Comment by henvic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henvic | Hacker News Reader

Just leave. It's the professional thing to do, if you can sustain yourself.

In 2012 I've left my hometown and went to the other side of my country to work at a startup. Within 20 days I left because the situation was critical. I was already feeling like I should leave on the second week, but decided to wait just to break-even from my moving expenses.

It was e-commerce startup where the team lead / project manager was actually the only backend engineer.

One of the problems I had was that it was impossible to work with him.

He despised git, so we used svn. Fine. It was in the early days of git, I could understand that. He didn't write proper svn messages (but garbage like... always 'ghnwerigkelrwn'), and told me I shouldn't care about it. Ugh... Okay, I think I can try to change this situation.

Then on my first days of work I noticed that something was very wrong with the repo. Turns out the guy configured his Eclipse IDE to commit to SVN any time he saved any change.

And he'd just type random keys out of boredom in any part of the system (PHP, which is an interpreted language) and break things wildly.

For those that doesn't know: SVN is a centralized versioning system. It's not like git, where you push things 'later'. When you commit, it's sent to a central server.

> Just leave.

Not a good idea for the OP to leave without having another job to start.

The OP only found this job after a long period of job searching. Having a large unexplained resume gap followed by a short 6-month employment followed by another gap is the type of pattern that starts to scare hiring managers.

Start the job search, but don’t just leave until you have something else to go to. Avoid introducing another resume gap within months of the previous long resume gap.

Read the next sentence.

>It's the professional thing to do, if you can sustain yourself.

This is the part you somehow missed.

I think the point is that even if OP can sustain themselves, leaving before having a new job lined up will likely negatively impact their chances for their next job. So unless they can sustain themselves indefinitely (unlikely, else why would they have a job now), lining up a new job before leaving seems like good advice.

Neh. Even if you can sustain yourself, better to look for jobs while you have a job. Companies will think they can give you a lower offer if you aren't currently employed. Sure you can negotiate up, but better to start with a better hand.

This is if you optimize for money.

If you optimize for happiness, the decision process can be wildly different.

For many people being unemployed is not a happy place. Not everyone can get a good SWE job in a week depending on location, skills, relationships, etc

You don’t have to put everything on your resume. Leave and leave the current job off of your resume.

> unexplained resume gap

Resume gaps shouldn't have to be explained. If someone thinks you're a bad hire because you don't dedicate every moment of your life to working, they are probably not someone you want to work for anyways.

> a short 6-month employment followed by another gap is the type of pattern that starts to scare hiring managers.

Q: "Why were you only there for 6 months?" A: "It wasn't a good fit because x y z"

If someone is scared of that, then they are a crap hiring manager.

Demonizing people for taking time off of work or for not sticking around in a work environment that not good for them is bs that needs to stop.

In principle, you're right, but try telling that to literally any recruiter or hiring manager. What really blows my mind, is how a couple of 6 month contracts on a resume can invalidate a candidate for future 6 month contract work. To be clear: recruiters hiring candidates for 6 month roles, do not want candidates with 6 month contracts on their resumes. Is that because they're a 'crap hiring manager'? Maybe, but then many hiring managers must be crap, because it's a question I get every time someone sees that I took a 3 month 1099 and two 6 month contracts between 2019-2020. And there are a couple of 6 month full time roles in there, from startups and projects that went sideways. Try explaining that to a nontechnical person.

Personally take a lot of phone calls just to stay abreast of the job landscape, and that's what I see every week. Not that anybody would want a 6 month contract. Just one data point, of course. Would love to be proven wrong. The culture has to change, and it's entrenched.

EDIT: Some (technical) hiring managers can interpret a resume well and will have no problem with your short stints, and will see you for what you are worth. These are the people you really want to talk to in the first place. Just ignore everyone else.

The way the world is and the way the world ought to be are not the same. Life should be fair -- but it isn't.

GP is not suggesting that OP goes down with the ship; they're suggesting that they get in a life boat first. In these circumstances, IMHO, it's good advice.

Oh God that sounds like a special kind of nightmare. Did you see any hints re:this during the interview?

Mostly just a bit of 'bro culture'. I also was told they were worried I'd 'rob their code' as I was using my personal computer instead of a company-provided one.

This guy told me the owners were worried because I could just take the code home (of course, I wouldn't delete/create the repo when arriving/leaving each day lol).

I don't know if it was really the startup founders' concerns or his paranoia, though.

After I left, I returned 6 months later to say hi (the founders discovered I was in town and asked me to go there, to their new office). So I went there, hoping this guy wasn't there, and guess what? They fired me about 2 months later after I left.

They played a trick on me, asking me what I thought about him once I came to the office. Only then, after I've politely tried to avoid shaming him while saying our working >style< was very different, I was told that they let him go.

I burst out in a laugh, finally telling them openly that they did the right thing. Then, they asked me why I didn't let them know about it.

I was just too naive, thinking they'd just outright reject my opinion and decided just leaving was the better thing to do for my mental health. I was wrong: honest criticism seemed welcome by them.

You have to be careful with that sort of thing, especially when you're new and don't have the vibe of the place... I think you did the right thing by not saying anything at first. I'm glad you were able to get out early though.

s/fired me/fired him lol

I’m more shocked that Eclipse even had a feature that would svn commit on every file save.

He put it together by writing a script.

In such a situation. He's treating the SVN as his own, not as a team resource. Just mirror his changes to git, and move on. Bypass authority.

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