Signs that it's time to leave a company | Hacker News Reader

Signs that it's time to leave a company

adrianco.medium.com

546 pointsbezeee339 comments

Definitely feeling this at another FAANG

I think there’s something about post-pandemic work in software that just isn’t working. I don’t think it’s just interest rates or a hiring downturn, nor immediate causes like founders leaving (because I see this sickness at most big tech companies these days).

Personally, I believe that hybrid work is not going well. Fully remote teams are good, fully onsite teams are good. With hybrid I feel like I never know how to contact someone and can never expect a quick reply (with remote, sure someone could go AWOL still, but there was less ambiguity on if they were just commuting or doing something in the office). I’ve had skip managers/directors who I’m almost certain are barely working and just milking out huge salaries while hiding behind their remote status. I’ve seen people join and leave teams from random offices all over the world, never onboarding fully and never truly getting it. It’s awful.

I want people to have flexibility and I think full-remote culture works just as well as fully-onsite works - everyone is in “one place” whether it’s in collaboration software or in person. But this sucks.

i agree with all of what you said, but i think the main change is just that these companies aren't growing the same way they were pre-pandemic. everything feels resource constrained in a way it didn't in the mid-2010s and this makes everything inherently political and negative

edit: to give an example, you probably don't think at all about an exec's value when you see him once a quarter in an all-hands explaining the great growth and complimenting teams, your paycheck is high and growing, and your team has happy hours, lavish team all hands, and tons of autonomy. when the same exec is announcing layoffs, no growth, and reduced benefits, you start to look at the deal a little differently

what is that warren buffet about "when the tide goes out, something something naked"?

searches ...

One of Warren Buffett’s most famous quotes is: “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.”

from

https://fortune.com/2022/10/03/warren-buffett-famous-quotes-...

You’re probably right in general. But I was lucky enough to have some great middle managers during COVID who definitely had their fingers on the pulse of what was going on, clearly communicated goals and strategy, actually understood how the sausage got made. I had some poor managers/middle managers too, but they tended to get managed out and their damage was minimized by communication routing around them.

Maybe I’m just personally unlucky to have had some especially weak ones that didn’t get managed out and that happened to coincide with hybrid work.

> skip managers/directors who I’m almost certain are barely working and just milking out huge salaries while hiding behind their remote status

Sounds like you're describing Amazon, at least it's very clear this was the case when I worked there, and it contrasted with several happy healthy years engineering in a core group at Apple, which was exactly the opposite description, partly because of keeping hierarchies very shallow, so everyone was involved in real work, not posing as valuable.

A few years after quitting to work on cancer research at a startup which soon failed, i found Amazon's 13 or whatever levels to be a complete joke, and didn't need to put up with the corrupt bureaucracy, so left.

The levelling system is a joke everywhere. HR needs to be totally annihilated

I agree, something about working hybrid just feels like “why are we doing this?”

It’s like an awkward inbetween

I also don’t get why companies seem unphased about paying for a giant office that is empty the majority of the week

Hybrid doesn't make sense. It's just "working in an office with some days at home" which was something I remember doing in the mid 1990s. Basically as soon as the Internet and laptops existed, it was done.

It seems more like a frog boiling exercise on the way to full in-office (which imho will never return).

For some people it's an intentional exercise into full home office.

Hybrid can make sense _if_ there are scheduled in person activities on the in office days. If you're coming in to the office just to work by yourself then it should have just been a work from home day.

This is what drives me nuts. I don't mind coming to work if we are doing in person meetings or something. I like seeing my coworkers. If I am gonna be alone in an office the whole time might as well be at home where my already purchased food is.

I would suggest a shift in language.

I don't mind coming to work either. If it's in my home. I do mind coming to work if it's in the office ;)

Same. Most of the time when I'm in the office it's 50% or less empty, anyway.

And most of the people there aren't on my team / projects, so it's pointless. Schlep half-way across the city to sit in an empty office and have Teams calls with the same folks two timezones away... like, why leave home?

Not to peek behind the curtain, but it's pretty difficult to hold down 2 jobs when you need to physically be in the office 2 days a week. Which, if my anecdotal evidence in my circle is to be believed, that was definitely happening during the pandemic.

Companies need to give up on this whole "we own your time" thing. Work product should be all that matters. If an employee has two or three jobs, but is able to get their work done with the quality expected of them, that's all that should matter.

(Certainly there are exceptions; working for two competitors at the same time is not ok for hopefully obvious reasons.)

Get serious unless the employee is open about what is going on none of that is ok. And if they are open they won’t be employees by multi employers for long.

Just be careful if your contract says you're working exclusively or 40 hours. Otherwise, agreed.

I have seen companies who have mandated "You _will_ be on video when you're on Zoom calls", which I think is much to the same end, in varying ways (are you working from another office, are you multitasking meetings, etc).

I wonder if there would be a massive boost in productivity if everybody was doing mandatory pair programming.

My company does week in-office, then week remote. Quite a bit of flexibility during the in-office weeks too if you have a doctor appt or whatever. I personally really like it. People get stuff done in-office, and then during the remote weeks we bust stuff out that doesn't need to be face-to-face.

We are not at all a tech company.

I'm hybrid too, and while I personally like it overall [1], it doesn't help with one of the main sticking points regarding remote work vs in-office: Needing to live within commuting distance of an office. It's expensive, it limits people with kids to certain school districts etc. — In some ways it's the worst of both worlds for some people.

[1] I however, really, really dislike going into the office only to have a bunch of zoom meetings anyway.

I will second this, at my previous role, we had one day a week in the office. Which, unsurprisingly meant that my team would hoof it to the office, and sit around in dead silence at our computers, or sit through zoom meetings with the rest of the teams who were either in different offices or had a "permanent remote status" as management...

As you can imagine, being forced into an hour+ commute to sit in a zoom call with management who weren't even there was the opposite of motivating

That sounds great. I think I’d love something like that if, during in-office week, it was more than just half my immediate team that showed up.

I think one reason this isn’t more popular is that it’s harder for parents to plan around. Most of the parents I work with want the same in-office schedule every week - easier to plan around other weekly things like daycare and after school activities that way.

> I feel like I never know how to contact someone and can never expect a quick reply

MS Teams and similar products have a color-coding scheme (green - active, yellow - inactive, probably afk, red - busy, white - offline) that solves that quite effectively (maybe even too much). Have you tried it, and if so, in what sense did you find it lacking? Also, if instant gratification is what you're craving, then I'm not sure fully on-site has you covered either - people spend much more time away from their desks than at home (in meetings and other places). I'm also not sure if it's the best measure of what 'works', because every instant response for you is a possible distraction from their flow state for someone else.

Exactly. It is basically never okay to expect a quick reply, whether you are working remotely or in office. Doing that just fragments that person's attention and makes them get out of flow.

A long time ago when everyone was in office, a cultural norm was that if someone was wearing headphones, regardless of whether they were listening to anything, they do not welcome interruptions. That cultural norm was gradually eroded during the pandemic.

I go into the office twice a week to sit on Zoom calls with coworkers around the country. I'm the only one on my team that has to do so because of where I live.

Time to invest in a green screen.

I've all but given up on finding anything in Canada even after opening up the possibility of on-site or hybrid. Was hoping it would allow me to tap into a market that not everyone was applying for, but surprisingly it's still a dead-end. I don't think it's an unreasonable ask if you're not fresh out of school to have a somewhat dignified space to get your work done in. In-house lawyers get a private space, oftentimes accountants, sales people, but people who write code are relegated to a big open space or a cube of soul-crushing greyness.

I think hybrid can work too, but it requires proactive transparency. In my workplace, a tech scale-up, we switched to hybrid after the pandemic and IMO it's working like a charm.

Everybody puts in their calendar each day whether they are going to work remotely or in the office. They also put their working hours or availability, they put when they are going to be off etc. Everybody I interact with shows up to meetings, some later than others, but that's no different than when we were onsite. Work is getting done faster than when we were fully onsite, although slower than during the pandemic.

The office is fully prepared for this working arrangement, with many "booths" for having calls, plenty of meeting rooms, all with great videoconferencing equipment, a meeting room booking system integrated with the calendar that "just works". Everybody is available on Slack while working, although IMO Slack is a bit overused and abused.

Now everyone works where they are more comfortable. Many have moved to smaller cities, others to the countryside. There are people that always go to the office, others that never go. There are teams that agree on certain days to go to the office, but AFAIK is not mandated by their managers, they just like to work and hang out together.

All in all, a great working experience, while staying productive. In fact, the workforce has increased about 20% since just before the pandemic, but the company has more than doubled in revenue, and volume of business and it doesn't feel chaotic at all. So I'd say that's the proof that hybrid is working for us.

I personally don't think it's related to hybrid (or remote or whatever) work. It's more that the pandemic made it obvious that there are so many jobs and functions in corporations that are simply not needed and don't add any value.

Those people already did not really contribute before, it just wasn't so visible maybe.

And I think this is highly demotivating for the people who do actually contribute.

It's pretty simple.

If there is an office, people in the office talk to those in the office and forget there are other people around. You get a similar effect with flexitime, but it is not as pronounced.

For remote to work, everybody has to be hamstrung with the same lack of colocation. Only then do the alternative management techniques necessary to make remote function get the time and attention they require.

My team of 5 synchronized our hybrid schedules (same two days in the office together). We love the mix of in-person collaboration days and remote "leave me alone so I can accomplish something" days. We're a small startup in the Midwest, so I have no idea how it would scale to FAANG-level problems, but it's the best of both worlds for us.

It wouldn't work where I'm working because we have less seats assigned to us in the building than there are people in the team...

Hybrid companies need the full remote AND on-site apparatus at the same time. They can't be half remote or people will be left off of office discussions all the time and they have to maintain expensive real estate.

Imagine having to wait for the office day in a hybrid company to discuss something important. Nobody does that.

It’s easiest to schedule meetings on remote days, since they are not constrained by conference rooms or commute blocks.

> I believe that hybrid work is not going well. Fully remote teams are good, fully onsite teams are good

I don't work here any more but I wrote this a few years ago about how there's a 'tipping point' with remote work:

https://business.dutchie.com/post/dutchies-remote-work-cultu...

tl;dr if you have 1 remote person and 9 people in the office, that remote person is just someone to hand work to but not really "part of the team". If everyone has to use the 'remote tools' rather than go chat over lunch, then remote is going to work pretty well in a lot of situations.

I agree on principal, but believe it is more nuanced and hybrid can work if you implement it uniformly across the company. For example, I’ve seen places where everyone can WFH Tue & Thu or Mon, Wed, Fri where hybrid have a quite smooth collaboration culture. But if it is “random”, every day ends up being WFH - that’s in effect just the same as fully remote, and you need to act accordingly. And if you work in a global company with globally distributed teams, the company already is de facto fully remote, and the picture becomes even more nuanced.

Hybrid is definitely the worst of both worlds. I worked there from the early days so may be biased, but I think Sid (GitLab CEO) really gets it and summed it up well here: https://www.wired.com/story/hybrid-remote-work-offers-the-wo...

I'm working at a company where hybrid is working fine. Everyone treats the situation as full remote, but some people are just at the office. There will be a con call invite for every single meeting.

Do you mark a difference between hybrid where not everyone goes in on the same days and hybrid where everyone goes in on the same days and stays away on the same days?

Yeah. My company is in principle set 2, in practice set 1. But even so, I’m on a team where almost half of us are fully remote or working out of other offices and so don’t go in on our “dedicated in office days”. I stopped going in on those days too because it felt pointless.

I think part of what’s so insanely demotivating about all this is how hard it makes leadership/management. Or rather, how it allows poor leadership/management to get away with doing poorly and how much worse the impact of poor management becomes in this setting. Because right now, even though I’m a TL I have absolutely no idea what the people controlling the purse strings want or care about, or what their goals are. I just wait for things to filter down through the org chart to me. There is no osmosis of knowledge or thought or strategy, and I feel like lazy/inattentive/unknowledgable management kicks up politics and siloing to the next level - when we were fully remote this didn’t seem to happen as much.

> Yeah. My company is in principle set 2, in practice set 1. But even so, I’m on a team where almost half of us are fully remote or working out of other offices and so don’t go in on our “dedicated in office days”. I stopped going in on those days too because it felt pointless.

Same. Essentially an open secret that most folks aren't going in at all, or if so, 1 of 2 days.

For me, the main sign that it's time to leave a company is when I start fantasizing regularly about leaving the company.

My gut seems to be wiser than my head on this stuff. Nearly every time that I've moved on, it's turned out to be the right call in hindsight.

I still follow same advise my dad told me before I left for Navy bootcamp. He was an Army vet. But it goes something like, 'when you wake up in the morning and realize you hate putting on that fucking uniform, its time to hang it up. Or else you'll end up doing shit and getting in trouble.' Now that I am out and went into software, and even before while I was working in the chemical industry while I went to school, I use that same philosophy but reworded.

And the one time I actually followed my gut and got a new job, I let my boss convince me to stay on (I really loved the company) and then he sold it shortly after to some jackasses that ruined it. And then when I did leave, I left without a good plan and ended up in a family owned company whose infighting left everyone wondering if they'd have a job the next day. Pure hell.

> I let my boss convince me to stay on

That sucks, it happens, it's not just you.

One place, I had reason to leave. Coincidentally, a non-startup, who I'd previously chosen the current place over, re-approached me, with an even sweeter deal than before (VP, doubling my TC, and a great team). So I went to an exec of the place where I was, saying what the showstopper org problems were, and that I had urgency to make a decision. They convinced me we'd solve the problems, so I decided to stay, out of general policy of loyalty to whatever team I'm currently on. Tech company battle-hardened veterans can guess correctly how that worked out. :)

Had a partner who was looking at a vet tech role to provide some income while she planned for veterinary school in the next 12 months or so.

She was essentially assured the job, but was concerned about the ad. "We want someone who is committed to us and this, who wants to stay with the clinic and be here for the long haul."

She was pre-emptively feeling guilty. "I know that in about a year I'm going to move on, they want commitment..."

I simply told her, "What happens if they have a massive business downturn next week, or one of the doctors retires, or COVID lockdowns, etc. How do you think they're going to react?

1 - 'we dont have the revenue or workload to support keeping you on, but, since you made a commitment to us, we are making one to you and will keep you on payroll', or,

2 - 'revenues are down or workload doesn't require the level of staffing we have, so thank you for your service, today will be your last day at the clinic'?"

We all know which is going to happen in 99.9%+ of cases.

+1000 if in the morning I dread leaving the car and walking in the office it's time to go. I shouldn't be excited like a dumbass all the time about the work I do but I should at a minimum not dread going into the office.

I always wondered how many other people did this. On the days I have to go into the office I'll spend 15 to 30 minutes sitting in my car sipping coffee and listening to high BPM music. Lately, I've felt like I need to psych myself into being motivated enough to walk into the building.

I think that’s a bad sign, but honestly, I think lacking motivation for any important thing in your life might have a lot to do with something else than “thing is actually bad for you”.

A poor diet, lack of sleep, or lack of exercise are guaranteed to make you hate your life — something that switching jobs isn’t going to fix.

Yeah, big +1 to this. I recently left a role I was at for four years, paid well, but turned sour quickly due to changes in leadership and mismanagement across the organization. I followed my gut out the door with nothing lined up and it was absolutely the right call for my health and sanity.

Wish I could find a job where I don’t do this three months in.

Wow, that's really accurate. At my last job, I didn't think anything was wrong but I fantasized about leaving almost every day. When I actually left, I realized how burned out I actually was.

Or simply if you have a hard time staying awake after lunch.

I have worked primarily from home for most of the last 25 years at several companies. I joined Apple during the pandemic and worked from home for the first 18 months but left Apple about 15 months ago for Amazon, in part, because of the increasing RTO pressure at Apple. The Apple RTO policy has only gotten stupider since I left.

Unfortunately about a year after I joined Amazon chose to adopt an RTO policy as well. It is not going well. Dissatisfaction is high, people are quitting, people are planning to quit, respect for upper management dwindles. There are many heartbreaking stories of productive long term employees being force out by RTO. WFH had also been opening new opportunities to people who were unable to commute either because of disability, location or other reasons. It has been sad to see those people shut out again.

The RTO policy has really soured the culture. Adrian highlights the issues very well. Amazon is a global company. We are expected to work with remote teams routinely. Many teams, like mine are also geographically distributed. Going in to the office doesn't make a damn bit of sense for most people.

If you're able to share, I'm curious what you mean by "Apple RTO policy has only gotten stupider"? Isn't it still 3 days in-office (or 4 days for some teams)?

The degree to which it is enforced, managers being required to enforce the policy, and to which compliance is used as a measure in performance reviews have all increased and, as you mention, some teams have gone to 4 days with pressure to exceed the minimum three days. At least one person I've spoken with indicated that their promotion was delayed until they could get their RTO compliance numbers up.

Other signs for me personally:

* Sales schedules dictate product development timelines rather than the other way around

* Leadership thinks about practical operational/logistics issues only when forced to

* The importance of "culture" is brought up without fail when talking about working from the office, and never at other times

* Leadership is fond of setting goals and deathly allergic to providing incentives

> Leadership is fond of setting goals and deathly allergic to providing incentives.

This hits me hard now. I was considering whether I should hit the gas at work trying to meet some completely unrealistic metrics, only to be in a conference call where some guy from another team basically did the same (missing a lot of events with his family), only to get a bunch of those stupid animated emoji things in Teams as his only compensation (I asked him offline if he got any bonus from it).

I'm leaving work early to hit the ski slopes tomorrow. Life is too short to be rewarded by digital clapping hands and hearts.

I agree with all but the last, as I think it's debatable.

> Leadership is fond of setting goals and deathly allergic to providing incentives

Goals are good, in any way, as long as their portioned right.

And at the level most people this is targeted to are working at, is the rather large salary supposed to be the incentive?

An incentive isn't an incentive if d/dx = 0 for behaviour x. Salary is how you get someone to work for you instead of a competitor, and keep them from spending their time worrying about mortgages, but it's not really an incentive unless someone is at risk of being fired. Performance bonuses, stock options, recognition, raises, promotions, and interesting projects are incentives.

I'm talking about repeated, big pushes for extremely short-term departmental achievements that touch everyone including people with five-digit annual earnings.

It happens at lower levels too, when the company is too broke to give bonuses

Depending on the stage a company is at or its cashflow, #1 can sometimes be acceptable. It's a balancing act; if you haven't got money to pay developers, you haven't got development.

What are some typical examples of operational/logistics issues that less than great management might otherwise ignore?

Developing (and frequently revising) complicated schemes for things like pricing, discounts, and sales commissions (does the accounting system even track the data required to do these calculations? what would it take for it to do so, and how much training and effort to enter and clean the data... you know what who cares!)

Not noticing the steady stream of accounting people traipsing to and from your IT manager's office to ask *accounting* questions, rather than ask the controller...and then when the IT manager brings it up, still refusing to notice it...

They ask for a web-based configure-to-order tool, so you mock up a quick-and-dirty but very fake interactive demo as a discussion piece to get them to answer questions and make decisions about how the thing should work. When you show it to them and talk about what it will take to develop the real thing, baffled looks followed by “wait, isn't this the real thing? It’s working fine already!”

I could go on...all stuff from past lives

I'll add a few more signs to the list.

- When the person who hired you leaves and you don't get an incentive for sticking around and keeping the lights on.

- When the CEO changes and they bring in consultants.

- When you haven't received a raise at least match "wage inflation".

- If you're hoping for a promotion but haven't received one in two to three years. If you still choose to stay, know that this is a big red flag for executive recruiters. They'll think of you as not ambitious enough.

- Your boss hires someone to be in between you and them - someone who you didn't get to interview. Because, nepotism.

- Your boss lacks people skills, and just wants people to do what they're told to do.

I don't understand this fascination with central offices. We live in the year 2024. We should be able to look at our workforce, find small offices, and have hub and spoke networks of offices - and work from home as a fallback.

Rent a condo, do a communal office, if you want more close collaboration - shuffle your teams to colocate them - not force them into 1hr commutes into a fucking empty office.

Our infrastructure is now ephemeral on the cloud - why can't we be more flexible with our work situation?

I wish they would stop trying to force us into shared working spaces. They can make me work from home, a close office, a far office... I don't care. Just give me a private office and I will do my best work. At home, I don't have room for a private office, so they would need to relocate me and cover a portion of the rent for their office. I am not a contractor. I am an employee. I don't control any of my working conditions and I shouldn't have to pay out of pocket for it.

As an anecdote, my neighbor is a crazy asshole who started blasting music and having parties at random hours; it can be problematic for sleep and productivity. Police in California are inept at stopping this. Will the company pay to send lawyers or do I have to waste my own time and money to pick up and move my whole life for something worse to be waiting at the next rental?

> Police in California are inept at stopping this

Former long time renter here. I had the same problem with neighbors in an adjacent apartment complex, and police couldn't do a damned thing except come out at 4 am and tell me, yep, we can hear that from the street.

I mentioned the problem to the landlord. The landlord told me to report it to the public health department. I did.

I never heard back from the health department, but the noise stopped within a few days, and the stereo blasting tenant and their onsite manager glared at me ever time I saw them afterwards.

What's the theory under which the company would get involved in your housing dispute?

The biggest reason I like working from home, is because I can have a private office. The second is the absence of a commute. If I had a private office and a short commute, I would have no problem going into an office.

> I wish they would stop trying to force us into shared working spaces. They can make me work from home, a close office, a far office... I don't care.

Yes. I'm pretty open to the benefits of working in an office. I had a WFH job pre-pandemic that I loved for 8 years, but when I got hired into an office job, I felt like my life changed qualitatively for the better in small ways. Socialization, lunch options, separation of work and home, etc. Nothing earth shattering, but it was ... nice for a change.

Now, post-pandemic, my office job has gone "back" 3 days a week, except the experience completely sucks. They've massively downsized the office so we don't have assigned cubicles anymore; it's just all hot-desks. So you don't have your personal comforts (keyboard, chair, personal effects, stash of handy office supplies at the ready, etc), you don't know where anyone is, and every single day you have to hunt for a desk when you get to the office. There aren't enough conference rooms, people squat on the privacy booths for the entire day, the kitchen isn't well stocked anymore.

If we were actually "returning" to the same office experience we had before, I could probably swallow it. Give me a fucking cubicle at the very least. As is, this crappy facsimile of office life is universally hated and I'd guess compliance with the RTO mandate is somewhere under 10%. When they start actually enforcing it, I will consider it a request to leave.

But I love distracting people and making them unproductive!

The current crop of execs grew up watching Star Trek TNG - a flying office building where everyone lives for their work and you could sound a klaxon and everyone scrambles to the conference room. Also everyone loves and is willing to die for the leader. That's all you need to know.

Crisis! Head to the conference room!

People collaborate easier in person.

Travel is a downside.

Except, some jobs really really don't require much if any collaboration. We've been having to come back into the office since last September. In all that time, I've only spoken to another person a single time. Literally one hour in one day in the past 5 months. All meetings are still over zoom and when I'm not in a meeting, I just find some place in the building to sit and work. Except many people still weren't coming in since september and now they have cracked down on it and said people must be in the office and they are checking badge check-ins and the ip address of where our work laptops are being used to see if they are on the campus network or not. The result is tons of people are here now, but there isn't room for them. Before the pandemic, the company started getting rid of cubicles and moving to rooms full of desks and you just find somewhere to sit. But they don't have enough places to sit for everyone so if you don't get here early, you just end up sitting on the floor or wandering around. It is crazy how much lost productivity we are experiencing.

I had a friend reporting a similar situation in the big consultancy firm he works for. There would be more workers than available seats. He said they would do it to make people get to the office BEFORE their working hours. Dark patterns all around.

I can do my job equally well in-person or remotely, but that's because I don't connect to my team. I started here before the pandemic and we never really clicked in a way that made in-person collaboration happen.

Whereas in my previous role, going remote would have had a negative effect, because we liked talking to each other and working with each other. I believe that on that team our online communication would have been more and better-quality than what I have now, but still less collaborative than in-person.

> some jobs really really don't require much if any collaboration

Yes, some jobs don't.

> tons of people are here now, but there isn't room for them

Well that's stupid.

> sitting on the floor

What the fuck?!

HR frowns on that.

Yeah I'm about to be harmed by my working conditions

Buddy, why on Earth are you still working there?

Really good benefits. Just in terms of vacation, we get 11 vacation days a year, a paid week off in the summer, paid Fridays off in the summer, 6 week paid sabbatical every 5 years, and 8 hours of paid time off every pay period (26 times a year) that we can bank and roll over from year to year.

Many of the largest software projects in history have been implemented by remote workers. Like the Linux kernel.

But if you require to read people's reactions and body language and try to figure out if they are telling the truth, or brag about your socioeconomic status or appearance, or if you need to assert dominance over others, or do social engineering like mirroring other's movements, then face to face is perhaps useful.

To me, when someone says "there is no replacement for face to face communication", what that usually means is "we distrust people here".

I dislike offices, they are cesspools of misery, dominance and fake smiles. Long live remote work.

You're summing up a pretty wide spectrum of things as "distrust". If a junior engineer says they understand what I'm asking for and will deliver it in 2 weeks, but actually they don't fully understand and will deliver half of it in 3 weeks, I wouldn't typically characterize that as them lying or being untrustworthy. But it's a problem that's a lot easier to detect and solve in person. (It's also, not coincidentally, a problem that Linux kernel devs generally don't need to worry about - there's no Linux Dev Inc. whose next big contract will fall through if a project doesn't finish on time.)

"I give deadlines to junior engineers who don't understand things."

Ding, ding, ding! You have won the toxic bingo.

If you work with 2 week deadlines you've lost control of your project. Like in Tetris.

It's quite rare to have the degree of control you're envisioning over a project. Most software teams are building products to sell to customers, and most customers aren't going to accept "IDK whenever we're done" as an expected delivery date. Companies can and should provide some degree of wiggle room, but it's not realistic to expect that you can avoid ever thinking about how long a task is going to take.

That sounds like you are totally winning!

If everything is urgent, that is a strong symptom that you completely lost control and you should not be running a project.

The value you add as a decision maker is making decisions that mitigate the risk of being in a scenario where everything is urgent, that is, a crisis. If you are constantly in crisis mode running for your life because you failed catastrophically.

2 week deadlines is way to long for a junior. I would be reading and discussing a juniors code every day.

Even mid level programmers should be reporting progress every day.

10 working days of code is a hell of a lot of code.

The expectation of producing high volumes of code in short cycles is a red flag.

Programming is not data entry. Programmers are not typists. Programmers make progress by creating building blocks that can be reused later. In 2024, many of those building blocks already exist in the form of libraries.

If there's no reusability, everything is a special case, there's duplicate code, your program maps 1:1 to your data... there is a good chance you have a problem creating abstractions. In that case, the junior is you, and you are not the right fit to be a mentor.

If you see a constant need to micromanage people, that is a symptom a highly insecure personality that is unsuitable for management, or trust issues, or poor recruiting skills, or poor delegation skills (matching the tasks to the wrong skills). All of those are signs that you may not be ready to be a manager. Micromanaging will just stress and demoralize your workforce.

If someone is unreliable enough to need a conversation every day, either you or that person should not work there. And if this is the case for every junior engineer in the team, and the situation persists for long periods of time, the likely reason is that the problem is you.

I think you misread my comment, or perhaps our definition of high volumes of code is different. Perhaps junior means something different.

I also suspect what I consider "good communication" you consider "micromanagement".

I like reading and talking about what my colleagues are doing every day. I'm interested. I learn new things, and sometimes I teach others a trick or two. Sometimes I tell them I don't like something and we agree to disagree.

Sometimes the requirements change, and that need to be discussed as well.

Sometimes I just like hearing and sharing stories about things that didn't work out. Yesterday I spend a whole day profiling to try and work out why we are leaking so much memory. I didn't work it out, but I can tell my colleagues what I tried and what I will try next.

The point I was trying to make is that a solid 8 hour work day is a lot of time, and I think everybody should have something interesting to say about what they did.

This is an excessively bitter take IMO. I'm saying this as a happy remote worker: office interactions are actually a good thing, provided you've actually built a good team. I miss many of my previous coworkers because we actually had fun collaborating, and we talked about interesting non-work topics. I enjoyed going to lunch with many of them because they were interesting people. And I recognize that such positions are uncommon and so I'm extremely picky abut new roles, but I know for a fact that it's not true to say in-office interactions are all deception and game-theorying.

I agree with you, except the last sentence, which may vary from place to place.

My office is very friendly and people have very good humour. Which is good for socializing but for work, it's tough because so many interruptions and we waste a lot of time "talking about the weather". I am way more productive working at home.

They have good humor, always want to have coffee and lunch, and are your best friends forever. Until you change jobs and you never hear from them again.

I mean that’s just life. Why is this a bad thing?

You go through periods of time and when that chapter ends you move onto the next chapter.

Expecting a band of misfits to stick together for 40 years is what is atypical.

When I was in college I had a great group of friends but after we all graduated we went in completely different directions, industries, and live vastly different lives. The friendship was perfect in the moment but now I’m in a new one.

Better cultivate meaningful relationships instead of reinforcing a sick institution like the fake office friendship.

Your family, friends, neighbors.

Depends on the work being done. In my experience in-person collaboration just means the loudest most stubborn person gets their way and it's difficult to pause things to fact-check and research while decisions are being made. And honestly, fighting with this behavior is above my pay grade.

I don't collaborate better in person.

I do, probably because of my particular flavor of strong introversion.

What's the solution to different people benefiting from different work styles?

People should find company cultures that match their work styles. That's the best way to allow people with similar work styles to work together.

There can never be one true corporate policy to rule them all. That said, I agree with most of the comments here. Hybrid is just bad. A company needs to pick on-site or remote.

Other downside: way more coffee breaks and private discussions.

That’s not a downside. That’s part of building and being a team. We’re human, not machines. If you hire the right people, they’ll know when to have a laugh and when to work their ass off.

That very much depends on the person. It might be an upside for you but a downside for me.

I love humans, just not all of them and I prefer separating my private life from my work life

> and private discussions.

I joined a company that went from in-person to remote and the number of private discussions and politics exploded.

Something about going remote and exchanging faces for screen names was like pouring gasoline on the fire for company politics. The number of private Slack channels exploded and one group even moved to their own private (unofficial) Slack because they wanted a private space where other people couldn't accidentally be invited to their discussions. It was wild.

Private discussions happen way more often remote in my experience

> way more coffee breaks

That’s upside.

Taking the most generous interpretation of this desire: It might just be because management is just not used to fully remote. Most workplaces aren’t healthy and satisfying, they’re somewhat toxic and in many cases incredibly so. The adaptable managers that have a consensus based management style find a way; those that are used to doing things by decree find themselves ineffective in controlling the direction of their reports. Literally the number one priority of leadership is to control the direction of the team; if they’re unable to do so there’s not much else for them to do.

Any company seriously considering adapting to the new environment should consider some kind of retraining program for their managers and have a support system that will help them adapt.

If you think those toxic managers are going to get less toxic when they don’t need to worry about death stares from everyone if everyone sees them doing toxic things to people in person, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

And those folks aren’t like that because of lack of training, generally.

As someone operating in exactly this manner, it sucks for the same reasons that hybrid sucks. Timezones, teleconferencing, shipping between offices, travel between offices, conversations that happen in one office not making it to the other office, etc.

Our company has exactly this and I think it works really well! We are a small engineering team spread out across 4 states with tiny offices/hubs for those that want to get together. I work with a friend in town and we go to an office 3 days a week on the same days and I love the schedule.

Fully agree. My weekly email rant was on how anti-customer offices are. https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-13-there-are...

> I don't understand this fascination with central offices.

It's not about you, it's about them. What they control, what they own, what they have.

They are in love with the feeling of dominance in a room full of people. They love to see the minions that they command. Its about being able to visualize and understand the domain that they control.

I wouldn't want to work in a company with strong "us" and "them" culture. If I don't feel everybody is working towards the same goals and is receiving a fair piece of the pie I would go somewhere else.

Running your own company for a while really helps see both sides of the equation.

> I wouldn't want to work in a company with strong "us" and "them" culture.

That seems like a pipe dream to me. Money and power often to change people for the worse.

I don't even understand how somebody can seriously think that there is no "us" vs "them" divide in a company. This culture is everywhere, just some places are better at hiding it.

The big RSU grant is depleted and you don’t get a new one that is comparable in size. There is zero reason not to leave in this case, because you will absolutely make way more money by leaving. You can even leave and rejoin the same company to get another grant, as dumb as that is. Make sure you actually ask for a new grant before quitting, nobody is going to give you money for free. You also need to be good but that’s a given if you’ve been around for 3-4 years (however your RSU vesting works)

> because you will absolutely make way more money by leaving

That is a pre-2023 advice my friend, unless you’ve been there like 10yrs or an ai researcher or something

It's pre-2023 thinking and early-career thinking. Without job title growth, eventually everyone plateaus. There's only so much any company is willing to pay a non-manager individual contributor worker bee. Early in your career you can go from say $45K to $60K to $100K like it's nothing, but the more you job hop, it'll start looking more like $110K -> $120K -> $125K -> $128K and so on, asymptotically approaching your locale's top pay for your role.

A lot of tech companies have figured out pushing ICs into management is counter-productive and have IC tracks with very high ceilings. Until you're a principal/fellow pulling down $500k+ you haven't hit the IC asymptote yet. And yes this exists outside of just FAANG.

The corollary is that you often will have to stick around more than a year or two to get promoted into the senior+ ranks due to the scope of work and actually seeing large initiatives through.

Or you can bounce around every 18 months from senior dev role to senior dev role and hit a ceiling with small marginal gains a lot sooner.

2 of the 3 places I've worked (non FAANG) did not have IC tracks that went past senior or if they did it was 1 position that was not promoted internally and it never opened up again.

Note: the national median for software developers is $127k, don't let anyone sell you that as some kind of career ceiling. Especially if you live in New York, Seattle, or the Bay Area.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm#st

Yeah, at this point $127k for a SDE in Seattle MSA is... high-junior through low/mid-mid level salary. A senior title in Seattle MSA should easily be clearing $160k base cash. Maybe drop those numbers slightly in the startup scene, particularly very-early-stage, but honestly, post-2021 salaries need to match post-2021 COL, which skyrocketed already-bad numbers (I remember laughing at Zillow listings here in 2017, even) well into the stratosphere.

I do think the asymptotic curve analogy still holds despite the numbers being higher in these areas (in vast majority part, IMO, because of housing purchase costs out here (or landlord greed, whichever you want to attribute to)). The jump from senior to staff bands, especially in take-home/post-tax dollars, is way, way less than the jump from mid-senior bands.

You're both right - you point out the absolute values achievable are a bit higher, but parent is pointing out that early career jumps are typically faster than later career ones (for good reason). So maybe it's 160k (or whatever) not 128k but the argument stands. Asymptoting to some sort of local-to-you maximum is how most peoples career arc will go. At some point there are no more big jumps to be made unless you wildly change what you are doing, and many folks will be ok with that, you continue making good money (globally speaking) for the longer run, but your days of doubling salary are done.

Yes it's always a risk on HN to post example numbers because people fixate on the values of them and miss the gist of the comment. I'm not saying that $128K is the magic number but that for every job title, in every area, in every industry, there absolutely is a number, and your late-career compensation is likely to flatline approaching it.

Well you’re right in that I haven’t been looking for jobs recently, but I find it extremely hard to believe that large grants and salaries are no longer a thing in the software industry at large. A few friends-of-friends I know very recently got nice grants and salaries, with large Mega Corps, but that’s always where the money was?

Everyone on HN knows someone's brother's nephew's wife's cousin's former roommate who makes $600K at MegaCorp FAANG but those kinds of opportunities aren't (and have never been) common. Especially now during our first tech bear market in what, 13 years?

Yeah good point, and 13 years is more or less the length of my career so it’s all I’ve known (feel like I will regret saying that I haven’t been programming for 192 years on HN but oh well)

At the same time, it’s 13 years of data backing up the claim, though they probably said the same thing before the dotcom bubble exploded, didn’t they, weee

What’s the unemployment rate for software developers? Still basically zero. It’s never moved, but for some reason people seem to think it has. That’s weird.

WSJ reported a few days ago that IT job growth is down year-over-year from 279,000 to 700. It's not contraction yet, but it is effectively the end of a long run of rapid growth.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-employment-grew-by-just-700-...

You will find work but a lot of those jobs got pushed downmarket, to early stage firms, as late stage and public companies are short of cash now. And those early stage companies dont pay you as much or at least not in cash

Absolutely. Total comp, not to mention hiring in general at publicly traded tech firms has dropped significantly since the “software recession” and mass layoffs.

The current good times for employees are mainly in the economy outside of tech

Smaller refreshes than the original grant are a clear message from management that they don't necessarily want you around, but you aren't underperforming so much as to want to bother with the hassle of a Pip. In any place that isn't massively dysfunctional, a manager can hand out large enough refreshes to the people they want to keep in the long run.

Yea, I just recently fell off my four-year "cliff" at my company and it's humbling to see your total comp suddenly reset back three or four years. This is often a very good discontinuity that justifies looking around, and it's no surprise that people tend to leave close to their whole number anniversaries.

Humbling is an interesting way to put it haha!

I wish you luck. As nice as it is to know that there are greener pastures, the idea of interviewing amidst the great tech layoffs of today scares the shit out of me.

You will have to re-interview to get a new grant, and even for a strong performer with a well-established historical track record at the company can be a very probabilistic event.

They're treating you like an idiot who can't count, and so the proper response is given them the middle finger by moving on. You owe them nothing.

Most MAANGs will match RSUs so you rarely must stay somewhere miserable just to vest. If it's not a fun place to work, it's not worth wasting your (work)life.

Not everyone is in for the money.

Hit the nail in the head. A growing company has plenty of opportunity for learning, promotion, making new things, and retooling old ones to match the growth of business. This means there are very few zero sum games, either at the IC or management level.

When growth stops, there's little chances to gain status by solving problems: Someone already has status, and really doesn't want to lose it. Those frustrated with the lack of growth, and who have good skills applicable somewhere else will leave. The people that stay are those that have fewer opportunities to find something better elsewhere. So when you see an architect/principal engineer that has been there for 15 years, you know they know that they'd not be hired at the same level anywhere with more chances of growth: Those people have already left.

This is why i understand the middle manager that tries to empire build: If you don't have growth opportunities, your top subordinates will leave you, and with them your group's performance.

There are other reasons to leave a company, like if you see good chances that you'll dislike your boss and they will remain your boss for at least another year, but the lack of growth will always be bad.

> The people that stay are those that have fewer opportunities to find something better elsewhere. So when you see an architect/principal engineer that has been there for 15 years, you know they know that they'd not be hired at the same level anywhere..

..or they are simply more enjoying life by maintaining a better life-work balance.

Eh, I don't get this constant growth mentality that pervades tech companies. It seems more related to investors wanting to see an ever growing return on their investments than it being healthy for the company and its products.

Can't a company reach an equilibrium where the right people are doing the right things, and everyone is happy with their role and compensation? Sure, people may leave and be replaced, and even a moderate amount of growth could be healthy, but why focus so much on constantly expanding teams, more products, more revenue, more, more, more...? It seems to boil down to basic human greed, at the end of the day.

I much prefer working for companies that don't have this growth obsession. IME they place more value and care into their product and customers, rather than chasing the next big thing, which often ruins the good thing they had.

So hyper growth is actually a signal for me to leave, not stay. With all these layoffs going on, how can we say that the growth/layoff cycle is a sign of a healthy company? It might not hurt their bottom line, but I sure wouldn't want to work in an environment where I'm worried I might be laid off at any moment.

There is a logic to the hyper growth style in software. Software products’ success are driven by network effects: the more users you have, the more features/integrations you support etc.

And if you don’t dominate the market, a more hungry competitor absolutely will. Software products can be developed incredibly quickly.

It is capitalism at its best (or worst, depending on how you see it). While it might be desirable to work in a more stable setting, without some kind of regulatory protection or stickiness this is hard to achieve in practice.

In most service oriented companies, the number of users and even revenue can experience growth, while the number of employees remains relatively constant. This only stops being true at hyper scale, where maintenance problems become more difficult, but even then the employee growth doesn't have to be proportional.

What I find objectionable is the constant focus on unbounded growth, and that that is somehow a signal of a healthy company. This is usually the case in VC funded companies, which is not the only way to build a business. It might be the quickest and easiest, but it creates an environment where wrong incentives can thrive.

For some B2C products that's true, but for most of B2B products it's not, and it's not for a lot of B2C either.

Not everyone is chasing status. IME a good portion of those that are seem to the most toxic and I'd prefer they did leave.

Here's a bizarre story about quitting. When I was at Microsoft, I had a manager who, despite good intentions, led through fear and paranoia. I had gotten yelled at for causing a production incident, which was not the first time, but that week I started having some very strange dreams involving seeing the number "69" in different places. Just some juvenile humor maybe, I just dismissed it.

In the meantime, gradually this idea of quitting popped up and felt like a crazy, radical, awesome idea -- and I told him I was leaving immediately, fuck 2 weeks notice, etc. I was excited and terrified of him. Well, he told me the processing would still take a few days no matter what, and once we finalized it, my official last day was... June 9. 6/9

Then I worked at Expedia, had a rough experience with a manager there, and wouldn't you know it I had the magic number appear in my dreams again. 3 months in, cya. Call it superstition, or classical conditioning, but I don't really regret it.

He lied about 'processing taking a few days no matter what'. Quitting on the spot is the whole point of the at will employment.

Sounds like apophenia.

Reminds me of the number 23. Critics kind of panned it but I think it’s entertaining :-)

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0481369/

Signs that I've seen before leaving:

* There are more VPs than there are restrooms.

* The free coffee and soda is no more.

* Engineers are co-opted as salespeople ("... and why is the project late?").

The soda is a classic: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Classic. When the free soda goes things are about to go down.

I'm pretty sure that "removing the free soda/coffee/tee/biscuits" is an intentional action to reduce headcount. The effect it has on productivity by destroying morale is vastly more than the money saved. I noticed this at my very first job (a govt. owned company which had to remove a bunch of perks because of bad media coverage of an unrelated scandal, because the "optics" were bad), and I just refuse to believe that the "people in charge" (generally; the MBA suit and tie crowd) are too dumb to understand this.

It must be intentional even if nobody admits it, and it's a way to drive out people. Ironically, it also drives out the people that know they have better options, while you're left with the worst workers who are desperate and don't think they can get another job. But they don't care as long as the headcount target is met, and they can get that performance bonus.

+1 for removal of snacks and coffee as a reliable canary

There's nothing wrong with occasionally pulling in engineers to help salespeople with writing proposals or participating in sales calls. Smaller companies can't afford to have sales engineers as dedicated specialist positions.

Agreed. In fact, the better that engineers understand the customers and end-users the better-off the company probably is. That is a good, healthy practice.

But having engineers actually trying to do sales to make up for revenue shortfall . . . not so much :-)

Heck I wish they'd involve us more often at our place.

After all, it's us devs who are left with the burden when it's discovered a few days before go-live that sales has sold something we don't have because they missed some nuances in what the customer said or similar.

If they can't justify a few dollars for snacks, what do you think they're gonna do about your six digit salary...

Can't justify money for snacks but can justify executive bonuses is why we need unions.

Toilet paper quality is a good metric.

Nice thing is that it’s easy to do pre-employment testing.

From the article: "There is a tendency to micromanage and add process overhead…".

Yes, the day that leadership invites "Agile coaches" in to start scrumming up the works is another sign to move on.

Why though I dont get it?

If your organization isn't accomplishing its goals, it's not due to a lack of nagging the programmers.

In tech companies in Munich, Germany the time to leave the company is when the whole team no longer gets an invite to Oktoberfest.

Agreed, that small fact speaks to a variety of issues I think haha

I've been at the same enterprise SaaS company for 10 years. Personally? Staying at the same company for a long time while performing well gave me some options I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Like OP, the culture has shifted drastically with COVID and the post-ZIRP environment we live in.

When RTO began, my spouse got a job which would have required me to move away and make it impossible to meet in-office numbers. Thankfully I requested remote and it was approved, now I'm living in a low-COL area while doing the same job. Most people in my position don't get remote approval. Hence I'm basically stuck here--looking around for available remote positions, my TC would be in most cases cut in half.

Is is just me, this post and this [1] one are just people complaining about RTO? If you were hired during COVID lockdown with the promise of your career buing built on remote only, fine but lay yourself off and move on. Else it's not entirely justifiable to be mad at AWS for RTO policies. From an outside perspective AWS looks very healthy and ouputing great innovation.

[1]. https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sa...

Opinions are maybe somewhat mixed on RTO. What is not mixed is the fact that the reasons given for RTO were pure bullshit.

People will never forget the bs they were subjected to. god help amazon when the market recovers and nobody will want to work there anymore - you'll suddenly see more flexibility as a result.

> lay yourself off

"Straight shooter with upper management written all over him."

Amazon's tech innovation died a while ago. It will continue to operate its successful business lines until it runs out of steam and shrivels up, just like IBM & co. It will never catch up to things like AI and will fall behind.

And it's not a bad thing for Amazon, at least for now. They are in a better position than Google, where they have a more diverse revenue stream, and can out-compete everyone else. They don't need to innovate.

> It will never catch up to things like AI and will fall behind

Amazon Q is appearing all over the place in the AWS console. The AWS Jetbrains plugin also integrates Q, though I've never actually used it. I can't judge the quality of their AI offering, because as I said, I've not used it, but they're definitely not asleep when it comes to AI.

Q is shit. Everyone and their dog is doing genAI. We will look back at this in 5 years and have a good laugh about "ai"

I finally got around to using Q today. It's more awful than I could have imagined.

Amazon Q is powered by an LLM that is not very capable (there are no official benchmarks, AFAIK, but the community consensus seems to be that the level is akin to GPT 3.5).

I wrote a Chrome extension that allows you to use GPT-4 Turbo from Chrome's side panel. It (optionally) gets context about your data if you choose to share your screen with it.

https://github.com/petrgazarov/cumuli-aws-console-chat

- Investors are priority over customers

- Getting stonewalled at every opportunity to be heard

- Drastic change in ownership with nonsensical goals

- Family ran company with lots of family infighting and drama

- An office full of cokeheads

Some of my personal faves.

> - An office full of cokeheads

Ah, the 80's. What a time.

... and the dot com boom. One office I worked at had jager taps and a rotating cast of nose blowers into and out of the single toilet restroom.

"Try and get a job at somewhere growing rapidly"

Personally I try and get a job at a company whose mission and ethics I believe in so I don't feel like a hapless techno-weenie cog in some generic startup wheel whose driving purpose is to give the founders a nice exit.

Sadly for my skillset, the people hiring are generally evil or their net effect on the world is negative. Looking into goat farming.

I've found local governments (city or district) to fill this niche nicely for me. They usually need a guy to help with all kinds of IT stuff, value any kind of automation work and are not as bloated as federal.

You help your community and the people who keep it running.

Only downside is, your pay will be significantly less than as a cog in an evil machine.

Agreed, having recently gone from a startup job to a government/university one it's like a large boulder of stress is suddenly gone. Being in that original mindset it's genuinely alien to see a workspace without a slack and kanban board, but also unimaginably freeing. There's more trust and people still get things done on time regardless, emails and impromptu in person chat works just fine. People genuinely living life instead of being on a capitalistic ass grindset. I've lost count the number of times I've seen the startup founder neglect family stuff to make the latest deal or sale or whatever that inevitably fell through anyway lmao, and naturally dragging the rest of the team into the mess at weird hours.

As you say the downside is indeed pay, but as long as it's livable it's still an acceptable tradeoff.

> whose driving purpose is to give the founders a nice exit

this seems to exist everywhere? no matter the stated the mission, no one is owning a business to not make money off it

Some businesses have a higher purpose. Some actually want to help people, or the environment, and commerce is just the means to do that. Insane, right! You won't find em in silicon valley.

"Customers don’t care what the companies buildings are like."

They never could, yet their experience is shaped by the buildings employees use. Having been moved to a hybrid office and lost my private office -- my work suffered and so did the work of my colleagues. By not taking real estate seriously, my company is pushing me to look for work elsewhere. I don't want to waste my thirties doing crappy work because I don't have an office to work in.

> I don't want to waste my thirties doing crappy work because I don't have an office to work in.

I personally find this statement presumptuous.

Most of us are doing mundane work on boring/useless products and that’s what puts food on the table.

People who do meaningful work in their thirties and have a private office are very rare. I think trying to measure your outcomes to this metric is a recipe for feeling like a failure because it’s unachievable for the vast vast majority.

This is one of my few favorited comments on HN. It's a great rubric on how to regularly give your company a "performance review", and how to decide if the company has failed and it's time to leave.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20609978

Of course everyone's ability to leave might differ, depending on personal circumstances and job market. But at least it's good to know what you do and don't like about your job, and what you want to try to improve, if leadership is amenable.

Thanks for the link, it’s a framework I’ll start using.

> ” As an employee, it’s usually best to leave in the first wave of cuts.”

That’s only valid if you can very easily find another job with similar salary and better work environment, right?

If I am a regular IC that will have to go through a lot of interviews to find a new job it is best to just wait until I am fired (while looking for a new job without leaving the current one).

In the first wave of cuts, you're still getting free lunches, you're getting 1 month/year of severance or more, you're getting vesting beyond your departure date, you're getting 12 months of benefits.

In the third wave of cuts, you've had 3 managers in 6 months, everyone hates life, you're having all hands meetings biweekly, and when you get let go quietly, your severance is shit.

Yeah, for sure. No need to put in your two weeks notice or whatever just to get out of there right away. Usually there's a bit of a breather after that first wave of cuts, enough time for you to look and interview elsewhere.

I think part of the reason why they said that is it's best to leave at this time (i.e. start whatever process you need to do to leave) because you'll have the most time to look and interview for a good next job before things start to get worse at your current job, or before you might get axed in the possible next wave and possibly need to take whatever crap gets offered to you just to get a paycheck again.

Personally, I always think its best to be in first wave simply because there's less people looking...

Generally, there's gonna be more then 1 wave of cuts, so the first wave gets first crack at the best openings.

Small company, in my first week the owner sent an all-hands email that chewed out some of the staff.

I left by the end of the week.

When they:

- Replaced good snacks with random, shittier ones

- Cut wellness benefits

- Closed the cool coffee shop

- Retreat without a strategy to move forward or grow. Sometimes it's a lack of product strategy with arbitrary cost cutting cannibalizing essential features of core product into a shell of its former self. Other times, it's round-after-round of layoffs uncertainty while making record profits and spending $10's of billions on servers without a clear need or purpose.

- No one cool is left because the "party" moved elsewhere

- All of the fun stuff is dead

- Increasing amounts of time-wasting bullshit

> the product teams that are left after pruning should try to keep the most experienced employees, lay off the junior ones, and [...]. Experienced employees have been through this before, make better judgement calls under stress, and communicate better.

I think that's probably true, if you are a company of people who are good at what they do, and if what they do is what is now needed.

But most tech companies seem to be either bad at what they do, or only good at things that are no longer the needed operating mode (e.g., the very common mode of Potemkin Village startup appearance of "growth", in what's essentially an investment scam).

In those situations, it might make sense to wring remaining value of the company, while cutting the highest salaries. If all you need is warm bodies, such as for appearances/obligations, or because you're going to do bad work in any case, then juniors tend cost less.

> Jeff Bezos was always focused on keeping the “Day 1” culture at Amazon, and everyone I talk to there is clear that it’s now “Day 2”.

I left Amazon around the same time, and was saying the same thing. All of the callouts in this article hit the mark.

i've been a remote employee for about 10 years now with a variety of companies. at my current employer, i was hired as a remote employee in the post-COVID, pre-RTO limbo time.

from what i understand, pre-COVID this company had a robust corporate culture, even at their satellite offices, and they mentioned i could participate in that, if i chose to do so (i live within 50km of a satellite office). unfortunately, the financial winds also shifted during this limbo time and the company cut a lot of what they did to develop this corporate cultureto accommodate the generous remote/WFH stipends that they gave to their employees as they transitioned from traditional employment arrangements.

however, the (former) CEO of my company mandated RTO two days per week. all remote employees were re-categorized as traditional if they lived within 50km of an office, regardless of employment agreements. hr did a great job sorting through this mess and remote-hire employees were re-re-categorized so there was no mandate.

unfortunately, there's been no re-investment in the corporate culture-building in the satellite offices (hq has gotten quite a few benefits for RTO restored), so those employees are left with no stipend, and no "corporate culture" incentivisation which was a hallmark by which many of them were hired. attrition has skyrocketed and now it's a bigger problem for the company to manage: employee shortages, physical plant underuse, and general mistrust in leadership.

ultimately this all feels like the post-911 airline industry. they instituted baggage fees to compensate for all of their lost revenue and once air travel began booming again, they kept the fees.

as i talk with other people (colloquialism, i know) i dont sense that everyone thinks that RTO is bad, per se, but it seems like many companies are looking to mandate an RTO without investing in restoring the previous environmental and cultural agreements that employees came to understand as a "fringe benefit" within their employment agreement.

Interesting perspective.

Through the author's lens, I would have to agree — if growth is the chief measure of a company's health and the main driver of decision-making, and if you're there for stock options, then yes, it's time to leave when that growth stops.

A lack of "growth" might not signal time to leave for all companies, though.

Other questions to ask might be, is the customer the customer, or is the investor the customer? Are we working toward sustainable relationships with high-value clientele, or are we working toward a profitable exit strategy for the founders? Are we looking for ways to attract and retain good talent over the long term, or are we managing staffing levels according to quarterly goals?

Assuming you aren't an owner and the exit strategy doesn't mean a huge windfall payout for you, then jumping ship might always mean more money for a while, but eventually you will take your last job — the one from which you will retire.

That might look more like a company that spends less than it takes in, cultivates stable sources of revenue, and prioritizes investing in itself — rather than one that chases relentless "growth" and doesn't think twice about "pruning" non-owners for the sake of preserving margins for owners.

But I'm also not a gambler by nature, so I might not count as one who "gets it" in this context.

Always have an engaging side project or non-work interest (a family even!). A slow-growth company is torture if you have to give it 100% of your attention. But in some cases you can turn corporate disfunction into a means to fund your own interests.

Let’s not conflate slow-growth with corporate dysfunction.

I'm currently dealing with corporate dysfunction due to fast growth.

When every day it starts feeling like increasingly a bigger struggle to get ready for work (could be the company, team, or specific work - it’s usually the company). That’s one sign that tells me it’s time to leave.

A significant portion of the reasons the author outlines are exactly the environment going on at $PreviousJob, except it started a year or two before the pandemic. It’s amazing to read their flags and notice how much of it aligned with the final few years of the nine I spent there.

It’s especially hard when a large company (80-90k employees) can’t see themselves as a conglomerate of smaller businesses that have individual/different cultures, customers and customer needs. The authors list destroyed $PreviousJob (not yet, it’s still there but all the “fruiting trees” that created the magic customers loved are gone. From top to bottom, it’s a shadow of itself in vision, ability and drive. It’s a shame, mostly for the customers.).

The biggest flag I can agree with is when sales timelines force corner cutting or outright premature/possible-unworking/unsustainable software get delivered to customers at outrageous prices all while losing focus on the needs of the core customer base. How can a business ignore the source of 60% of their core customers/fans for three-five years and believe they can recover from that? They can’t.

I know old peers and colleagues will read this and know what I mean. I hope they do, and I hope that my passion for what we were working on and our entire customer base was very obvious for all my time there.

It’s wild that “leaders” are deaf to internal experts who built and grew these smaller orgs into the businesses they are today. I don’t assume me or anyone else has all the answers, or are ever right, it’s the complete objection to suggestions of righting the course towards customers who actually need and want the product that’s wild.

I like to think of it like the Unix philosophy of “small sharp tools”, as our founders believed. Chasing extreme growth is a poison and when it infects giant organ from top to bottom… the issues the author highlights and the ones I experienced lead to these outcomes.

This is why companies/products die.

Two years and six months.

If you do not get any promotion, perks or increase of benefits during that time, your not going to get any ever.

Waiting with the mindset of "maybe I will this year" will only cause you mental anguish, to the point you'll become disgruntled and end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Why two years six months? It's takes three months of constant effort just to score an interview/new job and three to properly resign on pleasant terms or negotiate an upgrade.

Two years, is an substantial amount sum of time to work for a company and the bare minimum you should work in any company in my honest opinion.

Jumping ship will always bring more money. The truth is that businesses don't care much about you as much as they like you to believe. In that your forgotten in seconds flat and were only hired for your talent.

So why give it to them if they're not going to return the favour?

Maybe I'm the old man in the room, but I worked for non-tech companies for the first twenty years of my career.

No promotions, no perks and no real change in benefits is the norm for the vast majority of American workers.

What's wrong with getting paid a reasonable amount of money for a career you enjoy and are good at?

You valued your time differently than others value theirs. Every hour you’re paid for is an hour of life you’ll never get back.

Comfortable gig with adequate comp for some, “fuck you pay me” for others. We’re all replaceable, and you never know when you’ll run out of time and be unemployable (through no fault of your own). Maybe people just learned being reasonable got them nowhere. Sometimes it does, but not most of the time.

I assure you estimated attrition rates and compensation controls are built into spreadsheets somewhere. I’ve seen such artifacts at more than one org.

The fact that the ownership is capturing a huge multiple of your effort and you could go somewhere else to capture more of the money you create?

Let's invert it - why should I just make my boss more money forever while I get the same cut?

> If you do not get any promotion, perks or increase of benefits during that time, your not going to get any ever.

SV bubble. Getting a promotion every 2.5 years is very rare in traditional engineering companies.

It's partially a SV bubble, and partially a early-career bubble (and partially an I've-only-seen-the-good-times bubble, probably)

When having these conversations people often forget that it's pretty natural for the time between promotions to increase significantly as your experience and role level increases.

FWIW "promotion" i mean a meaningful change int he scope of your role, not a banding exercise to pay you a bit more. That can also be achieved without promotion; companies have different approaches to the 6ish meaningful role buckets in a technical career.

This means that advice about "how long is too long" isn't really general.

Yep. All this is telling me ie that there are still a bunch of sheltered HN users that are in for a rude shock when they see what it’s like to work long-term in an environment without free money keeping everything afloat. A lot of you have been living in a make-believe world.

A promotion? Sure. But not even a modest raise in 2.5 years, that's not a good sign.

As you get closer to the top, people keep their positions longer and there are generally less of them. Natural progression.

Two years six months is also a reasonable time as some companies have salary discussions only once per year.First time around, you might have only been at the company for a short time, after your first full year you might not be able to, want to go for a salary raise or you might not get it, but if you don't get it the second time, it's a sign that is hard to ignore

This is, though, with an asterisk that you made a reasonable effort to get your raise.

If you didn't, for example you had too much going on in your personal life, and therefore you couldn't put in the quality hours, it might make sense to just be happy with what they give you as in other places you might not be able to tend to your personal stuff as well as in your current company.

Salary discussions can happen at any time, though. Restricting it to once per year is just delaying tactic. If you resign and they want or need you, all of sudden everything is possible

Jumping ship stops bringing in more money once you get old, unless you transition to management (which not all of us can or want to do).

And once you are in the management jumping ship is even more difficult.

Two years for a company that isn't horrendous to work for. If it is clearly not working out - a no brainer - then just leave. Might be on day 1!

Funny you mention that. Looking back, there's at least one company that I should've left on day 1. The flags now look bright red. But my thinking back then was that I'm probably wrong with my understanding of the situation - maybe this, maybe that. There's an emotional undertaking when you leave your old role and show up at a new place and there's bound to be some struggle.

That place was a disaster. I mean the half-the-team-ends-up-leaving kinda disaster.

Figuring out when "it's you and not me" takes a lot of introspection and that's usually accompanied by a lot of self doubt. You can't really tell except long after the fact.

Waiting for "maybe I will this year" will only cause you mental anguish

The problem there is the 'waiting' bit. If you expect other people to see your impact and reward it you won't get it. You need to advocate for yourself. Make sure you're talking directly to stakeholders and leaders in your org. Post about things you've worked on in company channels. Update everyone when you hit goals and milestones. Celebrate your wins.

If nothing else this makes work more fun.

It might be good for the career but this sounds like the opposite of fun to me.

Jumping ship will always bring more money.

Thats not true often. I have known so many people ended up in worse place after jumping.

Why did they make the jump then? The work environment was worth the trade-off?

I'm thinking of the sea shanty "Leave her Johnny" as a power point:

* shipped it green

* rotten tub

* No grog allowed and rotten grub

* we're through

* going ashore

* voyage is long

* winds don't blow

* it's time for us to leave her

There was an interesting graph a few years back about amazon and all the warehouses they are building.

They had grown from ~100,000 employees in 2013 to 1.5 million in 2021. The growth rate would suggest they'd employ everyone in north america in only a few years.

While possible in theory, the government could never allow it. If a corporation were able to grow to that size, they essentially become the government. Bezos could simply tell his people to not send the taxes to the government and the government instantly collapses within months.

So unsurprisingly government went in and started restricting amazon. They can basically never grow again, they can't ever threaten the government's existence. Amazon to a large degree is now a US government ngo. Bezos is obviously no longer ceo and amazon laid off a group. And what has amazon done for the last 2 years, not much of anything.

> the government could never allow it. If a corporation were able to grow to that size, they essentially become the government

the US government is already overwhelmingly something that is structured by and for the benefit of corporations

>the US government is already overwhelmingly something that is structured by and for the benefit of corporations

This is an interesting subject.

The majority of tax revenue for the federal government comes from income taxes.

Only about 10% comes from corporations. But it's easier to deal with corporations and there is no income tax without corporations. So it makes sense to mostly work with corporations.

What's also quite interesting, in the last 50 years, there's no functional change to taxation in the USA. Politicians are afraid to make any major changes in fears of screwing it all up.

But worse,during the financial crisis, the USA basically went bankrupt. There is no such thing as bankrupt though.

The USA needs to find about 7 trillion $ in the next couple years. That's a pretty big, that's another great depression.

What happens when everything stops growing, though?

For decades our industry growed faster than almost any other industry and definitely faster than the economy as a whole. It's mathematically unsustainable. It must come to an end at some point, and that point is near.

Is it simply time to retire?

imo "growth" basically means a company is able to profit from mining "reality". their alpha or edge is having the know-how to be at this cutting edge.

in such an environment, "truth" matters a lot because it allows more efficient interfacing with reality.

without growth, managing perception becomes more important than truth. this leads to zero-sum politics exacerbated by things like mortgage payments and visa status.

everyone is trying to get into AI companies these days b/c they seem like the only companies that can still profit off of "playfulness" while all other cultures are becoming very Serious.

instead of just doing things or solving problems, every action and message has to jump through a bunch of "what will X think" hoops which is demoralizing.

Most of tech was a ZIRP (zero interest rate phenomenon). And yes, that includes people that were higher up as well. Money was basically free for 15 years. It is not free anymore.

It will take some time for people to internalize this.

Of course it all changes if money becomes free again.

For me it's when I get assigned to a project where we're rewriting a perfectly-good app for any of the following reasons: (1) in order to use the latest buzzword (kafka... fsck me) (2) as a PR stunt to get the company name back in the press (new! and improved!) (3) because some micromanaging activist investor said so (4) as a hail-mary attempt to erase technical debt (5) as a sneaky attempt to erase institutional knowledge so that they can offshore the whole operation (6) so the tech lead has another badge on his resume

i wrote the startups version of this for anyone interested https://www.swyx.io/startups-going-bad

Always Be Leaving.

Coffee is for deserters?

It takes brass bytes to sling C++.

More discussion previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38827801

Some good takes, some bad takes in the post. The analogy of cutting a tree is pretty dehumanizing and doesn't factor in the morale and culture hit laying people off does to a company.

Sustainable growth is far better than boom and bust cycles. I guess if you're shutting down entire product verticals you can reduce the blast radius. Doing partial cuts across the board can cause top talent to look elsewhere.

Because I personally don't like remote work, I'm ok with requiring 100% RTO. But bad management is a problem.

Out of curiosity, may I ask why?

Mainly because it's not pleasant to work w/ bad management. Bad culture starts from management - pretentiousness, stressed colleagues, micromanagement etc.

Archived: https://archive.ph/dk9vW

If you are in a start up leave as soon as it’s clear your options will be worthless

My sign is to leave is when I cannot stop glancing at the clock

...the product teams that are left after pruning should try to keep the most experienced employees, lay off the junior ones...

I think I know the generation the author belongs to

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38827801

Reality check … working at a company with hyper growth is of course fun, but also extreme rare in business.

Most companies in the world are a slow slug.

Tech got spoiled this past decade.

Now it’s time for reality to settle in.

I know it was only one piece of the article that talks about RTO, but as an aside, I don't think I've ever once in my life, in person or online, seen someone arguing for remote work that provided even a single piece of data, a single number, to back up their assertions. Their arguments instead just presuppose that RTO is awful and remote work is amazing, as if everyone "just knows" it. And apparently everybody that's involved with RTO is supposedly just a complete idiot that doesn't know anything about their business, or, as hinted at in the article, they're involved in some sort of grand conspiracy to force an "ineffective" RTO on workers for conspiratorial reasons.

No-RTO is the workers finally realizing they have actual power over management (thanks COVID!) We don't need to provide any numbers to the business because we don't care about the business when thinking about RTO. It's for us. Our lives. Not for the business. If anything, it's the business who has to provide numbers to convince us to go back.

So we just need to refuse RTO. Fire us if your really want to. We'll move to your competitor and the numbers will speak for themselves. We might be wrong and we might be back to the office if you can crush your competitors with the benefits of RTO even with all that talent lost.

perhaps common 1-2 hours commute is data enough

Yeah commute alone is reason enough to go remote. I have no problem with chat and conf calls. I’m routinely working with offshore teams and others spread all over the US anyway. Working remote is no different than in office I just don’t have to drive and fight traffic to get there.

"Politics and micromanagement have taken over, and HR processes take up far too much of everyone’s time."

How is the HR the cause here? From the mismanagement that the author describes in the preceding paragraphs, it sounds like HR involvement was too little, not too much, because the problems are symptomatic of poorly trained managers. Too many engineers are unable to see the contradiction when they complain about people problems, and then in the next breath question the need for any people or processes to help with those problems.

Hmm. I don't want to sound harsh, but I've been in the industry for nearly 3 decades and I've never been in a place where HR has been effective in helping train managers. I'm not saying it never happens, just that I haven't seen it. In fact, I wouldn't generally characterize HR departments as paragons of good management, so I'm not sure they are usually in a position to teach such things. Not their fault really, I don't think good management is that teachable. It's mostly learned through experience.

> In fact, I wouldn't generally characterize HR departments as paragons of good management, so I'm not sure they are usually in a position to teach such things

Exactly. HR is there to comply with certain regulations and otherwise minimize the number of lawsuits that the company is a party to.

Maybe if they're really good they might have a robust professional development program but that's certainly not a given!

I think it's not just experience, it's partly about picking the right people, and not picking the wrong people. Some people are just not good managers, and no amount of training is going to make them a likeable person with good people skills needed to lead a team of people. Many places seem to want to pick someone who has the best technical skills, and then assume he'll magically become a great manager somehow.

I think sometimes HR gets blamed for stuff that's really upper management's fault. HR can try to patch over the bad decisions and deal with the interpersonal problems caused, but there's really not that much they can do because they have no real power, and the problems are caused by inept management. It's not HR's fault when upper management decides to promote people to management who clearly don't have the right personality for it, and that's not something HR can fix.

"If you have to ask, it's time to go"

I believe there was an XKCD to that effect, too

That so many people are so focused on things "having" to be in a constant state of exponential growth makes me feel uneasy. It's like so many people can't see the forest for the trees - we can't have infinite exponential growth forever.

Like, little software shops which take on a stable number of projects / contracts / clients a year, focused on sustainability instead of pure profit, lose and gain people at a roughly 1:1 ratio, rarely downscale or upscale offices, have a relatively flat heierarchy, everyone is compensated realistically, reasonably and equitably, and the work is done at a rate that is a nice balance between interesting/challenging whilst relaxed enough to not cause burnout, with a sensible work/life balance. That's what I look for, and they're fucking havens.

Edit: my idealistic take on "I wish I could do software like a tradesperson" has prompted so many insightful comments looking at all sides of the equation! I will clarify a bit, first paragraph I'm lamenting specifically exponential growth a la shareholder nonsense. Paragraph 2 is "I am so tired, just pay me in line with interest rates to solve funky little code puzzles enough that I can keep the comfy roof over my head and have enough free time to go on my long runs and grow my vegetables" :-)

>Like, little software shops

I tried those and TBH they never worked for me. Small shops in my experience have not very good processes, rush to gain new projects and customers at all cost by sales/management always overpromising and burning out engineers in the process who strugle with the unrealistic deadlines, promotions are gained trough favoritism since there's no fixed clear and well documented promotion/career path but you're at the mercy of how your bnoss and his boss/CEO feel about you each day.

So no thanks from me, I'm going back to big old crusty established comapanies with established products and customers, established processes. YMMV of course, there' no one sized fits all for everyone and big companies have their own issues but I feel I can more easily manage and deal with those. Pick your poison.

That's ok. You are just built to work with more structure and processes. Some people like the small company vibe where things are a bit chaotic but also fun and creative. Nothing wrong with either.

> Like, little software shops which take on a stable number of projects / contracts / clients a year, focused on sustainability instead of pure profit, lose and gain people at a roughly 1:1 ratio, rarely downscale or upscale offices, have a relatively flat heierarchy, everyone is compensated realistically, reasonably and equitably, and the work is done at a rate that is a nice balance between interesting/challenging whilst relaxed enough to not cause burnout, with a sensible work/life balance. That's what I look for, and they're fucking havens.

Counterpoint: When I was hiring in another city, I routinely searched LinkedIn for candidates at the local "little software shops". Most of them went in expecting the unicorn situation you described and then realized it was actually kind of grueling, full of cliques, beholden to "customer is always right" thinking, and that they weren't really getting a chance to work on any long term projects done right.

I'm sure there are perfect unicorn little software shops like you describe, but they're not common and they're not easy to get into it. Also, being beholden to a small/stable number of clients isn't as great as it sounds once one of those key clients decides to end the contract or bring development in house. When a small software shop loses 1/4 or 1/2 of their annual billings all at once, things can get ugly.

Don't get me wrong: I, too, would love to work at the unicorn place you describe, but they're not really common or easy to get into.

Time and time again job announcements are mentioning fast-paced environments, and exactly those companies like to churn through an immense body count. Loyalty needs to go two ways. Stability seems to be a game for the older folks, whereas younger people prefer efficiency and risk taking.

"we can't have infinite exponential growth forever", I agree, but I can create infinite exponential personal growth for my younger self is acceptable as well.

> Loyalty needs to go two ways

This is one of the more perplexing elements of both working as an IC and a manager. I'm constantly battling the line between treating the relationship as purely transactional and one where work is more meaningful than that. The problem is that whenever you bring other things in - "loyalty", "passion" etc etc you are at very high risk that these are circumstantially dependent on the coincidental alignment of the employee's interests and that of the organisation. The minute that changes, you will find you now have an employee whose motivation is at odds with the interests of the larger organisation and all kinds of dysfunction stems from that. The only true stable basis for alignment is that the organisation needs work done and the employee needs money. It's great if there is more than that, but the minute anybody relies on it they are essentially rolling a dice with some odds it turns against them.

Whenever I read that a place is a "fast-paced environment", I take that as a red flag. I think it's usually code for "this is a difficult and unnecessarily stressful place where you're going to be a disposable cog in the machine."

> That so many people are so focused on things "having" to be in a constant state of exponential growth makes me feel uneasy. It's like so many people can't see the forest for the trees - we can't have infinite exponential growth forever.

From first hand experience, let me explain why I need this. It's because when the growth stagnates, management starts to attack their own reports. This is an effort to squeeze productivity that comes all the way from the top. Middle management politics governs your life. There are constant threats like PIPs, politics, measuring BS metrics such as lines of code. Your director may be getting antsy about their own promotion and want to fire you away to perform a reorg that makes themselves look good. Your coworkers will turn against you because management will start stack ranking. Imagine going into work everyday where every slack message, every email, every code review is all about posturing to let someone else take the blame. The consequences are dire. Productivity actually gets shot because no one is willing to help anyone. Entire services stagnate, dependent teams do not respond timely and the org is not willing to support any efforts.

How does this work environment sound to you, as an engineer?

Everything about that job becomes about management games. You will be blamed for things not in your control.

I would accept stagnation as an employee if the company can accept stagnation. Everyone knows infinite growth is impossible. And if the company runs out of ideas, no amount of pressing IC engineers is going to fix anything. But pressing IC engineers is exactly what they do. And this is why I don't want to work at stagnating companies. I am not a kid who will willingly take the blame for BS management.

>From first hand experience, let me explain why I need this. It's because when the growth stagnates, management starts to attack their own reports.

from my looong experience (I'm retired), perhaps more second hand than first depending on your definitions, of all the people I have known, who got rich rich are primarily people who stayed at one company a long time, and their career/responsibilities grew through promotions, eventually c-suite. I've known plenty of successful startup lottery winners, but a greater number of "unlikely" successes were people who delivered daily reliability, not fireworks. People who don't get caught up in corporate politics, whether they are attacked or not, just remained reliable.

I feel the exact same way. After nearly a decade in industry, I want to transition away from corporate life and start my own small software company. It will not be a high-growth startup; instead it will be a bootstrapped business. The issue is I’m having a hard time thinking of ideas; I’ve only worked in academic or corporate environments and thus I know little about the ecosystem of smaller software companies. Moreover, I grew up in an era of shrinkwrapped software and shareware, but these business models have largely lost ground in the past 15 years; it seems that SaaS is the way to make money in the software industry these days. But I may be unaware of other business models that may be viable.

In my experience, "little software shops" are about maintaining "living fossile" systems. They survive by signing contracts with non-tech companies (supermarkets, healthcare, etc.) to develop a system and offer support, but never update it. There is no need to update or improve anything since there is no competition. The customer would have to sign a contract with another software shop, and non-tech companies are highly risk-averse, as long as it gets the job done they keep paying.

It gets frustrating most of the times since you'll be working with old and unsupported tools, and you cannot update them. I am talking Postgres 8, AngularJS, ASP.NET, etc.

> so focused on things "having" to be in a constant state of exponential growth makes me feel uneasy.

> can't see the forest for the trees

SO MUCH THIS.

I get that momentum is a powerful force but it is incredible how many missed opportunities there are because the blinders we put on. We talk a lot about how difficult it is to align ML models, but sometimes I feel like we are the difficult to align models. A lot of it makes me feel less human too, because part of why humans stand out is that we __can__ do long term planning and have extremely powerful inference that allows us to generalize. But I feel like we're living in this weird world where we're trying to turn humans into machines and machines into humans. That we need to be the strict letter of the law entities and machines need to be the absolute generalizers. I don't know exactly when it happened, but I feel like one day we just woke up in Goodhart's nightmare.

I've been trying to combat this a lot, including in myself. One thing I find that helps me is to explicitly write down intended goals and outcomes. That way I can constantly check my alignment fairly easily and don't lose sight or get tricked by metrics. The other thing I do, which is a bit harder is to write down assumptions. This list actively changes a lot as I learn but it's become vital in projects I work on and how I understand things. I'm a researcher and this has become my most valuable tool (I've been surprised to find some of my peers are resistant to this idea). It's an essential tool to not get deceived by metrics if you have long term goals (this is where I find the resistance. Focus is typically short term). Any other techniques people have found helpful for keeping aligned?

> little software shops which take on a stable number of projects / contracts / clients a year

If I could be promised the stability of a trade gig such as plumbing in the software aspect you describe I'd probably want to stay in technology. The reality sadly is otherwise, almost across the board from my tiny anecdotal experience.

That's the double-edged sword of capital markets, right? If you take investment then you need to produce big returns forever, and if you don't then you're in danger of being beaten in the short term by those who do. Small consultancies and contract shops might be an exception, but that's not because of the owner is wise so much as because those kinds of businesses don't scale with investment like more typical software companies.

>Like, little software shops

My first dev job was at one of these. They didn't even use version control.

I started at a place that had

store_v1.js

storev2.js

store4.js <----- this one was the newest, and current production version

store_new.js

store_newest.js

I got their head engineer fired by explaining to the CEO what industry best practices were and how incredibly common and valuable they were (and honestly, the engineer got himself fired by refusing to even consider changing his ways). I introduced concepts like "store your products, sales, and user data in a database instead of a flat file" and "use version control" and "use a deploy script that supports rollbacks". Then I quit for a better paying job.

The CEO complained that I convinced him to change everything in the software stack and to get rid of the guy with 15 years of experience there, and then bailed on him. I pointed out that $40k/yr is not enough to buy loyalty. Last I heard he got acquired by a bigger company who threw out our entire estore anyway. He's doing great.

That doesn't mean that _you_ can't use version control. Or just introduce it to the company.

“Little software shops” are hell.

I say this as someone who owned/ran one for a number of years.

Never again. Never.

I worked for several little software shops, it was fine, really. Big tech was much less sensible, and I lucked into a very nice big tech company to work for...

Any tips on finding these positions? I'd love to work at a shop like this but don't know anyone who works at one and they most likely do majority of their hiring through their employees' networks.

Well, we are forced to constantly be seeking continual growth as individuals. If you don't, you are viewed as stale, a dead-end. So the least we can do is expect the same in return from our companies.

populations are governed the S-curve, which approximates an exponential in boom times. for humans, the exponent is biologically limited by the speed of raising children into reproductive adults, which is ~20-25 years.

financial and technological advances free us from traditional constraints, increasing productivity (wealth 1st derivative) faster than raw biology allows. the dark price is faster, larger boom / boost cycles. see eg the speed of adoption of technology, or the average lifespan of an S&P500 company.

the more removed an industry is from atoms, the higher the exponent, thus the perceived instability. alas, industries close to atoms don't pay that much. it's a tradeoff: low growth and stability + boring work and low pay, or high growth and instability + interesting work and high pay. the places you speak of are indeed havens, good luck finding one!

The don't want to be compensated reasonably, because they find opportunities to be compensated unreasonably.

From experience, without company or team growth there is very little scope for you to grow in your career: everyone keep their jobs at best and someone has to leave for another employee to be promoted.

If you're OK with that, sure. But if you're aiming for promotions and personal growth, move.

So privately held companies? """Shareholders"""" are the worst...

Privately held companies have shareholders, too, and some of the inter-shareholder drama at a small company can impact your day-to-day life as an engineer more than at a BigCorp.

"the product teams that are left after pruning should try to keep the most experienced employees, lay off the junior ones"

This inevitably leads to your product being owned by a few devs with no one else who has the org knowledge necessary to make meaningful changes. Your org should be making experienced devs. If it isn't, you don't own your product.

Junior devs are your future. They have motivation and want to be apart of your mission far more than the experienced devs that are there for a paycheck so they can get their own show running.

The full quote:

"... the product teams that are left after pruning should try to keep the most experienced employees, lay off the junior ones, and return managers to individual contributor positions where possible. Experienced employees have been through this before, make better judgement calls under stress, and communicate better."

So writes the experienced employee. Adding to the parent comment, experienced employees also may have vested interests and cognitive inertia based on the current situation, the way things have been done until now. If you want new growth, new perspective, new ideas, new energy, new blood can help. They don't know that 'back when Eddie was here, we did it this way ...' and they don't care.

The OP also writes,

managers start to hoard ... and play politics to preserve their products.

That applies to the experienced employees too.

“They don't know that 'back when Eddie was here, we did it this way ...' and they don't care.”

Per Chesterton’s Fence, that should scare the hell out of you. :)

Saying RTO picks the fruits of the trees and leaves the husks is true only in the way that it keeps the best workers which can create more fruit, and those "fruit" that fall off weren't going to be around long in any case.

The best, and safest practice is to only allow remote work only as an exception for those that produce results way above the average.

Anyway. One sign to actually leave a company though, is the free soda / coffee being cut off and it turning to something the employees have to pay for in the kitchen / cafeteria. Believe me, this is often a sign that the company is losing its way.

WFH is a benefit, and when you cut benefits, your best (and most mobile) employees evaporate off.

WFH is a benefit when you and your boss don't care about the company and are just on the mindset of doing the minimum hours to get your salary, and your boss is just trying to cover his own ass. And would prefer to just get the money for doing nothing while sitting home. And care more about benefits than if the thing you're working on even ever ships.

It is sad such jobs exist, I would never work in such a job and think that HN readers as an average also would not prefer that over working on something worth their time.

When seeking for jobs I always prioritize for companies where most if not all work in-office after seeing how bad remote work can for wasting those hours of your life.

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