Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

I'll dump this one here as it's still annoying me a bit. So one afternoon I'm sitting there and our sales guy John came in (you know who you are if you're reading this) and described what he'd managed to sell a client. I sat there and I scribbled on bits of paper for hours, did some research and went back to him with the point that it wasn't possible from an algorithmic perspective. Basically he'd assumed that if it worked for a couple of steps in Excel it'd be fine up to a few hundred. I scribbled out the mathematics a few times, wrote some prototype code and no the scalability characteristics approached "all the energy in the universe" levels of compute pretty quickly. O(wtf!).

So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and told the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I was expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not he screamed at me too. I was downtrodden emotionally so I sheepishly said yeah I'll have another look and went back and started at it for another couple of days. No it was impossible. At that point I was stuck in a situation. I've got unemployment on one side and I've got getting screamed at inevitably. I just sat there in a depressed little hole with no options. I was angry, isolated and had no one sympathetic around. I suspect many people end up here.

Slept really badly that night. Woke up, got in the car and drove into the office. Got half way and got distracted by a cafe and decided I'd get breakfast and think some more about it. Sitting there eating a fat sausace, something just went ping, I SMS'ed John and the CEO with "fuck you I quit". I moved back in with my parents, did fuck all for 6 months, got another job, which was 80% less shit and the company I worked for went down the shitter about a year later because they couldn't deliver it.

If you feel like shit in a job, just leave. It's not worth it.

It's good advice if you have the appropriate financial resources or support network, but plenty of us don't have the option to move back in with our parents for six months and need to adult on hard-mode.

Yeah I learned that security was pretty important after that and security means not buying nice shiny things until you have no money and having a decent buffer zone.

That may be, but it sounds like the GP was just sharing a story.

Sometimes you don't leave by choice and staying ahead of the layoff treadmill takes its own toll on mental health. Probably doesn't hurt to patch things up with the parents if possible.

I figured most of us in software would have at least a few months of buffer. Of course I don't have kids so

That's the gist, with kids (and potential mortgage) the buffer is so huge, even if its there it creates its own pressures. Nobody normal likes to burn through tens of thousands if not more, so they often stave it off, for better or worse (and worse it usually is)

For the last 20 years, employment in the software engineering field has basically been a dream scenario for the job seekers. Great wages and every company was always trying to hire.

However, that seems to have taken a pause. Higher interest rates mean the free money buffet is over and the FAANGs have spent the last year flooding the job market with engineers of the highest pedigree. I'm not quite job searching right now, but my understanding is that it's not the cake walk it used to be.

While software engineers have definitely had a few good recent years (especially during the work from home boom during COVID times), I would say it was equally dire around 2009-2012 post-financial crash. And 20 years ago was 2004 - just off the heels of the dot com bust, where the job market was much much worse than today. Anecdotally, from what I hear, I would agree it's not a cake walk anymore like it was in ~2021 but it's also not quite a hopeless situation either.

The Silicon Valley Machiavellian TechManager way to deal with this situation is to say "Yes, we will do this, but only if I get an up-front bonus and a team of twenty." The CEO instead gives you 6 headcount and a bonus schedule with performance milestones. You put the team together. Drag things out as long as you can, managing upwards with bullshit and a charismatic smile, faking the goals when you can, while the team is on a death march. Finally, when it's obvious that you'll never deliver, blame the team and parachute away to a different company with whatever bonus money you managed to get your hands on, where they offer you a "Director" title and $1M in stock because you were a "leader."

> Yes, we will do this, but only if

Caution though, the CEO may recognize this as a classic CEO subterfuge.

If they are impressed, or believe they can draft off of your hubris, you may still be able to pull this off.

Sadly, a lot of people are too nice to do this, and instead have a mental breakdown trying to solve an impossible situation. Despite the popular expression, "Never give up," sometimes it's important to know when to say fuck it and quit.

I wonder if this hits self-taught or "code boot camp" developers harder because they may not have the theoretical background to notice "oh this is the halting problem" or "oh this is TSP" before getting too far into the weeds.

I'd be curious what the algorithm was. Were/are there any approximate algorithms that could have approached the problem?

It was proximal routing optimisation in this case to decrease operating costs. They already had good approximation algorithms but they sold better than possible for a higher price than competitors and couldn't deliver.

Sounds like the sort of thing that if you had invented it, it would be silly to part with it for a simple wage.

> So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and told the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I was expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not he screamed at me too.

That's terrible, I'm so glad you got out of that situation.

Hands down the best part about working in a field like tech and building up a cushion of savings has been that I haven't had to put up with coworkers who yell, accuse each other of lying, or any other immature, boundary-pushing behavior.

In the past I worked for the military, academia, theater, etc and there were times when I felt a strong esprit de corps and others when I felt stuck because I was a cog in a large machine and had granted jerks immense power over my life -- working on a contract in a war zone, needing approval from certain professors to further my career, needing a job to pay the rent, etc.

Whereas in tech it's easier to fix situations like this. In one case I went home early to send out resumes and left a few months later. In the other I just sent a record of the conversation to my boss and she dealt with the issue appropriately.

A major career regret is having put up with jerks. No matter how much the customer/company pays or how interesting the work is you can find other work that pays just as well and is just as interesting except you get to spend more of your exceedingly short lifespan with kind, smart, well-adjusted people.

the scalability characteristics approached "all the energy in the universe" levels of compute pretty quickly

Something someone was doing in excel scaled up to taking all the energy in the universe? That does not sound right.

His point was they'd only done a small set in Excel as a POC. It's plausible that with an O(2ⁿ) algorithm you'd be looking at this kind of thing.

I just can't imagine what results someone would need that would mean a mandatory unscalable algorithm.

Haha that was a great post because I was reading from the beginning thinking "gonna follow up tell this person they don't need to take abuse from sociopaths" then got to the end. Good job. Not every employer is a psycho but many are.

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