Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? (June 2022)
Each of us have limits as to the things we're willing to put up with at a job. What's taking you near your threshold?
What the fuck is going on in the world of software delivery.
100 people has to spend 4 days planing 3 months ahead based on headlines from the business.
I have in my 22 years of professional experience never ever tried anything so shocking.
Fire me. Please
If the meeting was in person, I could do none of that, and I'd have an awkward chat with my boss about why I seemed disinterested at the meeting.
And close to nothing is written down, so people will not know what to do when they are done debating.
It's out of this world crazy.
Didn't think I would ever experience such a wild process
Ours started out taking three full days, and we eventually pruned them down to two full days which was still painful, but mostly productive. I can't imagine four whole days - day 5 would have to be dedicated to drinking.
And people use the failure of PI planning as an excuse for everything being stressful and chaotic. SAFe is the methodology of choice if you want your organization to work smoothly for the first few weeks of a planning increment and then become progressively more dysfunctional as people freak out and/or give up because it no longer makes sense to do exactly what the plan says. Exactly the opposite of agile.
- Quarters (every 12 weeks): Big ticket things that should move the business forward. This requires Engineering participation because items like technical debt, system re-architectures, pipeline improvements, etc. should be on the table. - PI (every 3-4 weeks): Light checkin on progress to current items. A ballpark estimate on what can be delivered in the upcoming PI given the current constraints (capacity, quality, etc.). This works out to 3-4 checkpoints per quarter. - Sprint (every 1-2 weeks): Real commitments to tangible requirements are made here. If thorough discovery leads to changes to the ballpark estimates or development is delayed for other reasons, it is communicated at the PI checkpoint and forecasts can be adjusted.
(imo) SAFe is just a solution to problems that may or may not actually exist - eager-beaver middle management-types adopt it chiefly because they think it makes them look good, but also because Product/Engineering teams don't commit-escalate-communicate well.
I encourage folks to take a step back and ignore the specific SAFe guidance, but do consider the value of the inputs & outcomes.
I'm not sure which way the causality points, maybe you're right and organizations that already have poor communication tend to adopt SAFe, but my experience is that it discourages communication between teams and encourages passive-aggressive irresponsibility. In a healthy organization, anyone responsible for the success of a project (management leadership, project managers, and senior individual contributors) will periodically think, "Next week we will do X, but only if Y is going to be done soon, so I need to check in with the team working on Y," and people constantly keep their finger on the pulse of work relevant to their own. SAFe claims to replace this with process, so people don't do it.
In the company where I work now, there's no plan (I mean, there are various plans and timelines, but they're tools, not totems) and we constantly talk. I can message anyone I want or schedule a quick informal meeting with anyone I want without thinking about the political ramifications. Under SAFe sometimes we needed info from another team and discussed how to approach them, who to ask, how to frame it, etc., and ended up deciding there wasn't a good way and it would be better to make our best guess and not engage with them. A few times I was put in the position of refusing to say how I knew something, because I found a way to get the information I needed to do my job, and I didn't want my source to suffer any consequences from communicating outside the SAFe process.
Little do they know all the useless planning is probably just hurting them more than helping - the investment has negative value even before subtracting the cost of tied up employee resources. Madness!
I quit soon after.
Looking back now, the brutal destruction of our self-organized team had a negative effect on my mental wellbeing, and I have been happy with the decision that I left (eventhough it was painful leaving so many long-time colleagues behind.) These days I do similar work as a contractor for a different company.
BTW in that thread I predicted that the company would abandon SAFe within two years. My old colleagues have told me that by the end of 2021, the actual software development teams were "relieved" of the SAFe process, and apparently went back to their normal more or less self-organized working methods as before. SAFe is now only apparently a tool that the middle managers use to plan their high-level work (LOL).
SAFe lasted about 1.5 years total with the company going "all-in" and investing big time in trainings etc. Probably they would have abandoned SAFe altogether by now but in the "transition" they hired a good roster of SAFe specialists, so I guess they have to keep at least some form of SAFe process going on to not hurt anyone's feelings / lose face on the investment (although the specific C-level whose initiative SAFe was "moved on" already before.) Lots of the SAFe "specialists" have also moved on - most of them back to selling the same snake oil as management consultants to other firms.
I realized that everyone and their mother is hiring and decided to scoot off.
Oh, and before [the ordeal] I was doing a lot of travel consulting. If it weren't for [the ordeal] I probably would have quit a lot earlier because the work-life balance was just abysmal.
To this day I still don’t understand how some businesses expect devs to troubleshoot in production in the middle of the night, and fix underlying issues the morning after.
Enterprise security is perma-employment, but at a high sanity cost and uses a sense of urgency not really warranted as because if it's always bad, it's not actually bad.
I knew enough coding and comp sci to scoot off into product security and have never been happier.
It's a Modern Stack™ – cookie cutter, untestable locally, horde of Golang services on Kubernetes pulling and pushing to various cloud services. Of course, it's ad-tech and for a company that seems to be the media equivalent of a Jerry Springer show.
I have now lost all of the original engineers I joined the team with (minus one who was promoted), my team of five has shrunk to two (twice), and management has been riding "people only use us for counter offers" (which can't be true because we're several orders of magnitude under our peer groups in competitive offers - ask me how I know). I'm now trying to interview, handle incidents, develop features, and release patches with the help of one other engineer.
Please, for the love of god, take me out back and fire me like Old Yeller.
Obviously it’s up to me to fire these clients, but still…
It also allows you to give free intro and consultations, subsidized by existing clients.
Architects and lawyers (even a few doctors) frequently do this and it makes for a smooth way of onboarding new customers - I'm glad I'm not paying just for some basic info and I don't mind paying a bit more once I get the service.
Tightly scope, fix a fee against that scope and set your rate high enough that you can accommodate dumb meetings, the occasional on-site, etc.
When I was consulting full-time, I never even charged for travel because that removed a potential objection from out-of-market clients. But my rate? It was at the upper end of the range.
The reason is blindingly obvious - our new user input has dropped to multi-year lows and churn has stayed constant. For some reason, people are convinced it is something else, and we've had endless meetings about it. I am constantly being asked to pull up more and more contorted reports to answer people's pet theories about what is going on, none of which make sense, but we spend forever on them.
Eventually if you torture enough data, you'll find something, I guess. But it feels odd to overlook the things that are well-supported by data and make intuitive sense as well. It is like going into the ER and complaining that you feel lightheaded and when they notice your left arm has been severed and blood is spurting out, they rush to treat it, but you instead say "I had a lot of bread this morning, maybe I'm sensitive to gluten.. Can we test that first?"
We do not have basic operational metrics around things like signup conversion and whenever I've tried to draw attention to those, it devolves into trying to create a dashboard with thousands of mostly useless metrics instead. The last time I tried to get everyone to focus on collecting a few operational metrics at first, I got shouted down and told we didn't want to limit anything upfront, and I have sort of checked out of those meetings ever since.
No raises/bonuses this year and everyone was forced back to the office. I'm torn between being more and more worried about losing people and being worried about them being left in a tough spot here as things get worse.
Also the principal engineer on my team insists on well optimized solutions for new features when I just don't think it will matter. And it would take the same amount of time to implement later as it does now, except we'd have more understanding of the problem then.
Sorry dude I got really into my animation side project and just wanted to see if I could pick up one of these extra wfh 9-5 salaries the WSJ keeps saying are out there. Things spiraled.
I already had a new job lined up, but I highly recommend saving up a bit of cash reserves to do this.
During this time I also moved to a new state, signed up for sailing classes and read several technical books. Way better than sitting in useless meetings and not growing (again, if you can afford it, do it)
Too many big corps hiring developers for no reason, too many bullsh*t jobs (RIP David Graeber) that stifle our ability to enjoy life. We may get paid really well but for some reason, attending useless meetings and reacting to slack notifications and outlook pings kill my energy.
I also read some fiction - old man and the sea.
Even as a manager, it's easier for me to let someone have one day off a week PTO, with a wink and a nod, than it is to formally get someone to work 80% hours. And that barely is perceptible to upper leadership.
You're probably right in that most of those employees are itching to leave already, but financially it would make more sense just quit than take a 2 month sabbatical and then lose a larger payout.
First, most tech companies provide -paid- paternity leave. Which was my point. The burden on most companies isn't the pay for that period of time, it's the loss of capacity.
Second, the companies that object to that loss of capacity often either misunderstand the nature of the work, or have built their teams without any slack and so have set themselves up for failure. In the former, the teams are fine with the person going out even though management doesn't like it; in the latter they aren't, which is why legally mandated parental leave is so important, since otherwise, as we've seen, a badly run company will make it so you can't take time off.
Third, parental leave tends not to affect multiple members of a team at once. PTO and UTO can. Having too open a policy can lead to half a team being gone for a month, in such a way context doesn't transfer well and actually costs the team a whole month, which will have a lot more effect on productivity than one person being gone for a a couple of months. Obviously you can still have a policy that allows people to do it, but it requires thoughtfulness on the part of someone to ensure it still works out. Again, pulling from example, the big pushback I had to having a person formally reduce their hours by 20% is "what happens if multiple people on the team ask for that?" and that's also why it's easier and less risky to the business to have the person take a day off every week, paid. It means that it can be more easily managed if others taking simultaneous time off is a problem, since pay isn't involved (i.e., you can ask the individual to return to 100% hours until everyone else is done with their vacation, say, and then return to 80%, without having their pay also having to seesaw, which is a *process*)
Also 'would consider firing you on the spot' is very location dependent, that's not even legal everywhere. Even where it is surely it's a bit extreme - 'lol, no' will do.
I myself asked and got it, went backpacking 2x in himalayas each time for 3 months, and came back a different, better person. Still riding the wave that experience brought. I dont care about money lost due to this, at the end its just a number that wouldnt change anything in my life. The younger to do this the better.
It helps, being healthy, but you are allmost never too old for travelling and new experiences.
Too many people are just existing and not living. Money is important, especially when you do not have it, but you cannot take your money with you, when you leave. And sure you can pass it on. But in my family a great drama is now happening, because of the money of the grandparents and how to split it up (one of them is even still alive).
My grandmother probably should have "wasted" more of it on her travels. (but she did travel until she could not walk anymore)
It was a rather uncommon benefit at the time.
But dramatic quotes aside, since I have kids myself, I am leaning towards security, too. But I feel that this has indeed been blocking me a lot and I felt stagnating. The world is big and full of opportunities, but only if you go out and dare to look at them.
So I do recommend at least a long holiday ;)
Also the new place only wants me on site when there's a specific need, not 'just because'. I hear from a former colleague that they interviewed for my replacement, offered the job to someone and he turned them down because he's not interested in being on site just because either.
Now the CEO wants us to remove MFA because students are quitting over this (although everyone else I talk to hasn't heard a single student quit from it). I have to find legislation that requires MFA or he will ask to remove it.
I'm thinking this will be the hill I die on...
Just start calling management out in larger meetings. ;) Making it clear that people don’t know what they’re doing tends to really send you out on the “not a team player” track.
Just waiting for that RSU cliff, or redundancy. Whatever comes first.
I've thought about leaving many times but it always feels like best case scenario I'd maybe get a 10%ish salary bump but one that is way more demanding. I know deep down this is bad for the long term but also hard to give up such a nice lifestyle especially when I've been able to fill it with other pursuits that were fulfilling.
If this really earned the company millions, maybe you could negotiate with the CEO where you start a new joint venture or something.
150k a year is not bad money, outside of fang, that's actually closer to the top of the market.
Sounds like OP has more opportunity than the average person to keep skills up to date on company time.
Reading about Foobars at Scale isn't the same as working on them at Netflix or wherever. (Even if you try to put what you read into practice and it's somehow free/cheap to deploy at massive scale and load test it, it's still not the same.)
You’re right that conditions could be far better for skill improvement, though having paid free time is also a great environment (e.g. for potentially earning a graduate degree online from a reputable institution).
This is a real thing, at least for me personally. I've been self-employed for the last 4 years and have been lucky enough to live a very cushy life. I make twice as much now than any job I had in the past, but all my income is more or less passive and has nothing to do with how much I work. That being said, I know my current situation won't last won't last forever and every so often I get pretty stressed out at the idea of having to go back to a regular job. As a result I probably work 40-50 hours a week on other projects trying to find something else that will 'stick' in case my current income source disappears. It's still cushy in the sense that I get to pick and choose when I work and what I work on, but the thought of going back to a full time job, or god forbid an office, is pretty stressful.
I do the occasional job searching - but not a ton. And my network feels smaller than it was when I started the job.
(This is an actual question. I really want to hear your answer, no matter what it is, as I am in a similar-ish boat.)
I taught myself circuit design/CAD/3d modeling over the last couple years since I've been doing some amateur product design. I feel like I've made progress but also this has consumed a lot of my spare intellectual time and although I had a few people reach out to me after seeing my amateur projects online have not made any formal progress into the business.
keep using your free time to improve your skills and/or building something on the side
Conversely I enjoy throwing myself into an empty pool head first and it leads to burnout and high stress levels that impact my health. So I swing between these poles in my career.
It’s bad for your sense of self-worth, even if it’s not objectively a bad thing.
One day you might ask yourself “Where would I be if I went all-in on something exciting rather than just putting 10% effort into my work for all those years?”
If youre only doing 40 hrs a month, finding a contract for 2 days a week or something would add workload, but ideally something you'd enjoy
Build your network through previous jobs or events and then sometimes they reach out to you or you can reach out to them and ask.
Not super helpful sorry, but they definitely exist.
I think you may be under estimating luck. Maybe you are not underemployed, maybe you are overly lucky?
If that is the case, then let it ride!
I think I "want to be fired" because it would take some of the stress of the decision away from me. My girlfriend makes slightly more than me now - even though years ago I made about twice as her - and I admit I feel some pressure to keep up.