Very true. I can't wait for my career to be over. I don't think I'll ever find the position where I feel I belong, so I'll just be miserable anywhere now that I know how broken the system really is.
Some people are chalking this up to depression, which is possibly part of it, but honestly I think this is simply the reality of a former idealist coming to grips with the big picture. You can't help but recognize that passion will come & go and it's all castles made of sand in the end. Whatever is most interesting for us to work on, someone else is almost certainly doing it better than you or I could without our help, and everything short of this feels like garbage when you only look at the work for its own sake.
All I can say is that what really makes anything worthwhile comes down to your relationships with people. Working a job which involves putting up with a lot of broken shit isn't so bad when you truly appreciate your team-- and on the flipside, working with the coolest bleeding edge stuff in the world will still suck when you don't. Localizing your focus and reinforcing bonds with the folks you enjoy being around can help a lot in getting through it. My two cents.
Someone who is mentally healthy realizes the world is imperfect and what they're doing is isn't working, but then takes that knowledge and builds upon it. Maybe they change careers, or maybe they lower their expectations for their job and focus on other meaningful things.
Someone who is depressed never gets out of the "this is awful" rut.
Again, nothing but sympathy for the depressed, but if you're unhappy you should try to find a way to redirect that energy if you have the strength to do so.
I'll work on problems I find interesting, and for all I care, the system can crash and burn. All the while, I'll clock out when I want and go home with a smile on my face.
I hope you will find more fulfillment in the future!
By the way I never planned anything. I don't think more than a week ahead. Somehow I have fallen into the right places anyhow.
I tend to get really bored once I've totally mastered a job so I change a lot. I need a challenge. Because I do this within the same company (lucky to get the opportunity!) it didn't really make me look like a jobhopper, that helped alleviate worries about having a CV that's all over the place.. Also, some things I've done (like desktop office telephony) are totally extinct now so it is pretty easy to explain. I'm definitely in the "Senior IC" category in the article.
But I can recommend to look around if you're not happy. You never know...
And I really love learning obscure tech :) always have.
Some companies really are better than others. But tbh it's more the people you work for directly that matter. They're the ones with the capability to shield you from the worst crap. That fight for you with HR when your job is on the line. When I look for other teams to move to I always take the management into account too. They may not stick around forever but if you have a good relationship they might bring you with them anyway.
When I do an interview I always ask to see the workplace. Just to get a feel for the place I'll be spending my days. It's usually viewed as a very peculiar request when applying externally but usually granted. I've rejected a job once because the team really looked burned out and literally stuffed in a corner.
Another place I was shown looked amazing and fun. I still work for that company today.
I do think some companies are better than others, but I don't think any company is really good. They all lie. My company has a reputation for being great and caring. On paper it's true. For over 90% of people, that might be true. But they don't follow their own policies, screwing over a small percentage. So I think if you don't fall into that small percentage, then you just don't see it.
For example, my company says they don't compare people except for the highest rating. So you have to meet the "standards" (which are poorly defined btw). I know departments in the company where if you gave someone the highest rating, then you have to "pick" someone for a low rating.
Not evil, but that they lie and screw over employees. Are there any companies on Glassdoor with 100% positive ratings (with n>100)?
Like any rating system it is biased towards people with grievances, as they are motivated to look for an outlet to express that grievance.
Companies are made up of people, this happens everywhere. You're just describing life. This is not a problem specific to "companies".
But this is also a personality thing. I prefer being a specialist on something unique over one of many on a big team.
I agree with you that when the obscure tech is simply the wrong one for the scenario, it's bad. If you don't believe in it yourself it's really hard to commit to it. In that case it's probably better to find another position or even another company..
Less than 2 years later NeXT merges with Apple, and Steve Jobs has begun the biggest comeback in tech history, including switching Apple to Objective-C. Well then...
This sort of thing is a lottery ticket. You likely will not win, but if you do it could just make a couple extra car payments, or you could be set for life.
I do not know how to make a career out of that :/
> you wrongly believed their promises that they would take care of you (retraining, career growth, not laying off, not outsourcing, etc).
None of these things _ever_ just happen, even when promised. People who want them have to actively make them happen. The promise is just a "the company won't get in the way" thing, which is the best you can hope for.
Your comments make it sound a bit like your career is something that has happened to you. Careers atrophy unless you take steps to force the direction.
For example, if retraining was mentioned, then find an online course at Udacity or something, get the annual review or whatever where retraining was mentioned, and send en email to your manager saying "hey my review said I need to do retraining. I need $450 for this course and then go from there".
Even in the best companies it's pretty rare someone will actually organise something like this for you.
It is solely the company who decides to outsource or lay off after saying they don't do that kind of thing. You have no recourse when the company gives you a bad rating. They don't even allow you to be present for the secret trial they put you on (calibration). God help you if you're in one of the departments that requires a manager to pick someone for a bad rating to balance out a top rating. Without a union, there's no way to contest bad ratings and keep the people in power from screwing over workers.
I have gotten certs like for AWS and one specific to my area's business acumen. So I'm not sitting here doing nothing. But it doesn't help that much and there aren't many options in my area.
Ownership structures other than VC funded startups might prove better fits.
I see it as like the corporate version of judging people by how they treat waiters or shop staff. You don't judge a company culture by how it treats its rare as unicorns tech staff, you judge it on how it treats the easily replaceable staff with low market pay rates. If it treats the latter like shit then the only reason it's treating you well is because they have to.
The world is a huge place, and the variation out there vast enough to be hard to get your head around. It will always be a mistake to assume you have a good handle on "everything" based only on personal path.
You would think that they would want to hire people who already knew the domain, but apparently that is often not the case.
We've written a lot about it in our company handbook https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/ (free to download, no email required) and you can find more stories and details on our blog if interested.
COVID has made things more difficult, especially since pre-COVID we did a lot of events together (skiing, surfing, hiking, co-living, workations, etc.) and not meeting up has definitely harmed our sense of belonging and purpose. So we're very much looking forward to having events again this year.
Basically what I wanted to say: People are currently jumping around a lot in their jobs, looking for the highest salaries and finding a purpose and a place they belong. We somehow have managed, despite not being able to match Silicon Valley salaries, to have a really good team of loyal, friendly and kind humans that gives me joy to get up every single day and to work with them. And with most of them it's similar, since many of those people have been staying with us since they've joined us. Despite getting better offers (financially speaking) every day.
If you are in another country/market, then we are very able to pay market salary and in most cases even above market salary, while providing a great work environment at the same time. We have and had people from Ireland, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Croatia, Serbia, Mauritius, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Austria, Thailand, Argentina and probably a couple more that I forgot now.
So basically what I wanted to say: just because we cannot afford a Silicon Valley market salary, doesn't mean we are underpaying people elsewhere or treating them unfair (financially speaking).
I hope my answer helped to clarify things.
pre-COVID we did a lot of events together (skiing, surfing, hiking,
co-living, workations, etc.)
The best solution I’ve come up with so far is simply paying well & giving a lot of time off (and making sure people actually feel comfortable using their vacation days, which is an issue with “unlimited vacation” sometimes). Then each person can just afford to take the activities they want to.
It’s not like you’re going to be coding while waiting for the next set.
I think the best we can do as companies is know the team, have a variety of activities (inside normal working hours!), and not require 100% attendance since there is never going to be one activity that works for everyone.
How we manage a fully reemote companyBeing happy is not a capitalistic goal and the capitalists will eat your lunch. Being happy and kicking ass is close enough to be harder to sabotage.
Also our business doesn't have huge profit margins like some of the big tech companies. So financially we're always somewhere between "it is not critical, yet", but also never reach the "100% comfortable".
You are right - it takes you several years of training, whereas you can probably pick up the bits and bobs of programming in a few weeks, if you have any aptitude.
But the basic idea remains - if you are doing something you hate, stop doing it, no matter what the price. It isn't going to get any better.
I really wish there was a way to hop paths that didn't involve making ridiculously less money for many years, while likely having to deal with many of the same problems.
I frequently lament not choosing to go into marine biology, even though I know now that it would have been a far more challenging field and would still have (likely) resulted in far less income. Had I just started on that path, I believe I would not have cared much about the possibility of making more money in another field that I would have been skilled at. The last bit is clearly an assumption as you can't actually go back and do it all over to realize the possible outcome(s), but I can't imagine a life journey were I didn't enjoy programming, even if it wasn't my career focus.
And so here I am, in a place that I mostly still enjoy, dreaming of what could have been, assuring myself that I'm doing the right thing for myself and my family. It would be one thing to completely upend my own life (I still have the belief that I could do it if I were the only person affected), but to completely change the trajectory for my family and possibly the financial stability we enjoy... I guess that leaves me in the category of "overall happy enough" because my family more than makes up for my perceived benefits of getting out of the tech industry, which if not already clear, I love more than hate.
Wow... that's a lot of text and felt more therapeutic than anything to unload that. :) So frequently I'm reading these threads and keeping my thoughts to myself. If nothing else, I hope that maybe some others who believe they're in the same boat take note that they're not alone in this and I have at least 2 close friends who feel very similar to this (though I rarely admit, even to them, that I feel this way about my career).
whew
I had this same feeling (including the despairing tone), until I changed where I work. Perhaps you can find a job in a meaningful industry (public transport, charity, a utility, etc) so that you can be certain you have a material positive impact on other people's lives. This impression helps a lot with work enjoyment.
For example, medical has great coverage for the employee, but only 50% coverage for dependents. It seems they're selecting for single people, and indirectly young people as they're less likely to have a family (the people I remember in their videos and media are mostly very young). Then there the whole "billable hours" switcheroo - making you think extra hours are rare, but really you're expected to work extra on non-billable projects (internal company work).
I’m curious what you mean by ‘how broke the system really is’. Which system are you referring to, how is it broken, how could it be fixed, and what kind of expectations did you have going in that?
I have an LLC for largely non-tech work. Tech work is terrible in my market, so I don't think I'd do well enough to support myself. Not to mention, the tech I spent time building expertise in for the company was obscure, so I do think even have any real expertise now.
Companies are there to make money, and policies are set not as laws in stone, but to have some control over the work environment. That means the company would use those policies as needed. You are replaceable in general, and that's a fact. The same way companies should be replaceable for you. In this case, in tech, we are lucky enough to have plenty of opportunities to get new jobs, so use it. Not to find the perfect fantasy company, but to get the money you need to live a life you want.
"we are lucky enough to have plenty of opportunities to get new jobs"
That's highly individual. I don't have many options or opportunities.
I didn’t get a picture of what the policies and imbalance of power is, or what it should be. I’ve seen some companies lie in varying amounts that don’t always add up to broken. What’s actually broken from your perspective? Does broken mean they’re not paying you? Or does it mean you aren’t getting promoted? Does it mean the software they produce doesn’t work, or the company doesn’t make any money?
A tech LLC won't help. The area is terrible for tech work and my expertise was in stuff that's irrelevant.