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Comment by cheesedoodle | Hacker News Reader

You strike me as a passionate employee that cares about the work. That is a great personality trait, wanted by many employers. Don't throw that out because of politics, make use of it somewhere where its valued instead! Doing bare minimum will probably not be enjoyable; it made me resentful and depressed.

This is a good time disconnecting from current work and explore new avenues. Start interviewing as a way to build up your confidence, visit other offices, talk to other passionate employees, understand what it could mean to be valued in a new company.

Contrary to popular HN belief, it is possible to land a new job, with better compensation and interesting work without participating in complicated interview processes.

At the very least, you have now opened doors to new work should you eventually be fired.

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Right... another way to look at this response is it's really passive-aggressively hoping they figure out they are wrong; it's still looking for their approval.

If you are truly dependent on specifically them, eg for visa reasons, that can only lead to a "partially managed decline".

If not, it's better to make your own decision to switch tracks in a controlled way and leave their bullshit and your need to care at all about it behind. You only have so many days on the planet, you will regret wasting them with people that make you feel like this.

Great answer that I wish I knew years ago. I was that guy.

So I started just doing as little as possible and... nobody seemed to care. It was on paper a sweet gig. Decent salary, lopsided work life balance. But you're right... despite what sounds like a dream job, I was constantly bitter about it all.

I finally moved jobs, am actually working again, and much happier. Wish I'd done it 5 years ago.

> Contrary to popular HN belief, it is possible to land a new job, … without participating in complicated interview processes.

Contrary to popular HN belief, the job interviewing process can be fun, interesting and fulfilling. As a job candidate, you get the opportunity to do something almost nobody gets to do: you get to peel back the curtain on a workplace and, as an outsider, see what it’s like! Is it the sort of place you’d enjoy working in? We spend so long in most workplaces that it becomes impossible to see the forest for the trees; or see our potential independently of the potential of our coworkers. Interviewing shakes us out of complacency.

Job searching can be an opportunity to redefine yourself and explore what’s out there. Think of it like travelling to other countries. It can be stressful, but the change of scenery can be delightful if we let ourselves enjoy it.

I do not see how take home assignments, leet code questions, whiteboard programming and binary tree inversion can fun and fulfilling.

I want to explore potential co-workers, what the employer would value in me, what interesting hard problems they have, what they do for fun, how they celebrate and how they learn, if they actually code or have meetings, what I would be doing, what they need help with, what I can bring.

I think all of the above can be understood in a meeting or two and should take about 2-3 days from meeting to offer and not be stressful :)

>take home assignments, leet code questions, whiteboard programming and binary tree inversion

As a candidate you can choose to refuse to engage with such impositions. If it's a dealbreaker for the potential employee, you probably don't want to work there anyway.

> At the very least, you have now opened doors to new work should you eventually be fired.

This x 100!

Thanks a lot for the kind words. Sure. I will do try that out.

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