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Comment by literallyaduck | Hacker News Reader

The grass was probably not greener and eventually reached an equilibrium at the new company. This letter reminds me of my recent departure. I wasn't really coding much anymore, the company had been ignoring suggestions since I started years ago. We fought the same fires and nothing was learned on company time. I had to devote my own time to growth. Sadly we don't know the rest of the programmer's story. I'd like to know if they finally found the dream job.

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There will be a full writeup on this system later on, but the diskette that contained this letter of resignation was part of what remained of the author's 8" diskette library, and contained a lot of 8080/Z80 code he'd written. He's deceased now, the fellow who passed the system on to me never knew him either, but digging through that much of someone's code and notes (a banker's box of documentation), I at least sort of feel like I end up in the programmer's shoes a bit.

Unfortunately, it seems this machine had a fault in its floppy drive controller some time in late 1985 or early 1986 (files stopped being updated). The fault caused any writes at all to disk to clobber whatever was under the write heads. So, this is about the end of the information I've got w.r.t. personal correspondence, etc.

Someone posted this[0] recently about recovering old data from damaged floppies using oscilloscope.

[0] https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2021/05/recovering-l...

The grass is greener if you stop working for companies dominated by non-technical leadership.

Unfortunately the types who move from one corporate behemoth to another rarely see the light and continue indulging in the fantasy that one day they'll find a large old company run by non-technical leadership with respect for engineering, other good developers to collaborate with who haven't left, and processes focused on progress.

The rest of us learned the lesson and stopped working as engineers for such companies.

This is the conclusion i came to as well, but you said it better.

Do you have any tips to share about finding places run by technical minded leadership, before actually getting yourself hired?

I feel my bullshit-job detector when interviewing at potential workplaces isn't as good as it could be...

I'm not good at it either and landed at a good place by sheer luck. But once I know what a good culture looks like, next time I have to look for a new job I would try to do an extensive reverse interview to learn what their approach to architecture, planning, development and testing is. Basically I'd like to make sure that these all are driven by developers, that people care about quality, not just metrics, and that there is a long-term vision of what the team wants to deliver.

Ask who your manager will be. Look them up on LinkedIn. Look at all the people on the technical side of the company and their LinkedIns. If their last few jobs for the last several years aren't technical, that's the answer.

In general, pretty much any company that isn't a technology company will fail this test. Working for companies which are young and specifically software companies is your best bet.

- I am not coding anymore. - I am putting out the same fires I have been for the last 5 years. - I no longer learn anything on company time. (New technologies does not equate with improvement) - I have to devote my own time to growth.

My company's leadership is _entirely_ technical. In fact, engineering leads the whole organization, pretty much. We're still a feature factory.

Working for technical people is not a panacea to bad leadership. It just means they're better at bullshitting engineers to their face.

> they’re better at bullshitting engineers to their face.

Why did you call me out?

> It just means they're better at bullshitting engineers to their face.

They're also better at detecting bullshitting from engineers.

Oh, how much needed that is now days too. Engineers are becoming insufferable (I’m first on the list).

I've read somewhere that BMW and Audi have internal regulations in place, which dictate that at least half of the top level leadership group should always consist of people with engineering backgrounds.

I have not been able to confirm if it's true or not.

But it sounds as a healthy regulation to have in place for a technical company, since gravity seems to work in the opposite direction. Non-technical leaders will, in my experience, have a tendency towards hiring other non-technical leaders, and towards trying to mould the company operations into something which can be run without the need for technical knowledge.

And Toyota has (had?) the requirement that all employees, no matter how privileged, should regularly spend time on the factory floor doing the core business of the company: assembling cars.

I think that sort of idea makes a lot of sense to avoid losing touch.

and their cars interior is by far the worst for price range. Infotainment is so bad that sometimes the touch response happens like 4-5 seconds later on a four year old corolla hybrid. Worst interior in a car i experienced

Anecdata aside, they are one of (if not THE) most reliable car brands

i agree with reliability.

Just the rest of stuff is so bad, i mean for a car worth 25-30k i expect a touchscreen that is not absolute lemon from the start. Or just give me an api over network/bus that someone can create an app for it and i can just run a tablet which would be a total of say (300 bucks for a decent tablet, 100 bucks for the app ).

Not a fan of teslas at all, but i hope they put the direction of industry to have a decent infotainment as default. Korean/German cars seem to have a bit better infotainment.

> just give me an api over network/bus that someone can create an app for it

Be careful what you ask for…

I got a _very_ stern talking to by legal a long time back (~2013), when I demonstrated to my boss that using the Toyota telematics and some knowledge of specific vehicles, I could locate 2 of the fleet Prius we used. I’m reasonably sure I could have popped the door locks on them too with a little more work.

I was just “playing” with some api docs I found in the company wiki.

Legal and the CTO made it very clear to me that I’d never found those docs, I’d never written any code to use those APIs, I’d never connected to any Toyota never mind one I didn’t own personally, I’d certainly never tried exploiting those APIs, and I knew _nothing_.

I hope (perhaps in vain) that things are better than they were 7-8 years ago (and that 7-8 years and the company who’s NDA I was covered by company going into receivership is long enough to tell some of the story…)

That would be fun, i know its hard to trust car manufacturers with software, but one can alwys wish.

I just wish if some company create an android/ios app, it would be definitely easier to create than working on some random hardware found in car infotainment for which its hard to find developers.

Now any tablet can be my infotainment. I only need navigation and music to be integrated in app. No other features what so ever.

Basically what volkswagen e-up / skoda e-citigo has done.

“The grass is greener where you water it.”

Manure also seems to help.

"The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/432288.The_Grass_Is_Alwa...

You can attract more flies with honey than vinegar, but a big steaming pile of BS works best.

     I  have the unpleasant task of informing you that I will be leaving __*this_crummy*__ employment as of __*shortly*__.

     As you know I have not been very happy with __*the_same_old_shit*__.  I have not __*seen_anything_worthwhile?*__ in a little over 3 months.   I have not learned anything new in the __*professional*__ field in the past year.   I have been putting out the same old fires that were here __*a_sad_number_of*__ years ago.

     I will be working as a __*much_better_position*__ for __*a_truly_respected_employer*__.

     I  would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who I have worked with for the past two years.   I know that I will miss you all.

On the other hand, a job that is 'good enough' can make you too scared to make the jump to leave. Then you get paid less, learn less and it becomes harder to make the jump if the job stops being 'good enough'

I wonder in general what are the odds of finding a better job? Are they 50/50 or do they skew one way or the other?

Depends on how bad your current job is. The better the current job, the harder it is to find something still better.

There can be a halo effect - the better your current jobs, to some degree the better offers you get - but I still think that on net, you should be more reluctant to leave a decent situation. If your current job is in the top 10% of jobs, then the odds are 9 to 1 that switching will get you something worse.

> If your current job is in the top 10% of jobs, then the odds are 9 to 1 that switching will get you something worse.

This is a wise insight. It therefore would be good if developers had created a Glassdoor-like site where people can enter technical details about their jobs (languages used, appreciation of refactoring, software tools, pair programming, technical documentation, use of version control, A/B testing, unit tests, UML, ...) in order to permit people to get a sense of what they're getting into. Asking about this at interviews is not productive, as hiring managers may bend the truth a bit to get talent on board.

I’ve seen a similar idea with employees, but a bit more forgiving. I can’t find the article, but it was about when it makes sense to replace someone vs keep them. The idea was to keep them if they get 70% of their work correct / do 70% of the job well and go to the market for a new hire if they don’t hit that.

It seems low, but with the inefficiency caused by turnover I guess 70% is where they settled.

Seems very difficult to gauge quantitatively. I've changed jobs at year 2, 12, and 19. Each time, what I was interested in to make my next job better had changed based on my age as well as my accrued experience at the different jobs. And there's the fact that for someone like myself, I'm guilty of moving the goalpost. I honestly have a great job right now. Bit as I get used to that, then new things bug me.

This.

I loved my first job. Every thing about it. But looking back in hindsight, it was a vanity project of the ceo, and was never going to recoup the manpower investment. Requirements and goal posts were ever-shifting. I was too naive to even perceive role status and did little or nothing concrete to forward my career except turn out (quality) code.

I loved it.

I would be frustrated to distraction if I were in that position now.

I've often found that the thing that made me take a new job was the change that I wanted and failed to make in the old. In fact, often enough I misjudged the new org in the interview and they had the same problems but I ended up being the force for the change that I wanted to see.

For some odd reason, it always seems like getting that inertia is easier at the next job than the current one.

Great point. My first programming job in college was for a little boutique software company in town. My boss would walk into my office at noon, describe some software, and ask if I could have a PoC by 4 so he could drive over to the client and hopefully get a check to build. Now, something like that would drive me nuts, but at the time I didn't know better and it was exciting.

The one consistent thing in my career is I don't tolerate jobs that have too little work to do. I've had 2 jobs at various points in my career where was I told to just hang out for extended periods of time, and in neither case did I make it a year working there.

The more inclined you are to leave it, the worse it is (all else equal), and therefore the bigger the chance the next one is better.

(By your own judgment.)

You can always reduce to more material aspects, like money. Sometimes a large salary increment can make you accept much more shit.

I have incredible frustrations at my current job but the 2x increment I got compared to my amazingly fun job I had in a small company before makes me brush them off much more easily :D

Every time I've changed jobs I've been happier for maybe 12 month or so and then it felt like the same old grind as the last job. It's almost like I might be a factor as well in the whole thing and not just the job.

The grass is still greener where I work now. And it has been for 10+ years.

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