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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr I wanted to do more frontend work but they made me mostly write Ruby. They're nice though.

I sometimes read articles like, "why I left Google," or "why I left Facebook," and they're mostly a teardown of the company.

This article is generally positive. The author liked the people, had a positive sentiment of the interview process, was impressed by the tech stack, had a solid manager, etc. It just wasn't the tech stack they wanted to be working with.

I am not casting aspersions on the specific OP, but often these "why I left" stories are missing key information, like the writer got a bad review, or was on plan, or had a monster boss, or was actually fired, etc.

People don't want to hurt their employment prospects, so it's understandable if they are selective about what they reveal, but that's why I don't trust accounts like this.

I don't blame OP for leaving. You can usually get the vibe in 3 months and have a pretty good feel for what things are in your control and how it's going to shake out.

I left HashiCorp in 4 months for basically the same reason, just swap our frontend with Go.

I was interviewed in Go and I knew the team was using Ruby but all the teammates were energetic for having someone else who knew Go, wasn't all about Ruby/Rails and the team was great. But the opportunities on other teams to build out things in Go and work on the existing Go codebases, both public and private, was just teasing me every day. I tried to work on one of our open source libraries and was told I was stepping on someone else's toes and could be taking opportunities away from them.

I would return in a heartbeat on one of the Go teams working on one of the Go products. I think they are just great in the Go community and their tools are fantastic.

imho, they should have expected that, since Shopify is a known Ruby shop

edit: this wasn't meant to insult OP, sorry

You make it sound like the author did something wrong. Accepting a job and finding after 5 months that, for whatever reason, it's not your thing is pretty OK is it? Better to quit quick than stick around unhappy.

It's not a 3 man company, you know. If they are interviewed and hired as Frontend (React) Developer in organization of that scale, they might expect to actually do what they are qualified to do.

> imho, they should have expected that, since Shopify is a known Ruby shop

Why is there always the tendency to blame the person and NOT the company?

Such a tendency is not on display here. This is like accepting a job at NASA and assuming you’re going into space.

> known

If you apply for a role that is explained to you, what does it matter what the company mostly does? If I apply to a rail maintenance company as a programmer, should I expect to maintain rail? No.

CP Rail anecdotally does this with a lot of its office staff in case of a strike.

accurate summary.

Rails views are frontend code. The assumption “front end = JS” is a false equivalence, and one only relatively recently promulgated. Overall this article reads like someone who doesn’t quite understand how inexperienced they are; this mistake confirms it.

What did the author do to you to warrant such a mean-spirited reply?

My read is that doesn't sound personal, rather it sounds objective and factual.

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