Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roboprog | Hacker News Reader

While I sympathize, my wife and kids need to eat now, not in 2 years when I pull equity out of an IPO.

If you can avoid the TPS-report-factory-factory (wink), by all means do so. But don't look down on those who are doing what they have to.

There's something to be said for knocking off after 8 hours, and going home to one's family as well. What I do is technically boring, but necessary, and doesn't consume my personal life. I don't have to spend 2 hours each way going to work through bay area traffic, either.

Yeah, I'd love to be building something super cool from scratch, but that lifestyle has a cost, as well.

View on HN

If you are sure that you will be able to market yourself after years of working on some no name corporate stuff, by all means. I've been there and seen guys working 10 - 12 years at the same company, enjoying their 8 hours shift just finding out one day that they are not needed anymore - and with obsolete skills set (you get into comfort zone pretty easily in corp world), some of them having really difficult time to find another job.

I have a hard time imagining that this guy reading HN is going to let his/her skills become obsolete. Besides that, was there really no writing on the wall? They really had 40 hours of work to do every week, and then suddenly none, with no warning?

1. Comfort zone - if you ever worked in corp world you know what I'm talking about (he mentioned that he enjoys family time after 8 hour work shift so I would like to know how he keeps up to date with skill set). 2. I've seen it myself at least two times - no warning, nothing. Thank you for your service, here is you severance package - 2 weeks of pay and application for COBRA coverage.

Yes the only way to keep your skills up to date is to completely ignore your family.

I'll second this. I had this happened three months ago, the owner walked into the office, sat down and apologized profusely, and handed me a months severage. No advanced warning, no slowdown of work, jsut boom, you're done. Doesn't pay to be comfortable.

I don't understand your stance on family time vs skill set? My day to day is usually like this: Get up, shower, pick up my house, go to work for 8 hours, come home where I make dinner and invariably end up cleaning my kitchen. Then i sit down with my boyfriend and just do whatever so that we're spending time together.

This past weekend I managed to pick up a book on Go and hoping to deploy something through appengine by the end of week. If you want something, you find the time.

And I work 48 hours a week minimum.

You have a rather small family. That's cool, but not everyone does.

That is a danger, yes. So don't let it happen.

Like most people here, I'm often learning something new, or new aspects of the familiar. Despite the inertia, large comps need people to lead the way, whether it's training how to properly use source control, teaching new languages or platforms, setting up application standards to make troubleshooting possible and aid comprehension for maintenance.

The problem is actually having a large amount of existing code, and having to live with it for a few years, rather than a blank slate to be written with whatever Apache (or others) just released last week. Don't think that code won't feel old in 2 years.

DHH did a wonderful talk about "legacy code" a couple years back, I think it's on the IT Conversations site somewhere.

But layoffs don't just happen in corporate, they happen often at startups too, and without warning (oops, just ran out of funding). Remember the last dotcom bubble? There were a lot of folks laid off with new technology skills that nobody was hiring for anymore.

My point is that classifying corporate:bad, startup:good is just unsafe thinking. If you look at the company on its own without stereotyping its demographics, you'll come out better in the end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com