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Comment by _abox | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry to hear that. I've had many positions where I felt like I belonged including my current. The ones where I didn't were very depressing and stressful.

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...

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It felt great at first. Once you realize that the company - respected/known as a place that does the right thing - doesn't follow its own policies and screws people over, you realize that every company/job sucks. It won't be better anywhere else. And you wasted your youth on obscure and obsolete tech because the company needed it and you wrongly believed their promises that they would take care of you (retraining, career growth, not laying off, not outsourcing, etc).

My experience is totally different. The company I've worked for for the last 20 years has always done the right thing by me. They allowed me to work from my home country for half a year when I needed to be with my family, they paid to move me to yet another country when my team was made redundant so I could do the job I really wanted.

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 would like obscure tech if it had a future - like when I thought the company would do the right thing.

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.

I feel like your perspective is very narrow. You’ve had a bad experience at one company that you admit has done well for almost all their employees, therefore all companies are evil and your chance of happiness is zero? That doesn’t seem reasonable or even likely. May I recommend “Feeling Good” by David Burns? It has helped many people in situations like yours.

"therefore all companies are evil"

Not evil, but that they lie and screw over employees. Are there any companies on Glassdoor with 100% positive ratings (with n>100)?

Would you ever expect that for anything? There are always going to be disgruntled employees/customers. if I see 100% positive, I'm usually looking for the scam.

Glassdoor is a terrible metric for measuring companies.

Like any rating system it is biased towards people with grievances, as they are motivated to look for an outlet to express that grievance.

And it's likely thar at least some of those grievances where born out of misconduct by the company. Bringing us back to my position that all companies lie and screw over workers, that the ones that look good just mean you aren't witnessing it.

Find me any situation anywhere in the world where there are no bad actors.

Companies are made up of people, this happens everywhere. You're just describing life. This is not a problem specific to "companies".

Or, on the other hand, I've seen companies offering to enter you into gift card drawings to relate your positive experience with them on glassdoor, etc. :eyeroll: To me, glassdoor and the like are similar to Amazon reviews, you can't trust them, but it sometimes feels like the only way to _possibly_ get the information you're seeking.

Obscure tech is also an opportunity to be one of those rare specialists in a field. A Linux expert still gets rewarded more than a Windows one in a desktop management role, though it's certainly harder to find a job in the first place.

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..

I recall thinking that my friend who had decided to gamble on Objective-C as his specialization in '95 was being foolish, because NeXT wasn't doing that well, and the hazard pay for being one of the last N experts was probably fraught.

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.

True, but I don't see Filenet and Neoxam ever getting big.

No, and any framework that your architectural astronaut coworkers created is most definitely not going to ever be used anywhere else you ever work. And in fact the decisions it made may well be counter to industry accepted practices outside of that company.

I have specialized on Pascal, XPath, and causal (Bayesian) networks

I do not know how to make a career out of that :/

"Companies" are made up of individuals. If a company has a culture where they make an attempt to care and put on a public face of caring then that is an awesome start, but actually making that work comes down to you and your managers.

> 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.

I understand what you're saying, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

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.

I think integrity is a rare resource, and an expensive one. I'm trying to only work for people with a lot of it. Even then, the ownership structure of the company matters a lot. A manager with high integrity and investors to please who misses targets will either compromise or be forced out eventually.

Ownership structures other than VC funded startups might prove better fits.

For what it's worth, there are companies who walk the walk, I've been lucky enough to work for a couple. However, I think they are almost always smaller companies.

Do they walk the walk for everyone though? I find that the stuff that's out of view and only affects a small percentage seem to exist almost everywhere.

In my experience, some of them do. However I think that in general the larger the company, the less that is true. In a smaller company everyone is on the same team. In larger companies you always find there is someone who gets shat on because someone three levels up doesn't think of them as actual people.

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.

> you realize that every company/job sucks. It won't be better anywhere else.

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.

I don't know what sort of alternate reality bubble I exist in but I've found that I often get more opportunity to learn new technology when working as a contractor or consultant than as a FTE.

You would think that they would want to hire people who already knew the domain, but apparently that is often not the case.

I have a friend who was laid off and said the contractor company he's with provides way more learning opportunities and courses.

What kind of company do you work for? Tech company, FAANG, etc.

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