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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

My experience graduating right into the dot-bomb was it absolutely sucked. I, a fresh-faced grad, was competing against experienced engineers who were laid off after Y2K, Cosmo, Yahoo, and other dotcoms for entry-level jobs. I wasn't very bitter then, but now when I meet mid-20s developer with "senior" or "director" titles, it hurts knowing that 3-5 years of my career was wasted trying to string together credible work history portfolio.

The best thing I did was tap out, sell my car, turn in my apartment keys, bought a one way ticket, and stuff my life into large backpack. I saw lots of things, made lots of friends, and met a life partner. Simply because life decided to unplug the career treadmill and there was no point in me trying to run on it.

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Titles are bogus and everybody wants to be a "senior" something so they claim to not be clueless. Director is a ten-a-penny title like in the Wall Street banks. There, every other person is a VP. It's a total joke.

Also “Head of X” which often means the titleholder is practically the only person doing X at the company, and/or has no actual power.

Usually this is the “leads the function but we’re not going let them into the c-suite”. The head of engineering gets usurped by the outside cto hire and put out to pasture.

Oh, that explains the Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer. No power.

Isn’t Microsoft pretty great with accessibility?

It seems like a weird choice, I would expect that person to have quite a bit of power.

They've been slipping, especially on Windows.

As a former Head of Mobile, I agree.

I worked at a bank some years ago me and a co-worker got curious about the whole VP thing and setup a script/query(harder than it sounds)to find the ratio of FTE VP to all other FTE ratio and it was something close to 10:1.

After that we were like ok so VP is basically like what every other company calls a supervisor. We are not going to take crap from them anymore.

It's not about authority, it's about old-school payscales, created in an era || at traditional / vertical / hierarchical banking corporations when/where it was inconceivable that an IC could merit significantly higher compensation than a manager (let alone a manager of managers). Hence the "bank title" aspect assigned to senior or principal engineers with market rates higher than generic middle managers. An AVP (Associate Vice President) might be a not particularly senior developer.

A lot of the "VP's" would try to throw their title "UH I"M A VP so get it done" around as some sort of weight when they wanted/needed something. Originally we were always like "OH Crap" a VP needs it so it must be important. After a while we noticed the quantity and did the whole research to that conclusion. It greatly reduced our stress/workload.

Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.

One of the perks of the Wall St banks VPs is that they got a desk such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.

That does sound like a nice perk!

>such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.

Oh, so like gunfighters trying to be a bit more safe while sitting in saloons, in Western (cowboy) novels like the Sudden (name of the hero) series by Oliver Strange.

Grew up reading novels like those (and other genres) as a kid. Mainly bull, but somewhat good writing, and entertaining to a green youngster like me at the time, at least.

Good times. Sigh.

Dey don't make em like dat no more.

Grrr.

I've met a few people who have spent time in prison and developed the same habit of always sitting so they're facing the door. One of them told me he just can't feel comfortable otherwise.

I thought this was well-known, that everyone's a VP in the financial sector because a lot of contracts required a VP or higher to sign off on a lot of things and it was easier to make everyone a VP. Sort of like giving everyone sudo access.

> lot of contracts required a VP

That is probably really outdated and no longer a thing. I'm guessing based on what I saw. I remember when we bought some small local bank they told us not to tell the customers/merchants/vendors that basically there would no longer be local decisions made since everything goes through the banks underwriter/contract/ect systems. They literally told the local VP's to pretend they were making decisions.

I'm not sure why I was included in this since I was just working on the migration. They probably didn't know or care that I was there is my guess.

Our VP Mario had 5 of us plus a contractor.

Could be worse. They could assign demeaning titles "Junior Assistant", "Compliance Associate",etc. I think title inflation is a charming sign of an organization trying show respect to its workers.

More like appeasing their workers with worthless titles instead of money.

I can't wait to see a Vice President of Helm Charts

I was a Petroleum Transfer Engineer when I was sixteen. Then everything went self serve. History repeats I fear.

my mothers first title was inexperienced assistant in her public accounting firm

Banks making everyone a VP is a marketing gimmick.

Customers like to think they’re talking to a senior manager about their home loan, rather than some worker bee. Makes them feel important.

But it is not related to customer feelings nowadays. A lead of a small team of engineers has director title.

Maybe at an early stage startup.

Nobody takes such people seriously unless that startup later has a successful exit.

And by successful I mean a big exit. Like IPO or high 9 figure or bigger acquisition.

Imagine working somewhere and then walking away with peanuts and calling yourself a “director”. Of what? You got played lmfao.

>Banks making everyone a VP is a marketing gimmick.

Didn't all the characters in American Psycho had the title VP on their business cards?

It's as much a response to regulatory stuff as it is a marketing and perception thing.

All these banks over the years were faced with rules either from their insurers and/or government to the tune of "you must have a process to control X" and they say, "well, ugh, I guess only VPs can do that" and then as they grew and merged and were acquired by each other it pushed the VP title way down the org chart.

Graduating in a recession is really unfair to the graduate. Economists have looked at the effects on lifetime wages and it's estimated that recession kids lose in aggregate about 20% in lost lifetime wages, and to no fault of their own.

Of course this is an aggregate figure, but it goes to show how uneven economic outcomes can be across cohorts.

Life’s not fair in general. Personally though I have no regrets starting my career in 2001. Sure it was harder to get a job and it paid less, but it made me more willing to join a startup which gave me experience and skills that opened more leadership doors later.

By contrast I see a lot of folks with 10-15 years experience whose “normal” is an unprecedented bull market where stock is continuously up and to the right with very little correlation to their actual work. Yeah they made more money than I did, but I don’t believe their psychology is in a better place.

Either way, you can’t control for these things in life, just have to play the hand you’re dealt.

>I don’t believe their psychology is in a better place.

People are as ignorant and stupid as their experience in life permits.

This is why highly imperfect messages about privilege resonate despite being imperfect (which they must be to resonate, perversely).

a mid 20s person with "director" in their title sounds good on paper but there is no credible replacement for experience.

Yeah, I'm assuming they signed onto a startup with a bad case of title inflation.

Can confirm, I myself was a one person support desk (for a restaurant chain) and just never officially had a title. The internal moniker of "the IT guru" was fine for an email signature, but certainly not for a resume. (I've since made other retroactive edits to that, both for something more sensible and to better represent years of scope creep.)

Startups are weird though, new college grads can be (inexperienced) CTOs & CEOs if they start a company together

I have a former coworker in their early 20s who left a startup as Senior (they were 1 year out from graduating) to become a "Director" at another startup. Their first job was implementing the control law for the robot's wheels. In this case (and perhaps many others), "Director" just meant "Only person we have".

It can also mean that on the way down. At a private unix software company in 1994, the rise of Linux destroying our business led to firing nearly everyone in support except the cheapest person (me). As I was the only person left in tech support, I became Director of Tech Support by default.

I actually told a startup o joined a few years back that was 5 people that I wanted a more junior title. Because cod it didn’t make it off the ground I didn’t want folks rejecting me as overqualified for roles I was well suited for and under-skilled for ones say my title

Turned out the company didn’t make it and the title in my resume I one I made up anyway.

If you don't mind sharing, what would be the things that a person should think about it before doing the same action that you did? I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.

I'm not the guy you asked, but given the way that things are going right now, if you're currently gainfully employed and not miserable, then you should continue banking money for as long as you can.

For every romantic story you read about someone selling their stuff and striking out into the world, there are a bunch more stories of people who ruined a reasonable life trajectory chasing a vague dream or simply fleeing discontent.

Talking to a therapist and practicing gratitude is a lot cheaper than burning through life savings. That said, if you're genuinely miserable in your life and career, definitely pursue changes. You should probably consult professionals (therapists, life coaches) in that case, too.

I feel that young people having a Big Adventure Before Settling Down is very traditional, the sort of thing that adds "life experience" even if (especially if) some of the experiences are difficult. But it does need to be cheap. And the 21st century crackdown on worker mobility has made it much harder to have a proper international adventure.

Admittedly there can be some survivorship bias in the stories one hears about, but anecdotally I know several people who have taken time off from their careers and zero have regretted it. On the converse side, I know lots of people who never took time off but wish they had. (I also know plenty of people who never took time off because "time off" isn't in their DNA, but they're not the ones who are considering the option).

Yeah there's a danger that this tech recession is "permanent" somehow, but I took mine in the midst of the dotcom crash and by the time I came back (three years later), the economy had recovered. I think tech will always come back. And if it doesn't, then maybe getting out early and having time to reflect will allow you a head start on whatever your next pivot is.

Not OP but same experience. If you're not overly concerned about a certain quality of life, number of cars, square footage of house, etc., then there's nothing to think about. Engineering is a fine career (granted, AI takeover notwithstanding) and a few-year gap isn't going to leave you on the street. Being a few years behind your peers in your 30's may gnaw at you a bit, but by your 40's things will have reasonably equalized. My "wealthier" friends have some nicer things, go on more lavish vacations, but it's never really bothered us. And they generally got that way because they're type-A personalities to begin with. So they're not the type of people who would even ask the question about taking time off. Maybe one downside is they can also afford private schools and tutors etc for their kids, though, IDK, we could afford to do the same (though it would be more than a blip in our finances), but they seem to be doing well and happy where they are.

So I think if you're the type of person that's even asking about it, then just do it.

[*] I'd say one caveat is, don't go broke doing so; save/invest enough and live cheaply enough that you're coming close to break-even. The other is, have a decent network so that when you want to re-enter the job market, you'll have people to contact. That makes job hunting an OOM easier.

Actually, a further thought about my higher-wealth friends. About half of them got there by a good mix of ability and determination, but half of them just seemed to be in the right place at the right time (early engineers at Facebook, engineers at NVidia just as it exploded, etc).

The latter aspect could sway the decision either way: "time off" is almost never the right time and place, so reduces the chances you'll be in that group. But the fact that this group exists, and the randomness by which one can be included, may take the lustre off of being in the high-net-worth group to begin with, if you don't have strong intrinsic desires to have a ton more money than what you'd need to live reasonably comfortably.

Thank you for your thoughtful answer. I've been thinking about it for some time and your answer puts the "life after" in perspective. I don't have big plans for life, but the financial aspect is something that worries me, though.

Later in life is not guaranteed. Later in life will involve health issues, family, work commitments, fatigue. If you can go now you should go while you can.

Just go in with the realization that you're setting your career on fire. I was lucky, I moved to another country and was able to find work in my field after 10-12 month of searching.

> I'm always torn between doing that or saving more and trying to make changes later in life.

If you can always try and save more. Compounding interest means you'll be further ahead later in life. I'm still catching up on my retirement savings, I'm luckier than most healthwise and financially. In hindsight, if I could have stayed around a few more months I probably would have found a job in my expertise and built on it careerwise. But, mentally I was finished. The constant rejections, multiple interview rounds with indeterminate responses, the gaslighting really beat me up inside.

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