repo on a server that developers use ssh to access just with git. The bells and whistles aren't part of the core job. It's just my general griping about software these days.

I get where you're coming from, but I still don't think it deserves a ??. Most people in most environments want a GUI they can click around in.

I'm very comfortable with git at the command line, but I still think it's valuable to have a web interface. For instance, with a web GUI I'm able to share a link to a specific line or range in a file in a specific commit.

Typically if I need to do that I'm asking a question or requesting a change, and in that case I want there to be as few barriers as possible to increase the chances that the other person cooperates. Asking someone to clone/pull the repo, checkout a hash, and then view a line in a file is a much higher barrier than asking them to click a link.

Good luck doing code reviews with a distributed team using that.

Linux is one of the most massively distributed projects in the world, and it just works fine without GUI review tools. If Linux devs don't need such tools like gitlab, why you?

Like others have suggested, use git locally, there's no need for them to be involved or aware of that detail. Do you consult them on what text editor to use?

There's a skill to learn in keeping engineering concerns to yourself. It's unsurprising when management or executives are faced with decisions in unfamiliar topics they err on the side of Nay. Your mistake is involving them at all.

this ^

Using git locally is a tool just like your code editor. There's no need to ask your boss about that.

Since you're the only developer it's mainly to make it easy to revert any mistakes and to have confidence in deleting useless stuff (that you can recover later).

> "What are the arguments against version control here (if any)?"

No good ones of course, but there is one that I think is superficially very compelling:

It keeps a permanent record of everything that has ever been part of the codebase. If HIPAA required medical and patient data to not be stored anywhere except under highly controlled circumstances, the CEO might be afraid that data might end up in version control.

And that's not an entirely unreasonable fear; developers writing a quick PoC could include data in the project because it's quicker than setting up the infrastructure required. And of course they'll later fix it, but the version control system will still keep a record of it.

Of course there are tons of bad practices about this, but here's the thing: bad practices do happen, even if it's just as a temporary measure, and version control will create a permanent record for that.

Of course the right way to do this is to ensure that the developers only have access to anonymised test data and not to real sensitive production data; and to ensure that production data is always and only stored under the proper, secure circumstances required.

It's still a red flag, but the reasons might be more subtle and complex than simply "I don't understand it".

working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO

Did the CEO give a reason? I'm a bit curious based on it being billing and HIPPA. Also, are you rolling your own EDI import/export?

HIPAA

I don't work with HIPAA but with other compliance/regulations NOT using version control is the problem.

Unless you have patient information hardcoded into the source code for god knows what reason...

Things that might be hardcoded are access keys and passwords to PII databases.

Which is bad practice for lots of reasons and, is that a HIPAA violation? Your code also has it then.

Hosting git externally might be an issue though.

No. No no no no no.

You're not storing patient details in VC...... Right? Maybe show him that you can run svn even on his own machine... Anything... Anything is better than not using something

I've work with HIIPA and VC. No issues, as long you do not store patient information within the source code, I cannot think of any reason why you would need to do that...

I worked at a place that is extremely concerned with HIPPA to the point of having many specialist lawyers. We were required to use version control.

I work with HIPAA and SOC2, this is ridiculous. Your boss is misinformed.

Just show him that you're literally only committing code, and not any real data in the repo.

CEO doesn't like "the cloud", and VC is obviously that to him. I do use it locally, but that's about all.

Yes, I just wrote an EDI exporter in Ruby for Medicaid services, working on one for MCOs now. Thankfully we don't have to import EDI, or I'd go nuts.

I didn’t see any contact info on your profile but if you’re looking for a Rails gig, let’s chat. Ping me at my profile email.

Seriously, the GP comment makes me wish I had a job to offer, not just due to sympathy but because any 18-year-old who is even sort of managing to tackle that problem and also knows that lack of VC is a serious red flag is probably worth an interview.

>having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO

Well that's really fucking stupid of them. Maybe they're worried about evidence of old HIPAA breaches existing after the system gets updated, and doesn't want to explain that logic? On your local development station:

  mkdir repo
  cd repo
  git init --bare
  cd ..
  git clone repo project_folder
  cd project_folder
  cp -r ../<path_to_project>/project project

Congratulations, you now have version control for local development that your CEO never has to know about! The only reason I'd suggest an extra folder (horribly named project_folder in the example above) is so that you never accidentally copy the hidden .git files when moving it from your dev station.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/505467/can-i-store-the-g... you dont need to copy files, just tell git to store its data in another dir

Wow thank you so much for this. There's some stuff I've been working on which I want to sync to Dropbox as I type but without the .git being synced too. Up until now I've just had to deal with the .git files being synced with Dropbox. But now it looks like I finally have a way of moving the repo!

If your bosses are concerned about Git, then they will likely have a fit over Dropbox. Get permission first, it is not worth your job.

it is not worth your job in a thread entitled "who wants to be fired"?

This entire thread discussion is filled with it's not worth it, but towards the "no one should be forced to work like that" kind of way

The Dropbox comment is from a different user.

Wow, that's a great idea!

It likely is because of accidentally storing PII randomly in a hidden folder.

The data and application code are probably very intertwined, rather than portable code that could be plugged into any kind of stage database.

> working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO

Version Control is a basic requirement of professional software development in this day and age.

You could try explaining to your CEO it would be like telling a carpenter they can't use a hammer to build your new house.

Or just take the initiative and use Version Control without telling them. In my mind it isn't something you need to ask permission for.

This is bad advice. If you accidentally leave personally identifiable healthcare information on some random stage server and that server gets hacked, that is a federal crime. If the data and application code are very intertwined (likely in a pre-SOA era), it can be very difficult to version control code completely isolated from PII.

> If you accidentally leave personally identifiable healthcare information on some random stage server and that server gets hacked, that is a federal crime.

Not sure how that relates to Version Control? I personally don't put production (real) data on staging servers to begin with; always scrub your production clones or generate data for testing instances.

> If the data and application code are very intertwined (likely in a pre-SOA era), it can be very difficult to version control code completely isolated from PII.

Maybe I am naive (never had to work on DOS), but shouldn't the data be in a database/datastore/data directory that can be ignored by source control?

Huh? Why would the code have medical data in it?

If you were to take an api response and save it for testing, but not completely remove all personal information.

Easier than you'd think, or at least I could see it happening.

The CEO has likely given this directive to avoid a paper trail. Any attempt at rationalizing with the CEO will be a waste of effort when this person could (and should) be focused on finding another place of employment.

Apparently (according to a carpenter friend) - if the carpenter uses a hammer on a modern build it means something has gone wrong - they're normally using nailguns or similar to put things together - hammers are to bash them back apart again or knock them into alignment if they weren't done right the first time.

LOL, yes nail guns are the more efficient tool these days, however I bet these carpenters still have a hammer on their tool belt and use it at least once a day.

Hammers can also be used in awkward to reach places that a nail gun can't get to. Also, structural timber is very rarely straight or true. Knocking things into alignment is a very common part of framing, and hammers can achieve sub-millimetre accuracy with gentle tapping.

Yes, nail guns are awesome, but hammers are very useful tools.

And to bring it back to the original poster - barely a day goes by that you don't need a ~hammer~ ... version control history.

I've done some work as a builders labourer. Admittedly ~18 years ago.

Nail Guns are awesome. Pneumatic, butane/battery and powder actuated all have their place and were heavily used. Always had a hammer on my belt though.

In particular, it's hard to use a nail gun to fasten a plate, hanger or bracket.

I always thought it is more like making a building without a scaffold: when you're on the ground floor it doesn't look bad, but the more you build....

You may find this article helpful in some way: “How to Improve a Legacy Codebase” [0]

[0] https://jacquesmattheij.com/improving-a-legacy-codebase

Yo, git can be used locally. I highly recommend it.

this whole story probably just boils down to people not understanding the difference between github and git.

You do know that HIPAA violations can land you in jail, right? Run. Don't walk. Vacate immediately. Leave.

I'm finding myself hoping that this is a fake, because I wouldn't wish this situation on anyone at all.

This might be why the CEO doesn't want version control. It's extra evidence

Unfortunately wouldn't be the first time I've heard something like this :(

Not just jail, you are also now personally liable. Meaning your personal assets are on the table for a lawsuit (at least according to Stanford’s HIPAA training)

You won’t go to jail if you do nothing wrong, but legal fees. Ugh, yeah, you’ll be in court as a witness and possibly defendant if you don’t leave ASAP.

Or if they have a better lawyer than yours.

Well that would be the OCR. It’s doubtful they would waste a lot of resources going after a developer, unless they really thought he had done something. Usually they go after leadership.

And then leadership hires good lawyers that do their best to deflect the blame to the developer.

> be in court as a witness and possibly defendant if you don’t leave ASAP

Might be able to quit the job, turn them in for HIPPA violations and also claim unemployment (source: I did this at a job that was violating HIPPA)

Yeah...as someone who works on HIPAA compliant software, this sounds very scary to me. We carry a $1M insurance policy at all times. Did you sign a business associate agreement?

This was my first exposure to a professional development job, but for medical transcription (we had a billing dept too). I wasn't even hired to do it (I was hired as help desk staff), but the application neeeeded updating and the 2013 HIPAA omnibus had just dropped so we were on the line to get in compliance and no one else was stepping up. I had to learn as I went. decade old, undocumented code written in old .NET and (some) Java 6.

No version control, running on Win2000/XP, ancient beige box hardware (some with turbo buttons).

I was 19 and making $9 an hour. I got fired for automating my help desk tasks so I could bring us up to date.

I don't think anyone has gone to jail for HIPAA violations who wasn't intentionally misusing or stealing PHI.

not a lawyer, but I think intent is a big piece. That said, if you ever feel pressured to do something that you know, or even think, might "not be quite right", diplomatically argue your point and get things in writing. Even an email thread between you and a manager is good. The idea is this: if the fecal matter hits the oscillator and auditors come in, you want evidence that you were doing what you were told, despite your protests.

Unless you're boss tells you to do something so egregious that after the fact it will look like you're stealing or committing fraud you'll be fine.

If your boss says "Hey download all of the PHI for these celebrities to a flash drive and load it on your computer at home" you should definitely say no or get it in writing.

But if your boss says "hey I need a copy of George's medical records, e-mail them to me" as an individual you won't get in any personal liability for it.

If you're that young (18??), you can almost definitely afford to quit tomorrow and look for something better.

Never sacrifice your own career for your employer's success (within some time horizon.) Being willing to quit when your boss is a clear bad actor is a core part of this.

Quit. Period. Maybe find a new job first. But don't stick around.

If you're that young (18??), you can almost definitely afford to quit tomorrow and look for something better.

It very probably is the opposite. A lot of people who end up working at 18 are doing it because they need the money and their support network is poor.

Can confirm. Been working as a SWE full time and trying to finish my degree since 19. I would not take this pile of stress if I had a pile of money.

That's a good point. If things will go to shit if you quit, by all means don't. But regardless look to secure a job before quitting.

It's hard when you're young (no savings, car payment, whatever).. but it gets harder before it gets easier.

This is a time in your life when you're (hopefully) not supporting anyone else, don't have a ton of possessions, don't have a mortgage, can couch-surf, eat ramen, etc.

Well, yeah, no. Family is leaving the country, S/O got kicked out, and I have a Great Pyrenees.

You are 18 and been working professionally for 3 years. Well done. All said and done this is what matters. Real life experience over university education.

One thing for GP to consider: I did the exact same thing (worked for three years in software development), but now I’m back at school in college. This obviously depends on if you think school is worth it (I did), but I wouldn’t be surprised if my work experience before college helped me stand out in the application process. Either way, good luck!

Wow. Just wow. Run. There is no way this will end well.

No version control = no way.

You're junior in years, but 3 years working professionally makes you perhaps less junior than you think. It's right around the point it becomes easier to get other jobs.

I worked for a "CTO" who didn't allow us to use version control either. This was from 2007-2010. I am surprised there is a company TODAY that does this, but I guess I shouldn't be.

The reasoning behind not using VC was that it "caused more problems than it solved." His solution? Code directly on the production server. Yep. You heard me right. Let me say that one more time. Code directly on the production server. We eventually finally won a development server and wrote some bash scripts to deploy from there, but we never actually got SVN or anything. Imagine working on five person development team with no version control.

The guy was a serious joke. The VC issue is just one of many. A serious despot. The guy was hated by all. We laughed at him. Why would I stick that out for three years? I had zero experience when hired. All of us were very green. We were all just putting in our time to hit that magic three years experience checkbox we needed for the next level gig. The CTO was more concerned with appearing to have a large department and having developers working on lots of different things, than actual quality. We wrote some pretty terrible code back in those days and we did a lot of it on a production server during business hours.

We all left at or around the three-year mark. Month by month the "CTO" lost developers faster than he could replace them. The "CTO" was eventually fired and we laughed from afar.

You are being taken advantage of like I was when I first started. You are cheap labor. Your CEO doesn't care about the product. Your CEO likely doesn't care about your career development. The sooner you leave, the more you will learn and grow. That was my experience.

I'm the GP, on my work account. Yes. That is exactly what we do. It's horrifying.

The good news is that there are fantastically good shops to work for (you should start looking for one), and that you'll have some good stories to tell about the hellmouth that was your first company.

But yeah, get the heck out of there.

> Code directly on the production server. Yep. You heard me right. Let me say that one more time. Code directly on the production server.

What a coincidence! We have a customer that is having a strange, hard-to-nail-down problem with our software. We asked if we could provide a diagnostic build to them that they could run in their test environment to gather additional information about what was happening.

Their reply was that they didn't have a test environment. They just install any software they get directly to their production machines.

Complete insanity.

Before quitting, try your best to make changes that will reduce stress and improve the project's manageablity with or without permission. Your work sounds so mission critical you could probably do whatever you want with no chance of getting fired.

Just be able to justify your action and communicate your decisions clearly. You'll start earning respect and that alone will reduce your stress levels. Standing up for yourself is hard to do at any age and "learned helplessness" is a concern if you don't push yourself.

I worked in insurance for over five years (at a Fortune 500 company). I had annual HIPAA training. I was in claims, so I'm not sure how pertinent this will be to your needs, but here is some stuff I remember:

1. HIPAA has a minimum necessary standard of disclosure, which means give only however much info you must give to accomplish the task in question.

2. You need at least three pieces of identifying info to positively ID an account, such as name, address and account number. (Other possibilities include: Social security number; date of birth; phone number.)

3. When disposing of papers or other media containing covered information, it must be destroyed, not merely thrown out. This means papers, floppy disks, etc must be shredded.

4. If you're printing a lot of papers with HIPAA covered info, you should have a locked trash can for any papers you are discarding. Presumably, this is merely a holding bin until it gets shredded.

5. Papers with pertinent info should be turned face down if anyone comes to your cubicle to talk, even a coworker. Ditto for papers coming off the printer containing covered info.

6. You need an annual HIPAA training program to remind everyone of a lot of the above (and likely other things I'm not covering).

7. Computers should be password protected when you walk away from your computer.

I guess the short version is: When in doubt, err on the side of making sure the information cannot be accessed by anyone who isn't using it to accomplish the purpose it is intended to serve. Also, you can't go flipping through covered info for funsies. Although you have authorized access, it's only authorized for a specific purpose.

> 6. You need an annual HIPAA training program to remind everyone of a lot of the above

When you say 'need' do you mean 'legally required to' ? I wonder if that could work to the advantage of the poster, in that if they left because they became aware that things are not being done correctly and they have never had any such training, the legal responsibility would reflect back on the employers who had not provided such training to an obviously inexperienced employee and the CEO in particular who is the person who should have known to do that.

I am not in the USA and I think the UK has slightly better employee protections and lines of legal responsibility, at least in some areas (such as Health & Safety) but who knows..

HIPAA requires organizations to provide training for all employees, new workforce members, and periodic refresher training. The definition of “periodic” is not defined and can be left open to interpretation. However, most organizations train all employees on HIPAA annually. This is considered to be a best practice.

https://www.medsafe.com/blog/compliance-topics/7-common-ques...

I was sort of in a similar situation when I was your age - in over my head at a complex project where the owner had never heard of version control (though in my case, I was too green to realize that it even existed). They had 30 copies of the same software, one in a folder on a shared hard drive for each customer. If there was a bug and it wasn't specific to a customer, you had to go fix it in 30 different places.

I promise you, if they don't want to provide version control they aren't going to provide you with other benefits and necessities that you deserve.

Related questions to benefits and necessities:

* Are you getting healthcare? * How is your pay compared to other Jr. software engineers in your area? * Are they paying you hourly? If so, are they actually paying you for hours worked, or are they finding ways to reduce that number of hours? * What if you demanded that they used version control, and brought your best arguments: what would they say?

Consider the answers to those questions, and if you don't like the answers, I strongly urge you to leave. There's a complacency that can come with "settling" for a place that is a "known constant." Don't settle here, when you deserve more.

Put what you've done on a resume, and give it to a headhunter. They will find you a better job - maybe not an ideal job, but a step up. And your career will truly begin.

Ghost this job immediately. It's a clusterfuck waiting to happen, and your bosses are going to leave you holding the bag when everything turns to shit.

You're a programmer, not a fall guy. You aren't getting paid enough for this.

Everything about this screams that you're being set up to fail, and given the circumstances "failure" might mean jail time.

There are plenty of jobs out there. Go get one, _today_, please!

Same boat, similar level of responsibility and I’ve been programming 20 odd years.

I accepted an offer yesterday, 35% pay bump, 5 extra holiday days, twice the bonus cap and all of that pales against knowing I’ll never have to touch that fucking codebase under unrealistic constraints again in a short time.

In stead I get to run a team, in a much bigger company with proper modern development practices.

When they rang to tell me it was mine if wanted it I was literally shaking, it felt like an elephant had stepped of my chest.

Until that point it really hadn’t occurred to me how unhappy the last two years at work have been, fighting the worst undocumented codebase I’ve seen two decades was a long slog, doing it alone for people who don’t understand the issues just made it worse.

Will be putting my notice in next week.

As someone 20 years older than you, get out and get out soon.

You are damaging your future career chances by stagnating in a job that won’t teach you how to do things better for your future.

My suggestion if you need one is to make a lateral movement and offload your problem to your CEO. Go hunt for another job.

> expressly forbidden from using ANY VC by the CEO [...]

I read this and thought this could be because the CEO only thinks of version control as "GitHub", and is worried about putting sensitive information in the "cloud".

Have you considered discussing this with your immediate superior? Not using any VC is a disaster waiting to happen...

Probably they should stop using internet too, just in case, bad people lurk around there, they say.

Giving a demanding task to a junior is usually how they improve and learn, but what you describe here is just a big pile of management incompetency. Escape.

If they require that you don't use version control but at the same time want it to be HIPAA compliant you need to walk right now if you have options, ASAP if you don't. You're being set up to be blamed if anything goes wrong.

Change management is part and parcel of anything in the medical software domain, and VC is an obvious part of that.

Three things:

1. I’m impressed that you’ve made it this far.

2. This situation has ‘get the fuck out’ written all over it. It’s time to dust off your resume and get out of there.

3. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble. You seem like a good writer and I bet you’d be a good developer to work with.

Best of luck bud. I wish I had a concrete way to help you.

No offense, but starting to code professionally with only 15 years sounds... a bit strange? I mean, I started coding with 10 (~20 years ago), and the easily available tooling was much worse back then than it was 5 years ago, but if I was your CEO I wouldn't put anyone with that little expertise and (I suppose?) no formal training on such a project alone (it's something else if you're working with a senior dev from whom you can learn). And when I was your age, I wouldn't have done anything that might put me in jail if done wrong.

Also, please pass this message from me to your CEO: He's an idiot for not letting you use version control.

Leave asap.

This all sounds so similar to my situation that it's scary... but I'm 40. Getting out is proving difficult because of age discrimination.

This smells like you are being set up to take the fall for something. Possibly something with really serious personal legal consequences. This is way, way worse than being underpaid or working for abusive jerks. No way it's worth it, I'd say quit now, even if your immediate alternative is working at Wal-Mart or something.

Seriously, leave now! While you can.

I know the feels but I'm a bit older. I am currently rewriting an old web forms app. Source code is outdated and not what is in production. Some methods are 1500+ lines of code. This project is dumpster fire but at least I can vent to everyone and they agree. Plus, I don't have to deal with HIPPA good luck brother!

>I'm very junior, been coding for ~5 years, 3 professionally

I agree with everyone else commenting here. This is a disaster waiting to happen. You are also limiting yourself by not working with people who will mentor you and show you the correct way to do things.

You're experienced. You can find a new job. DO SO IMMEDIATELY. FIND A NEW JOB, NOW.

So many ideas in my head that I really want to be working on, and I can’t seem to separate myself from the mental model of having a set position in a heirarchy, taking confused and/or hostile direction from seemingly arbitrary sources of authority. Some kind of fear, not even financial, more like the idea of getting lost, losing touch, never finding my way back, being abandoned and undesirable, dying alone. And beyond that, I can’t seem to rationalize why my job is so stressful; I’ve kept my head in war zones and extreme sports, but corporate politics feels like it’s killing me. I don’t know why, or whether I should give up hope that it will get better. The lay-off fantasy disappears when it becomes reality. Dreams give way to fears, preparing for interviews, obsessing over things which I have no control, thinking I’m the only one that feels this way.

I've always wondered the same thing. I've lived a reasonably stressful life, living through much worse things than the daily monotony of office life as a software engineer. However there are some days where it truly just crushes my spirits and leaves me completely spiritually depleted. There's truly something to be said regarding the elasticity of our mental health and how large a role expectations and norms play in our mental well-being. Not to mention there may be something particularly dehumanizing about the profession of software engineering.

I've worked what people would consider horrific jobs (significant that most of those I was one of the few English people) like greenhouse work in the summer, freezer plants, 12-14 hour shifts in a factory with weekends.

Those jobs will destroy your body, a toxic office environment will destroy for want of a better word you soul.

Both are awful but the are quantitatively different.

You are not alone. I feel similarly

How true. Outside of work, I regularly find myself in low risk / high consequence situations and those are the times I feel most alive. No matter how stressful they may be.

But I can’t take the stress of political bickering. It’s crushing.

One problem is that in order to progress one’s career, a ‘management track’ becomes more and more apparent. And to nobody’s surprise, it contains a fair share of games and posturing. And to bulldoze it will get you nowhere. At most, you’ll be used as the bull dog to level the field for others.

There’s just no winning.

THIS. I've been feeling this for the last 4 odd years in tech consulting. "Dreams giving way to fears". Spot on. With me also the "comfort zone" factor. Getting use to how things go and settling in. You're not alone.

There's no need to rationalize the stress, it just is stressful. "Ability to be stressed" doesn't really apply when it's an entirely different thing, with different things making you stressed.

I don't think I found corporate politics funny until I had a pretty good nest-egg of savings built up (nothing crazy, about a year of living expenses).

Your other worries, I would talk to a therapist or at least someone better than me about. A lot of ourselves flows from our jobs, and it sounds likes it's got you.

I think corp life is something that is extremely romanticized by public success stories and anecdotes from (occasional/incidental) winners. Everything suggests that you should be in check and control of the situation, but you are not. You are in the rat race and just reacting with your best effort. The suggestive stories contain a lot of lies or leave out the negativity. There is always the 1% that is crazy good, but we should compare to the 99% to stay sane. But they are unheard of.

Kill your idols and realize that we are the plebs that actually get shit done.

Personally I take too little risk myself. I am 40 now but I cannot imagine anymore how I can myself in a joyful working position. I have no fun in hunting new jobs, but getting out of the rat race and getting back into social life would bring way more opporturnities. Also I believe that I am not holding down my 1% potential, but the environment you are acting in.

When I started to listen to the "manager tools" podcast, I started to get a much better understanding of corporate politics and it became easier to navigate that space. Jocko Willings podcast also has some insights how to deal with complex political situations.

For your mental health I can recommend some of the modern Stoic approaches to life. Most prominent candidate here is "A guide to the good life". Good luck.

https://sivers.org/book/StoicJoy

I second this comment.

"A guide to a good life" was the first book on stoicism I read, that link was posted before and led me to it, and it really helped me a lot. I would also recommend the "Tao of Seneca" 3 PDFs that Tim Ferriss put together, the audiobooks are great because you can easily listen to a letter a day which helps me to build the habit of following stoicism.

Another book that really helped me was "The Inner Game of Tennis" https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...

I love writing software, but I think there's something about the psychology of it that is really unnatural.

Not long ago we were just hominids hanging out in small bands, and our psychological sense of worth and reward were tied to our capacity to find and kill something big enough for everyone to eat. Or perhaps to turn that mammoth into shoes and clothes to survive the winter.

I wonder if this system fires the same way when we're coding. The contribution we offer is valued by the market and desperately needed by society but it's very abstract compared to bringing home a fresh mammoth.

We may be solving hard problems for great compensation, but as far as our subconsciousness is concerned we're just sitting at our desks all day long making symbols dance on screen. Its the polar opposite of the lives humans used to lead.

Not that I'd want to turn the clock back. I'm very fond of coding, modern medicine and hot showers. Though I do wonder if mammoth meat was any good...

I think lumping all coding together isn't fair either. When I'm designing and implementing new features, I definitely get a sense of satisfaction. It feels good to solve a difficult problem and the sense of accomplishment is definitely there (at least for me). When I'm dealing with a bug ticket or doing a lot of plumbing with a story, I definitely get far more burned out and don't have the same sense of satisfaction.

There's a ton of diversity in humans. I do honestly believe that software can be just as fulfilling to some people as hunting, gathering, farming, etc that are more "natural" to humans. With that said, I definitely don't think it's for everyone. I can certainly see how people could get very little satisfaction out of programming as a career. To each their own, but I personally wouldn't trade my career in software for anything outside of a "dream" job like being a writer or standup comedian. I'm sure there's people that wouldn't trade their job programming for anything.

Not too long ago we also learned how to make plants, animals, and other humans work on our behalf (voluntary or not, the whip or the carrot).

For many of us, our lives have been shifted to the work of squirrels.

We climb tall trees and knock down nuts for other men to capitalize on.

---

Do not be the squirrel.

---

Find or form your true tribe and help them understand your contributions and together you will fuel each other to thrive.

---

As for hot showers, and clean clothes, you can still work with nature and have both.

and deodorant

I wrote about my experience at my current job a few weeks ago [1]. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for all your support. I recently got an offer for the field I've always wanted to be in, with around a $25k pay raise too. It's such a huge weight off my shoulders to finally see a way out and I feel so much better, basic things like my appetite are back and I don't dread waking up. I already have so much more free time now that I'm not searching for jobs 2 hours a day after work. I gave my two-weeks notice this week and I'll have around 3 weeks off to decompress before starting - I'm planning on visiting Seattle, anyone have any recs?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951953

Hey man, I'm so glad to hear the good update. I was really worried about that other post and just wanted to tell you that it's not normal to be bullied at work. I've been on 4 very different companies, and never went to something even close to what you did.

Congrats on the new job! Be sure to enjoy your vacation, you deserve it!

Congrats! I moved to Seattle recently. The Space Needle and the Museum of Pop Culture (mostly if you're into rock and roll) are good tourist attractions. Personally I love the views the most (we have the Cascades and a few mountains/"active" volcanoes here, plus the lake/the ocean close by). A few nice parks in the area to check out too.

Glad it worked. Just trust yourself, stay positive and keep doing good work !

I remember reading the thread. Awesome to hear that you've made some changes for the better. Congratulations from this internet stranger!

Don't shy from letting us know how the new job is. If you feel like talking, please do. I am probably not in the same country, but sometimes it helps to just chit chat with someone in the same field. E-mail is in my profile.

Seattlelite here. So glad to hear you found a better job! Those hell gigs can really crush you.

Just to warn you it can get dark and rainy this time of year but there's plenty to do.

Recommended:

- The Underground Tour. A fascinating historical tour of the seedy gold-rush roots of the city.

- Pike Place Market. It's an iconic Seattle spot that has great food, a great view and great people watching.

- The Ballard Locks. This is the mechanism that keeps Lake Washington from draining into the ocean while allowing fish to pass through. Go when the weathers good.

- Mt. Rainier, the Cascades, great for hiking and skiing if the weather permits

- Breweries. We have tons of great craft beer, and our coffee is legendary too

Not recommended:

- The gum wall. This landmark is the grossest excuse for a tourist trap ever conceived.

- Driving in, out, or around the city on weekdays between 7 and 11AM or 3 and 7 PM. You're going to have a very bad timmeee...

Have fun!

There are other good replies for where to visit in Seattle, but one more: I went recently, and we went to this Starbucks Reserve. Sounds really dumb, but it was really cool and unique relative to any coffee shop I'd been in. Nothing to go out of the way for, but if you end up nearby (there's stuff nearby), drop in.

Otherwise for Pike Place, we did a food tour. It was overpriced, but looking back we both felt it was worth it. Kind of get to skip lines and try a bunch of really great food. Touristy of course, but so what.

This fucking year...

So, for starters I'm already really depressed and low energy due to a death of a really close family member. I have particularly low tolerance and high fatigue due to this.

So, we shipped a product, successfully on time in a company that has had many years of difficulty of shipping products in our target market. Which was the goal. So the new management decides to disband the team, most of the team is already laid off.

I get moved into an adjacent org, onto a ~15 person team building a complicated piece of technology that I have great expertise in, and have built 3 versions at other companies to commercial viability, sounds great.

Well, the team has nobody else anymore who has the experience building the tech we are trying to build. Has existed for nearly one year, and (almost?) the entire team has changed through attrition already (maybe more than once). We have the sunk cost of almost 150k lines of code, that is immensely over-architected, and still doesn't provide any customer visible features for what's expected of this type of software. The team is stuck thinking way to big, and the few people who will focus are kept chasing around the rest of the team like cats. At this rate we will build something that can solve any conceivable problem in about 20 years.

There are already a lot of hands in "architecture". Politics, and honestly my previously mentioned fatigue are preventing me from fighting the engineering fight I need to try to get a handle on it myself.

I honestly like the new manager enough. He listens to my complaints and recognizes my experience, but solving the problems are more difficult, and honestly I think we really should just scrap everything. This is already a rewrite and we have an old version of the code base that would be a better start, or I have enough experience to properly build a new one. But the sunk cost fallacy is ohh so stronger when you have this much of a sunk cost, and a lot of expectations from execs and external teams.

Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine.

Anyways, thanks for an opportunity to rant.

What managers don't understand is that there are developers with negative work output.

> Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine.

Reminds me one of my past colleagues who worked at some_proprietary_compiler with so many tests for corner cases that it took 6 hours for each build on a top enthusiast grade PC each person in a project was provided. Also the presence in office for 8 hours a day was mandatory, imagine the whole team spread around the place for the most part of the day doing nothing with an excuse "I'm compiling!"

I've had to work in some gnarly monorepos where pulling the dependencies down itself took an hour and a hundred gigs. Local builds were not fast. I usually ended up hacking the build system to build individual projects manually and copying things where they needed to go. sigh much much happier now that I'm living in a smaller repo.

I didn't know this format was a thing and am so very excited to discover it. I hope you folks enjoy reading horror stories.

I got a job as a Software Engineer in my current company 4.5 years ago; friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. The company had an apparently disastrous piece of software that was their main LOB. They had gone through pretty much every local consulting agency - at least once, on a few occasions they had gone back to one they had already used. It was about 10 years old and consisted of a mix of VB6(!), VB.NET, C#, F# and somehow now Node. At the time tackling a disaster like that sounded fun and I was miserable at a consulting gig. It was a 20k bump but no benefits (health or retirement), but as a single guy 6 months away from paying off his college debt I wasn't worried. I figured I'd dump a few years in then move on.

Three months in, I'm absolutely baffled at what the company does. I was told they handle insurance claims, basically acting as a TPA. (Important detail: I had no idea what a TPA was at the time. It's gonna matter later.) The software does handle claims, but they also have 10 other projects that cover a bunch of random business use cases. Apparently the CEO is a self-described "idea man" and would task the previous developer to 'prototype' his ideas from time to time. The problem was his idea of a prototype was a fully-functional application that he could sell to investors and clients - until he got bored with it and shelved it. This ended up with the company having around a half-dozen actively used products in a half-dozen markets. In addition to the TPA side of the company that was about 50% of revenue, the other half was split over 1) check cashing software, 2) HR/onboarding software, 3) some sort if discount medical visit scam, 4) some sort of MLM scam that the CEO's brother-in-law co-opted him into, 5) a random cannabis and self-help website run by some yoga guru type dude the CEO knew and finally 6) a piece of software that let helped churches organize events and donations that took about 50% of any transaction that was run through it as "fees" for our company. Now I could talk about any of those monstrosities at length, but this is already shaping up to be a wall so I'll skip that.

1.5 years later. I've wrangled the mix of VB6, VB.NET, C#, F#, PHP4, PHP5, PERL, ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL still using MyISAM, god knows what other horrors I've forgotten. All of this without version control - just folders copy-pasted over and over on a 10 year old server in the closet that has no redundancy, two failing disks and one PSU out of order. The last guy had started some positive changes: moving everything over to Azure, porting everything related to the claims business into a more modern MVC app. I finished his work. I squashed about a dozen Wordpress instances into a single, multi-tenant host. Squashed out all the other languages and databases into just C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server. Ended up reducing the Azure spend by about $2000 a month. Felt good! CEO loved me. COO (my direct manager) loved me. CFO was pleased. All throughout this, I had convinced the COO to cut out all the shady, near-illegal, morally bankrupt garbage we did. No more check cashing (awful, awful industry), no more MLM of any sort, no more stealing money from churches (we kept that going, just changed our fees to a nominal amount). All the work I had done lead to a decrease in onboarding time from 2-3 days to 10 minutes and the TPA side of things was now about 85% of our revenue. Happy ending, right? Just you wait...

Somehow, I had not encountered a single brilliant "CEO Idea" for 1.5 years. He decided to fix that on one delightful summer day in the mid-west by announcing that we would be acquiring a healthcare startup that a buddy of his ran. Now this pissed most of the folks at the company off and is probably a good point to talk a little about the structure of said company. As mentioned, we had a CEO, COO, CFO, and "Chief of Sales" (never heard of a COS myself, but who knows). We didn't call ourselves a startup and had none of that Bay-style of startupness; we were just a small business with some investors. After the C's we had myself as the lone engineer, two sales guys, three admin-types and six or so customer service folks. None of which had healthcare or retirement benefits, mind you. So there was a bit of rancor when Mr. CEO started talking about dropping $5 mil to acquire this fancy new healthcare company. Somehow me, Mr. Software Engineer, ended up being the guy that needed to take this head-on (well, to be fair, the COO and I had great relationship). That's a tale in and of itself, but at the end of the day we ended up getting a 6% matching 401k and $500/$1000 single/family monthly reimbursement for health insurance, stopped 3-4 people from quitting, got me a whole lot of respect in the office and a fancy new title of "Chief Technical Officer" (not related to the benefits; CEO was just happy at how efficient I'd made everything) and 20k base salary increase. CTO at a company with 1 engineer. Neat. Happy ending, right? Just you wait...

We also got a brand new healthcare startup for about $2.5 mil in cash, $2.5 mil in stock. We got sheisted and it was our fault. While I'm no MBA, I know what due diligence is, and I intended to do it from the technical angle while our CFO handled it from the financial. Before we bought the company I made every effort to actually review what their software looked like, but was single-handled blocked by my own CEO. "We're never going to do that, Throwaway," he would say, "Other CEO is my friend! I've known him for twenty years and if he says his software is solid, it is! Just trust me." Diligence took about three months and despite dozens of arguments, I was denied any access to anything technical. All I ever got was: "Our software is in Node using MongoDB and is hosted in the cloud." Great. I was never even allowed to meet or speak to their development team (apparently 5 engineers, all of which were phenomenal). The only human being I ever spoke to at this company was the CEO. So I tried other angles, the big one being: what the hell does your software actually do? Their big claim to fame was 'modernizing concierge medicine using AI'. If you're like me and have no idea what concierge medicine is, it basically means your doctor comes to you because you're a rich yuppie and can't be bothered to leave your beach house to visit him. How do you enhance that using AI? I had no idea. Still don't. And so we bought the company with zero diligence done, though the CFO did say their books looked good, whatever that means. So the nightmare begins...

2 years in. We start onboarding people, I start onboarding the project itself. I am finally given direct developer contacts, which are a bunch of emails that don't end in the same domain as the company we just bought? Pardon? They're all @BobsRandomConsultingCompany. I reach out, explaining who I am, that we just acquired Project X and I need access to the code, environment, engineers - the whole nine. I get a very lovely, professional response from a Project Manager over at Bob's who lets me know that they will be sending over a contract so we can get started right away, along with their rate sheet! I'm baffled! I thought Project X had 5 internal engineers, Mr. Other CEO?! At this point I promptly aged 6 months in 6 minutes and I felt the first twinge of an ulcer growing.

Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO and explain that we have been duped. COO is angry; CFO is not concerned until I show him the contract that Bob's sent over. The contract ye olde healthcare startup signed apparently agrees to pay for 5 fixed resources (at $200/hr!) for 40 hours of work each, per week, for a period of a year. Now I'm not unfamiliar with being outsourced as a resource, from a consulting company, for a fixed amount per week - but never have I seen a contract that binds you for a year, especially for 5 resources, with not one deliverable mentioned anywhere. Maybe my five years of consulting wasn't enough, but that blew my mind. Additionally, they sent us the server bills (AWS) and informed us we paid directly for utilization in addition to a "HIPAA Monitoring and Compliance Fee" of $3000/mo. As I had not a year ago lowered our own cloud costs to about $800/mo, this number struck me as staggering. $3000/mo base + around $2000 for the servers currently running. Also, "what the fuck is HIPAA" I said aloud, the only answer being the two confused shaking heads of my COO and CFO. Uh-oh...

Segway. The actual Project Manager of the acquired company (not the one from Bob's Hair Care IT Consulting Nail and Tire Salon) has moved in and I've finally got a victim to victimize with my many, many questions. She already looks harrowed before I begin my interrogation. Are people actually using this? How much do we make per visit? Visits per month? I forget the answers to these, but the end takeaway was: we bring in about $10k/mo net right now. I'm no accountant, but I'm fairly confident you can't pay the expenses of a company + a half dozen employees on $10k/mo. PM agrees - they've burnt through about $7 mil of investor cash over their 6 years of existence. No path to profitability is in sight.

Around the same time I've got the Project X repository (whew, at least they used source control) moved over into my world and have started reviewing the actual source. I'm no Node wizard, but I'm immediately confused as I see both Express and Hapi (two server frameworks, generally considered competition to one another) used in the same project. That's...odd. Investigation intensifies: it's a simple CRUD project that takes a form submission from a registered user, saves it in Mongo and slaps it into a queue for delivery to the given doctors email. That's really it. There's some back-end admin that allows the doctor to write some notes about their visit. Like a little baby EMR (though I had no idea what an EMR was at that time). Amusingly, it's got an Angular front-end (1.x, because why not spread salt on my wounds) that hits an Express endpoint that then proxies the call to a Hapi endpoint. For no reason. I can't find a single comment or piece of documentation explaining why. Icing on the cake? Their is in fact authentication used from Angular -> Express. The Hapi endpoints, however, are wide open - but surely not from the ELB, right? Certainly it's just an idiotic architectural decision that isn't actually exposed to the public? Nope. There's a rule in the ELB. Sweet Baby Ray's someone help me, there is a publicly accessible, completely open API that anyone could discover that gives away patient and doctor information. Huh, I wonder if the US has any sort of regulation on that kind of stuff? I should really take some time to investigate that HIPAA thing I found earlier, maybe that's got something to do with it...

Employment duration: unknown. My ulcer has had a baby. I think I may have had a psychotic break. I Googled HIPAA. I simultaneously shat and pissed myself, which I didn't think was possible during a panic attack, but the human body is an amazing thing. I took Thursday and Monday off from work to read through a PDF I found of this most enlightening "HIPAA" legislation. It says "SAMPLE" or "UNOFFICIAL" or some such on it, so I'm not sure how accurate it is, but whatever - I need to educate myself somehow. I spent a thrilling four days reading, re-reading, and summarizing what I understood of the several hundred page document - printed in three-column layout because why not make it more abysmal. It doesn't seem completely dire; it looks like there is some stuff we need to do if we are storing this mythical PHI, but it isn't terribly complex (at least technically!). I had already been planning encrypting everything we own, and all of our sites are already behind SSL, so this should be cake. Phew! Calm down, baby-ulcer, don't think about grand-kids quite yet. Also I found a few great summaries of the Act which I could share with my COO - but really, we need to sit down with Legal and have them explain why this was never brought up. And let's be honest, I'm not a lawyer - the professionals can handle this!

Legal has never heard of HIPAA. That's not good. I convince COO to ask Legal to reach out to a different Legal who specializes in healthcare. We sit down with them a few days later and our new Legal turns white after I lay out everything we do, our concerns, and the simple question: "Do we need to do any of this stuff I read about?" Turns out, having your CTO read a complex, many-hundred-pages legal document is not the best way to get accurate legal advice. We're fucked. We're a TPA filing insurance claims - we absolutely, 100% must comply with this Act. Oh and guess what? The Act has a delightful addition called an Omnibus, passed back in '13, that makes any possible defense we might have had to not comply...completely null and void. We're in what is called 'Breach'! We have fucked up. Royally and legally. Icing? We're all personally liable, at least to the letter of the law. But don't worry - we didn't know we fucked up, so the fees are an order of magnitude less. They'll only bankrupt the company 5 times over, instead of 10! Hurray!

I have no idea the right way of posting long posts. Here's the rest: https://pastebin.com/k0tYZYgY

I've merged it into your comment above so the whole thing is one piece.

there's a lot of stuff in the pastebin that hasn't been added to the comment

Ah ok. Thanks! I'll uncollapse the GP.

You're gonna go to jail.

You should be a writer. Or a movie producer.

"We're never going to do that, Throwaway,"

-- genius.

please write fiction please. you are like a thriller writer, it was better than watching "the dark night"

For someone who cares so deeply about security you just gave away a lot of sensitive info and uploaded it to a popular forum.

This is one of the best things I have ever read on hn.

Well that was a fun read. I have some background working on an EHR and yes, HIPAA is taken very seriously. Hope the "divine intervention" you mentioned doesn't come from having shared this story.

That's an amazing story. My father has his own experiences with a CEO who has a habit of screwing up, but it's not nearly as entertaining as yours.

CTO at 29 with that salary is the midwest? That's rather amazing. You should be proud of what you accomplished. Do you still have that ucler, or was that just a joke?

So sad I can only give you one upvote per comment.

That was one hell of a ride.

Have you tried to defuse your dangerous CEO by giving him a harmless hobby?

Launching anvils into orbit with black powder?

Do-it-yourself bacterial genetic engineering?

I was thinking less dangerous to the company, so these hobbies would be okay for this goal.

Cave Diving or cleaning out the tape safe

Why are you still there? You could easily leverage your accomplishments to get another job. With your experience you could probably be an overpriced consultant.

Logically you need to figure out in what way CEO benefited from this it sounds like he should be in jail.

Will echo other comments and say that I enjoyed this post.

IANAL, however, in all seriousness...

I think you should talk to a personal lawyer about your situation ASAP, especially now that you posted this publicly. HIPAA is not to be trifled with and now you've shared that you have knowledge of a breach. You've also provided enough detail in this post that (if found and traced back to you) could be used as proof that you were knowingly complicit in breaking the law.

You want to retire early? I would not be messing around in a company that skirts the law. All this work could be for naught. You are high enough up that you have a decent chance of getting caught in the inevitable downfall of this company.

Seconded, hard. You can't spend that $165K a year when you're staring down the barrel of willful HIPAA violations. Leave the company as soon as humanly possible. Leave and hope that the blowback from the inevitable disclosure--which won't be from your company--is happy enough eating the executive team that remains. And get a personal lawyer who understands HIPAA and explore avenues for whistleblowing; turning over on that company might be important for personal survival.

The story exceeds my suspension of disbelief. What particular jumps out at me is the backwards details - nobody off the street knows what "TPA" means, sure, but everybody who's ever gone to see a doctor knows what HIPAA is, even if they think it's called "HIPPA".

Maybe it's bull. But it has the ring of truth to it, to me, and I've worked for a few healthcare startups. A lot of developers think of themselves as "just developers" and a lot of people are brutally incurious about the world until it hits them in the face.

> ... are brutally incurious ...

This is an amazing phrase.

Thank you. I try sometimes. ;)

Yeah, but the world generally hits you in the face by the time you turn 18 or maybe even before.

About some things, sure.

Not necessarily medical privacy.

I think you are rather over-estimating the degree to which people read those standard forms: it’s akin to expecting everyone to read the full text on the “Are you sure?” dialog before clicking OK.

I don't know if I read the forms, but so what? Many if not most people don't do their own taxes, but they know generally what the IRS is and what it does.

I ONLY know of HIPAA from my work. Maybe it was on a medical form.. I don't visit the doctor much, can't recall.

I worked at a networking hardware startup outside Silicon Valley many years ago (during the first dotcom boom). It was run by two people, father and son, with no technical experience -- one previously ran a garbage collection company, as I recall, and the other was a sales guy -- and shortly after I started, I learned that the antics of them and their cronies had caused the entire engineering staff to have over 100% turnover in less than a year. Not only was no one left at the company who had originally had anything to do with the product's design, there was no one left at the company who had worked with anyone who originally had anything to do with the product's design. During the barely two years I worked there, the company had a system architect who talked about "making the code more flamboyant" and eventually fled the country for legal reasons, had a cold war between that architect and another executive in which the former was (badly) installing spyware on the latter's laptop, had the CEO earnestly tell us about how a former engineer had put, quote, "death code" into the system that the CEO had found and removed himself (this is, again, a man with no programming experience and the former engineer worked on the system-level C code; if he'd put "death code" in there, the CEO would not have been able to find it); on and on and on.

tl;dr: small tech companies run by completely non-technical people may not always be shit shows, but when they are shit shows, the shit can be pretty unbelievable.

>You can't spend that $165K a year when you're staring down the barrel of willful HIPAA violations.

It's much harder for the government to take back your $165k after you've spent it all. Sure they'll garnish your wages but they'll do that either way so you may as well live a little in the meantime.

Thirded.

Work at a hospital and in the orientation the first speech is given by the head of compliance who goes over what executives have gone to jail, why, and all the underlings that have been fired for seemingly innocuous HIPAA or PHI violations (looking at a friend's chart, posting on social media, etc).

The money sounds nice but OP could probably make the same at somewhere more reputable with less a chance of feds walking in and taking everything.

HIPAA is absolutely to be trifled with. Look up who is actually fined and face actual consequences from HIPAA violations. It is 99.99% big universities, hospitals, and insurance companies. Everyone else gets (at most) a slap on the wrist and has to promise not to do it again. Once in a while they’ll fine a small family practitioner $25k for not shredding papers properly but it’s a total joke.

HIPAA Compliance Services are something for consultants to sell so business owners can sleep at night. It’s like Lisa’s magic rock on the Simpsons that keeps tigers away. Does it work? I don’t see any tigers around here do you?

Seconded. I’m a physician that got so pissed off at how a practice was repeatedly and willfully violating HIPAA that I risked my standing in the local physician community and reported them.

I was basically told by the case manager, or whatever they call themselves, to fuck off.

When I worked at an MSP, we supported a small dermatologist's office. Everyone had personal computer accounts but everyone had a password of '1234' so...yeah.

Preach it. Reported my own psychiatrist for having a bunch of highly sensitive "followup" forms asking about medication, emotional state, etc. (and including patient name, address, other PII) on the practice website that transfered data over plaintext to a shared hosting server running PHP5 in debug mode that had been hacked by an automated script and was redirecting people on first visit from a fresh IP to a "Congrats! You're our 1000000th visitor" spam site. Haven't heard from OCR in over a year.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Agreed. The organization would likely get fined for a breach, not the engineer. I work a senior IT role in Healthcare and I've seen what breaches look like. I've never even heard of someone going to prison, let alone for what this story tells.

Yeah to go to prison you have to really screw up, in a way that is malicious and willful. Though the CEO driving over to his MLM buddy with a thumbdrive of PHI might do it.

Do you know what the actual risk is here?

Personally, I wouldn't stake my future on hoping the government doesn't notice what my hypothetical law-breaking company is doing. Or that my law-breaking unethical CEO won't lie and try to throw me under the bus if/when the company eventually gets caught.

I'll restate that I recommend OP talk to a knowledgeable lawyer to get an informed assessment of what kind of risks he/she is undertaking.

I understand the difference between odds and risk. The risk is high (assuming you use the harshest possible penalties) but the odds are infinitesimally long.

Google and find who has actually faced penalties from HIPAA violations and what those penalties were. How many serious fines/prison sentences have been handed down? Who was at fault? Were they random no-name startups?

I think you should also seriously consider blowing the whistle on this. Turn government's witness.

Enjoyable read, thanks for writing it all down : ) Keep on fighting the good fight.

This was fantastic.

> With stingy living I'm set to retire at 40 and that blows my mind

Got some Mr Money mustache vibes from your post, now I know why. Congratulations.

That was hilarious, the 2nd half was better than the first! You’ve had an amazing lesson in running businesses, you’d now make an excellent CEO, much better than the one you work for, having done some of his job. All I can say is they didn’t pay you enough money for the amount of stress you went through!

Did you get another raise?

I lost it at "What the fuck is HIPPA".

Who the fuck buys a healthcare company and doesn't know what the fuck HIPPA is?

Great read.

That's (purportedly) a quote from the person posting this on HN, not the purchaser of the company.

Ok, but I've never come close to working on healthcare software but I've run up against HIPAA numerous times because partners, customers, suppliers, customers of customers, are in that space. So the idea that your company can buy a full-on healthcare software business but you and your legal people have never heard of it is pretty hard to swallow.

I agree, but my point was that it wasn't the buffoonish CEO that the quote was attributed to, but the HN poster who's bragging about his talent, wealth, and illegal activities.

but he sat down with everyone involved right, and nobody knew what it was. That does sound a little fishy, under the circumstances it's a little like sitting down with a pair of nice old ladies who've been poisoning people and hearing "Arsenic? What's that?!?"

> Who the fuck buys a healthcare company and doesn't know what the fuck HIPPA is?

That could have been you, apparently.

https://searchhealthit.techtarget.com/definition/HIPAA

Thankfully I'm not out here buying businesses of any kind. And knowing what a thing is and knowing how to spell it correctly are two different things.

That may be so. But when it comes to consuming information on a subject I prefer my sources to be those who know what the acronym stands for which makes mis-spelling it a near impossibility.

Knowing what something is in the abstract versus knowing it intimately is a huge difference and if you don't know how to spell the acronym you've pretty much outed yourself as someone who is not familiar with the details at a level that would allow for a constructive discussion.

It would be like talking to someone about cars who spells BMW as WBM and Porsche as Porche and then to have a discussion about the relative merits of each. Of course it is just form, not function but I would highly discount the opinion of someone who would not be able to spell the names over someone who can, chances are the former hasn't driven one and might not even be of legal driving age.

This was a great read, thanks for sharing!

So, uh, you know that there are other employers who pay well for developers just now, right?

Thanks for sharing. Between your salary, stock options, 8% matching 401k, and being in the Midwest you can probably accomplish FIRE even faster than by age 40.

whats great about this is that you don't realize that you've written a new classic.

also, get out while you can!

> also, get out while you can!

May I humbly suggest that this is not strong enough. You're staring down the barrel of HIPPA; get a lawyer and hand in your resignation NOW.

(Not a lawyer, not legal advice)

That was an awesome story. Thanks for posting. HIPPA is a huge deal.

*HIPOO

I've worked for Fortune 500 and even Fortune 50 companies that acquired tech companies with no due diligence (usually in a panic) and I've had to clean up the mess. And the acquired folks usually leave in exactly a year and one day, after vesting.

And, even in 2019, I've gotten calls to clean up messes from people that have hired a software developer (for a company whose business isn't software) who doesn't use source control. Amazing!

Fortune 500/50 companies should be able to absorb the cost, no? If you have a lot of money, you can afford to make mistakes as long as the expected value (of many acquisitions) is positive in the long run.

I’m not sure what the point of this comment was, so apologies if I’ve assumed incorrectly.

Maybe that's their logic, but a little due diligence can go a long way.

For example, one of the founders of one of the companies lied about his Stanford MBA Degree in his CV. He didn't have one. The company did not fire him. I lost a great deal of respect for the company after this.

One of my first jobs as a teenager was not software related, but basically just accounting support. A mid-size retail chain had acquired another retailer and needed help going over the books. This was in the 90s and I was basically typing stuff in an Excel sheet and getting a sum. Last day on the job I gave them the bottom-line number of something (revenue?) and my manager looked at it and said it seemed way off. Whatever, I'm done for the summer. Few weeks later there's a story that the company they acquired had lied about their value by a large margin and it was enough to put them out of business forever. Close all their stores and liquidated. I know it was not my fault at all, but I like to think it was my Excel sheet that destroyed them.

HIPAA is lovely in that it is worded strongly enough to get your coworkers to stop writing their password on a Post-It stuck to their computer. Fabulous read!

Thank you for sharing this. This is, by far, one of the best comments I have read in a while. I am wondering though. What made you stick around ? Money doesn't necessarily seem to be the motivation here to me.

Lovely evening reading, I consumed each word, thank you for the writeup! Third act redemption for you, I believe it.

Just FYI, segway != segue . Unless it was a joke, in which case joke's on me.

Crazy story, thanks for taking the time to share -- makes me feel better about my job!

I nominate this for "best of Hacker News" comments

This is actually pretty sad. HIPAA is not something a company should take lightly. It would be like a private company having no audit logs or encryption while running a government contract, but 50x worse.

Working in healthcare myself, I urge anyone whose eved contemplated or has the opportunity to work in a healthcare related company to take a few days to really digest and understand not only HIPAA, but it's purpose and it's consequences. You can go to jail just for being part of a company that does not properly take care of patient data.

Amazing. I know I shouldn't be laughing at the expense of your misery but this sounds like something straight from The Office.

How are people like this able to become CEOs and attract investors? Does it just take a shit load of lying and knowing a lot of people?

Thanks for your briljant story, enjoyed every sentence (it's very well written).

This has to be one of the most impressive war stories I've ever read. Thanks for writing this all out!

But as others have said, you need to get yourself out of that company ASAP and hire your own lawyer to figure out what your own potential liabilities are. I'm not in the US and am not familiar with the details of HIPAA, but just based on what you've written I really don't think it's a good idea to stick around a place like that particularly given you know exactly what's going on. Even if you don't end up with any liabilities/troubles from what has transpired to date, it seems inevitable that something will happen eventually that will end spectacularly badly for everyone involved.

I understand the money is good, but I would seriously recommend finding another employer with a bit more knowledge of and respect for the law.

This post should make many people on HN feel confident that they can run a company that does millions in revenue. As long as you aren’t doing favors for family and buddy’s, you too can run a small tech business and make millions.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

Let me just add that people like you are BEST OF THE BEST to hire.

That's what I want to hear during an interview, not the "bubble sort on a whiteboard".

If a person has been through THIS - gosh, I want you to work for our company.

PS. no, not because my company is a mess too, don't go that way :)

PPS. I do see this is a thoraway profile, but if by any chance you're checking back to read the replies - let us know if you're available for hire (remote). Contact us (see profile). Long shot, I know...

> Now I could talk about any of those monstrosities at length, but this is already shaping up to be a wall so I'll skip that.

lol

Thank you for sharing this.

I love how the story goes through everything that should not be done, from blind investment to breaches and personal information leak (in a thumb-drive!!).

And this is just one company.

I shouldn’t find anything this horrific this entertaining. But, I’d get cable for this show!! :)

What a story. The part that surprised me the most was "Legal has never heard of HIPAA." HIPAA is major legislation (almost as influential as a Constitutional amendment) and has tentacles in every field, so how is it possible that an attorney (even an incompetent one) has never heard of it? I would never trust legal advice from an attorney who hasn't heard of HIPAA.

Now THIS is the Great American Novel.

This, right here is the problem with our industry. Someone has a brain wave and asks a [set of] hardworking engineer(s) to 'make it happen yesterday'. Engineers toil away and bring out something useful by making all possible hacks since yesterday has already passed. Early engineers get frustrated and leave only to be replaced with some more hardworking engineers who now have to clean up the mess, keep the lights on _and_ implement the next brain wave that the idea man came up with. The problem is, a lot of 'thinkers' are becoming entrepreneurs - most of them have no idea about the complexities or intricacies of software or those who wrote code so long ago that they largely worked on monoliths and have absolutely no idea how complex systems work together 'in the cloud'. We need more 'builders' (engineers) as entrepreneurs. It'll invariably lead to people working on more sensible, real world problems that need real solutions - since, hopefully, builders would know what it takes to build out something and won't waste resources on frivolous and ill thought out ideas.

hi, i've pasted your story here. the account password is passwort1 if you're uncomfortable with that and want to delete it https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-name...

(Throwaway, for obvious reasons.) I work for a boring start up remotely half of the week (2 days in the office) and I run my own SaaS business on the side (making a few $k MRR after 5+ years). I do sometimes day dream about being fired, selling my company and quitting tech entirely for a damn good while. I have well exceeded my threshold. Perhaps I will continue to watch Twitch instead of work, sabotaging my job, or perhaps I will get my shit together. I am not really sure.

What really gets my goat...

Working for a boss who's a dangerous cocktail of arrogance, incompetence, and is self-conscious of it. He's the kind of person who keeps a copy of Steve Jobs' biography and The Design of Everyday Things around his desk. If you ask him a yes-or-no question he responds with, well that depends. And if you ask him to clarify be prepared for a journey through tales of the south, hippie communes, anthropology, and how it all relates to the tragedy of choice and material design. He has an opinion about absolutely everything. He always tries to get the last word. He gives speeches about failure way too much. And if you get on his bad side be prepared for a word-tsunami. You will know it's coming because you can hear him typing furiously from across the office -- the little typing notification flickering on and off in Slack for ten minutes while he composes the final word.

He's the kind of person who will swear he's your friend and has your back. And in one on ones he'll make you feel like people are saying things about you. He'll put you down in front of your direct reports. Will insist on winning an argument even if he's obscenely, incontrovertibly wrong because he's too embarrassed to admit he doesn't know. He once told me that I wasn't using abductive reasoning and if I was smart I would be able to figure it out. I had asked him if we could cut one or two columns from a table in a view so that we could ship on time with a nice user experience after patiently explaining why. And he collected negative feedback from people about my work, without telling me, in order to throw me under a bus at an important meeting with advisors. Then he rolls with my ideas as if they were his own.

That sounds exactly like my ex-boss. Never stopped going on about how he once worked for Qinetiq and they had him implement an FFT on an FPGA... last I checked that was a fairly common student assignment in FPGA courses.

Sounds like your boss is in fact my insufferable neighbor who is a CTO and is word-for-word the guy in your description. I've stopped inviting him back and I think he finally got the memo. Tell him I didn't say hi.

My boss (effectively) prohibits us from displaying negative emotions towards each other, as he pulls us aside to chide us when we do. I think the intention is to encourage more constructive conversations, but his bar for what he considers inappropriate is so low that it ends up stifling disagreements. We have a tough time making decisions because of it. It's also difficult to tell him about other problems I have, because if I show any annoyance, he'll criticize my tone. He, of course, gets visibly angry with people on our team on a weekly basis. It's driving me nuts to have to walk on eggshells all day.

Wow, fuck that guy.

Yeah that’s seriously unhealthy. I’ve been in that situation. Get out, you’ll immediately be happier for it.

Wow. It is already a struggle to live through conflicts in an average company. Turning any conflict down early on is insane. Sounds like he is trying to built a brainwashed cult.

> his bar for what he considers inappropriate is so low that it ends up stifling disagreements ... because if I show any annoyance, he'll criticize my tone ... It's driving me nuts to have to walk on eggshells all day.

this describes a woman I was seeing

disagree with her, and you're being condescending

agree with her, and you are bringing up something that she considers we had already resolved

bring up a positive aspect or endearing moment, and you are dismissing her

the best part of this is that she would rationalize her conversational superiority with her education in speech pathology!

Ugh. I hate the "tone" police. Most of them won't even acknowledge what you say if they don't like your "tone".

I do! I work at a failing startup. I find the direction and strategy of the company lacking. My advice is often ignored or they wait years and then claim it as their own. Sluggish sales. Sluggish revenue. Haven't been profitable in the 5 years I've been there.

I'm looking for a job but I rather just be laid off and collect unemployment for a while. I've been working for 17 years with no employment gaps. I'm tired.

I can relate, I haven’t gone more than a week without a job in that same amount of time. I fantasize about just straight up taking a week or a month or a year off and doing absolutely nothing.

I'm not good at getting fired. I am personable and don't slack off. Those positive qualities are having a negative impact on my dream. I've wanted to collect unemployment for years.

Everyone makes mistakes. You can as well, you just need to want. Some suggestions (read aloud in an enthusiastic, you-can-do voice): Deploy to production! On Friday evening! Something that doesn't even build on your machine! Hardcode an universal password into the auth backend ("toomanysecrets" is a classic)! Invert a few conditionals in almost unreachable code! Enforce an overly complicated review system! Be horribly pedantic with every review you do! Skip review for your own commits! Re-write an important component from scratch! In OCAML, C# and TypeScript! While drunk! With no version control!

You get the idea. Or, probably better, ask your boss to fire you for all the good work you did? ;-)

I'll try harder...wait, you know what I mean. The first step is to stop being a workaholic, be more like the CEO.

Who is in his position because he doesn't feel sufficiently bad about driving others to generate money for him. Or something along those lines.

You're right about the first step being more like the CEO. But you don't have to give up the 100%-work-hard track record. Just shift your focus toward working hard at finding a style of ever-so-slightly psychopathical indifference that can work for you.

I've been working far less than that, but I always take some time between jobs. Currently at the beginning of month 3, and am doing interviews since last week. Take some time and get some sleep dude.

How did you know I am suffering from insomnia lately?

> I'm tired.

I can relate to that.

Because stress keeps you up, and chronic unhappiness and stress is a recipe for not sleeping. I've been there dude.

Please sign me up!

I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed state, then canceled.

I'm on a very small team, I am the only expert in infrastructure, but all infrastructure code is reviewed by the lead engineer who is a complete novice at AWS/GCP. I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.

In my other areas of responsibility I am prompt, spot-on, and thorough. I bring experience and perspective, challenge half-baked ideas gently and constructively, and have shipped tons of solutions. I keep proving myself, and I do my best to celebrate my other team member's wins.

I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default. Plain wrong solutions get approval, and prudent, cost-effective ones are ignored or even ridiculed.

I would understand a bit of politics and orthodoxy on a large team, but for such a small team I'm stymied as to why that needs to exist. I keep losing bits of myself as my genuine efforts are met with forceful rejection, day in and day out. I've sought direct feedback and gotten vague responses if any, followed by closed door meetings about me as I do.

The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.

It sounds that your additions aren't values by your team. It might be because (like you say) you are the only expert on X. If you are in such a situation you should be in charge for X, if not you'll be fighting these battles every time.

> I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.

Great that you were writing all of that, but it sounds like even before that wiki reorg your docs weren't read or used by anyone else. Especially if you are the only person who understands what you're writing, why are you writing it? The only possible reason I see for spending all that time is for the situation where they hire someone else who knows about cloud as well.

> I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default.

Note that if you give common-sense suggestions about not X (backend code, or databases for example) but you are not the person who is responsible for it / in charge of it, you are telling people (who think they are more expert in that topic) what they should be doing. I'd probably fight that to. If you are given common-sense suggestions about X that impacts how they need to do non X, well that's work they don't want to do. I don't like lawyers or compliance guys telling me how I need to arch my code either (if I could ignore them I probably would ;))

Look at it from the other side: here is our colleague throwawaymyjob who is our cloud guy, whenever he is in whatever meeting (that's not purely about cloud) he is telling everyone else how they can do things better. But he's not responsible for doing that nor how that turns out.

> The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.

This is the real problem. Don't trust company. It is not yours. They will throw you when then don't need you. Better spend time on your well being and get better job.

I worked on contract at a place for 4 years, worked on 5 or 6 projects. Only one went to production, the management changed their mind on the others after they were finished, the money was good though.

You're getting negged. The team or above your team is worried more about politics than value, maybe rightly so.

>I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed state, then canceled.

So what's it like working for Google?

7 years ago I was hired as the sole developer in a train wreck situation. 14 year old company had just relaunched their site to early and without any testing. It was like eBay but for an expensive niche market.

The primary developer walked after the launch. The new site was buggy and the whole thing had been rebuilt without any of the previous security tooling. Phishing and fraud against the user base were everywhere.

I spent a year fixing this site, combatting fraud, building anti fraud tools, setting up DMARC, learning both the old Perl system and the new rails system, adding new features, running the servers and being on call 24/7 at the expense of my home life.

I did it too. I stabilized the site, rendered the fraud and phishing ineffective and saved the company.

At my review they thanked me for saving the company...and told me they didn’t think I was working hard enough.

I realized that if they actually believed that after the year I just put in there was nothing I could do to change their mind and I was really, seriously depressed for most of the next month. As you might expect, during that month my work actually did suffer and the CEO sent me a nasty note over a weekend while my wife and I were out. She saw the note and told me to quit because she didn’t want me working for somebody like that. It was the biggest relief in the world to hear that from her because I was struggling with how to tell her any of it. I internalized it all. I asked what about money? She said we’d figure it out.

So I called and resigned immediately and told them I’d write up transition documents for the next developer. Told him what he needed to do moving forward to make the company work and he actually listened to exactly what I told him to do and paid me an extra 2 weeks after my last day to actually thank me for saving his company.

Couple of months later I got a good job for the next 5 years and now that experience has me working in the email security and antiphishing world...very happily.

You did great! Congratulations. For anyone reading this and considering doing the same, one minor tweak.

> I called and resigned immediately and told them I’d write up transition documents for the next developer

...or any other task they want at an appropriate hourly rate. That rate being at least 3x what you were making previously. Also you have to be totally OK with them not hiring you.

Depending on the relationship, perhaps the hours are only sold in packs of 10 and must be prepaid. (e.g. hourly rate is $300, no work done until each $3000 check clears)

+1 gold star for your wife being supportive, and +1 gold star to you for making a classy exit.

I am an acquired founder working in the bay area. The acquisition made me rich, I'm liquid, and I love my product and my team. Everyone did really well in the acquisition.

The acquirer means well, but as a public company there is little intellectual honesty and projects are going off the cliff while my fellow executives not sharing the truth of how bad things are going and asking for help from one another for the good of the company. I'm increasingly demotivated having to deal with lying and intellectual dishonesty at every turn.

I can quit, but then I lose out on almost a million bucks that's unvested, not much compared to what I've made so far but I'd really like to just be fired (without cause) and get to walk away and start a non-profit.

If you're fired, do you vest fully? We got acquired recently and it seems like my vesting doesn't jump ahead if I got fired (without cause)... not totally sure though.

it's technically not vesting (my founder shares were fully vested on acquisition) - more of a hold back. we made sure to negotiate this term in.

doesn't work that way for employees unfortunately.

So basically there are separate founder and employee shares and negotiated different terms for the two (hold-back and options)?

If you're in a situation where your vesting schedule incentivizes your acquirers to fire you without cause your lawyers may have ripped you off.

How does it usually work? Does one fully vest upon firing? Vest several months upon firing?

wear sweat pants and no underwear and put your foot up on stuff while you talk to people in the office.

If you don’t have a penis, put a strap under the sweat pants.

No one is going to fire you with cause for not being aware of your obviously swinging dick.

either that or he'll make HN

I didn't know Erlich Bachmann was on HN

Then coast. Just do the minimum to keep your job until your vesting date.

The way to signal that you're unhappy is to give your notice the day of your vesting date. (Or give your notice so that you leave on your vesting date.)

I've seen worse. One CTO that I know of, after acquisition into a public company, got stuck with an idea guy who just monopolized his time pushing for dumb ideas that had nothing to do with what the company wanted. From reading between the lines, it sounds like there was a lot of verbal abuse going on.

I'm looking for a person like you. I've started non-profit - LibreTaxi, which is Uber alternative. PoC works and there is some traction. However, there is a need for some funds to make this app native. Ping me if you're interested (email is in profile)

If I may, I get the strong sense that your hesitation isn't really about the unvested $$.

Can you tell us more about the nonprofit you'd like to start?

I don't want to be fired. I absolutely love my job and the people I work with. But I can just smell that we are about to hit a sticking point with how I don't do on call (it was never mentioned in the interviews or part of my contract) and I don't respond to work after 5pm.

If it does come to that sticking point I'm trying to figure out how to be the most assertive and diplomatic. I.e. How do I convey that I badly want to keep this job but those new terms are a non start?

> I'm trying to figure out how to be the most assertive and diplomatic.

Having a job offer in hand does wonders for one's communication skills.

I perpetually have a few competitive alternatives. But I don't want to have a conversation that way. I shouldn't have to.

You could perhaps try framing it as a negotiation, i.e. "there was nothing in my original contract that indicated this would be one of my regular responsibilities, I'm happy to open negotiations with you in order to add that stipulation." Think of a salary at which you might actually consider being on-call (don't be charitable; make it double or triple or quadruple your current salary if you want). Then, increase that number by 50% and call it your starting offer. If they balk and try to talk you down, offer to go lower, but don't go below that number from the first step. Negotiations will almost certainly stall and your supervisor (who I presume is the one putting pressure on you) will then have political cover to tell their own supervisor (who I presume is putting pressure on them) "hey, I tried", and hopefully this will continue far enough up the chain until it reaches a person that is so detached that they don't really give a damn and drop it. If they do eventually end up firing you over this, then this indicates they would likely have fired you anyway and therefore you've not lost from this exchange. And on the slim chance that they accept your terms of quadrupling your salary, I guess you can retire substantially earlier. :P

Then don't.

First: Have a very direct conversation where you state that after-hours work, and being on-call, are not the job you took. Also state that you really like the job you have, and that you'd like to continue to work where you're working.

Next: Make sure your value to the company is clearly established. What important things have you done that were vital to the company? (If the decision makers think they can replace you, then you're better off switching jobs now.)

Finally: Figure out how to telegraph that you're considering other offers without actually telling anyone that you're considering other offers. In the late 1990s - early 2000s, showing up very late one day in a suit did it. In my case, I just started leaving at random times to meet people for coffee, or taking phone calls behind the office. Later, I didn't pick up the phone for an "important" call with my boss, and his boss, because I was at an interview. They figured it out and the problem was solved very quickly.

> I don't want to have a conversation that way. I shouldn't have to.

I've been though this after a comp review. Despite good review, my raise wasn't impressive. Once I had a competing offer in-hand, suddenly a lot more money was available. Had I wanted to keep the job more, I would have pressed the issue during the comp review, but to your comment, I shouldn't have to.

Or money in the bank.

I think the best way to convey something you don't know how to say is to put it this way

"I don't know the right words to use - so I'll say it directly. I BADLY want to keep this job but I even more so can't be 'on call'" .. you can explain to them that for you personally you need separation between work and personal life."

As the other poster said, I think an honest framing of just what you said is fine ("I really enjoy working here, but those other things are non starters"). If it truly was not outlined beforehand, then just point out that you feel strongly enough about the extra requirements that you would not have taken the job in the first place had it been mentioned.

Maybe they accept it, maybe it becomes a learning moment for them in the future. Either way, its unfortunate but non-starters are non-starters.

In professional settings, when it comes to these kinds of awkward topics, I have found a method that has served me very well:

A. Meet with the person who is applying the unwanted pressure (it works best one-on-one, so if more than one person is pressuring, you may need to figure out who is best to speak to).

B. Frame your concern as asking for advice. For example, "I'm struggling with how to handle this on-call thing. Work-life balance is EXTREMELY important to me, but I love my job, and I don't know how to set that boundary without upsetting management. What would you do?"

In my experience, this approach makes the listener very sympathetic and pragmatic, and they advise you to do what you already want to do (and subsequently stop pressuring you to change). I think this is because people like being asked for this sort of help, and when they enter "advice mode" they take a step back and look at the situation from an impartial distance.

YMMV, IANAL, etc., but it's served this awkward introvert quite well.

Thanks for sharing it, this is a very interesting approach.

This approach really depends on the manager. A manager who has a habit of bullying people will have no issues laying on more pressure/guilt/whatever... in this situation.

Personally, if I feel as though a manager has expected me to do something outside my contract, I just don’t even give it any thought. That’s their problem. If they bring it up I just tell them no in a rather blunt way.

I’ve worked with plenty of bully managers, but have myself never really been bullied by any of them. I’ve watched all of them bully my less assertive colleagues though.

As an introvert, what I like about this approach is that it does not close any doors, it just opens a discussion. Ofttimes that discussion is rapidly helpful. When it is not—when the manager is a bully, or oblivious—I still have the option to be more blunt. It's a diplomatic first foray into tricky topics.

Whatever works for you is great. I’d just suggest you be careful that you don’t first establish yourself as somebody who will tolerate bullying. Once you’ve laid the groundwork for that, undoing it can be much harder than just avoiding it in the first place.

This approach was coined as "forced empathy"[0] by Chris Voss, author of the book on negotiating Never Split the Difference[1]. I would highly recommend reading it. Blackswan LTD is the consulting group he made based on his experiences, also mentioned in the book.

[0] https://blog.blackswanltd.com/the-edge/the-1-tactic-for-nego...

[1] https://info.blackswanltd.com/never-split-the-difference

This requires the other person to see the need for the work-life balance. Some people genuinely don't. For some work is always the priority.

I see you've met my CTO.

Thanks. It is really good advice. Seems like dropping little bit of ego, gives lot back.

> How do I convey that I badly want to keep this job but those new terms are a non start?

You don't convey that you badly want to keep the job. You keep that under wraps. The terms are a non start. End of story.

On call is shitty and I wish it wasn't accepted they way it is.

Either hire people to work around the globe, or people that want to hire in shifts or accept that your product isn't going to be on 24 hours a day.

Even Facebook does on-call. So money can’t solve it. If you wrote the code and it breaks you’re kinda the only one that can fix it (in a hurry)

Any time you're called in for an emergency off-work hours, you should get time and a half, minimum of four hours paid.

Blue collar industrial jobs treat their people better than software usually does.

> called in for an emergency off-work hours

Yes this should be the only time your ever called in off hours, there better be a threat of people dieing. hah

The reality of oncall is the server is filled up because no one can bother to rotate a log file, so you get paged at 4am to delete a file.

I suspect we work at the same company :D

Yeah I'm being idealistic, but money can solve it, smaller companies do have teams around the world to do 24/7 on call.

Partially, i think its this way because it is accepted, no one seems to question it or push back on it. No one values their free time out side of work?

Also, Every time Ive been oncall I have been oncall for code I didn't write, I haven't even always have a job coding (ops/devops/sre roles) and have been on call for services. Or there's that thing that been neglected and unowned but someone needs to be oncall for it.

Start with, "Fuck you, pay me." If you try to be diplomatic with people who are trying to take advantage of you, they will eat you alive.

sadly I feel this is the best advice. Modern management are a bunch of feeding piranha when it comes to people who can do stuff.

It's the culture. We working stiffs aren't people. We're "human resources". Resources exist for but one purpose: to be exploited until they are exhausted. Once exhausted, they are abandoned in favor of fresh, untapped resources.

Not saying socialism is the answer, but is capitalism as currently implemented really that great a deal for people who work for a living?

Indeed, I feel this entire approach causes employees to adopt maximum disengagement, its the only response that preserves your sanity.

It always causes me to chuckle since its the exact opposite of what management say they want, and they seem to work very hard to produce this result.

"Nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good work. You could lay that down for a rule—if you met a man who was rising in Packingtown, you met a knave. That man who had been sent to Jurgis' father by the boss, he would rise; the man who told tales and spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own business and did his work—why, they would "speed him up" till they had worn him out, and then they would throw him into the gutter."

where's that from?

edit: googled it - the Jungle, I've been meaning to read that

It will put you in an odd land of "special guy" if you refuse to do on call.

I've never seen or heard of on call mentioned as part of a hiring contract, but maybe others have. It's expected, if you built or helped build something, that you will be on call at some point. It's absurd to me you would avoid it, but maybe you're special.

absolutely and violently disagree. the hiring process should convey expectations, and the negotiation process is being done in bad faith if expectations are hidden. being on-call should be reflected in compensation. if on-call expectations are brought up after compensation is negotiated, that is a problem.

I agree it should be part of the compensation package, but not every place is that progressive (yet?). OP might bring that up, or negotiate some form of compensation (ex: day off after on call, whatever). But I tend to agree with parent -- having an on-call schedule that developers participate in is a normal part of professional software engineering (assuming services of course).

this is so alien to me. are you and GP talking about putting in long days during crunch time, or actual on-call rotations where you're expected to be available in the middle of the night? i agree the former is universally expected, but the latter? not at all, not without discussing it beforehand. that would be obscene. i am so boggled to hear people accepting and defending the practice.

I kind of locked in on my recent experiences when answering that. So I want to clarify -- its not expected in all orgs and is dependent on roles (e.g. if you aren't working on live services, it wouldn't even make sense). I would expect larger shops to have dedicated ops people or site reliability engineers who handle most of the duties. But I think small to medium sized corps that either don't have or cannot afford these would expect developers to handle crashing services, whenever they occur. Having an on-call schedule is a natural next step to prevent everyone from always being on call, or (worse, imo) prevent people from siloing and only fixing "their" stuff. I agree it should ideally be part of the job description, but don't find it unusual to be left out if the job otherwise fits the mold.

Start interviewing for other jobs just in case. Also, if you want to stay, try to find a way to compensate for not being on call. Provide an extra value to them beyond what everyone else is doing and beyond what is in your job description. That worked for people at my previous employer who didn't want to be on call.

If you are worrying about keeping your job you are not in a position to set terms at all. You must be willing and somewhat eager to lose it.

I was just recently fired, but honestly I was about to leave. I work in a two person branch of my current gig. The other person is my supervisor and is learning how to be someone. He's constantly looking over my shoulder and decided to fire me because I missed the goals, that he forced me to quote. The project wasn't ready for a deadline. I honestly got tired of all the little supervisor experiments as well.

When he fired me, he asked me if I would have liked a warning that my performance was effecting my job. I told him yes. Then asked what the reasons were that I was being fired. "You're a good developer but this team needs more speed." Whatever that means, there goes my 10% at a startup...who saw this coming (hint: everyone)?

He fired me before I went on a 2 week vacation. During said time he got a good taste of the difficulty of the project and why I was resistant to quoting times. Would a manager ever admit a mistake?

> The project wasn't ready for a deadline.

I really like that way of looking at deadlines and project lifecycles. I haven’t ever heard the relationship expressed that way.

I interpreted it as "the project wasn't ready [in time for] a deadline". But I agree, the concept of a project that is somehow too immature or unprepared for a deadline is though provoking.

If the project isn't read for a deadline, then it's not product development, it's research. (And I feel I have some standing to say this!) Phrasing it that way may help get people's lightbulbs to go off.

It's more that the project was immature. If I have a bucket of data and an unknown part of the data is either incorrect or unknown then I can't give a full quote on completion all data in the bucket. Especially if the data accuracy/discovery is contingent on other team members also uncertain of the quality of the data. This will and did lead to burnout.

The bigger issue is that I've been treated by a robot. Just talk to me and quit trying to social engineer a solution out of me or try to make me discover the results you're expecting.

Final note, my supervisor said he really enjoyed working with me the past year, but they're trying to improve the "shitty parts" of the company. Doesn't that make me some of the "shit"?

As per my experience, mostly they won't. At least not immediately. Just forget everything once you quit and focus on your well being.

Oh boy. Not even gonna bother with a throwaway, draw your own inferences about whether I'm taking the thread title too literally. My current responsibilities:

(1) Architect for significant updates to one of our financial projection models. The requested timeline for results from these changes has been changed (directly by C-suite) from mid-November to late October to ASAFP over the course of the last week. Said model was built by non-programmers using a 20-year-old modeling platform; the lead architect was a new grad with a CS minor. Ever tried debugging a runtime error in a >1000-line C++ function, with no error messages, using nothing but cout? Try it sometime, if you've got a good therapist.

(2) PM for an internal application that executes the projection model in (1) on our in-house grid computing platform. The developers and tester for this are great, which helps. But none of them had seen the codebase until a month ago, since the previous developers and tester all moved to different teams since the last time we worked on this application. They also don't fully understand what the application is doing (I haven't had time to get them totally up to speed, though I'm working on it!), which means I get to build a lot of the testing tools myself, the highlight of which has been writing a FoxPro DBF parser in R (long story).

(3) Reviewer for the twisted hellscape of Excel workbooks that makes up one of my old (~2 years ago) team's processes, since the guy who was supposed to be reviewing them quit out of the blue (can't say I blame him) and my old team apparently couldn't find anyone else to do it. The old team usually gives me a heads up when they make substantial changes to parts of the process while I'm reviewing them, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

I should mention that I'm ostensibly a data scientist, but sometimes management seems to take the idea that data scientists should be generalists a little too literally.

Side note:

Over here employers must give you a notice of termination, the length of which depends on how long you worked for the company. For employees with over a decade of loyalty, this period can be a year or more.

The intent is that a worker can get enough time to find a new employment.

The regulation has a perverse effect. As an employee who is on notice is generally no longer trusted to prioritise the company's best interest, the practise is to just pay out the wages for the notice period but prevent further access to the business and its clients.

This makes firing someone with enough tenure an expensive deal.

There are two ways around this. (1) If you can fire someone for 'grave and urgent resons', let's say you caught them stealing from the till, the the termination period does not hold, and you can fire them on the spot. Problem is that 'grave and urgent' is not a very well defined concept, and therefore is open to abuse. You got ill and did not submit a doctor's notice within 24hrs to HR? That is formally 'illegal absense' and could be a 'grave and urgent' termination offense.

(2) The notice period is reversed in case it is the employee quits. Then they have to give the company the lengthy notice. Same as above the employee is usually alowwed to leave much sooner if he agrees to tie up some loose ends and do a handover. In practice many employees that a company wants to fire will be nudged/pestered into quitting by making their work more difficult or less attractive.

The regulation is well intended and for the right reasons, but fails in practice.

If you say that it fails in practice, is that your opinion or is that a general opinion? Presumably, in some cases the regulation that you mention works the way it was intended?

I wouldn't mind not working in the notice period; it would be a plus for me. The other question is also of course: What kind of a law should supercede such a law?

I am not saying I disagree with you or anything like that, but what I am saying is that developing countries (for example) usually have concrete problems that make some scenarios around regulation in developed countries look somehow immaterial or even amusing.

By the way, newer labour regulation in South Africa are also causing problems. Our particular problem is that you don't want to hire people anyway; you would rather downscale. If you hire someone who turns out to be a incapable employee, you have a harder time letting them go. This disincentivises "giving someone a chance" with an uncertain ability or a unusual background.

But we have >60% youth unemployment (I think that is defined as aged 18–35) and that overrides most arguments or high level laws—there are simply more pressing matters at hand.

It is not just my opinion. I have friends that are HR managers and this view seems to be generally accepted among them.

The hiring is another issue. Over here there is always a 6 month 'trial' period when you hire someone. During those first six months, both the employer and the employee can end the contract without repercussions. This acknowledges that no screening/hiring process will be perfect, and that bad matches do happen.

Employment law and regulation is not easy to change as it impacts the lives of so many. My personal opinion is that even then this is just part of an even larger rethink we need in an age where most 'work' (not all) has long ceased to be a productive contribution to society, and has mealy become a game for a polarized redistribution of 'wealth', that is not just viciously usurping our lives and the environment, but due to its penchant for 'growth' those of future generations as well.

> employment law and regulation is not easy to change as it impacts the lives of so many

OK, so assuming a significant amount of people disapprove of these laws, why are they not changed? Do you suggest that it is institutional inertia or populist pressure?

I know about the 6 month rule; it seems like a logical and useful feature.

In South Africa the answer is simple about why our practical implementation of regulations is not good: our government is dysfunctional. From a point of view of our actual laws, they are well written and better than many European countries, but they are selectively implemented.

I have a similar situation here but not as extreme.

My thought is that this should encourage companies to fire fast. However, I see the opposite. Maybe it's the sink cost fallacy in effect.

Most people leave their bosses and not their jobs. The inverse is also true. My last job as a programmer was not so great but I stayed there for many years because my boss was quite great and supportive.

Now, I run a tech recruitment consultancy and if programmers come to me about changing jobs, in most cases the reason is the boss.

Most programmers invest a lot of time in coding and related activities but neglect most other aspects of their career. This Ask HN is a proof of this. (Shameless plug: I am writing a guide on how to be more efficient in the workplace and get better compensated, pre-order "Coderfit: Make more money as a programmer" here: https://gumroad.com/l/cdrft)

My last day at work is Friday.

I was hired three years ago to write web apps for a major children's hospital, but given no web servers to run the apps. That hasn't changed much.

Let me repeat that. My job is to write web apps. I have no servers.

The first "servers" I was given were three old RedHat boxes that were used in a share environment by researchers. Ports to the box weren't open and basically everyone was root to install whatever they wanted.

The second set of "servers" I was given was this "enterprise solution" called BlueData. It basically runs crippled versions of open source software and to top it off, our "DevOps" team did things like not open any ports to the farm and set up one command line ingress to it.

I spent years arguing this was insane and I finally had it. It was low stress and I hardly did any work, but at the end of the day, I didn't feel good about taking salary for money that can go directly to children's care.

This is both funny and sad, but it just leaves me curious what did you spend your time doing for three full years working like that?

I'm gonna guess side-projects. The sort of thing you throw together on a lunch break to learn a new library or tool or otherwise scratch an itch.

I'm exaggerating at the situation, but not too far off. For the past year, I've been working on an ETL app. I used Go at my last job, so I really got to hone my skills especially in regards to threading challenges. Kafka and Cassandra were also new to me.

Still, the VMs these are running on are a complete mess. Frequent, unannounced infrastructure changes, spin drives, old Java in Docker are just some of the issues that made the environment completely unstable. They chase sexy buzzwords like "big data" and "machine learning" but give us spin drive machines to do it.

CHOP?

LOL No!

I met some guys there at a conference this past summer and was incredibly envious of their resources compared to us. If you think CHOP is bad, I hope that tells you a little bit about us!

I wouldn’t hate it. They’d be doing me a favor if there were more mouths than mine to feed.

A company merger resulted in lots of engineering talent leaving with multiple unfinished projects and very little documentation. We’re at a point now where only 2% of the original team remains.

I was hired to complete these projects and clean up the technical debt left behind. That priority shifted to work on new products. That priority changed again. It changed a third time. Now I’m being tasked back with coming back to cleaning up the technical debt and security mitigation’s I was originally hired for after a weekend outage that affected the wrong client. Suddenly the critical infrastructure weaknesses I pointed to needed our full attention and system reliability became the first class citizen I long argued it should be.

Except every time I make progress on patching up and stabilizing one system, a new hole springs in the dam.

I’m the Dutch Boy of DevOps at this place.

Despite recent increase in funding, management refuses to backfill any of our open vacancies, project management refuses to budge on timetables, and as a result we’re putting out fires daily with water guns and spray bottles.

Meanwhile we’re on our third VP of product in two years, and our second Director of Infrastructure.

Two years more later and I’m well beyond the threshold. Hoping there’s an offer letter coming soon after interviewing the last few weeks.

In theory I have the perfect job: I create developer tools to be used with my company's platform. I choose the tech, decide the features and when to deliver. The commute is OK - about 30 minutes from door to door. I get reasonably paid but the workload is just too little. I have to come up with things to do just to fill in the mandatory 40 weekly hours in Jira. There aren't that many developers using our tools and there isn't a "push" to improve/evolve them so I just drag any tasks endlessly so I have enough to do all week. Still everyone is quite happy with my performance as I get shit done. I know I am not the only one. Other departments have people just idling most of the time. I feel that I am completely useless. I've already mentored a junior developer so I guess he could handle it on his own. I am seriously done with this and I would consider moving to a new job if it weren't for two problems: I am having my first baby in a few months and there aren't any product companies around (I don't want to go to a consulting company again). If I stick around my unit test code coverage will be 200%.

If you're going to be sticking around, is there someway you can (perhaps covertly) pivot within the company? You didn't mention what the platform does, but is there some featureset you could work on in your free time, and then surprise the company?

I don't think I could do something within the platform itself because it's a different team, a different tech stack and a different mindset. They are disconnected from reality and build whatever features the product owner & CTO puts on their plate. The only thing I could do is to try to convince Sales or Account managers that we need new integrations and POC projects...

Okay, how about: make extremely casual friends with the developers you can resonate with the easiest, and unofficially learn about any and all pain points and so forth. Maybe even hint at the truth about not having enough work to do, if you think it would be understood correctly (something to play by ear), and point out the specific area of tooling you work on.

If you play your cards right, you might be able to go up your chain at the same time you get your new friend(s) to go up their chain, producing a most odd coincidence where some random idea you offhandedly mention to your boss one day happens to be exactly what the boss heard the developer team lead really wanted :) or something to that effect.

Basically figure out how to engineer a planets-aligning moment in terms of approval. If possible, mix things up so it looks like your initiative was key in the new feature happening.

Maybe (more playing by ear) you could skip the coincidence stuff and just mention that you happened to grab lunch with a developer and heard they really wanted XYZ feature (that happens to be exactly the kind of thing you'd be perfect to implement etc etc). Sort of sounds a tad less impressive put that way, but could still work.

2017, due to a misconfiguration or lack thereof, the system that manages 250k employees marked me as terminated. Security came to my desk and escorted me out of the building like a criminal.

I was hired back 3 weeks later, with a small apology and no pay. I looked for another opportunity right away and quit the job.

Today, I design and build automated systems for a startup. I made sure that the "AI" has a big red button that stops the process and spits out a backtrace of all the steps it took so we can be accountable and reverse any damage.

interesting. I thought it only happens in movies.

Based on the gp's handle, I believe the full story [0] had been posted here [1] before:

0: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645

Employer making me choose between career advancement and LOB success and then tying my job security to the latter.

I usually have comparable or better options available at any given time due to the sheer number of recruiters who are constantly floating things my way.

An up-to-date, relevant skillset is worth a potential 5 figure pay bump in the near future, which tends to be much more lucrative than slightly increased job security at my current pay rate.

They usually get one screw-up before I skip out for a better paying gig.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Have more than tripled my salary in the last 6 years hopping around like this.

But honestly, I'm also just not a fan of management styles which attempt to extract additional value via appeals to fear.

Usually if I see workplace management react to crunch time by letting shit roll downhill while making negative implications about how resistance might impact job security, that instantly puts me in job hunting mode.

I might stick around for a bit to help out people on my team that I actually like, but at that point I'm already mentally checked out and looking for my next gig.

I do, but I need some filler on my resume so I'm toughing it out as long as I can.

Just finished four months of overtime to meet an arbitrary executive-decision deadline. Now I'm on a new project, and I'm finding out just how horrible the other teams had it: legacy systems from the dark ages of tech that are being shoved into the cloud, critical account access is shared with everyone, everything was built by hand two years ago by people who are no longer here, nothing is documented, and 4am maintenance windows are a weekly thing. There's aloof parent companies imposing draconian pointless restrictions, finance has a strangle hold over everything (hiring, new hardware, new software, etc) and kills any funding no matter how much we need it, but somehow execs will buy a giant pointless thing that we never use, all the bosses refuse to take responsibility to push back or even fix problems we can control, and we have to go through three different teams to get changes made outside a single cloud account. Developers don't want to have any responsibility whatsoever for how their code actually runs or is supported, scrum masters impose ridiculous process requirements that have nothing to do with productivity, we never actually see a single customer/client until we launch a product, we have almost no tests, and almost no plans for what to do if we can't just build more cloud stuff to fix any problem. There are 10 architects whose sole job is to tell you to use arbitrary technology with absolutely no context or consultation, security is one guy who doesn't know what metasploit is, and the people building shared services for internal use don't want to actually support the users using them. I'm the only one trying to improve anything because I'm new. Everyone else is either job hunting or is super green and in love with the constant free food and beer.

A pissing match between two unrelated branches of an enormous org chart has caused monumental waste and discord where I work as a software engineer.

My employer is also allergic to open source, even though we are a huge publicly traded software company, so we're reinventing wheels for things that are already solved problems.

Toxic hell, I should be gone in weeks.

I work in a factory and I see all of the problems my older coworkers have. Along with that I think the company wants to move the whole plant to Mexico so there is no long-term job security. I've learned programming in my spare time but when I've tried applying for jobs I didn't get a response, which I assume is because I don't have a degree. I've been trying to get back into university but I'm not sure that it will happen anytime soon. We've been working a lot of weekends too so programming time is limited. I'd quit but this is the best paying job I've been able to get.

I decided to make an account to comment on this. Build things, put them on github, write 500 words about it, add to resume, repeat.

I am in your situation. No longer work in a factory but still in a dead-end job. Have you considered trying to become a sysadmin instead? Everyone and their nan are trying to become programmers, but network engineering gets overlooked a lot. CCNA + maybe an AWS cert and you would easily find an entry-level role. GL.

I recently changed careers myself. My advice is to look at positions that look interesting/are in high demand, check out the technologies that they are using, learn them, build them and put them on your Github. And make sure to put the keywords of the technologies you know on your Linkedin - if you actually know them (because otherwise you will embarrass yourself in a technical interview).

Since your time is limited, make sure every time you sit down to code you are learning something new rather than retreading the stuff you already know.

This won't be easy - you will have to be stubborn and persistent and really commit to it. I for one got here because I became obsessed with tech and spent countless nights coding instead of socializing. But the rewards are there if you have the passion to stick it out.

Companies don't care as much about the degree as your projects.

There's a team at my workplace that I think is almost literally making our product worse every time they check in code. They rejected a security fix I made because they didn't want to test it. The manager makes incomprehensible decisions and just blatantly lies about what they are doing. My entire team has a policy of just not interacting with them to avoid problems. How am I supposed to respect the management skills and decision making of execs who keep these people around?

Getting told by my director that the product manager thought it was rude when I answered a question by sending them a link to the answer in the relevant documentation.

I guess this is why nothing else at this company is documented, because why write things down when you can waste multiple people's time repeating things.

Not the rudest but it is basically saying RTFM. I deal with it like, here's the info you're looking for, but in the future you can read here instead of having to wait on me :)

The idea being to present it as a benefit for them and not an unburdening for you.

That would be considered passive aggressive messaging. People easily see through the intent. Just copy paste the content from the manual and link to source.

Tried that approach and got told I was condescending.

I’m very sorry to hear that. Some people will go to any length to avoid work, even by putting it on us.

Thats cause it is. its snarky. solving someones problem and telling them they could be doing something better are two different things. its often offensive to mix the two. it also shows an incredible lack of empathy—sometimes someone is asking you something because theyre swamped and you seemed helpful, if you respond like that theyll go from thinking youre helpful to thinking you’re a know it all jerk.

heres a better way to communicate the same thing without being snarky:

“here it is! <link> its a pretty good resource, the docs are fairly extensive, theyve saved me a couple times in the past” that gives the person the hint without simultenousely saying “i think you’re a dope for not knowingg how to look up this doc” In fact the “next time you can just <x> :)” pattern in general is nearly always snarky—the smily face is clearly not genuine and is belittling.

I'm less sure that works when I'm the one that wrote most of the docs. But thanks, yeah, I understand how it can come off.

> “here it is! <link> its a pretty good resource, the docs are fairly extensive, theyve saved me a couple times in the past”

that's in the same vein as what I meant. The smiley face was not literal and of course I would encourage anyone to find their own words.

Eh, all you would have had to do is something like “I think this is it! <link>. Let me know if you need anythinng else”

takes one more second to add a little fluff to humanize your message.

Don't forget the mandatory 2 hour delay to answer though, you still don't want them learning that it's quicker to ask than to look.

Well honestly I have had a lot of sleep problems in the last 2 years. It seems I have CPPS[1], where I am up all night with an overactive bladder. The result is 5 or 6 out of 7 nights I get very little sleep.

I am in a role where I'm in leadership of a startup. I got there by being ambitious and pushing my capabilities. Now that we've experienced some success because of that, the company needs me to maintain a high level of performance. Further, I have a lot of equity tied up in the company. I feel stuck from the perspective of wanting to support the team, because of my equity, and honestly because when I'm normal, this is what I WANT to be doing.

I would love to be "fired" and just spend time with my kids until I figure this out.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_prostatitis/chronic_pe...

I have the same issue and it was completely resolved with Amytriptalene. Until I found the right doctor it felt like my life was over, and they kept giving me useless treatments. Contact Dr Hanno at Stanford; he’s the only competent one I have found.

I assume your doctors have considered it, but have either of you had a vasectomy or undescended testical?

I have had a vasectomy (which my urologist knows, cause his office did it). I'd be curious why you say that. Is there a link?

Sorry, no scientific link that I know of. I just have similar symptoms and wanted to see if there was any historical similarities. It may just be anecdotal but it seems there are a few others here with similar symptoms and history, perhaps there is a link.

Unfortunately, age is probably the most obvious link.

In addition to age, most of us have been sitting most of the day for all of that time. That probably doesn't help either.

I had a undescended testical when I was younger, and had a surgery when I was 5 or so. Curious to know the link, as I share the same symptoms as OP now that I‘m 30+.

This, uh, struck a nerve. Can you explain the link? Or provide some terms for googling?

Thanks so much. I'm actually not in the Bay Area. But yesterday I met a second urologist. They diagnosed me as CPPS after a 1-2 years of misdiagnosis from sleep doctors, primary, and another urologist. So I'm happy to finally have this diagnosis.

My new urologist is having me try OTC drugs (Zyrtec, ibuprofen, benadryl) as he said that it can be linked to inflammation/allergies where NSAIDs and anti-histamines can help. I'm trying those out to see what happens. Did your doctor send you through that course of treatment to try out?

Have you looked into pelvic floor physical therapy (including myofeedback)? Sounds like it might be stress related?

I always get downvoted for saying this, but many diseases with "unknown" causes are psychological in origin. I get the feeling this is one of them. Read The Mindbody Prescription - hope it gives you your life back like it did with me.

I work remotely for a company in the Bay Area, doing mostly web development.

- Compensation is great.

- Few calls, very little micro-management.

- People I work with are great.

- They don't care about where I'm working from as long as the timezone isn't too far off.

Somehow I feel miserable. I can't quite explain it. I think it's because the work I do is boring and I've been doing it for a long time. I've been working fewer and fewer hours because I just can't get myself to work more. Also I don't really like being an employee, even if my relationship with my employer is great. I yearn for the ultimate freedom of owning my own business. I wish I could just be happy with my situation which is fantastic in every way.

I get it. It’s lonely and if you’re not careful to leave the house it gets worse. The good news is you have plenty of time to work on a side project but that requires first improving mental state to have enough motivation.

the best jobs are where I can sit down with people beside me and crack jokes all day.

Yes, I feel like I cant get myself to work more unless I have pressing need from meeting team members. If they are on vacation or too busy, that's when I really struggle to focus and self-start as I just dont fundamentally care about the work itself.

I haven't been in your exact shoes so forgive me if this sounds judgmental. I have worked remote for several years and if there's one thing I can say, it's that I don't think your job is your problem. The problem is that you don't feel challenged, and you're expecting your work to fulfill that for you.

Find a way to fulfill that on your own. Start a blog, side project, or a hobby. I have all 3 going, plus more. Work is where I get work done and support my family. LIFE is where I get fulfillment ;-)

I was told that I wasn't doing enough code reviews, even though I am the only person on my team, because the 3 other engineers left over the previous 9 months. When I pointed this out to my manager, she said that I should have found code to review on other teams instead of waiting for people to ask me. I started studying that evening and quit the next month.

Well I actually just got "fired" today. I'm doing an infosec traineeship right now, and I supposedly don't put in enough effort at home. Employer told me the company expects people to put in another ~20hrs of studying by themselves on top of the 40 in the office, I hope this is not industry wide...

Had I known this I wouldn't have signed in the first place.

Any infosec companies with sane hours hiring trainees in the Netherlands?

Do you want to mention the company name? I'm curious as I have an idea about which company this is.

I can neither confirm nor deny before I get another gig, I don't want to burn any bridges prematurely just in case. What company are you thinking of?

The one in the Zaltbommel area. I don't want to be too specific either, I know a few folks over there. :)

Nope, that's not it. You're saying I should avoid Zaltbommel then?

I work in this place where I've made quite a few nice products the management are selling, they are, in part, keeping the company competitive. However they spend all their time trying to convince me that the work I do is crap and they could do it themselves easily (they're developers to - its a small company).

There is this continuing comedy where a bug or enhancement arrives and they say they'll do it - we don't need you (implied). I say sure, and they fiddle around for days or weeks, occasionally a small one is fixed, but usually they just fiddle around the edges. Eventually they give up and I do the work, and they spend all their time trying to poke holes in what I do so they can prove that they don't need me.

I asked for a couple of pay rises initially and they don't want to pay me more. Here's the bit that really gets me - this has been going on for a couple of years, and competitors products are overtaking ours which were leading edge. They spend all their time saying they don't need me and to the extent that they're actually hurting their business.

I've given up a long time ago and have moved to part time and I'm developing my own business, so I don't really care, the cash coming in is enough to keep me going, so all good. They still keep asking me to go back full time, but they don't need me, and they don't need anything changed. It truely is the most bizarre experience.

(It feels good sharing this :-) )

That'd be great. I'm actively searching, but a 40 year old junior dev isn't in high demand. I took my present job hoping for some mentor-ship to better develop my skills. My days are spent in my office, with no concrete understanding of what is expected of me. I have projects that are "mine"... and by that, I mean that no other developer has a clue what I do. There is no team. No goals. No targets. I just work on whatever I feel like working on, and it's slowly driving me crazy.

talk to people around the office and figure out the mission of the company, figure out how to make peoples tasks easier to complete so they have less work to do, and can work easier throughout the day.

It's not that I don't have work. I have plenty of things I could be doing on a daily basis. It's that there is no direction. No plan. No priority. I just show up and do whatever I do and go home. Once a week, I send a report to my supervisor of my activities for the week. My projects are entirely separate from the other developers here, so it's not really an option for me to go sit with them and co-work because we don't know each other's codebase.

How does your company make money? Thats the priority. Make whatever they have to do.. to make money.. easier. Also, bring up Silo-effect with your supervisor and let him know you wanna go meet the other team, go take a cookie tin or some beer or whatever to the other team and introduce yourself and hang out 30mins in the morning or something just to get a feel for what theyre doing/pain poitns etc... ask questions to get a feel for how _they_ interpret the organizatiosn priorities and plans... maybe they have an entirely different paradigm/perception.

We don't. We are a state agency. Apathy is rampant.

Wow, this rings true for me. Slow days are depressing and fast days are anxious and frustrating, and on all days it's down to me, myself, and I to figure out what to do. I ameliorated this by getting a couple of mentors, they have diff projects but they know my workflow decently well so can guide me generally.

I have one person I go to regularly... he's in DevOps, doesn't know my code at all, but he's good at testing and being blunt. Often, my workdays are spent working on whatever criticism he levelled to me the day before.

Once when I was a recruiter I got a call from one of my clients because they said that my consultant was being irritable. I called the consultant and he told me that it had been a week and a day and he still hadn't been issued a company computer to work on.

My first job was as an SQL database manager. It took them over a month to get me access to the database I was supposed to be managing.

Someone I know is a manager at a really large government contractor. They once had a poor engineer sit in another building for 6 months waiting to get his clearance. Poor guy finally quit after sitting at an empty desk reading books.

I contracted somewhere once where a new full time employee had to wait a month before he was issued a machine. I don't know how he stuck it.

Same happened to me as a contractor, but I was fine with it. Most I've ever been paid to read books.

The company I work for is active in an industry I have zero relation to. I can't relate to the business at all and I'm working with ancient tech. It pays well though and was brought on board by a friend and I don't want to disappoint him by leaving after just 1 year.

Have you talked to your friend about the company since joining?

If you're miserable it isn't worth wasting your time. You only have so many years to live...

1 year is pretty much the modern standard for the minimum appropriate time before moving on in my experience, so I think it's fine.

Yeah I thought the OP will finish his sentence “after about 1 week”. 1 year is decent in IT.

I have a ten month job on my resume. People ask about it years later.

Where I am from it's normal to get a 1 year contract when starting. Then if you did well you either get another temp contract or a contract of indefinite duration.

I feel if you quit after a year other companies will assume you didn't make it past the first period. So I'll try to stick around some while before making moves.

Also just having had a kid makes me feel I don't want to burden myself too much. A new job might be better, might be worse. For now at least I know what I've got.

Yes, it is very culturally specific so I guess that should be taken into account.

Here (Australia) it's common to have a 6 month probationary period where you can be fired or leave with basically no notice as employee and employer determine if it's a good fit, after that it becomes significantly harder to fire and the employee needs to give a few weeks of notice to leave. So a year is generally fine, you passed your test and were enough of an asset to make hiring you worthwhile and repay any onboarding overhead.

A few 1-year gigs in a row though, yeah, people will definitely ask.

I work at a pretty well known (in our field) and well respected digital production agency. I've been here for a bit over 7 years now. I started as a developer and learned almost everything I know. It was a really fun job and I loved my coworkers, the managers, the culture, the work was exciting and cutting-edge. Everything was great.

I went from medior to senior developer pretty quickly and eventually they asked me to take on a technical manager role at a different office abroad.

After my move, I was assigned development work rather than management work, and I assumed this was merely a transition to my new role. This continued for 2 years, even after I flagged it multiple times with my superiors.

Eventually, about 6 months ago, I was told I hadn't been taking on my new role, and that they were considering letting me go or sending me back (I'm on a visa and depend on this company for my stay here). This came directly from the people who both asked me to take on this new role and who were not allowing me to do said job. I was completely in shock by the absurdity of it. We cut a "deal" where they'd allow me to do my "new" job and to reevaluate a year later.

I'm 6 months in now and I think it's going fairly well. I'm learning a lot and working really hard at this role. In reality though, I'm using the job to learn how to perform in this role and I'm planning my leave to take on a similar role elsewhere. This whole episode has left a really bad taste in my mouth (that and a change in leadership which is more passionate about money than craft), and I have no intention of staying after this year is over. I hope I get fired, since it would require them by law to pay me a months salary for every year I've worked there.

I want to be fired. Joined as Staff Software Engineer in pretty well-known company. Turned out they work a lot. There is no too much work-life balance. 95% of these folks don't have kids, and I have. I need to go home at 5, often earlier, cos commute sucks. They allow to work from home 1 day a week. Now I'm in jeopardy - need to stay for 6 more months to have my stocks and sign-in bonus vested. Also new change won't look good on my resume. Next time I'll bet on WFH and WLB. F$ck the money.

Ah I see we are playing the guessing game.

Facebook ?

I bet AMZN

> Also new change won't look good on my resume.

Unless you work for people that have kids. Its difficult to understand what kids do to your schedule and needs until you have them. I've met plenty of employers where your situation could be explained with "I have kids, and they weren't flexible", and 0 questions would be asked. Its honestly a good test of whether your employer understands WLB and how to keep people happy.

Getting fired from a bad job is like having the best sex of your life but with the worst human being ever.

Feels amazing for a brief moment but you need a very long shower and a doctor's appointment after.

Then confusion and anxiety sets in because you're afraid you'll never have that high again and some part of you wants you to go right back for that perverse rush even though your smart brain says "HELL NO".

You see all your friends working for their dream companies and wonder not if you'll ever have that, but if ~anyone~ will welcome you again and you long for that filthy job.

You're spiraling into darkness and come to HN for the Who's Hiring posts and see all the other depraved lunatics and that's when you realize - you are not alone and you are not special and that you're gonna be downvoted just like everyone else - and it feels like home and it's ok that you're a miserable aspiring founder like everyone else who isn't happily employed.

(I say it with love from past personal experience)

Soo it's like dating a borderline?

Not with the job in particular, just want to take a break from tech especially from being a programmer.

Tired of staring at a screen for 80% of my awake time and constant puzzle solving. Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough, that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work.

Same. Have been thinking about taking a 6-month sabbatical from all things tech, but then worried I might just become so obsolete and out of touch that I'd rather suck it up.

yup I have the exact same worry, I have a little side business unrelated to tech that is profitting about 500-1k depending on the month. Considering taking a leave to work on that fulltime but also worried when I come back I'd just become completely out of touch.

Don't worry too much about becoming obsolete. Frontend web development is my field and it moves faster than any other single area of programming. I took 5 years off due to burnout and it only took me a month or two to get back up to speed from a technical perspective. Putting up with the bullshit interviews is another story. I freelance now.

+1 for freelancing. I never had to deal with any of the bullshit 2 days on-site interview with whiteboard challenge. I don't get the full interview routine because I'm considered "external" and "temporary workforce" ( 6-12 months ). Funny story that I've seen lots of "internals" moving to other gigs in about the same amount of time.

Freelancing gives you the opportunity to do your job, get your money and don't get involved in company policies. As a side-effect you pass interviews and have flexible working hours.

How do you start finding clients for freelancing? How do you figure out a competitive rate without going too high or low?

I have about 10-15 hours of real work to do each week at MegaCorp. The rest is idle time at my desk/couch. Thought about moonlighting and doing 2 jobs but freelance sounds better.

As someone who experienced the same thing and started their sabbatical 3 months ago, I highly recommend/encourage it. I regret not having started my sabbatical earlier.

The elephant in the room whenever anyone talks about taking a sabbatical is MONEY...

What are you guys doing for money? Just burning savings?

Actually talked with my therapist about this exact thing; apparently we're in a weird industry where your side projects matter more than your actual work that you're paid to produce.

The look on their face as I'm explaining how if I ever quit my job I'll need to put twice as much work into side projects to stay relevant was... enlightening.

> Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough, that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work.

Dealing with this in the heavy right now.

I've built a lot in my 10 years as a programmer. Infinitely, and automatically scaled application server based on load. Hasn't crashed or had a single downtime ever since release.

I've built mobile applications 100% myself being used by thousands still today.

I've learned 7 different programming languages. I've done web, mobile, server, and even bare metal firmware. The only 'domain' I haven't touched yet is ML.

Yet.... I truly feel DUMB. I feel like I'm nothing in this industry when one phone screen call puts you into an 'online assessment' where I can't solve the problem in better than O(N^2) time.

These fucking algorithms are killing me, and making me have a hard realization that maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Yea, I've built shit... but you know what... anyone could. I've plugged together a bunch of work other people did, and wallah, working server. Working app. Working whatever. But I can't write the libraries. I can't code a hyper scalable function that could handle petabytes of data.

The only reason my fucking amazing server hasn't crashed is because it doesn't handle anything close to the scale that many companies need. Hence why these algorithms are so important. But I can't fucking get better at them.

Outsource things you aren't good at. You think Tim Cook knows how to write the code required for iPhone hardware to communicate? No.

Well, I'll be sure to tell that to the next guy who sends me an 'online assessment'.

Maybe it's time to build something for yourself then. You have the necessary skills, basically a full stack dev + devOps. That's the route I'm taking - also have never studied algorithms or data structures and am mostly self taught.

I’d recommend trying the graded exercises in https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-alg... or https://www.edx.org/course/data-structures-an-active-learnin... — unfortunately, for the most benefit (online automatic grading), you’ll have to pay either EdX or Coursera, but EdX offers a small sample of exercises to start, if I recall correctly. And there are a few more courses after those.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll learn better if someone doesn’t ask you to do the impossible, but instead leads you through enough solutions that you can get an immediate confidence boost from the first few easy ones, then the intermediate ones require more thought, and if you really get stuck, there are discussions about how to solve some of the problems. Usually you have to think algorithmically, not just write code, and some problems might just be harder for you to understand because you haven’t done as much work in that area. I won’t say it’s a complete look at algorithms—there’s a whole other course on strings if I recall, but it’s a good start.

Also, here’s my cheat to pass those employer questions — if they let you use JS, do EVERYTHING you can with ES6 Map and Set classes. Folks rarely look at the code and don’t care if you’re using for loops or advanced classes, but it’s way easier to use a Set than to worry about how many times you have to loop over some result to reduce duplication, or sort things, or what have you. If you need a unique sorted set, there are faster algorithms, but a simple (new Set(arr.sort())) gets the job done, because Set is insertion-ordered by default and any native JS function is generally faster than you writing your own code, so it’s impossible to mark this solution as wrong unless you exclude native functions (but who does that?). A bonus tip, if you need to figure out the difference between sets, just get creative with .filter and .map. There’s not much to memorize beyond that because there’s not much advanced functionality, just building blocks flexible enough to do anything, relatively expressively. https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/ch_sets.html#missing-se...

A follow up, if ES6 JS doesn’t come easy to you — pick a language you like best and look for its equivalents to Set, Map, .filter (or select) and .map (or collect). Bonus tip, look for .find or .first, to short circuit looping and stop at the first thing that matches. Yes, you can memorize for loops or why one thing is more efficient than another, but if you start with Set and Map where each makes sense, you’ll solve 80-90% of algorithm questions pretty easily and usually in a way that’s straightforward to read and understand later, especially if you start naming some of your functions to make them a bit easier to read. (Like naming selectors in Redux...)

If writing SQL as part of a quiz, learn the different joins because usually the question is worded in a way where picking the correct join will deliver huge performance benefits by reducing how much data you’re going through or making things more efficient than looping through multiple subqueries. Left vs Inner vs Right vs Outer vs Cross... remember that the less data the server has to go through (the fewer records in the earliest sub query), the faster everything will run, in these quiz scenarios. Yes, in real life how you store data matters, what you index, but it’s rare you’ve any control over the index or schema in these tests.

Agreed, but as OP was alluding to lots of people need solid business logic written that doesn’t have to hyperscale. Just lame that all the shovel-sharing apps interview as if they want to process petabytes of requests :)

I'm taking the princeton algorithms 1 course now, and it is proving helpful. It has automatic online grading and is free.

The only gripe I have is that at the end of the day, the litmus test for whether or not I'll pass an interview really is leetcode.com

While the coursera course is great, and provides fundamentals I'm clearly lacking ... It's tangential to the actual solving of these riddles.

> These fucking algorithms are killing me, and making me have a hard realization that maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Yea, I've built shit... but you know what... anyone could.

I wouldn't get too discouraged about this: they couldn't - not necessarily anything of value anyway.

I've worked enough places now where the product the business is built on was written by somebody who wasn't necessarily a great programmer, yet this "bad"[1] code is the foundation of the company's success and may be the sole reason they're able to pay me.

You can build a really successful business on really "shitty" tech.

[1] Inefficient, non-scalable, hard to follow, poorly architected, spaghetti code - call it what you will.

I have news for you:

You can study for technical interviews and get good at doing them. "Cracking the coding interview" is a good start, then there is interviewing.io and other resources.

You can learn to be good at that shit with a bit of practice. You're probably not dumb.

Well, I'm currently taking the Algorithms 1 (Princeton) course on Coursera, while tackling as many problems on leetcode.com as I can. I purchased a Premium subscription on leetcode.com.

I'm just finding that my progress is SLOW. Like, I look around and it seems like everyone can find all these creative solutions to problems... meanwhile, I'm lucky if I can solve the brute force solution.

i'm going to be honest with you - if you wrote an app that has never crashed or had a single downtime yet is infinitely/auto scalable based on load, it is either extremely simple, you are a legitimate genius, or you exaggerated. there is just so much that can go wrong there that i'm skeptical, ergo i'm skeptical of other things you wrote.

however, if what you said is generally true, then it's obvious you have some skills gluing stuff together. news flash: this is what a large fraction of people in this industry do on the day to day, it's just that nobody wants to admit it. 90% of my previous software engineering jobs was just figuring out how to get things to talk to each other.

key for you i think will be spinning your skills in a way that makes you attractive.

you'd seem like a good fit as a consultant. clients generally don't care about how you'd write a string matching algorithm from scratch and what the theoretical runtime is in theta notation - they typically appreciate contributions, on deadlines, and clear communication. they pay you to figure out how to make stuff work on a schedule you mutually agree to, and you either give them that and get paid, or don't and don't. put up or shut up, so to speak.

so i'd start there. you have a large pool of knowledge, so just pick whatever interests you the most. then what you think you should get paid per hour, and triple it.

expect 80% to not follow up on leads and 80% to reject your schedule/hourly rate/etc. sort of like interviewing, but at least you're not stooping down to a level of desperation. keep your head up: your skills are worth a large amount of $, so don't take it personally, and don't reduce it just to get scrub-tier work/wages - unless you're legitimately broke, but hopefully after so much working you've got some sort of cushion.

I've thought about consulting before, and my wife actually thinks it's the "right" thing for me (given my recent anger/frustration over the "online assessments" aka algorithm study).

The problem is I'm just not onboard with all the struggles that come with having to find clients, maintain clients, etc. I appreciate (and value) the security and consistency that comes from more-or-less knowing you will have a paycheck next week.

My skillset also lends well (I think?) to a technical manager, or even CTO position at a SMALL company. I certainly know of some great tools, how to glue them all together, and how to do so really quickly. Yet how one makes the jump from "Senior Software Engineer" to fucking CTO is beyond me. I'm not even sure where one would search for CTO jobs. And I'm 32 so, not exactly young but, not quite what you think of when you think of upper management...

The point is - I get your point. Maybe I shouldn't be killing myself with these algorithms. Maybe I should lean into things I'm better at and market myself, gain clients, etc.

I switched to Math from CS at my university specifically because of this. Although the CS field does emphasize a lot of theory, having a more general theoretical background greatly helps with picking up new engineering fields as a hobby.

IMHO the main reason people feel stupid about algorithms and the like is the progress isn't as clear and as linear. I wasn't good starting out. Coursera is great, and probably the most flexible and least frustrating way to expand your skill set.

I’m currently prepping for these kind of questions and “online assessments” as well. I have accepted that my worth as a developer is in most part going to be dictated by how diligently I can game this glorified IQ test.

There are common patterns to these questions and I’ve found that they get more predictable after having done 50-100 of them, with very careful attentiveness to what your mind is coming up with to solve them. All these questions can only vary so much in how they are asked, and unfortunately we just have to do use repetition by numbers to enforce better pattern recognition.

So I recently switched up my approach on leetcode.com to optimize for this naturally.

What I was doing initially was:

I sorted their entire problems database for the most frequently asked questions. Started at the top, and worked my way down.

The problem with this method is that each question can be quite different from the last. Your first question might be an arrays / sliding-window question. The next is a dynamic programming problem. The next stacks. After that, union-find / connected components.

The point is each problem would end up sufficiently different from the previous one that in a given day, or over the course of a few days, you weren't practicing the same (or roughly the same) type of problem.

So as of literally TODAY I've changed my approach to sort the list by TYPE of problem. I will then focus on a specific type (per their categorization) for ~X number of problems (to be determined).

The hope is that by sticking to a specific category of problems, I'll be able to actually learn the commonalities within those problem sets.

voilà

To you and any other developers that feel this way, there are plenty of companies out there, big and small that need your skills. FWIW, developers that know how to buckle down and do work are so important to a lot of un-sexy businesses, but especially on a project basis. Ever thought of working as a consultant? Or just doing part time technology work/advisory for several small businesses? It's riskier than a salary, but the work is much more deterministic than it is novel.

edit: clarity

> Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough

I just want to mention that this isn't an industry-wide problem. It is a cultural problem that tends to be concentrated in a few geographic areas and a few specific sectors of the industry.

You might benefit from taking a step back and considering a substantial change without leaving the industry entirely -- to a new geographic area, or a new sector of the industry.

Also, there is quite a lot of very interesting and well-paying dev work in businesses that aren't IT-related. They often have difficulty finding top notch talent, and as a result will pay well and be thrilled to have you.

name these industries please!

That would be a rather lengthy list, as devs are needed in most industries. But here are a handful (not an exhaustive list) that exist in my area: trucking, railroads, banking, major retailers and wholesalers, hospitals. I'm not talking about bean-counting software here, either.

The single best software dev job I ever had was not working for a software house. It was working in a neurscience lab on applications ranging from software that ran custom experimental equipment all the way through writing software that emulated biological neural networks.

I’ve got one and a half feet out the door of a well known fruit company, after going through a half dozen re-orgs in 4 months, in an infrastructure org that has an overtly sexist management chain (down to 1 female manager in a 600+ person org).

I’ve reported these concerns to the HR team, but they’ve been completely unresponsive, which makes sense seeing as their job is to protect corporate interests rather than employees, as is the case with all HR teams.

It’s been over 10% attrition in the last few months, and we’re two weeks away from annual bonus payouts. I sense a mass exodus coming as soon as that happens.

I hate all of my jobs. Computer programming just doesn't seem worth it for 100-120k. I could work an easier job for a better money/bullshit ratio. My therapist is concerned. So am I.

What if I don't fit in anywhere? I'm extremely sensitive with a high EQ, am an INTP. People really like me, and I make fast friends and can run a room extremely effectively. I've always been "the funny guy."

I'm absurdly driven A-type and I go crazy if I can't hack and distinguish myself through my natural work ethic and intellect.

I do EXCELLENT at both the interpersonal and implementation part of software engineering. I've never had a bad review.

I've fucked my career up while actively trying to build my resume. I thought building a successful start up would help my resume. It doesn't. Nobody cares. People want to pay me the same mediocre pay for a harder job five years later. They want to see Google and an ivy league on the resume.

I don't know what to do anymore. After 10 years and a 4 year degree, I'm totally lost as to what to do next.

Create multiple income streams. Build a product not a startup. Learn, earn, grow.

I don't know you, but it doesn't sound like programming is the problem. 100-120k is objectively a lot of money and it sounds like you're comparing yourself to others who have shinier jobs and higher salaries. Maybe it would be healthy to focus less on accomplishment/prestige and more on enjoyment.

if this is all true, the obvious answer is consulting. the non-obvious answer is developer advocacy/evangelism. when you search for "developer advocacy", it's all "what do DAs do?". it's sales, but targeted at developers. developers don't like BS, so how do you sell to developers? show them how to build cool shit and make their lives easier. finding a niche is great, since you are no longer as replaceable. but DA roles will only work if you're realistic about your standards, other peoples' levels and standards, and you're truly empathetic, and don't have a chip on your shoulder.

What are the easier jobs with a better pay ratio? Programming (at least as an IC) is already really easy/rote most of the time...

Please give me a way to contact you. I’m roughly in the same position you are.

Money/bullshit ratio made me chuckle.

I feel like I'm 5 years into what you are describing. From time to time I start to get that lost feeling too these days.

In my mind I have it mapped out that I only really have to do this another 8 or so years.

Then just go on whatever the hell journey seems the most interesting once finances are no longer the main priority.

But during that 8 year trek I struggle with "now that side projects and learning new tech are no longer fun by default, how do I make them fun because otherwise the fact that they completely consume 100% of my free time sometimes makes me mildly depressed."

What about academics? If you're insanely driven and want to distinguish yourself, you could do well there. You sound like professors I have had, funny and engaging and always driving for the next Grant or paper. The CS at my decent state school was total garb, they are still stuck on Java and PHP, my worst professor there is now dept chair because they have no good options. You'd do tremendous good in academics, or hell even in non profits or open source.

If you're driven for distinction and excellence and a middling level of income and wealth is ok, I think the impact could be big!

This isn't nearly as bad as the others here but recently our scrum master came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively over pointing stories because apparently it looks so bad to management if you don't complete something within it's estimate.

A week later I finished something early and was instructed to not bring anything else into the sprint because, you know, visibility is more important than actually being productive.

I get that deadlines and metrics are important. And I get that managers/mgmt will never see eye to eye with developers about how long stuff takes. But this is just sheer idiocy, encouraging doing the bare minimum and a culture of fear instead of rewarding good work. If I actually told the next up the chain about it, they'd absolutely sweep it under the rug.

So yeah I'm interviewing looking to go somewhere way, way smaller at this point.

Fuck my job. I make more money than ever but a bunch of chodes want to meet all day. I do NOT like meetings. Pairing is a NIGHTMARE. I’m a hardcore sysadmin, let’s debug some drivers. Instead we run php web apps where I can’t grep.

Today was really close to it. I'm a team leader and I texted my boss in the morning that I'm sick today, he called me 10 minutes later asking me how I feel, and also telling me there is an alert in production, asking me if I saw it, and asking if I talked to my team members to check this. My throat hurts and I have fever, so no, I didn't do it.. I feel that I need to hold his hand with anything and if I'm sick he can't handle anything alone. 2 hours later he called me again, just wanting to ask a "small question" that a sales guy had, regarding the product. My boss is the VP of engineering.. I really don't understand how he got this job, he can't handle anything alone and don't have empathy for his employees when they are sick.

Silence your phone, let it go to voicemail. When he asks why you didn't answer, say "I was sick with a fever and a sore throat. I didn't answer my phone because I was sleeping, trying to get better."

I won't tell tales about my current employer, but I'll tell the one about my previous one (without naming them).

I left because the code base for their main product was incredibly bad. Brittle, opaque, undocumented, buggy, and virtually unmaintainable.

That alone wouldn't have been a dealbreaker as long as the company saw the problem and we were working to fix the situation. That wasn't what was happening, though, because the Big Boss didn't agree that there was a problem at all, even though literally every dev was telling him so. He saw any effort to improve the code quality as a waste of time and money.

So, I had to leave in part because it was a terrible working condition, and in part because I didn't want my personal professional reputation to be damaged by being associated with that project.

Always be refactoring - work that shit into the ticket.

Yeah, that was my intention when I saw what I had to work with. But it was also specifically prohibited.

How do you prohibit making code better?

> for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change

And all that jazz...

Was your boss a super dev reading the code and calling out if it looked better?

> How do you prohibit making code better?

By instituting a "minimal change" rule. No code changes were allowed for general refactoring. If you're fixing a bug, only the bare minimum changes to address it were allowed.

If fairness, the rule was not entirely irrational. It was very difficult to make changes that didn't break stuff all over the place, and "minimal change" helped to reduce the short-term risk.

This did allow some refactoring to get sneaked in, of course -- sometimes a bug required rearchitecting code, which comes with the opportunity to refactor. And if you're adding a new feature, the new code can be properly done.

> Was your boss a super dev reading the code and calling out if it looked better?

Pretty much. He was involved in all code reviews. He single-handedly wrote the initial implementation, and I believe that he took any criticism of it, overt or implied, as a personal attack.

The truly scary part of this (for me) is that this is an enterprise product that is pretty widely used by major corporations in system-critical deployments.

If you actually want to be fired, find a new job and quit.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to take responsibility for your part in a toxic relationship. Don't wait for other people to make your life decisions for you.

Before anyone starts in with the "but there aren't better opportunities"--if that's really true, you don't want to be fired, so what I'm saying doesn't apply to you.

I've been working as a developer at a shitty company with no mentorship or room to grow for 2 years. My co-workers are obnoxious, loud sales people which drives me insane. I've tried my best to get out but due to visa constraints/random shit I've not been able to find anything.

I sure hope this format doesn't take off.

Having worked as a dishwasher, line cook, pool manager, business analyst, software engineer, and startup founder, I have to say software engineer was, by far, the most coddled job.

How about this:

I'm a line cook, and I can't afford to be fired. I make minimum wage, and burn or cut myself badly at least once per week. I'm not allowed to take the day off and have to work through it. I work 8 hours nonstop above a very hot grill. I can't see any windows during my entire shift. Nobody respects me. My coworkers are alcoholics.

Edit: of course this doesn't mean software engineers shouldn't work to improve their well-being at work! Yeesh. Just adding some perspective. Earlier in life, I would have killed to have 95% of the work situations described below.

I'm sure there are worse jobs than line cook.

If someone would provide a description of a worse job, would that invalidate your argument in the same way you tried to invalidate OPs argument?

Of course not. And there are better jobs than software engineer. However, I do believe it's possible to stack rank jobs, and Software Engineer must be in the top quintile in terms of quality of work-life.

Because it's a cozy job in the US? Software Engineers face horrible working conditions in a lot of parts of Asia, far worse than your line cook example.

Got evidence?

There's the whole 996 culture in China, for one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

What argument was made?

People at all ranges of life experience have authentic concerns.

Listening can be hard, because, yes, we might hear stories of things that seem, well, entitled. That’s ok. Perhaps people that take too much for granted can reassess by putting their stories out and getting feedback?

Yes, that would be constructive. My fear is that often, these threads devolve into devs enabling each other's entitlement rather than illuminating it.

Well put, and yes that is definitely a risk. As a software developer myself though, I find these stories to be a good learning opportunity.

I'm a third world sweathop worker. I was forced to make clothes here ever since I could walk. There are hundreds of people packed in to this tiny windowless room, and every time there is a fire I die. My coworkers can't even afford alcohol. Every time I hear decadent American line cooks complain about their working conditions, all I can think is, they have it so easy.

Get off the internet and back to work!

Yes, this illuminates the point even better. Software devs are among the best treated first world employees. In a global perspective, most (but not all) complaints are laughable.

Stop complaining, there are starving children in Africa!

I like your dark humour. Can you please give me reading material for the next year ? Ideally your most recommended books on _life_.

I agree with you that line cook is a very hard job and I have nothing but respect for all the workers out there facing daily harsh conditions.

Having said that, I also understand that mental problems caused by stress at work, the abuse and pressure some intellectual workers face is as real and dangerous, however is less visible.

That's why I think that people reading this should not underestimate those dangers and look for a change from those conditions regardless of whether they come from mental or physical sides of our jobs.

Honestly, I've done a lot of jobs, some manual, some not, went to university, all of it. Anything that pays well is easy compared to a job that pays shit. The possibility that a missed shift means missing rent and potentially being homeless is far more stressful than any amount of mental 'abuse' or physical strain.

I did not mean to compare different level of hardships people can face. What I mean is that when someone feels pain and suffering they should look for a change whenever it is possible, regardless of the outside perception of their position. Do you agree?

Sure, whenever possible. I don't agree with abusive workplaces. But from my personal perspective, there's a certain amount of shit I'm willing to take and it's based on how much I get paid.

If the pay's the same, I'll take a happier environment 10/10 times.

> Anything that pays well is easy compared to a job that pays shit.

There are always exceptions to this rule:

https://time.com/4487297/high-paying-jobs-personality/

Edit- consider newly graduated investment bankers, medical residents, junior lawyers. There are some very well paying professions that operate under extremely stressful situations.

Another problem - it is common for HN users (myself included) to have their account expressly linked to their own name. Obviously it would be disastrous if one's current employer found out about a rant like those in this thread.

Even if the user can't trivially be linked to their name, these stories can get so specific that if someone else from the company read it, they would know the writer.

I think there is room to recognize that line cooks don’t get treated as well as software engineers while also discussing unfair treatment of workers in any field. Abuse of software engineers is not unimportant simply because other workers have it worse. We as wage workers can work in solidarity with others to fight abusive labor conditions in all fields. Absolutely the service workers need representation and fair treatment and the situation for service workers is far more urgent, but that doesn’t mean we should not discuss the plight of software engineers as well. All workers should be free from exploitation.

Yes, good point. There should be room for any field to advocate for improving their collective well-being.

I still hope this type of thread doesn't catch on. The comments here skew negative and entitled, in my opinion.

There are certain anonymous communities and subreddits where IT workers come together to complain, attack, or boast in very toxic ways, and it is understandable to be concerned about a similar situation arising. That said, any industry, even the well-paying, can have room for awful, nonsensical, and oppressive working conditions. Why would you deprive people the chance to commiserate with each other? You don't know the extent of their suffering.

You realize one of the most popular to level comments is about someone who is 18 amd working on modernizing an old DOS HIPAA app alone and not allowed to use version control and is being advised by people to quit ASAP because HIPAA laws mean they might be personally liable for some violations and face prison time?

Suddenly, your line cook job doesn't sound so bad. Maybe we should just accept that every job might have circumstances that make it a bad place to be, and judge on the details rather than the title.

I would much rather be cut and burned than personally liable in a suit that could ruin the rest of my life.

Contrasting point - I dislike the thought that folks who've "got it good" should just stay quiet and never complain because they are much better off than others. To me, this is immoral and ineffective.

Everyone in a shitty position has a right to speak up. You're absolutely right that some people cannot exercise that right - they can't risk losing what they have. That is unfair to every single person in that situation (and personally, I find this to be a shameful reflection on the world).

But using that to justify that other workers should stay quiet is equally wrong. It's using something wrong happening to one group of people to justify something wrong happening to another group. Even if you don't believe the moral reasoning, there's the pragmatic angle - this attitude leads to overall worse employee treatment. If 'better off' workers are shamed into not discussing poor treatment (because they should be embarrassed complaining about such trivialities), then minor poor treatment is allowed to escalate unchecked.

In my opinion, a better approach overall is to think "all of us have some rights, including good treatment by an employer and a right to a life not straddled by anxiety or debt". Anyone crusading against that is on the same side.

I don't believe developers have no right to complain.

I only hope these types of threads don't become a habit. It promotes a mentality of negativity, in my opinion. It's not constructive for the industry, I don't think.

This is the first thread of this type I've seen on the front page. I don't see any reason it'll be a "habit".

Yes, software engineers are generally well-off, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of people in our field who work in toxic environments, or have an over-demanding manager, or feel like they have no potential to grow in their current role, or have mental health issues that are exacerbated by stressful and isolating working conditons, to name a few possible issues. And I'm sure many of those people are hesitant to try to change this situation because they are well-compensated and work in a nice office building. So if a thread like this could nudge them to take that first step, then I'm all for it.

The number of upvotes and comments is an indicator that enough people feel or have felt this way for this thread to be worthwhile.

This type of thread helps us looking for pain points in the industry to be solved. The targeted market research is extremely valuable.

> Contrasting point - I dislike the thought that folks who've "got it good" should just stay quiet and never complain because they are much better off than others. To me, this is immoral and ineffective.

I like to say "Just because other people have it worse doesn't mean my problems aren't problems." I think the argument of "other people have it worse" is very dehumanizing. To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in that suffering (to provide a cliche). Can we just accept that problems are problems and they should be solved, even if trivial? I'm all for finding logistically which ones should be tackled first, but I don't think that commonly applies here.

Agree with what you're saying but it's quite easy for this thread to become an unironic mirror of Silicon Valley. A bunch of folks complaining that the free food at work isn't vegan or that they aren't making humanity better with their CRUD app.

I don't see how a thread around that helps. We already know that more than most other professions, software engineers have options when moving jobs. If you want to be fired, let your boss know.

> or that they aren't making humanity better with their CRUD app.

Feeling like your work isn't positively impacting the world is a very common, completely valid complaint, and isn't specific to "Silicon Valley" at all.

What's your problem with people talking about whether their work feels worthwhile? Why is that any less important of a conversation to have than all the other chatter that goes on here?

It also says something very human. That people want to make the world a better place. I do not understand a complaint against those that are seeking work that is more meaningful and beneficial to humanity. Isn't that exactly the type of work that we (as ... humans...) should be encouraging?

> A bunch of folks complaining that the free food at work isn't vegan or that they aren't making humanity better with their CRUD app.

Is there any evidence that people are doing that in this thread?

At a big firm: Good luck getting in on the first round of volunteer layoffs. They always seem to deny developers.

At a startup: My options vest after 4 years. The company can remove my options if I quit or I have to buy these options now at crazy valuation and hope the company goes public quickly before the next round dilutes my shares further.

> _Everyone in a shitty position has a right to speak up._

Yep. But they _don't_ have the right to make anyone else care. Say whatever you want about your own problems, but if your situation is comparatively better, then don't expect people to give a damn. And complaining is not without risk. It's not uncommon to make your situation _even worse_ by speaking out when your problems are comparatively light.

Speaking up in a situation where those who take notice want to help you, that's real courage. Speaking up such that those who notice don't care, that's just whining. The only significant difference is how others interpret your situation, and the primary factor is how your problems compare to others.

And you're right, that's not fair. Sorry.

I also wouldnt like to be fired again (me as a programmer); the prospect of doing job interviews again and again scares the shit out of me. I have this suspicion that the interview ritual was invented once upon a time, a long time ago by management as a means to cuddle the ego of a local alpha geek.

Look up the story of Aline Lerner. Consider that, whatever you think about your situation, she was probably thinking similar things, and despite that, she’s always been one of the most interesting people in her class at MIT, even when she was in your job, especially then. And look at you, first post in the most popular thread right now. You have physical hardships, no doubt, but there is an existential interest that you’ve piqued here. Well-paid software engineers may struggle with the banality of irrelevance, boredom and disconnection with their fellow man. I once met a girl on a plane that told me that the most important thing you can know about life is that nobody has it better than you. Nobody. Interestingly, whether it’s true or not, you have nothing to gain by believing otherwise.

Most of us are adults, I don't see how staking out moral tentposts adds anything to this discussion. I was enjoying the stories from the community.

Nobody should feel guilty for being unhappy in their job and wanting to talk about. Trying to make someone feel guilty about it is the same kind of thing an abusive employer does to abused workers.

Yes but that job is easy to execute, and there is no risk of falling behind and one day not knowing how to do the job because things evolved so quickly and you slacked off on weekends instead of trying to keep up. Additionally, it's not a job that in order to do better requires you to isolate yourself more and more. The better code you want to write, the more you need to practice, which may mean more hours alone. This pace kills your social life much quicker than many other lines of work, imho. Just saying it's really more subjective than anything else, not to mention all the other possible variables which combined make it hard to say whether any line of work is harder/easier than some other one.

I've worked minimum wage jobs like that. Yet it was at my last, professional job that overwork and pressure to travel in unsafe conditions led to me crashing my car into a tree and almost dying.

Get off your high horse.

can you elaborate on the meaning behind your username?

I once worked for a company that was purchased and we were tasked with signing new employment papers for the new owner.

When HR asked why I still have not signed the papers, I said it was forthcoming and BTW, can I collect unemployment if I don't? Mysteriously enough, half hour later I get an email from the CTO. :) So I told him I want to get laid off since the company was terrible. He promised to fix thing, but of course nothing happened and I ended up quitting anyways a few months later.

Rewind to 1996 or so. I was around 20 and living in Reno NV at the time and was really good at fixing computers. There were a number of local mom and pop computer shops, and I needed a job. A working interview consisted of 10 breakfix cases inside of a day. They'd have been happy with me handling 5. I was hired. I was confident that I'd do a good job for them.

The first sign that there was a problem was when the guy who also interviewed that day got hired. If you go back that far, you might remember that there were two piece power headers on motherboards. If you didn't install them correctly (with the ground wires in the center) and forced them the wrong direction, you'd let out the magic smoke. Somehow they thought hiring the guy who made that mistake was a good idea.

The first week wasn't so bad, but then the bullying started. Verbal abuse. Name calling. Giving me nickname that they'd use to remind me of every mistake I made. Harassing me over mistakes I made to the point that I wanted to cry. If I didn't know something that they knew, even if I couldn't be expected to, I was berated and treated like an idiot. I was young, and so badly needed that job because I was living with my grandparents at the time and they made it clear that I was to get on my own ASAP. They were kind, and didn't kick me out (and it wasn't threatened) but I wanted to be a Good Boy and Do The Right Thing. But it wasn't easy.

Then there was the shop talk. Sometimes they'd talk about work, but most of the time it was talking about strippers and drugs. I was in a shop full of coke addicts.

8 weeks in, I was let go. I was never more glad to be fired from a job in my life.

My team runs a mission critical application nearly all of us were duped into supporting. Ops engineering turned into "process champion" and now I yell at people about ticket structure (bane of my existence) instead of diagnosing db performance issues (things I gleefully lose sleep over.) Now I question my passion for IT daily, fall asleep at lunch and wait for the day I do bad enough to be fired.

Happened to me a couple of times. The common denominator in all cases is managers and an organization preferring opinions over facts. The last case took three months to reach that point. During that I had to manage a serious raw material shortage situation everybody tried as hard as possible to ignore. After three months that wasn't possible anymore and all of a sudden the business decided it was up to me find a solution, prioritize customers and markets and it was also me who was responsible for sales to miss their targets due to that raw material shortage. That the root cause was a force majeure incident at a single source supplier, we were most likely in a dominant market position and the global market for the raw material was empty didn't matter. The last straw was my new manager who insisted to provide numbers impossible to extract from the ERP system and present numbers I knew were wrong simply because they showed that there was no problem. Also he directly said that apparently I was incapable of doing my job. The day after that I quit.

I took a role which relates to a strategic goal aligned with correctness of data held. Its public-trust information. From time to time, pragmatism around "can't we just change this record..." makes my blood boil: Its explicitly not what I took the role to do: fixing pragmatic bad choices time after time, makes me want to go do something else, when the intent was to defend a line of historical accuracy and completeness.

The agency is a community benefit NFP, consensus led policy. The decisions we take off-policy worry me intensely. But realistically not all things can be done by consensus. I do think there are some pressures in this space which are similar to the above: if your own moral compass and how the enterprise is driving don't align well, you really need to talk to yourself about why you are doing things. (I am not so far mis-aligned i have this problem, but I have in the past)

Friends left e.g. the IETF, precisely because of this. If you can't adhere to the norms, you need to ask why you're going.

Probably any founder of an acquired startup with vesting acceleration REALLY wants to be fired (without cause):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/05/30/what...

Not sure why you got voted down, the US has very poor protections for employees when a company is taken over.

You might have wanted to use "redundant" and not "fired" or "laid off" as these have quite different meanings in labour law.

In a previous job I got very close to a ‘them or me’ ultimatum. Then I got over it. Then we all got laid off.

Nobody. Perhaps you want to be laid off when you know your employer may be about to lay off some employees, you'll have an easy time finding a new gig, and the severance will be nice. But if you want to quit, then quit, and whatever else you do, don't get yourself fired for cause, ever.

Recently, the business I’ve been working for the last few months, threw me in a project where I (and my whole team really) ended up realizing that they didn’t even understand what the problem was. Specifically, I had to develop an integration with our system and an external provider but we ended up realizing that our system wasn’t even close to being integrated with this provider. So what we thought it would be a few months work, we started hitting walls on every step and realizing that it was just impossible, at least based on our initial assumptions. The project ended up stale after working on it for three months, I ended up being completely demotivated and eventually quitting the company for what I thought an incapable executive layer for taking business decisions.

Working on 20+ years of bandaids on an MFC C++ ERP Application with no documentation and some crazy ass shit going on. The goal make it a 'web app'... The corporate office is constantly waging political fights between management. We can't get anything done. Stymied.

This gets my vote for worst technical situation.

* three planning layers

* no reasonable reaction on devastating feedback

* purely numbers driven. Ignoring tech debt and creativity

* no new recruits in years

* not honoring experienced programmers

* no working creative process to bring the product to the next level

* naive and reactional cargo culting

I have great colleagues. Workload is usually fine, except too many topic on the table. We have quite a lot freedom how to handle things, but not so much about the what. Our tech management is quite horrible. The top manager has unsolved conflicts with the majority of coders. Mostly because he has no idea about tech and never gives reasonable feedback. Fluctuation is currently extreme and I will be leaving soon with only 2 tech people remaining that have been there long term.

Our company has the potential to break the 1bn threshold next decade, just to give an idea about the scale.

I thought this was a counter-thread to the Who wants to be hired one lol

lol, made me laugh.

It is.

Organization I work for is in experimental phase about what roles would be more efficient, last December I switched to be a DevOps from Software Engineer role, partly because of "Organizational Needs". but now, they want to move all the DevOps into a room extracting them out of their Scrum Teams, and they've asked few guys (including me) to be "Multi-Functional" which I don't get it.

as they're moving backwards from what really DevOps means, I want to move out as I fail to see any outcomes of this move which will turn out to be good for either of us.

also, if I start back up with Development I'll be treated as a Junior developer and will be shoved to work on non-interesting parts of the project.

I worked for a startup that was only founder and myself at the beginning. I took responsibility to build the product, the company grew from us two to 24 in 3 years.

At some point he invited manipulative manager into the team who had a very bad habit of making friends with people by badmouthing other people. Founder did not want to read these signs until the point that manager got private phone line with investors and started badmouthing founder and everyone else. Half year later founder was fired, that manager took over. Soon after I was told off, but I was on my way out anyways after I found him shouting at his subordinates. Anyways this was way too long after I was stripped off from any voice in the company.

I was hired to write firmware but we lack hardware for me to run and if we do get it the hardware people are too overloaded to build it for me. As a result I have no hardware to test my code against and I'm constantly shooting in the dark.

I've quit a couple of places. If the management is incompetent or just out of their depth; if they company can't make good use of my skills and talents.

I'm an outlier, but I've been homeless and I have no wife nor children to support, so I don't fear just quitting if any BS comes up.

My advice, FWIW, is to always have your "FU" money.

(Money is a technology, here's a good simple manual: "The Richest Man in Babylon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28... )

raises hand I'm a freelancer in the position of an interim department head. I've never had such ungrateful and hard to work with team members. Somehow the people above me and around me want to keep them. On top of that, getting anything done with other departments is like pulling teeth. Of course I'm judged on how much I get done, which means that I end up doing a lot of the work myself. Sometimes I wonder if it's all my fault but that doesn't help me either. I just want out but the money is too good.

I think I do, though not for the reason everyone else seems to be posting. Like I do hate my job, like most people do but that's not why.

I think it would force me to get out of my comfort zone, find something new to be excited about. I'm pretty sure I'm to comfortable at the job I hate. I guess it would be interesting to see what I end up doing without work sucking up time. Maybe ill find time to be excited about programming again. Maybe get good at something that I want to be good at.

I just recently left a startup that was giving me Theranos vibes.

The founder seemed far more interested in attending conferences and becoming a "thought leader" in the industry than actually building the product and the company. I'd consider myself as someone who enjoys working in a startup setting with ambiguity and the opportunity to shape the product vision. But there never seemed to be any effort to try to resolve the ambiguity.

Instead, we had major problems with secrecy/lack of communication and the inability to be honest with the current state of the product. A lot of people in the company (including myself) tried to introduce some rigor and establish common ground, but none of us were successful.

And honestly, this felt like it was by-design. Every employee was only privy to understanding part of the problem and only the founder held all the cards. My opinions would frequently be superseded by "you're wrong because you only understand the user side, not the customer side" while my colleague who worked on sales/business-development would hear the opposite.

At a certain point, it just felt like an uphill battle with the founder that was no longer worth the debating and shouting. Any effort to measure efficacy was dismissed. No one could actually articulate the problem we were trying to solve, how our product solves it, and whether or not it was effective.

It's a real shame because on paper the domain and vision of the company is exactly what I'd want to focus my career on, but this was starting to feel more like a shell of a startup than an actual one.

After 8 hours total interviewing at one company, I kinda feel like I was hired and fired in a single day

WOW! That would very exhausting.. is this norm these days to have full day interview sessions?

Definitely not

As someone who spent 5 months interviewing, studying, applying, tech screening, full-day-onsiting, healing from rejection, washing and repeating

Definitely yes, majority will do full day interviews and reject you because you can't write on a white board.

A couple years ago I had TWO full-day interview sessions with a single company. That I had to take time off of my then-current job to attend. After a one-hour phone screen. Who ended up not hiring me anyway.

Unless the position was for serious fuck you money and I really needed it, there's no way in hell I would tolerate 2 full day interviews.

I'm also guilty for spending lots of after work days studying for jobs I really wanted and getting rejected but at least I didn't burn any of my precious vacation days.

I fell prey to the “sunk cost” fallacy - after the first full day when they asked me to come back, I thought: a) it would be a shame to “waste” that first full day of interviewing by saying no now and b) surely nobody would be a big enough asshole to ask me to take two full days off of work to interview with them only to reject me after the second day, so surely this second day is just a formality.

Apparently I was wrong.

And no, it was just a regular programming job, nothing special.

I have found that lightly pushing back on such requests makes them value you a little more. Doesn't matter too much since they should've valued you in the first place. I've had a couple processes expedited in this way, sometimes skipping a call here or there or changing a second onsite to a call.

As much as it sucks, it sounds like you dodged a bullet on that one.

I've done about 3 of these kinds of "interviews" in my career.. basically a small work for hire each. Didn't get the jobs.. but took great joy in checking in on each of these companies after 6 months to find they no longer existed.

My gf interviewed at google from 8am to 2:30pm (after 2 half-hour to hour-long phone screens).

Northrop Grumman had a (wasteful) 8 hour "college day" that was an hour of technical interviews, 4 hours of propaganda, and 2 hours of arbitrary fluff like team building games among the applicants.

The ~5 or so on-sites I've had apart from NG were 2-4 hours.

Told the last Google recruiter that contacted me "No, I've been through your interview process once years ago, I'm not subjecting myself to that again."

I got my current job after a brief phone screen and a one hour in-person interview. It came with a big pay increase and the smartest people I've worked with so far.

I'm not sure why so many companies insist on the days-long torture interviews (I've been through several), but I know they're not necessary to find good people.

Facebook wasted loads of my time before I even got onsite, with several shared-screen coding phone interviews spread over a month. Each time I would solve all the problems and get to working code but a week later they would ask me to do another interview.

I got reasons like "the interviewer quit without submitting his feedback" or "interviewer said he had hard time understanding your voice on the phone" (I'm a native english speaker and interviewer was not), or "interviewer lost his notes", etc. Maybe my code just sucks and they were lying but I don't think so. It took so long to get through that stage to the onsite that I felt like I'd already worked there.

I'm interviewing for the first time in years, totally forgot how degrading it is. For one company had 1 interview/week (each relatively short) for 4 weeks, passed the technical (my third interview) and then the 4th/final interview I was asked 95% the same questions that were asked in the 2nd interview. I gave the same answers. And then I was turned down.

At least you got an answer. I was searching (being picky) for almost a year. I got through numerous phone screens and in-persons where I confirmed the timeline before leaving (ie. you're going to make a decision on 'X' day and notify candidates) and the dickheads just straight tried to ghost me. I persisted until I got an answer, even if it was one I didn't like because you owe your applicants a goddamn answer either way.

My favorite is when you apply for a job and you get there and magically the job title/responsibilities have changed. It's like, y'all don't even know what you're looking for… get bent.

Recently went through something similar with a fairly well known tech company. I was told after nearly a whole day of workshops and interviews that I didn't make the cut. Was called back 3 months later and asked if I'd be interested in another role, organised an interview and the company cancelled it the night before.

I'm out the door pretty soon if I'm alone in dealing with a bully or an insecure pr$&k who builds himself up by putting putting you and others down.

Two years ago I reported a female colleague whom I witnessed being harassed. After reporting it I was harassed by different employee ..nothing came from reporting my harassment and so I left. That place was terrible and no longer exists.

Overall There's too many jobs out there in our field to have deal with b.s. and stress.

Had a job working for an online gardening shop, where I was on minimum wage and despite being a junior I was probably one of the more switched on devs there (I had to convince everyone to use a git when joining, previously they edited files directly via SFTP on the prod oscommerce site that had not been updated in 6 or so years and had lots of config.php.2009.barry.bak type shit going on).

Someone not in the IT department went around our back (held us in disdain because we pushed back with his silly demands and deadlines) and got an outsourced team to build us a solution to replace our proprietary accounting software, which needed to tap into the accounting software's MSSQL db, and our ageing OSCommerce MySQL database.

Because he didn't talk to us, the spec was completely absurd and he didn't even mention that there were two completely different databases.

So my task was basically to take the immensely poor quality, wrongly specced code, and "make it work". Think having to chew through a giant class with literally thousands of mysql_ (no escaping or anything like that) queries and having to rewrite them either using PDO or the mssql extension. I think I lasted about a week on this project before I got up from my desk and left, never to return.

6 or 7 years ago I did some freelancing to fund my open source project (some nice algorithms and stuff). After two or three clients I had the idea to build some parts around it to make it a real product and invested 2 months into this, which meant no money in that time. After that I urgently needed a new client as money on my bank account ran out. I did not plan this properly.

Unfortunately it took weeks to find a new offer and so I accepted the first that came in and it was a completely crazy contract that required me to do parts I never did before (e.g. database and mobile related) in a very short time. Additionally it was a few weeks before X-mas where I should have planned with some holidays.

The other ugly downside of this task was the contact person behind this. He was unfriendly and put huge pressure on me, insisting on the contract deadlines and adding requirements (I know now this is not uncommon, but I hadn't this with my few older clients). Additionally or logically I got ill a few days before X-mas, which made the already crazy project now impossible. The client called me one day after X-mas about the progress (was still ill) and I got crazy and didn't know what to do. Luckily my wife earned money too! Still I needed to find a solution of how to end this and still get a bit money for the done tasks. After my health got back I discussed with the client of how to define the next milestone and I tried hard to avoid to state that I cannot fulfill the contract although in retrospect no one could have done this. This process took 2 weeks and I was able to remove many requirements from the contract and somehow was able to deliver this and got some money.

A few months after this I got a shock when I got another Email from this company and thought now they'll sue me, but luckily the original contact person left the person and they just wanted to know how a few things work. So finally I was really able (with 2 other founders) to rescue my plan to make the open source project a product, which is now a smoothly running, small company.

Lessons learned:

* as a newbie define smaller milestones, include holidays in your plans, include at least monthly payouts

* never give your clients your private phone number and let them know when you are available (e.g. not on weekends)

* do freelancing with enough money in the bank or enough clients

In my country we have a two main employment contracts. One with full benefits and one with partial benefits. Second is usually used for your first contract or for hiring students on half time job.

In my IT department, everybody gets two monitors, unless of course, your contract is a "partial" one. Then you get work with one monitor, regardless of doing the same job everybody else does. They buy you second one, after they sign you with the full contract...

I've shared parts of this before but it seems apropos of the topic at hand.

I was working a Fortune 500 corporation. Been there 5 or 6 years. Pay was ok. Culture was meh. Technology was open source. I was happy enough but figured it was time to start looking around for other opportunities. Coincidentally, just about this time I get promoted to senior and the senior gets promoted between me and my current boss to be my new boss. He was not really prepared to manage people, was not given any training or preparation for the new role, was still expected to mainly write code, and probably preferred it that way. Because I'm pretty good at expressing myself and he wasn't so much, I think he also felt threatened by me.

We had had a perfectly fine working relationship before this. But I started to hear from other team members that new boss was badmouthing me behind my back. Didn't make me feel good, but shit I'm doing my job and, you know, you can count up my story points at the end of the sprint if anyone's worried.

Things came to head during my first annual review under new boss when boss gives me a mediocre review. Tells me I ask too many questions, and says I don't have adequate knowledge of our applications. I'm kinda dumbfounded. I point out to him that, besides having worked on most the applications for several years, I'm the one who set up the wiki and has written most the application documentation found therein. His reply: "That's not knowledge. Knowledge is what's in your head." I'm at a loss. I felt like I was being gaslighted before that word had entered the popular vernacular and provided me just the word I was looking for to explain the strange feelings I was feeling.

I made the mistake of challenging the review with HR. It immediately became a shitshow and I quickly learned what people mean when they say HR is not your friend. Put on a PIP. Everyone I knew told me to put my head down and get the hell out of there as soon as possible. So that's what I planned to do. Problem was every other company I interviewed with seemed like it was the subject of another post in this thread. Besides, my commute was only 10 minutes with no freeways involved at current employer and I was being kinda picky on that point.

Six months drag on. About everything that could go wrong while I was looking for a job seemed to go wrong. At one point I had a couple decent offers in hand I was ready to accept and then fumbled them both by trying to play one against the other. Meanwhile, I am keeping my head down and doing my job. I mean, my take on things is probably a little biased, but I'm pretty sure I was the most productive and reliable member of the team and the objective data, if management could have been bothered to try to collect any, would have backed me up. After all, in the not so distant past, they had promoted me to senior.

So the period assigned to the original PIP expires. I'm ashamed to still be there. But at least I figure they'll let that go. Nope. Boss comes back with new PIP. Totally fabricated stuff. Like "On project X, Klenwell did work to which he was not assigned." I point out that I was updating everyone on the project every morning on what I was doing in the daily daily standup. Including my boss. "You were standing right there!?" I'm furious, demoralized, ready to quit. On advice of a family member, I talk to an employment lawyer.

Best $300 I may have ever spent. "Yeah," he tells me. "You're fucked. They're papering your file. But don't quit. You'll sacrifice any benefits, including unemployment." I learned something that day. And the screw turned. That point forward, I'm not taking shit from anyone or anything. My boss. My boss's boss. Fire me? Cool! I'll take my unemployment checks and have my new best friend lawyer be in contact with you!

It was a very satisfying two weeks. I was like a kid peddling around on over-inflated bicycle wheels. But all good things must come to an end and the final straw came in a sit-down with my boss when boss said boss's boss (my old boss) was questioning why I was writing tests for a critical piece of ancient real-money-processing infrastructure that we needed to upgrade. My response: hey, is Boss's Boss writing code again for us? Great. Let him take over this story and I'll move on to something else.

I was fired the next morning. Walked out of the building with my belongings in a garbage bag. And a shadow was lifted off my little world.

Lawyer never returned my call. Took me exactly 6 months to find a new job. Things have been much better since then.

Sometimes it's nice to step away for some perspective and start again fresh somewhere new!

People do actually read these comments so please give it a shot (even with a throwaway) just to see what's out there at least:

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? October 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126012

What do you have to lose, you want to be fired anyways!

I was asked to implement "passive data analytics", so our iOS app could soak up data on age, gender, etc. I put in my notice the following Friday.

That was almost a month ago. Currently struggling with the realities of unemployment and depression. Not sure where things will go from here. I haven't discovered any kind of support system for software developers who left their jobs because of their personal morals.

(throwaway) every day I debate whether to quit or stay on unhappy and trying to do things the way I feel is right until I'm fired.

I love my job but at an earlier one, every day I wanted to quit. My boss was threatened by me and did not value me. He tried to show he had my skills. He valued another engineer more. I felt jealous, stifled, and miserable. I learned a valuable lesson though. Don't quit because you have an impulse. Wait until you have figured out your next move.

Management which prefers to recruit only “offshore” talent, believing the offshore talent is inherently superior to all other talent that is not from their county. Discrimination? Yep. Happening anyway? Yep. Obvious? Usually, but it’s subtle. Anyone important taking notice? Not really. The higher ranks from offshore support the offshore model first.

I'm utterly bored, I changed jobs a year ago because of family reasons. The company is great in a lot aspects (team culture, benefits, technology). I got asigned a project where I did a successful POC which was already shown the costumers and management. But after the POC the project is now on hold, there is no decision from managment since 4 months. I still have weekly calls with the PM, which tells me how he wants the project to continue, but rumor is he'll change positions shortly. My boss won't assign me to another project as he doesn't know how the project continues and wants to hold me back as resource. So since months I'm dabbling around trying to support my teammembers with random scripts and tools to do at least something useful. I've got an offer from another local company which I'll probably will take, just to do something useful again.

On my current job most of the engineers have little engineering experience. Mostly we use modern tools but it's obvious that they had been set up once and since then nobody took care to maintain/tweak them. That makes the workflow very disorganized and sometimes tedious.

Decisions are often made very spontaneously, the process (Scrum) is often skipped and a lot of blaming happens even in meetings. One guy sometimes spontaneously walks up to others and starts loud arguments or blaming. Also there seems to be low trust among the department heads. Many tasks I work on the agreed upon solution changes back and forth.

It's a real mess, so getting fired would be the easiest option. But probably I'll just have to keep my eyes open for a new job and then switch.

Working at 1000+ person companies and moving 'up' the ladder, but if it wasn't for the paycheck I'd be in a small shop actually building things.

Every day is another bunch of meetings, political posturing, or just dealing with people who don't care.

The magnitude of this post is very distressing to me. (Also, HN is an unfortunate format for this kind of thing). I hope plenty of employers will read this thoroughly and take heed. I always try to assume positive intent, though it's obvious that's not what many commenters here are experiencing. Expectations seem to need to change industry-wide. To the employers that do (supposedly) care about your employees mental health: you may not know what you're asking for sometimes. To the employees: you need to be better at expressing your troubles and needs. I don't know what a solution might be. But I'm praying for y'all.

They're tearing down some walls to fit a few more desks in (the openest of open offices). I've been living like a college student for 10 years now following FIRE blogs, so getting fired wouldn't be completely unwelcome.

My limit was that after a decade of single-handedly spec'ing, programming, supporting and otherwise being in charge of all internal app development efforts for the $6 billion North-American arm of a $50 billion multinational corp... I still wasn't deemed worthy of the opportunity of a green card, or a salary commensurate with my responsibility and impact on the corp. The day I got my GC by other means and thus was no longer stuck working for them, I gave my 2 weeks, to everyone's surprise and disappointment! And that was with no jobs lined up after that.

I have work at a bank long enough to hear stories about people having mental breakdowns. Everything from just walking out of there office naked to people using the stairway as bathrooms to help deal with the stress and anxiety that some jobs at the bank can cause. At the first bank I worked at I never witness it myself, but when I got a new job at another one it started to become a normal.

So a friend of mine got hired by a bank that needed to hire 100 technical people in 30 days time. He told me how awesome of a job it was, because they had nothing to do so he spent his day doing whatever he wanted and getting paid mad money. Something happen and 2 people got fired so they needed them replace asap. He ask me if I wanted to throw my hat in the ring. I got such a gleaming referral from my friend they skip the interview process and hired me on the spot. In the week time of those 2 people getting fired though everything had changed.

We came to find out those 2 people got fired because the project was suppose to be 80% done by then, but instead it was more like 10%. They fired them 2 to show they meant business and they had the lowest performance score out of the entire 100 people so they were made a example. New policy was created no more headphones, meetings everyday, only work allowed on your computer screen, no smartphones out, and a old grumpy man was put at the back end of each isle to watch us. To make it worse all the cubicals were only shoulder height. So you had all the disadvantage of a open office with all the disadvantages of a cubical farm in a neat little package. The cubes were also smaller then normal with only enough space for your chair to slide back against the wall so you could slide out.

This is when stuff gets really strange you would think with all this distress and work needing to be done everyone would have there head down pounding out whatever they were suppose to be doing? That is the thing there was no work to be done. In my 6 month contract there I probably spent 3 hours actually doing work. In reality a 10 person team could have easily done what we had to do in a month time, but because of how the bank and management had structure everything it was impossible to do anything. There was also another strange thing people were expected to work 50 hours a week no matter what. When I started I put down 40 hours and got told by my manager, my recruiter, and a higher up I need to work more to help them catch up. The following week I work only 40 hours and the talks turn into threats so I started to work 47 hours a week and the threats went away. If you work 51+ hours a week it would give you the awesome option to work weekends as well.

So with all this stress, anxiety, and boredom a good number of people started to act really strange. A handful of people had stop taking showers leaving a noticeable smell in certain areas. Some people would squirrel food away leading to infestation of bugs and a underground market for trading and selling junk food. Some of the higher ups notice people were wearing the same cloths every day so after a talk those people started to wear jackets and such so the higher ups couldn't say anything to them. It became a normal thing for some to just sleep at there desk the entire day. Office supplies were constantly going missing even with the higher ups guarding them. Fights would break out randomly some just shouting a couple physical ones. Every other week a women would normally have a break down and cry in her cube because managers had started to use them as there own punching bags over emails/IMs. Lunches became more group therapy then a enjoyable outing. At some tipping point the main recruiting agency came in and had us all sign something basically pledging we would act professionally from that point forward and they were not held legally for our own actions and such.

To make the matter worse the recruiting agency was adding more anxiety and stress on the people. Most of the people there had work VISA and needed a job to stay in the country. The agency bully them into working 6 days a week. Someone accidentally sent out a email letting some of the people know they were no longer need on the project would be let go in 2 weeks. All the recruiters instantly contacted all 25 contractors that email went to saying that was a mistake and not true. They said they would be on the project for at least 6 more months and to ignore that email. 2 weeks later they were all let go.

I was told my contract was only going to be 3 months, I ended up 6 months there. When I hit the 3 month period I started to do whatever I wanted thinking I would get fired, but it never happen. I repeatedly reached out to my recruiter telling her to put in my 2 week notice, and it never happen. It finally hit a point where I told my manager my recruiter told me this was my last week. After my last day my recruiter contacted me 6 days later asking me why I wasn't at work. My friend that got me the job stayed on for another week, but ended up getting fired. A manager that leaned on him heavy for answering technical questions got scared he might replace her and told the higher ups he attacked her during a meeting. Security came and lead him out of the building.

what country?

America

People who have money and power today are on average less intelligent and less competent than people who don't. I guess this is the result of the past 10 or so years of expansionary monetary policy. It enabled greedy people with very little talent to capture a lot of money. Value creation was sacrificed for the benefit of value capturing (rent-seeking) activities.

Why would you want to get fired at the limits? Why not talk to your managers or you know resign.. I mean if you get fired you don't get unemployment benefits.. I think you mean you'd rather as to be laid off. Getting fired in the best case means taking a moral position against the company that is righteous... Does being laid off mean you were lazy?

this is incorrect, at least in the US. If you get fired, you do get unemployment benefits. The only way to not get unemployment benefits when being fired is for-cause. Ie stealing, or something similiar

In California, so long as you do not get fired for misconduct you are (generally) eligible to collect unemployment benefits whether you are fired or laid off. The definition of misconduct in California law is actually quite narrow—there are four standards and you must meet all of them in order to be ineligible for unemployment.

Obviously this is only one state in a large country in an even bigger world, so this may not be applicable to where you are. But wanted to clarify for any SF/LA/other CA city readers that the legal distinction for unemployment is not being laid off vs being fired, but losing your job for misconduct vs losing your job for some other reason.

Sad thing is that the money from unemployment hasn't gone up for years. $1800/mo pre-tax. I was pretty pissed when first on it that the feds tax the unemployed, seems like kicking someone when they're down, but at least in CA there's no state tax, which I learned occurs in other states.

Any amount of blaming from management onto the employees will get me to decide to leave immediately.

Lying to employees. Army-type discipline at the office.

Any non-payment of salary (unless it’s not employer’s responsibility, but 3rd party and I‘m given full transparency on why that is, like a bank transfer issue etc. with a promise to sort this out).

Indeed, I quit a bunch of jobs for these reasons.

Every one of these decisions to quit led to the next job being better in terms of managers, experience I got and compensation.

It's not hell on earth but I think about "oh my god dude get another job!" at least once a week. My job is this "hybrid" of 50% software developer, which I want to do, and 50% of, let's just say, flippin' burgers. It's not flipping burgers literally but the metaphor applies pretty well because being a short-order burger chef does take some skill, but it's repetitive, and subject to requests/orders that come in intermittently, each of which is urgent. So, it's like the interruptions everybody complains about from noisy co-workers and Nina from Corporate Accounts Payable, except the thing interrupting you, is the other half of your own job, and it continues all day long. So really with all the interruptions I'm doing close to zero programming.

Why this arrangement? Because they figured hey, what better way for him to find all the pain points and automate them, than to have him use this crappy cobbled-together system himself! Well sure, I'm all about seeing it from the user's point of view. So yep, did that, figured out long ago everything that's wrong with it, but now what? I'm stuck. Forget burger flipping, let's say this time, that I'm an axe maker. A craftsman of fine chopping implements. And the job they gave me is to chop wood all day with somebody else's dull axe. Um that is a different thing, that is not what axe makers do! And it's not like, okay make us a new axe, here's everything you need; they need someone to chop the wood! Pretty much the stupidest situation to be in.

Then there's the team - it's totally silo'd, a bunch of little fiefdoms, run by naysayers, and my every minor request for an enabling technology or whatever-it-might-be, is met with an unanswered phone call or email. I'm still kind of new, so I have no clout whatsoever, that is a truth, but I can also see that it's not just me. You've read much about the conflicts between Dev and Ops that led to "DevOps." Well on this team the Database people and the Programming people (hello, those two are the same thing, or perhaps you are an asshole) don't even see eye to eye.

Also - and this shouldn't matter - but the developers are somewhere else. Instead of being surrounded by developers bouncing interesting ideas all around (not that these particular ones would), I'm here physically sitting with the other burger-flippers. Yes we're back to that metaphor. These are people who either can't, or never wanted to, be anything other than burger-flippers, and everything they talk about is in terms of burger flipping, and life is just a big burger to be flipped. Starting to sound elitist, but keep in mind I'm intentionally not telling you what they, what we, actually do. They are skilled workers. Just not the same skills. I probably should've held out for something else.

>These are people who either can't, or never wanted to, be anything other than burger-flippers, and everything they talk about is in terms of burger flipping, and life is just a big burger to be flipped.

Lol, hilarious! I love your writing style.

I'm in a similar situation. Thankfully rare but random unpredictable urgent but formulaic jobs to do, fixing things for well-educated burger flippers.

My job is ostensibly to improve things but that's impossible because everything is managed by inept naysayers, with the added entertainment of crippling bureaucracy mixed in.

So I'm on hn instead.

"they figured hey, what better way for him to find all the pain points and automate them"

So, I'm not clear on why you haven't been able to do that?

I got to where I hated the developer culture, and got a job that was outside of it, where I had access to nothing except MS Office, and had the epiphany that it's Turing complete, I can do anything!

In a nutshell I'm spending most or all of my time using the tools (keeping up with a queue) not working on them. To work on them I need either permission to fall behind in the queue (probably not an option) or someone else to cover for me. I'll probably pursue that latter option.

that's like something out of Kafka. It would be fitting to incorporate Kafka, the technology, into your solution .

You may be describing a support developer role. Reactive to support tickets (internal or otherwise) rather than planned uninterrupted work. Some people enjoy being a support developer, it's not for me and it sounds like it's not for you.

Artificial harmony. Where people smile and nod about some decision face to face, then subvert it quietly afterwards.

I work at a tech company that just lost 70% of its stock price in under a year, my team was laid off from 15 people down to 3 people, my boss quit, and the app I've been working on for a year is questionable to be shutdown.

And I'M going to look like the jerk on my resume for quitting before a year is up.

God love capitalism!

"And I'M going to look like the jerk on my resume for quitting before a year is up." - this problem is in your head. Capitalism has nothing to do with that. You can quit at any point, even after a couple weeks. If you can't bubble-wrap an explanation for future interviews then work on that. Soft skills are also important.

I thought resumes exist to GET the interview.

This reminds me of being fired from a cult for willfully disobeying ridiculous rules

Don't want to be fired.

However, what would get me the most is the interaction/attitude between my team and boss.

Also, a terrible salary makes for a low tolerance.

From a programmatic point-of-view, inadequate framework, legacy code, and disagreeable methodologies.

996.

My last employer was ByteDance, the creator or TikTok and Toutiao. Actually, the situation was a little better than 996, we call it "big small week", we work one more day per two weeks, not each week.

I keep pressing my work to never take a job from AIPAC again because as a "progressive" company you can't be "progressive until palestine"

Leaders that claim to be leaders but are actually managers.

I am living the startup to big corpo movement. Goddamn, how amateurs people with a huge amount of money can be. Toxic management? YES, a lot :)

Anyone successfully pull off an "Office Space"?

I did. 11.5 years ago before starting as freelancer and never looking back.

Freelancing sounds like fun, but it looks like a real pain getting started. From what I can tell, it means working for free or next to it on sites like upwork. Any tips or suggestions?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...

I can't say for others but for Upwork is not that bad. You do need to grow your profile with successful jobs to be able to charge more later, so start lower but do make a polished profile. Show lots of projects, including those from open source, if you have any, and fill all fields as well. Also state that you're at beginning and you're going for low prices only to establish your reputation. Also don't give up, keep on bidding on jobs even if it looks like a number game. In the end if you're persistent enough you get your break and can start build your clients base. After that it's a breeze, given you're indeed good at what you claim. Otherwise, it's a harsh environment for those trying to scam.

I'd love to hear the details, if you're willing!

It all started with Brainbench in around 2000, when I did some testing on them, when they were still free and even sent you hard copy certificates for free. So I had fun with testing myself online and got those certificates. Fast forward to 2007 when out of boring I wanted to do some more test and I found out that Brainbench was now a paid platform for tests and the hard copies were actually around $50 to get, so I wanted to find something else that had free tests. And I stumbled upon oDesk this way - back then they were called that, now they are Upwork. So I made an account with them, filled all the fields there with my mind wandering around, including all the fields that were not required - and this was actually crucial later, out of pure luck. Then I started to do tests to see how I grew meanwhile vs. Brainbench. Then I forget all about for half an year, when in September a notification from oDesk came into my e-mail about a potential client wanting me to work on some component but for very little money - he figured I was good enough but without history of jobs and wanted to take advantage of it. I outright refused the job but this opened my eyes to what oDesk really was - a freelancing platform. So I started to tinker with this idea to have some side projects and do them on my free time. At that time I was over an year employed by a German company and I was support/programmer for anything the technicians of said company was need it. Their main job was carpentry repairs and the technicians were using laptops to record the entire job at client site. It was a successful company hiring hundreds of technicians but was having only us 3 as IT support/programmers. So one day the leader quit, he found a way better lucrative job in Switzerland, the other guy was never good enough in the eyes of the company owner and when he asked for a salary raise was denied and he quit too. So I was solo and I started to not care at all about the job anymore. I was just like in "Office Space", coming at 11 or even noon, leaving after 2 or 3 hours, during this time I was completely only browsing internet and procrastinating heavily. 3 months later, in February 2008 I was like at already 3rd client from oDesk and this one was a heavy project with long term relationship, so I just started to actually work via encrypted VPN from work for those projects at home as well. I believe that was the final straw for them and they kinda fired me. I mean, was not a firing per se, but more of a situation where they asked my resignation and I just stopped going to work. My contract was bullet proof and anything less then actually committing murder or arson (like in Office Space) could not fire me from work. So no bug in software to steal money or arson like in Office Space, but everything else was point on - coming at my own hours, heave(n)ly procrastinating at work, leave early, got promoted (sic!) also, even had sex at office with a girl I picked-up one day on my way to work and she was a screamer, the entire lower floor where some paper pushers were working heard everything despite multiple attempts on my side to quiet her by putting my hand on her mouth. Yeah, not even that was good enough to get me fired, the owner when called me later that day didn't said a single word about this and he definitely was informed about it by the paper pushers. Oh yeah, we had a table tennis in the yard, I started to get kids from street to play with them, for hours and I was still promoted. So totally Office Space. Hope you enjoyed ScottFree - have a nice day

I love this question!

The never-ending battle of sales vs. marketing. :)

Every day.

Half the time TBH

always being happy to help and people using that as an excuse to be their shit dumping ground because they are [lazy|incompetent|arseholes]

TopTal's CEO... if he could be...

I clicked expecting a What's the worst / most creative thing you'd do to get yourself fired? thread.

But I'll play.

My $dayjob involves hosted healthcare software. Looks more like bespoke outsourcing than SaaS. I'm on a two-person team responsible for a relatively tiny number of systems within each customers' deployment. Officially I'm on-call every other week. In reality, on a team this small, everyone is always on-call.

During my first year here, we busted ass to reduce after-hours calls -- cleaning up our own messes, giving support teams access to handle certain internal items, demanding better judgement of "Is this potentially affecting medical outcomes, or can this wait until normal working hours?", etc.

This year the company launched a more formalized and automated Major Incident process. Much human judgement has been removed -- if a Major Incident is raised, every team is contacted by a PagerDuty-like system to join a WebEx.

At the start of implementing this process, I found myself being called out-of-schedule by the automated systems. MIs weren't being raised that often so it took a few weeks to figure out that we were both being called every time and then months of venting to everyone up-the-chain as MIs were increasing in frequency before they finally believed us and got the right person engaged to fix it.

Then the reality of having a process with little human judgement really started to sink in. People default to CYA behavior. We're getting called for things that don't come close to meeting the criteria for a Major Incident. Often the MI process is initiated after the right teams have been engaged and are working towards resolution. We're getting stuck on calls for hours where the incident manager doesn't want to release anyone, "just in case they're needed later."

Right now I feel thoroughly abused by this process and automation and being such a small team. We've removed too much human discretion, and where there's any left, it's being exercised poorly. The anxiety I and my family experience when my phone rings is palpable.

Apart from this aspect of my employment, my job is pretty cush. The work itself isn't stressful, most of my coworkers are great to work with, management is above-average, PTO is generous. I've been officially 100% remote for three years now and at this point my life is completely structured around the freedom it provides. My salary is relatively high for direct W2 employment in my field -- nobody has come close to offering a big enough bump to make up for the monetary expenses of a soul-crushing commute, loss of benefits for a contract gig, and needing to pay for after-school care for my girlfriend's twins. Nevermind the intangibles.

Which makes me feel trapped.

The girlfriend changed jobs last month, trading a negligible amount of salary relative to shaving a dozen stressful commuting hours from her week and getting home about the same time as the kids. So that's a massive improvement to our lives -- I say 'our' because, aside from happier wife happier life, I'd not fully appreciated the burden I was feeling this past year having to be at home for the kids on an inflexible schedule -- plus we've removed the greatest obstacle to my changing jobs...

Tho I still feel fairly pessimistic about finding another job that doesn't leave me worse off financially or mentally.

I just walked from a job after a week and a half. Applied and interviewed for a junior full stack java/angular developer position. Really excited for it.

Got and accepted an offer just to show up day one to a weird point & click/drag & drop visual programming thing called BluePrism. Tried to make myself like it, but couldn't stick it out.

Moved 800 miles for that job too, just to get bait & switched.

Holy molly .... dude ... that’s hilarious

In 6 months I'll probably agree. But right now, I just feel lost, depressed, and not sure what to do.

Never heard of BluePrism, so had to Google it: https://www.blueprism.com/why-blue-prism/

Looks like a Visio type application that churns out code automagically, a bit like Scratch[1] for Grown-Ups.

[1] https://scratch.mit.edu/

Heard that a friend of mine had to use something similar at one of his jobs, and he was miserable. Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay.

I think it felt like an extremely arcane thing to learn and just not something exciting to work with.

Sometimes we forget how blessed we are with the DX in mainstream programming languages.

> Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay.

I made an honest effort to get into it for more or less those reasons. Now I'm just bumming around unsure of what to do.

Ah, Blue Prison. One of several RPA (robotic process automation) tools—AKA glorified screen scrapers—that all cost tons of money, work horribly with web apps, and have no public documentation on improving the situation. Each one has its own special way of interacting with a browser, and none of them is half as good as scripting with Selenium.

I have to support clients who are all getting into RPA and wanting to know how to use it with our web app that was never designed with those in mind. If the tech were better, it’d be fine and I wouldn’t even know about it. As it is, it’s a ton more work for everyone involved than just asking us for an API. But then you don’t get to watch a browser window change magically in front of you, I guess.

There are so many of these companies. Lil' mini-SAPs running around, deploying high touch sales teams to large companies and get foisted on whoever's unlucky enough to do work for them...

A place I contract for did this, and then they bought something again 5 years later - still Lego development, but it doesn't do much to hide that it's a thin layer over ASP.NET WebForms so we're getting a bit closer to 2007 anyway.

When there are stupid and idiotic power trips in the workplace, then I can't put up with the situation and will quit.

Nothing annoys me more than people exerting power over somebody else unnecessarily, especially to coerce or bully somebody in a social or work related way.

Also, if there is gossip about other people, then I don't want to work in that environment. Social gossip is toxic.

My reason is different from most. I am working on difficult problems, more technically difficult than I ever have before. Maybe I will succeed, but I may fail because I'm way in over my head.

But if I am in over my head, I hope I get fired. Because at least I was challenged enough where I hit my limit for the first time, from a technical standpoint. And then I will be free to move on and do something else with my life.

If I succeed, then I will be happy continuing to succeed in this role, working on difficult problems. So it is a win win.

My office mates audibly fart throughout the day and act like it's normal. Pretty sure it's not.

I think it's only allowed on Casual Friday at my place.

It's not. They should do what I do -- silently "crop dust" the other cubicles as I drift past on my way to an unimportant meeting.

But seriously, I have a cubicle-mate that goes through a box of tissues every two days. He is constantly grunting and blowing his nose. He also spends 15 minutes brushing and flossing in the bathroom twice per day. I say 15 minutes, because he has his phone propped up with a timer.

Every time my noise cancelling headset runs out of power and needs to be recharged, I re-evaluate my life choices and my tortured existence.

I had a similar experience with a mechanical keyboard so loud I could hear it through my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Fortunately a spot opened up in a different room and I jumped on it.

OMG, you must be a colleague from my old team. :)

My ex boss bought a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches(the loud clicky ones) that would penetrate my noise cancelling headphones and gave everyone in our shared office 'Nam PTSD flashbacks.

Nobody dared to complain to him about that. Still wondering if he did that on purpose to troll us or he was just really indifferent about the others in the office.

There's something about the sound of clacking keyboards that's more intolerable to me than nails on a chalkboard. It's pretty inconsiderate to use a mechanical one in a shared office

Well if they gave me a proper cubicle like God intended instead of shoving me into an open-office floor plan, they wouldn't have to put up with the clickity clack of my MX Greens :)

Instead, it's payback for all the chitter chatter that's happening around me at this very moment. I also like to eat loud crunchy snacks and open energy drink cans to be extra evil.

I have a very loud keyboard, and if ever there’s someone new sitting near me, I ask them if it will be bothersome and then stress that it’s no trouble to replace it. Of course, there’s a chance people are just being polite and I should replace it anyway, but it’s a small room and half the time I’m alone in it anyway.

He clearly reads McSweeney's - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-brush-my-teeth-at-work...

> You retreat to the furthest stall for your afternoon constitutional. Perhaps you hope to wait me out, but you underestimate my resolve. Dentists recommend brushing for 2 to 3 minutes, but I will be here for a minimum of 10 minutes — possibly 15 — to ensure that I’ll be seen by as many coworkers as possible. Yes, I will still be here when you emerge, to the rhythmic sounds of Reach Extra-Firm bristles on flawless enamel. Each stroke brushing away any illusion of equality between us.

This is not about teeth. The teeth are merely 32 gleaming ivory towers from which to look down on you. This is about what the teeth represent. It’s about what else we both might surmise from this moment: That I am likely far better positioned for retirement. That my houseplants enjoy regular watering and seasonal fertilizer. That I have enviable cholesterol and triglyceride levels. All of that with which you struggle in life, that which eludes you? These things are effortless for me.

I guess it's all a matter of perspective, but I'd just be thinking he's some kind of weird loser with OCD that can't manage his own personal grooming at home, but for some reason isn't bothered by spending a lot of time in a public toilet.

Sounds like OCD or at least severe germophobia.

You said "mates". It's normal if everyone else is doing it.

Can you file an HR complaint? The stink must be unbearable.

What can HR do? Their job is to protect the company against internal liabilities.

Unless farting is illegal nasal harassment, you have no case.

At a previous job, several us did go to HR with complaints about another coworker over body odor complaints. It was seriously bad enough that you could smell this individual from over 50 feet away. It was nauseating and was hurting the productivity of everyone around them.

This individual was a foreign national working in the US for the first time. My understanding was that HR took the individual aside in a private meeting and explained there were issues about their hygiene and arranged for them to attend some sort of cultural acclamation course that addressed things about cultural and workplace expectations.

We weren't looking for the individual to be disciplined or anything, but we certainly needed to be able to sit in our cubes without our sinuses being assaulted and our eyes watering.

I once worked one desk over from a bloke who did CrossFit in the middle of the day, and for some reason had to hang up his damp, sweaty, reeking gym things on the substructure of his desk to dry when he got back. I had to lay down a protective Lysol force field to protect myself. Oh, and this was at $LARGE_SEARCH_ENGINE_COMPANY, who treat contractors as subhuman scum, not even entitled to a laptop so they can work in the lounge or something.

Mercifully, about the worst my current coworkers do is say "leverage" when they mean "use".

Large search engine company??? Altavista? Excite.com? Duckduckgo?

Probably AskJeeves

No, it's one that treats contractors as subhuman scum.

So Bing, then.

I once worked at an office for a large bank that had an atrium as you walked in, and then desk partitions up against the glass windows.

Some of the people that went to the gym used to hang their towels over the partitions, until an email from the Head of Facilities saying that they made the office look like a holiday hotel in Benidorm.

I have one that has had a runny nose for about two years now and is constantly sniffing. No matter how many times it's mentioned, and even though there is a Kleenex box on their desk, nothing ever changes.

It's enough to make me think about quitting some days.

Probably chronic allergies with post nasal drip. They've probably had it their whole life and don't even realize how often they're doing it. That doesn't make it an easier to tolerate though.

Yeah, this happenned to me. No allergies all my life, then about 35 yrs old, it seemed like my nose was running all the time. Blowing my nose about 20 times a day. Enough drainage down my throat that it was causing gag reflex amd coughing issues. Finally lead to bad sinus headaches. Got diagnosed with allergies this past winter. Now, daily take Xyzal and Cingular plus Dymistra nasal sprays, and I get weekly allergy shots. The headaches have mostly subsided and I can breathe more easily, but I still get some drainage.

Odd thing for me, despite my allergies being to cats, dogs, tree and weed pollen, I always feel worst when I'm in the office away from my allergens. When I'm at home with my dog and 3 cats, with the windows open and pollen flowing through the living room, I'm fine. :shrug:

You should buy them all butt plugs for xmas. That would send a message and be equally as awkward. Make sure you get ones with soft tips incase they become pneumatic projectiles.

As an experiment, you should let one rip at an opportune moment. Should be enlightening whether they carry on as if this is indeed normal or try to gaslight you about your strange behavior...

Question: what's the farting protocol in the office? Current strategies I've tried have been: Letting it out as it comes - This is bad for everyone and causes a noticeable odor and occasionally sound Letting it out in small bursts - the smell is never too bad if it's noticeable at all, however there's a chance you'll misjudge the pressure and let out too much at once Hold it in - This is extremely painful but I have done it when I fear the frequency of releasing gas as often as I'd like to would be extremely disruptive Go to the toilet - I find this strategy borderline useless because by the time you've reached the toilet the situation has somehow resolved itself

Brutally shit yourself and scream “game over, I win, motherfuckers” and moonwalk out.

I love the use of the word "brutally" here.

One of my early jobs was working at a small PC repair/sales shop owned by a married pair of Indian immigrants.

They would fart as freely as blinking. This was in a very conservative white midwestern town, and they wouldn't even reel it in while pitching sales to potential buyers.

I was a teen at the time and couldn't believe it, ripping ass right in front of a potential customer while running over prices of various components, without missing a beat.

But clearly this is a cultural thing, and some cultures don't seem to frown upon it.

The best part was they also ate vegetarian, and the most convenient vegetarian fast-food option was taco bell so they ate bean burritos practically ever day. The flatulence was nearly constant.

Are your office mates immigrants?

All I can say is every time I've been fired it was a huge relief.

Having to touch any Windows machine.

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