Comment by _coveredInBees | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _coveredInBees | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, I was surprised by that line. I tried to do that. 10 years ago I was a newly minted Ph.D. and my wife and I had to solve the 2 body problem and we compromised with our jobs so we could both be employed together in a nice town with a relatively low cost of living and a great place to raise a family. Our lives outside of work were fantastic! Great friends, nice house, lots of weekend activities, got my first pup (waiting my whole life to have my own place so I could have one), had my twins a year later.

But good God was my job (big company, lots of politics and bad management... the usual) absolutely soul crushing. I thought that I'd be able to make my peace with it in lieu of everything else which was near perfect, but the more time dragged on, the more it crushed me and sucked joy out of the other areas of my life. I will never forget the sense of existential dread that would overcome me every Sunday evening and the relief on Friday evenings.

Fortunately I was able to leave and take up an opportunity at a small startup in the ML/consulting space. It's entirely bootstrapped, so no VC people fucking everything up, and the management are incredibly nice and decent humans, and several of them I count as close friends. I love the work that I do, and I am almost always learning new things. I've been working here for 4 years, and I have never yet experienced that existential dread on a Sunday evening. Work is just another part of my life that I enjoy now, and it is incredible how happy and fulfilled I am with my life. My wife has fortunately experienced the same with the move and change in jobs.

I get hit up by recruiters for the big tech companies all the time and there simply is no reason why I would ever consider working at any of those companies to be another cog in the wheel. No amount of money can ever make up for what I have now.

So I would strongly encourage anyone who is in the situation described by OP or me above to try their best to switch jobs if possible. I can't fathom going through my whole adult life as unhappy as I was at my first job and I wouldn't wish it on even my worst enemy.

I appreciate reading your story. I'm ~6 years out of school having been in large companies and am wondering if it's normal to have the joy sucked out like I'm experiencing. If you don't mind me asking, how did you end up finding the small startup job? When I look at the job boards they're often dominated by the big guns or it's hard to sort through lots of small (oftentimes shady) postings - I don't know where to go to find small-by-design companies or similar mindset jobs.

I wish I had a better answer but like in almost all cases, it ends up being your network. In my case, my brother-in-law had been working for a few years at the company and he knew the founders as a couple of them were his mentors in grad school. So I knew enough about the company and when they needed to hire someone, him being able to vouch for me was enough to get me an interview with them.

That being said, I think places like ziprecruiter / indeed will still have job postings from smaller companies. The challenge, as you mentioned, is trying to figure out the good ones from the sketchy/shitty ones. Small companies can also be challenging if the management isn't great and they have bad culture. So I would definitely place a lot of weight on that if I were interviewing at smaller companies.

Try AngelList, lots of small companies and startups.

Funny enough, I just finished my PhD in December 2019. It's been hard getting interviews in the bay area (I want to stay close to family with older parents). I have great academic credentials but somehow I can't signal that to recruiters. I managed to snag an interview with a company I know I'll dread working for. The recruiter acknowledged it's a stress factory and weekends working where regular and I couldn't care less about their product.

I'm debating if I should take the job, assuming I pass the interview, to set foot in industry or keep searching continue working on a potentially monetizable passion project.

In this climate, I would probably lean towards taking up that job. You have a few good things going for you:

1. You have good academic credentials

2. You are trained in a "hot" field (my Ph.D. was in Physics but I've always loved software engineering and ML, but that was a very hard transition for me to pull off)

3. Getting a year or two under your belt is probably better than a large gap in your career if things continue to go south on the employment front. I suspect a decent number of ML/Datascience people are going to be laid off if they haven't already because they end up being more expensive and it isn't as easy to quantify their net impact / benefit to a company.

Just focus on how you can use your time at any job right now to improve your skills and round out your profile so you are a more attractive candidate for the kinds of jobs you'd like to target in a few years.

Also, if things bounce back in the next year, demand is still going to be high and you should be able to find a better job and switch relatively easily.

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