Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nbox9 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that seems like a terrible place to work.

Why is he going to a daily meeting if he doesn’t have to pay attention to the meeting?

Why is there not an incentive to complete more than one card a day? If one card can take as little as two hours it seems like a massive waste to expect someone to only do one card.

Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend X,XXX/yr for proper equipment. The company should provide high quality mouse/keyboard/headset.

View on HN

> Why is he going to a daily meeting if he doesn’t have to pay attention to the meeting?

Attendance is not usually optional for standup.

> Why doesn’t he have proper equipment?

Oh, oh, I know this one! Because the equipment is standardized for the entire organization, meaning that it's optimized for the administrative branch who uses mostly Powerpoint and Outlook.

For the extra credit: Of course you can order specialized equipment, but it will come out of your department's budget (because it's non-standard) and there might not be enough. It may also take weeks to arrive, a business case justification, and/or quotes from several vendors.

Paying for it yourself also won't do - Bring-Your-Own-Device may be forbidden due to security concerns, and I have yet to see a company that allows me to buy more RAM with my own money.

There's also the question of what a "high quality headset" is, but that's probably a different topic.

> and I have yet to see a company that allows me to buy more RAM with my own money

Reminds me of a funny story from my first IT internship. Got a ticket for a weird issue from a software developer on the floor above. Went to visit his desk, and found he was a quiet, shy, but likeable guy who was having trouble with some hardware in his workstation. He gave me a cheeky look before opening his company-supplied desktop, and it was completely full of custom parts he had slowly installed himself over the course of years to improve his workflow. This guy had a PCIe SSD, in 2011, while the rest of the company still had spinning rust.

> Why doesn’t he have proper equipment? If you spend XXX,XXX a year for an employee it makes sense to spend X,XXX/yr for proper equipment. The company should provide high quality mouse/keyboard/headset.

Because it is an expense, not an investment.

If you are building a product, having good equipment is a force multiplier: You get more from your expense in people.

If you're just billing hours to a third party, good equipment is an expense and might be counterproductive.

I realized that the OP can correct these actions himself. If he is in a useless meeting then he should speak up and work towards changing that policy.

If he doesn't have good equipment he could work with management to lobby for better equipment or bring his own there.

Instead of working for 4 hours then "doing whatever" he could make meaningful changes in the organization but he chooses not too.

Maybe it isn't a terrible place to work. Maybe he is a terrible employee.

Why is that a better option for the OP than finding a job that better aligns with how they would like to work? It's really better for everyone in the long run. Company has fewer malcontent workers and can replace the headcount with people that do want to be in the office, and OP isn't suffering in an environment they can't tolerate.

Maybe neither are terrible. Maybe they're just poorly suited for each other.

Just as changing jobs tends to boost salary more than getting raises, changing jobs and disclosing all of one's grievances at the exit interview is probably a stronger signal than being the squeaky wheel while still in the company.

I agree in theory but in practice regular employees have extremely little agency in team wide matters. With the points you're making you might as well say "he should take things into his own hands and set his own personal permanent WFH policy." See how ridiculous that sounds?

All of those seem pretty standard in large companies in my experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com