Always be ready to leave (even if you never do)
andreacanton.dev
andreacanton.dev
If the decision makers are welcoming honest feedback, chances are pretty good it's to put you on a potential troublemaker list so they'll know just who to hand pink slips to at the next round of needed layoffs (if not before).
Unless you're prepared to lose your job TODAY, treat your employer like the Roman Empire, and the CEO like Caesar.
The other piece of advice about documentation is important beyond leaving for a new job. Many people lose promotions because “who could possibly backfill them?” Creating a high talent well documented organization is a great signal for promotion readiness, and takes a roadblock away from it too.
There's the founders podcast about Elon Musk. Apparently he stayed in good contact with the Paypal people, even though they fired him and later on that relationship saved Spacex.
The best time to document isn’t two weeks before leaving. It’s right now.
But even more, why a small employee in his right mind would make himself replaceable for the good of the company...
The hilarious part is that clearly his approach doesn't work very well, since he admitted not getting a promotion.
Unless you are getting paid for it and it's part of the job description, I don't see why one would want to document his own process to get stuff done. Like the secret sauce is basically the reason to keep you around, if you give it for free, they can just swap you for a junior that will just have to copy your process. This is already what happens when you decide to leave and they give you someone to "train".
I know this type of person, because I used to be one. They have a very naive, idealistic view on the world and feel like they have to serve others before them even though basically everyone does the reverse (especially companies) and they feel shame or guilt if they would put themselves first.
The reality is that it is the only way that things work out for you in the long term, because nobody else than yourself is going to think about your interests first.
Having leverage to negotiate your position inside a company is basically a necessity, and it's not playing dirty, that's just how things works. If you give the good stuff for free, not only you undersell yourself, but you make everyone else look bad and have to work twice as hard.
The issues he had probably comes from his refusal to play the game with the same rules as everyone else, or even inability to see that there is a game in the first place.
yes, english is not my first language, so I use AI to helping me structure the article, but I've edited and fully reviewed and take responsibility for every word in it. (Anyway I will trust less AI next time, so thank you)
What I was trying to say is that if you do less because you don't like where you work, you are losing opportunity to learn skills, or worst: you are learning to do less in general. How can you find a new and better job if you are doing less?
First, you can do your job but not be overzealous.
Second, it is not because you are not "doing more" for your employer that you miss opportunities to learn skills. You can do that for yourself on your personal time to your own benefit.
In addition, with what you wrote, it didn't look that like that you were suggesting to learn skills: You said to document what you already know, "transfer" your knowledge, so that it is easier for others in the company to live without you (or get ride of you).
I started working toward a promotion to staff engineer at the beginning of 2023. By the end of the year, my manager said I was ready, but he had been asked to step back into an IC role, so he couldn't start my promotion paperwork.
My new manager felt I wasn't ready for promotion, but she claimed I wouldn't have to start over. It felt like starting over though, because it took another year to convince her. During that time I consulted regularly with her and my director of engineering—seeking and taking every possible opportunity to demonstrate that I could operate at the staff level.
My manager then spent six months writing an 18-page promotion packet, highlighting my accomplishments, and outlining why I deserved the promotion. The packet was approved by my director of engineering, so they both felt I was ready. It was then presented to an anonymous promotion committee, which ultimately makes the promotion decision.
Despite two and a half years of effort, the committee rejected my promotion. They even provided a list of 12 bullet points where they felt I was coming up short.
I gave up trying for the promotion, for my mental health. Sheesh.
I'm sorry you got such a mixed signal from your engineering tree and the promotion committee. Need to do more research on that promotion committee. This sounds like the committee nightmare that many PhD candidates face.
I’ll never understand why companies as an almost universal rule make it as difficult as possible to get promoted or get a raise but will hire less qualified outsiders for those positions at higher pay without blinking an eye.
"I’ll work like I might stay forever, and like I might leave tomorrow"
Besides practical benefits of this approach mentioned in the article, it's the attitude that brings you closer to stoicism that just makes your whole life, not only professional one, better.
I was expecting something more practical, like doing an interview every six months or something along those lines.
Supervisors and HR just smile and nod.
Maybe if he had a better relationship with his manager, he would’ve realised sooner that he was just wasting his time.
Documentation is like an untested disaster recovery plan.
When a major issue happens, you’ll be the one called.
You should delegate or automate the task and remove it from your workload, especially if it carries high risk.
I’d actually love to read the dark arts equivalent of this article.
Incidentally, I hear advice like that (especially a variation, of "practice" interviews) on HN, but I really wish people wouldn't do that.
Actually, please don't do this resource burning with startups or other SMBs, unless it's clear they want to burn resources.
But feel free to burn the resources of FAANGs, who mostly created the idea that interviews should be a series of performance rituals that you have to practice and refresh on.
(Though the related phenomenon, of techbro frequent job-hopping, wasn't the fault of FAANGs. It seemed to start during the dotcom boom, pre-Google, especially in the Bay Area, AFAICT, where a lot of people were chasing the most promising rapid IPO. At the time, the rumors/grumbling I was hearing from the Bay Area made me want to do a startup in Cambridge/Boston instead, just to avoid that culture. After the dotcom IPO gold rush ended, it seemed that job-hopping for big pay boosts and promotions became a thing, and that job-hopping culture never went away. But I don't think we'll find much team loyalty anywhere anymore, not from companies nor from colleagues, so that's no longer a reason I'd avoid the Bay Area specifically.)
Startups are fine scheduling candidates for 5-6 rounds of interviews, they should be fine with the occasional tire-kicker
Not all startups are like that, and you might not know in advance.
Though, incidentally, I did find one about a month ago, and I will take this moment of inspiration to complain about it, constructively.
I bowed out of an imminent offer, because I thought that the CTO's gauntlet of evaluation steps was a sign of the day-to-day I should expect: that I would only be valued like an untrusted junior commodity worker.
(I have a lot of experience, my detailed resume shows that, and I'd been patient and met more than halfway with the process.)
Meanwhile, the initial pitch about why I might want to work there had worn off, after 5+ calls and a takehome. I wasn't going to invest any more time+energy+soul, submitting to the final grilling/hazing step, of a job I no longer wanted.
ProTip: Unless you are a FAANG, or are paying FAANG-like money, don't act like one towards prospective hires/colleagues. Otherwise, you should expect to hire only people who are moderately good at interviewing (good enough to pass your nonsense, but not the nonsense of the people who pay more). And you should expect them to hop without loyalty, because you do FAANG arrogance and nonsense, without paying for the privilege.
Not sure when the job-hopping culture--especially on the west coast--really came in. I do associate it with post-dot com but I'd really have to look at the data. Certainly wasn't really true pre dot-com at large tech employers.
And this was exclusively at SMBs and startups. At least, the FAANG companies have structure and you know what to expect.
They are job hopping because they want high level compensation and maybe a position on an high-impact team, instead of being sidelined and powerless against the disrespect of their manager.
Your company can make those work together.
I’m not saying every job hopper is the right hire. I am offering a reason they get hired anyway (availability!) and leave anyway (respect and $$).
(And it didn't fit any rational objection I could think of, if they'd actually looked at the resume, beyond triggering on a keyword.)
I think a root problem is that many companies are bad at hiring, and many of those get confidently bad at it. In institutional emergent behavior terms, as well as individual actor terms.
Precisely. And who are we kidding? I know a lot of people that have performance objectives to grow $ or cut $. I don't know anyone who has a comp clawback for making bad hires.
Spending too long (vague) consulting for one company doesn't measure your competencies or value you bring to the team. I bet they just needed a reason to knock you out and shortlist the hiring manager's preferred candidate who they don't know personally, but know via close friend referral.
This can also dovetail with illegal hiring discrimination: when there's an exec/manager who doesn't want to hire women, people with kids, people likely to feel pressure to have kids soon, military veterans, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc... it's really easy for those resumes to be among the ones quickly discarded, with or without pretext. It's plausibly deniable, because of all the random declines of good resumes.
They're screening job-hoppers as a "rule of thumb" that shrinks the candidate funnel at the cost of losing out on 100x programmers or 1-10x programmers that can commit to 2y.
I don't get the cost-benefit other than time and a lack of need for 100x programmers.
The talent view is that this candidate is in demand by peers, and it's the candidate's choice to put in a full 2y and leave early before vesting.
Scratching someone out for being an alleged job hopper on the surface is pre-mature optimization for hiring talent. What is your concern that you can't mitigate? e.g., call their referrals, backload their comp, etc.
the best analogy I can give is that at work I (and many companies) are looking for a marriage, not a one-night stand. no matter what your technical provess is, it takes a while for you to learn the domain and get gelled with the team. While this is happening, we are all putting a significant effort to make this happen. if you then turn around and leave the entire has wasted a whole bunch time/effort and even if you are some “rock star” SWE we lose
Why can't you address this with mitigants I mentioned? It sounds like you do some of that with "other non-$ comp" (mandatory PTO, parental leave,...) that's use it or lose it, but those are table stakes these days.
I love the idea of thinking about a long term marriage and contracting accordingly, but at some point it's a leap of faith.
Your bias has a presumably unforced handicap. Losing that 100x programmer may not matter to your business/personal goals to make GOOD wealth accumulation, but it will hurt your changes to go from GOOD to GREAT outcomes.
How do you handle retention, once you "marry" an employee?
If the manager retired, would the company keep nurturing that?
- great team
- competitive compensation
- maternity / paternity leave
- mandatory pto
The compensation one is the one that most companies get wrong for retention. It seems most companies say they're "competitive" (within some unspecified tier). And they may be at hiring time, but a frequent complaint is that companies don't keep the compensation competitive. (Netflix famously being an exception.)
I can't help but think the real take away is that you should trust your gut and quit a lot sooner and the poster basically wasted a year being jerked around.
If you are telling your employer you are unhappy for a whole year and they don't fix the conditions leading to your unhappiness, they are telling you they don't value you enough to make those changes (for the sake of simplicity, I'll just assume the employee's specific points of dissatisfaction were reasonable fixes and not ridiculous asks).
You don't owe them a year of soft landing when you quit, in the vast majority of cases they wouldn't have given you anywhere near that if they let you go.
English is not my first language so I trusted AI for my article.
I will study better this behavior
The actual contents are almost the opposite, the blog poster stayed around in their role for an entire year while letting their employer know they were unhappy.
I'm all for professionalism when leaving a job. For any full-time position I've held I've always followed the 2 week notice standard as a minimum and have even done part-time work past the 2 week period in a couple of special cases where I understood the burden on the company I was leaving was more than a 2 week transition could handle.
... but I don't see how it counts as being ready to quit at any time if that quitting is the result of the company not being able to fix a job situation you've told them isn't working out for you over the course of an entire year.
Yes, you will need to pay for the coverage that the employer was paying for, but that's not "eliminate your healthcare coverage at the drop of a hat with no remorse".
Big yes
"For a year before leaving, I talked openly with my supervisor and HR about my dissatisfaction"
Big, big, big no. Might have worked for OP this time but in general this will backfire drastically. In many European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.
To be able to have (again, mostly) honest conversations with a boss or HR is a privilege. In 99% of the cases, HR is there to protect the company, there were only a handful of HR employees that went above and beyond. And even then, you had to make sure not to use some triggering words. I mean this in the literal sense, there are a few things that, if you say, that triggers an automatic HR response, regardless of who you are talking to. Hinting of leaving, even with an unspecified timeframe, is one of them.
In general, don't do this.
Also, exit interviews cannot benefit you. Decline.
Huh, where?
Bold claim considering you left off a key part of the quote.
It's not reducing the protections (change in law). It's reducing the protections you have. The qualifier you left out changes the meaning.
Of course the meaning is "reducing the protections you have". And I'm challenging the notion that complaining or voicing dissatisfaction could do that in any European country.
Therefore I would like examples of countries where it is the case that simply complaining to your boss has any impact on protections you have.
'any' ?
See "cooperative problems" [0], the EU-wide "duty of loyalty" for (not relevant directly here for internal complaints, but paints a bright line), and countless posts on socials of EU people getting let go for complaining in the workplace.
If this doesn't challenge your perception, then we're wasting time.
[0] https://businessindenmark.virk.dk/guidance/employment-and-di...
"Countless posts of people getting let go for whatever reason" is irrelevant too.
What protections did these people have that did not apply because they complained to their boss?
Why did you conveniently skip over the first and primary exclusion for "cooperative problems" and "unfitness", which linked to the Danish Ministry of Employment's site?
> What protections did these people have that did not apply because they complained to their boss?
Is English not your native language? This question makes no sense. If the protection doesn't apply, then they never had it.
As for providing additional context,
1. "duty of loyalty" is something you probably weren't aware of. It sets a bright line, and would surprise people with your over-general view.
2. Dismissing social media posts [0] about claims of dismissal for complaining at the office that would satisfy your request... is bad faith.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/vpsbp0/just_got...
Which countries specifically?
- Before being ready to leave, make sure you either have, or will have, another opportunity or no need for an employer. VERY often (especially in tech!) employers/managers will have employees, not for their labor, but for vanity, to build a pyramid to themselves, or for image reasons. Such people will immediately send you packing for complaining about non-productivity. Your perception of your superior's alignment can easily be wrong.
Given that precondition... I agree with the premise.
Yes, I have done it 10 years ago: I've left a job because of burnout without another opportunity. After that, I've panicked for 6 months without a job. Never again: I promised myself to never leave a job if I was without energy.
With self-serving advertblogs like this, I always imagine that Simpsons episode where Bart has a pot on his head and is banging two pans together, yelling "I AM SO GREAT, I AM SO GREAT, EVERYBODY LOVES ME, I AM SO GREAT!" lol