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Comment by gabereiser | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, the worst are those that pretend to be benevolent but end up firing you after a vacation. The one who writes memory-bloated code, who keeps state around, that loves to cross types has the gaul to do a single performance review after 8 months to criticize your code quality and fire you. (Recent experience)

Or how about the one guy that shouts at people when they ask ANY question on why things work that way, responding with things like "NO!! It's not how we do it" and berating newer employees with their lack of legacy knowledge.

I've seen a grown man, extremely well educated, data scientist make a fellow data scientist cry. I've. Seen. Things.

I also made a conscience decision to focus on people, co-workers, and foster those relationships where I can. Sometimes I have to leave those behind when drastic life changes happen, but ultimately I'll always be there should they need me. Kudos to the OP for including the Sinek clip, love that guy.

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I am very much working class / (blue collar) in my upbringing. Raised by single parent in a very run down area with a fair amount of poverty. I luckily found an early love and curiosity for computers and eventually found my way into software engineering. If this had not have happened god knows where I would be, when I look at where my friends have ended up. I learned quite early in my life, that if someone picks you out , then you need to immediately front up to it or it will just escalate from there and you're in for a bucket load of torment and bullying. I am not presenting this as any sort of solution , it's far from ideal. I can misread situations / emails and feel fight or flight come on (and my ego insists it needs to be fight 'don't let them walk all over you'). This means i ALWAYS I clash with the arseholes whenever our paths cross. It's made me quite popular with co-workers as I confront them everytime, but I don't think its doing my career any favours.

You are right that it’s always good to discuss these feelings and events immediately. Try out the book ”Nonviolent Communication” if you haven’t.

Dad? lol, you basically describe myself as well. I have zero tolerance for brilliant jerks or arrogant assholes when all I want is to solve a problem. Like you I came from a very blue collar upbringing and I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for my complete and utter obsession with computers in the early 90s. Confrontation doesn't have to be destructive. It's also a great way to gauge another person's motivations and desires. Just remember to treat everyone (even your enemies) with respect.

Meh, it depends. If you’re in the right then responding to assholes in this way is acceptable, at least in the UK. I’ve found this doesn’t translate to German companies tho which have a kind of “the emperor is always right” attitude. ;)

I actually had my friendships with the folks there used against me. If I thought something was wrong or shouldn't be done, my boss would say, "You like your friends here, don't you?"

W.T.F.??

There's really no correct thing to do. I lost so much sleep just trying to come up with something that wouldn't be turned against me.

It's a form of learned helplessness. They force you into a no-win situation, so you'll stop winning. They can't win on merit or competence, so they force you into no-wins. Impossible deadlines. etc. etc.

It's the opposite of "Hire people smarter than you and get out of their way." Their strategy is more like... "Hire people smarter than you, get them to do your job, make their life hell, so they quit, then take all the credit."

Psychos.

Yeah if your team/org is forcing you into no-win situations, my advice is to update the resume and find a place that treats you better. Teams that treat ppl like that don't deserve the staff they have. Your life will be so much better not dealing with that BS.

I know the situation you describe. It’s debunking when they say they only hire competent people (make the incompetent people feel competent). I mean it’s true that they prefer competent people but they will destroy their mental health, make them quit and then, as you say, take all the credit.

>I've seen a grown man, extremely well educated, data scientist make a fellow data scientist cry. I've. Seen. Things.

Data scientists seem to be on a level of their own when it comes to disrespecting colleagues. I've been surprised by this recently.

Data scientists seem to be on a level of their own when it comes to disrespecting colleagues. I've been surprised by this recently.

Pretty much every developer, when brought in as a replacement, will bad-mouth their predecessor, say their code is junk and needs to be totally rewritten, etc. Managers love it and encourage it, to them it's a divide and conquer tactic. Data scientists just take it to the next level, that's all.

For swe, I've rarely seen it happen except with junior engineers and end-of-career engineers.

I do that too, but the code I work with is objectively shit - I can provide the daily WTF with months of wtfs. Maybe I should, but if the previous guy finds it I may be in trouble (I think he's still a shareholder?).

The first thing my colleagues did after he left was replace all the code he wrote in the C codebase (I work on the front-end, there's a few years worth of work yet to rebuild it).

I'm talking stuff like 15K LOC files with 4-5 times nested switch/case/if/else blocks; string concatenating XML to a global variable, then at the end converting it to JSON; string concatenating HTML with embedded JS and CSS in a JS function inside of a PHP file; using a semicolon-separated value in a database column instead of a simple foreign key (more fun when there's an extra value attached to it, separated with a colon).

It's already not an easy domain or a simple application (thousands of fields across dozens of models), but the lack of coding practices only made it worse.

My eyes! Kudos for sticking with it that sounds like a write off heh

I call it The Eternal Refactor. Gets completely absurd if you're at the same company over 5 years or so and have seen 3 or more groups of devs blame all the issues of the software on the previous tech choices and their preference will solve all the issues and a rewrite is the only way forward yet every time when the rewrite is done and the thing is maybe 10% better at best but has new issues from the rewrite the team begins to cycle out and the process begins again.

> are those that pretend to be benevolent but end up firing you after a vacation.

This happened to a close friend of mine relatively recently, both the "benevolent" and the "firing after the vacation part". I cannot understand such tactics.

In the end it was much better for said friend the way things turned out for him, but right when it happened it was a shitty situation to be in, because you just don't understand why that is happening to you.

What's with the firing after vacation thing? Always puzzled me.

You can see each vacation is like a trial firing, if they miss you then you get to come back.

Still puzzles me. Businesses are all about relationships. Building a business based on this level of hostility must be exhausting. The level of staff turnover and overall churn due to trust issues must be huge and they must haemorrage employees continuously. So much bad will being created for short term gains. They then complain when they get bad employees or can't find good ones.

So strange. But not unexpected. Its obviously profitable, right?

Conditioning. The US job market is conditioned to fear vacations.

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