Ask HN: Who want to be fired? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who want to be fired?

74 pointskaramazov43 comments

Is your job terrible? Would a sense of relief wash over you if you didn't need to come in tomorrow?

Talk about it with your friend, the internet!

Getting fired would be the best thing that could happen to me, I would be smiling like a kid on Christmas morning feeling pure happiness and relief. I hate the job, I hate the pressure, I hate the environment. The pay is very good, but I have many years of living expenses saved up, so the pay is not a factor anymore.

Why am I not quitting? I was hired to be a tech lead/manager a bit more than a year ago and a lot of people rely on me, it would suck immensely to have a boss that everyone likes quit on you after just one year. I have been on the other side and I know how bad it would feel. People love me, as I turned around a heavily burned out team, unfortunately severely burning myself out in the process…

But realistically, I’ll most likely quit soon regardless, I am on the edge and one little crisis from here (production outage, argument with my director, …) will push me over. Some of my direct reports have been telling me: “I see you are burning out, let me know anything I can do to help, it would be awful if you were to quit and we were to report back to the old management”.

I am in an insanely stressful hedge fund, the quintessential definition of pressure cooker. 70-80h a week of distress and brutal oncall, including weekends. It’s tough for individual contributors who have to deliver work, but for (technical) managers is hell on earth.

Have you considered funemployment?

Totally. When I quit (or get fired haha), my plan is to take one entire year off to spend with family, travel in SE Asia, and ultimately get bored, then get a low paid/low expectations job just for fun. Might not even be tech.

Sounds like a good plan IMO. Best of luck!

What was the original attraction to working at a hedge fund? For 70-80 hrs of work, are you just getting paid a lot more than a typical SV eng (sounds like 2 jobs a week!)?

It was the only interview process that didn’t require me to invest months in leetcode, and the pay is 50-100% higher than a similar role at FAANG. Seemed like a no brainer!

I'm burnt out. I'd love to be fired and given a severance package so that I can take a breather for a month. I'm completely sick of non-tech enterprises - the politics, the apathy towards development, the offshoring, the crazy deadlines set by executives and stakeholders that do not know tech, waterfall, development being seen as a cost center, etc..

There's just so much inertia. I have a comfortable life with not a bad salary. I have great wlb. And I work remotely. Everytime I think about leaving, I just focus on it maybe being a matter of perspective.

I fired a client recently. It felt like the last day of high school. It's incredible how draining some people and environments are compared to others. It may be the most important thing in life - to screen well, and failing that, to sever ties promptly.

BTW Why do people always advise others to find a new job before quitting the current one? The finances of software people cannot be that precarious. Are you afraid of the mythical gap in the resume, or what?

> The finances of software people cannot be that precarious.

You’d be surprised. hedonic treadmill intensifying

"Why do people always advise others to find a new job before quitting the current one?"

There are a lot of jobs out there but the interview process can take months and after being exhausted from searching, you may well just accept a bad deal.

I've been in bad jobs though, and tried to job hunt from there. There was one where there's a meeting every half day to discuss progress. It was so draining that it was a confidence hit during interviews. I quit and it felt like the days were literally more beautiful.

To provide context, I have gone around 6 months without working since I left my last job without another offer in hand. I have done the same thing with my previous 2 jobs as well, but at those times I managed to find a new job within a month. What changed was impact of pandemic and my interest in finding a job in another country.

> Why do people always advise others to find a new job before quitting the current one?

1. Interviews are complicated (and not just technical skill dependent) and sometimes time consuming especially if you are looking for specific companies or domains to work in. Your pace at getting the job might not match the company's. Hence your plan of savings for 3 months might have to be stretched to fit for 5 or 6 months.

2. Explaining why I quit my previous job without another offer was a constant question asked during the initial HR interviews and that required carefully worded answers. Since it was during the covid pandemic the general assumption would have been that I was part of a mass layoff.

3. Your existing job provides the stability for you to negotiate better since you already have something to fall back on. This matters only if you do not have an existing offer in hand.

I know engineers making less than me and spending 2x my spending.

A lot of people spend a lot, partially to be in a certain location for their job, partially because they can afford the starbucks everyday, dining out all the times.

“Why do people always advise others to find a new job before quitting the current one?”

Dunno. I did exactly that last year. I don’t regret it. My kids weren’t worse off in any way. Within ~6 weeks I had signed up for another job with better salary.

I will quit my job on Friday.

I will still have to work a few months and I dread it.

I actually would be happier if I got fired, effective immediately.

I won't badmouth my employer here because I don't think they have done anything wrong. We just don't fit.

I'm lucky that my wife makes enough money for both of us, so I won't look for a new job, I'll just become a stay at home dad, and pursue my side projects while the kids are at school and the home duties are done.

About 15 years ago I quit my job at a consulting company, and the realization that I was happier sick than healthy and working there made me quit. It really liked it at first, but it was a slow burnout, so slow I didn't realize I ended up hating it.

The funny thing is, I recovered in one month, quit, and had the happiest two months after that; but after the fourth month I also realized that I still like doing my job, just not there. It took me three more months to find a new job I liked, meanwhile the initial happiness rush became boredom.

My point is, working with your side projects will improve your skills and stave boredom; and who knows if you'll find you just needed a sabbatical instead of staying at home forever.

Are you working on side projects? How do you manage that? After 8 hours pushing stuff around I don't feel like doing side projects anymore.

Same. I enjoy my current work, but I need to rest from it in my free time, otherwise I'd risk another burnout. I have little side projects implementing free software around the house, but it's mostly fiddling with new things.

There's no shame in doing pleasurable things with our free time, not everyone has the same way of resting from work.

It is nice that you can drop to one full time income, but I recommend you at least try to keep your skills up to date, to help keep the pressure off of her by knowing you are ready to dive back in.

I left tech completely for 5 years, to make gears, which was rewarding, I stayed because I was part of a 4 man shop, and it was nice to not worry about servers on the weekends, etc.

My wife's income took a hit, and now I've been out of tech for far too long... nobody programs in Pascal any more.

I get people want compensations or whatever, but if you dislike your job you should quit rather than waste people's time, include your own! I'm all for quitting. I have friends leaving their jobs within first few days, better sooner than later.

If you can afford to quit your job on a whim and get a new one, you are luckier than about 99.99% of the population. Most people work jobs they dislike because they have to in order to survive.

I imagine most hackernews work hitech, high paying jobs. let me know otherwise

That’s not exactly true. Many on HN are unemployed or underemployed, even if they are in tech. The industry has a pretty wide range, it’s only the VC capitals that have amazing pay, benefits, etc.. Most programming jobs have average salary and standard crap benefits.

Definitely not true. Big variety of people here

> I have friends leaving their jobs within first few days, better sooner than later.

What kind of jobs? A few days are too few to judge a workplace, I've never seen someone quitting before completing their probation period.

I can see someone leaving immediately if they arrive at a new job and find out that they've been blatantly lied to about what they'll be working on, what their working conditions would be (e.g., amount of on-call time), their compensation package, or other fundamental facts about their job. Unfortunately, such things happen.

exactly what happened to me last job place. I was told very precisely what I'd be working on and actually I based my decision heavily on that. it was some software driver. first day "actually we need you to do something else". I get around low level, os internals stuff, but I'm no electrical engineer to say the least. ended up looking at pcb schematics, debugging hardware and I have while this and drivers go hand in hand, they are radically different worlds. "fine, I'm gonna learn new stuff" thinking too myself. aside from playing with arduino I've never touched hardware and I have no professional interest whatsoever (my interest there ends in watching YouTube videos) and I found it extremely boring and terrible use of my time. things I had to learn could easily be solved by hiring a real electrical engineer. aside from that, it was terrible management and incredibly unsocial, quit after 6 months and apparently the manager quit shortly after because he got another offer... figures.

one just got a better offer and left within 5 days, no shame. other time just bad fit socially/personally or whatever. everything looks fine professionally wise during interviews but once you actually go to the office and sense the atmosphere you can really tell, and vast majority of places actually don't let you get the feel of working there, no prior meeting the team, walk through there office or whatever. strange! costly.

and yes few days in a bad environment is well enough to judge. and what probation?

In one job, in the first week, I saw multiple instances of fraud against customers, and evidence that the business was largely an excuse for an utterly horrible insurance fraud scheme. That was one to have left sooner.

I've left after day one. I've left the first day 20 minutes in. HR presented us with a contract it said I agreed to not work for another company doing games for a year. I asked them to remove it but the guy acted like I asked for something no one else ever did. He pretended to ask HR and than said you have to sign. I took his sheet for review and left. The ride home was quick.

Though I would say, that you shouldn't just quit. You should take your concerns to your manager and give them a chance to fix it. Sometimes they can.

I started a job last November, and after about 3 months I was ready to quit. I spoke with my manager and he said he would help fix the problems. He hasn't been able to fix everything, but he was able to fix my biggest annoyances. For the things he could not fix, he is helping me mitigate the issues.

Though if your management is not willing to help you fix the issues then it is time to move on. I've had that happen before too.

I would like to be fired because then I don't have to quit myself.

I am currently in a IT project I don't want to be in. There is too much going on and there is so much shit here. They told me that it was going to be X and I was already hesitant, but I had to do it and now it is more like XXX.

I am still here because I don't know what I should do else and I like the pay (but I don't need it and it isn't that great). Also, I know the book of Cal Newport "So Good They Can't Ignore You", but I don't know how to implement his advices. Probably I will not like my next job or the next thing I would do (if I know what it would be).

1. Find another while still working.

2. Give the customary notice because you're a professional.

3. If it keeps happening, it might not be the jobs or it might be working for other people.

Point 3 is very important: if every job sucks, it might be something about you rather than the companies you've worked for.

I've worked with people who always complain, and when an object of their unhappiness disappears, they quickly replace it with another. It's as if they were unhappy with themselves and kept projecting it elsewhere.

A string of bad luck is entirely possible. I hated my first three jobs, then the next one was okay up to a point and my current one is alright (although boring).

I hate my job but need the income and benefits.

I'd love to be fired. I hate the job, I hate the work environment, I hate the pay and I hate programming.

This is an interesting question, but it seems like it would get better traction on Twitter rather than HN.

Disagree. Now Twitter is going mainstream with social manipulation, I would rather receive feedbacks from HN

This isn’t the first time this topic has been posted [0]. A couple years ago, the “who wants to be fired?” post hit the front page. So I disagree with you.

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It feels too much like memeposting. It sidesteps actual issues like burnout and dissatisfaction over long periods of time, frustration with commutes. These are all concrete issues that leave people feeling this way, and could be talked about distinctly and purposefully.

To me, it seems dismissive to just ask "Who wants to be fired?" when there have been those whom we've lost to suicide or cardiac events from being overworked and overlooked. It's just not right to reduce that problem to "haha, fire me, durrr"

I had a friend of a friend in NY some years ago not show up to work, and my friend was weirded out because it was unusual. The guy was some director of account management or something at Goldman, and he jumped in front of a train around Canarsie or somewhere. Guy had a wife and a newborn and a toddler. This stuff really happens, in my experience.

Finance is insane.

My uncle worked backend systems for a trading floor in the 90s. His last straw was when a vendor CE died in the datacenter, iirc of a heart attack during an early morning repair. Someone called 911 when he was discovered, but the fire/ems guys got into a fight with the management and security and stormed off.

They ended up getting threatened to complete the repair or get fired and rolled the dude into a cold corner of the datacenter, where he sat for several hours.

That's unbelievable, and yet, entirely believable. Wow. I'm sorry he was a part of that, and I'm glad he got out. It's such a nasty, awful industry. I've done some report generation stuff for banks (way before they called it data science) and it was strange being around people who were so highly strung and odd. I mean, there's parts of their personalities that just gave off "I could snap any moment" vibes.

Anyhow. Yeah. Finance sucks. They ought to make it illegal to work more than 40hrs in that industry, right away.

I understand, but as somebody who has wanted to be fired, I value the stories. It lets me know that I'm not the only one in my industry with these kinds of feelings.

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