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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

What a psychopath.

To anyone who may be in this kind of situation, trust your instincts and leave. It will not get better. You will find other, better opportunities elsewhere. Best lesson I ever learned was from a high level exec that had just started at the company where I worked. He quit in 2 weeks. Impressively, he did it without drama or really even causing bad will - he just told the CEO it wasn't a match, and that the longer he stayed the more detrimental it would be to both himself and the company. I wish I had followed his lead - I was too worried about what it would look like to leave a company so soon after joining.

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> I was too worried about what it would look like to leave a company so soon after joining.

You don’t have to put every job on your resume. :)

Exactly. I worked for 4 months at a company and just put "Contractor - various" in that spot because I did not want the stigma of that company on my resume.

I once worked at a place where an employee started their first day at the start of the shift. They mumbled their way through it to lunch where they never returned. That's the shortest I've personally seen. Absolutely not a c-suite role or anything management related though.

I think you're the winner here. The shortest I've seen is someone who left after their first day.

I usually stay long enough to get the company mug.

I had somebody sit near to me who wanted to leave at lunchtime but was convinced to stay on and left after the second day.

This was on the ads team. The job involved managing ads on our site (via google ads and some other providers). They had never done this sort of thing before[1] and were not up to being thrown in the deep end.

[1] I think they had done other sorts of advertising, just not for websites

You say deep end, but any chance somebody had a crisis of consciousness with working with ad tech. Oh who am I kidding?

Crisis of conscience, I imagine

amazing how modern spell check can let you down so badly.

I've had that as well. I've always wondered how someone felt so out of place they wouldn't stick it out until the end of the day, or give it a few days.

I always tried to think of it as they were interviewing for some other place they really wanted, but that place was taking a really long time to get back to them so they took something else before things got too dire financially. Then the other job finally reached out, so they said c'ya! I really have no idea the actual thought process though.

I wouldn't be surprised at that, but I personally would still at least stay out the day. And sit down with someone and tell them.

I guess the chance is small people will remember them, but you never know where you'll come across someone again - I had someone (that I thankfully had better memories of) that had worked for me show apply for a totally different position at a different company where I was the hiring manager without knowing I worked there, for example...

When I was younger, way before I got into tech, I started a job working at Whirlpool working on their assembly line to manufacturer dish washers. I really had no idea what I was in for, it was my first time in that kind of position. I left at lunch and never came back. I don't suffer from anxiety, but I was about to have a panic attack trying to keep up with the assembly line. Having exactly X amount of time to fasten clips, insert screws, attach hoses - all while the item you're working on is still moving? Maddening. Kudos to those who can do it.

In college, a friend and I got jobs at the university's call center making cold calls to alumni for donations. Awful job. He quit on his first day on the floor before finishing the shift. I stuck it out long enough to be fired for poor performance. I'm still not sure which of us did it right.

Execs can have bigger voids due to gardening leave, non competes so it looks OK. But honestly because you can (in theory) lie on your CV it ain’t worth worrying about. So the scenario where you die because you run out of money and need a job because of a gap can be remediated that way. Change the dates or something.

is this 'gardening leave' some british thing?

Yes, means you're still paid by the company but have essentially no duties. One way of making their inside knowledge somewhat stale before they officially leave.

I'm trying to normalize this to my circle and strangers in India, where getting let go is a huge shame. I joined a company and my boss wanted me to be a human copilot, given a task and left for a few hours before getting interrupted. I copy pasted 500 line scripts in Lambda web editor, released certain versions for dev/prod, complained about sql injection and variables named data which overwrite each other depending on state and more crap.

What was the truth? Really just bad fits or something more sinister?

Not really something "sinister", but there was a level of chaos/shit-show that was orders of magnitude bigger than I had seen before, and I've worked for startups my whole career.

Years ago I took a dev role at a very well known UK organisation, a prestigious brand supposedly good for the career. Their systems turned out to be smoke and mirrors of the most braindead kind. One and a half days in I'd seen enough and I quit. If you know, you know.

This kind of hinting is worse than useless. "If you know, you know" is obnoxious. If you mean Autonomy you should say so, and if you don't then your post is just misleading and confusing.

I assumed they were suggesting that they knew that it would be best to leave the company and didn't hang around. e.g., "If you know [hanging around will be a waste of time], you know [enough that you should leave]."

Your generosity does you credit, but no, it's a set phrase.

Did you tell them what was wrong and how it should be fixed (in general terms)? Or I'm guessing your sense was, that would be a complete waste of time because the organization is so dysfunctional that if they _wanted_ to know, they could have figured it out?

Seems that raw pragmatism/self-preservation clashes with conscientiousness in some cases like this.

the stupendous risk taken on by founders confounds instincts, and we're already filtering to folks who have resorted to taking money from third- or fourth-tier options

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