1,984 karma · joined January 11, 2016
I used to be in enterprise software sales and consulting and have been involved for RFIs/RFPs across multiple industries. I don't know a single person who thought the process was sensible or efficient. Unless you have an person whose job is dedicated to responding to the questions, it's basically just a game of passing a hot coal around until you have something you can submit.
I realize that every decision is easier in theory when only one person has to make a decision, but sometimes having a spouse and kids can make things easier.
Most of the people I know who went back home because a)their spouses also wanted to migrate back home and b)both of them weren't comfortable with their kids going to Middle/High school in their "Western" country. Your spouse supporting your decision can make that easier. So if your goal is ultimately to go back, pick a spouse that supports that.
First thing they did was purchase a home, car, furniture, and that took care of the typical monthly expenses that eat into your salary. The rest went into CDs or other fixed income accounts. If you combine that with a teacher's salary, it's more than enough to live a basic and comfortable life.
I think the only caveat here is currency value fluctuation. The laws and rules about how you keep your money in accounts (e.g. American Dollar versus local currency) can vary a lot and change over time. The weakening of a currency can basically force you to change your plans. Some people have to "unretire" after a while.
None of the people I'm thinking about were "rich" by Western standards when when they lived in US/Europe. So it's not a story of some startup millionaires who went back and lived a life of luxury.
I'm genuinely asking this question - I'm not trying to be a smart ass.
I worked at a tech company (~3500 worldwide) that had an office in almost every major US city area (e.g. Bay Area, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and a bunch of Tier 2 cities as well (Atlanta, Raleigh, Houston, etc), and remote workers (e.g. sales) as well.
They had a big layoff and in theory they could laid off 500/15% people worldwide without laying off 50 people at each site. Would that still trigger the WARN act?
IME 14 weeks minimum is really generous in the US.
I've been at 2 companies where it was 1 week per year of employment. At one company they added on 1 month of severance during a really large layoff. The tenure at tech companies in the US tends to be quite short, so getting 14 weeks probably unusual at typical tech company.
When I ask myself the question about when I'll get back to the way I was, I also have to ask "Does that include being that person that let myself get burned out so badly in the first place?"
What I'm slowly getting back to is a different person than who I was. I have different priorities about how/where to apply and manage my curiosity and energy. If I can accept the person I'm turning into, then I feel like I'll be back one day.
If I want to be the person I was a decade ago who naively worked like a donkey until I burned out, then yes, I'm never coming back.
>My mind knows what needs to be done, but my body says no and I am overwhelmed by apathy.
I've been there before. I was completely burned out but had to keep working. You need to find a job where the expectations are sensible.
It took me more than 1 year find the energy to change jobs after I burned out and in hindsight I waited way to long.
Find a new job and make sure you ask questions like 1)What's the work culture. When do people usually start working and when does it end? 2)How often is there a fire that needs to be put out? 3)If I need to take a 2-3 week vacation, would that be considered normal? 4)Are deadlines set in stone or frequently accelerated?
A healthy job environment will help reignite the part of you that has gone dead. It might take years, but you'll get back some of the faith and motivation you once had.
It took me 3 job changes to find a job with a good working environment because I simply didn't have the guts to ask employers the tough questions about the working conditions. With my current job I was very direct in asking questions about work/life balance and the manager and good managers/employees were equally direct in giving me answers. Being in a healthier work environment has done more for my mental health and personal life than anything else did.
https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Delusion-General-Electric/...
Not that Immelt was a star either, but he he wasn't the person who created a lot of these problems.
When I think about the workplace, I've usually interpret this version of stupid as a way of saying that there is a type of personality where the compulsion to do something completely overrides asking themselves if that thing should be done in the first place. The end result is exactly what you said - shotgun frantic activity because everything needs to be done and everything is a top priority. They are not stupid per se, but they create an astonishing amount of stupid and wasteful activity.
Unfortunately there are people who really are just stupid as well. I'm sure in the Armed forces that can have deathly consequences.
lol. I'm glad somebody got this reference. It's pretty dated at this point. Nowadays it's all about people going bald after working out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...
His comment on Type 3 - "One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
I once had a manager and his manager who were both like this. I've never seen a dynamic duo with more skill in turning a group of good ICs in a bunch of dancing monkeys churning out pointless work. But hey, while problems solved was zero, number of PowerPoints in the shared drive was over 9000.
I think there is some CRM that automatically sends these emails to all the email addresses in their system. Your email address is easy to figure out since every company has something like first.lastname@company.com, finitiallastname@company.com etc. You can use LinkedIn to find people with a particular job title and then spam them.
The most comical set of emails I received was from a company that used an ever escalating set of words and images (e.g. a sad puppy) to try and make me feel guilty and respond. I found the sad puppy one so amusing I almost replied just to say the email made me chuckle.
Click the SPAM button and send it to your Junk Folder. Eventually the CRM system will realize you are never going to respond.
Occasional a sales person will contact me on LinkedIn or tries more personal ways to reach them, I just say that I'm not in a position to make any evaluation or purchasing decisions and I don't know anybody who does. That usually stops everything quickly.
This interaction happened many years ago. I wish I could give that person that much credit about being so savvy about the secondary market, but I think it's really just a question of cost sensitivity. A person who really wants a cheap bike is going to Walmart (my conversation happened before Amazon existed) or another big-box store. Anybody who goes into a bike store either a) didn't realize bikes would be more expensive there or b) less cost sensitive compared to somebody who would never consider going to a bike shop in the first place.
The point being, by selling a lifestyle choice instead of a bike, they were trying to upsell me.
Which is exactly what I've seen with so many things on social media sites. It isn't just a hobby, it's a lifestyle.
I think the nature of this has changed recently, but I feel like things were like this in the USA to some degree even before.
I migrated to the USA a long time ago (20+ years). Among other culture shocks, I still remember experiencing this "go pro" mentality was when I first came here and wanted to get some basic stuff like shoes and a bicycle.
Going into a bike shop, I couldn't just purchase the cheapest bike. The person said maybe now I want to bike for 20 minutes on weekends for fun, but in 1 year I'll want to bike 50 miles. So I should consider buying bike that is 3X as expensive that is made of carbon fiber. Want to buy a pair of shoes to go for a 20 minute run? Well, then you want a custom measurement and evaluation of your gait and ... you see where this is going. When you go into a sports store to buy something they want to sell you a lifestyle, not a product.
Obviously the majority of people buying running shoes and bicycles aren't going to become triathletes. But that's the vision to upsell people into a particular lifestyle.
I think monetizing things is just the latest incarnation of this. The vast majority of people are probably doing hobbies for fun, but if you go onto social media people are selling you a lifestyle, not a hobby.
100% Agree.
But to go back to the parent post, what the COO said "If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."
Maybe some COOs run small businesses they started where they call the all shots. But most big company COOs have a lot of obligations and have a different carrot and stick for the C-Suite. And a lot of them didn't start the business where they became the COO. So, yes, still Donkeys.
There are lot of places in the world where there is no expectation that the children will leave the nest.
The whole "I can't wait till my kids are 18 so I can kick them out and get my life back" is only a phenomenon in some cultures.
That's the secret. With some parents, when you find out you realize they probably aren't parents who spend much time with their kids.
I have a friend who founded a startup a year before becoming a dad. His spouse works for a startup as well. He lives in a different city so we rarely meet nowadays.
After about 2 years of listening to them talk about how adorable their kid is and all the time they spend with them, I found out that the kid is dropped off at daycare by mom at 8AM. Nanny picks the kid up from Daycare and puts him to bed at 8PM. Mom and dad basically only see their kid on weekends. Even then, dad is usually too busy and it's pretty obvious that the 3 year old kid has realized he can't rely on his dad for anything.
People can raise kids however they want. There are entire cultures and countries where kids are raised by maids and nannies because population density is high and labor is cheap. But they are more honest about who is raising the kids and that's why they can work 12 hour days and focus on their careers or themselves above all else.
Somebody has to have the time take care of those kids.
A COO is an Employee too. Therefore he is a Donkey as well :)
I remember reading a post on HN where a person said they took them close to decade to be close to feel mostly fully functional after a major burnout. I'm sure some people recover faster, but I would agree that it can take even longer.
I had a massive burnout about 8 years ago and only now feel like parts of "me" are coming back. My recovery took longer because I had to keep working and I was at the age where I think a lot of people naturally become jaded with corporate structures. So it was a work induced burnout that later overlapped with a natural philosophical crises.
First of all, I don't think I'll ever "love" what I do again. At every job I've had after my first few entry level ones, my job responsibilities are ever increasing and a lot of those responsibilities are organizational things I have to do, not stuff I actually enjoy doing. What's there love in that?
>If so, how did you manage to do it?
1. Time, Time and more Time. Be patient with yourself. Forgive your own failings and the forgive yourself for not recovering at the speed you feel you should.
2. If you have to keep working, find the right job with the right management with goals you agree with. This can take a few job changes. Changing jobs is tough and that in itself can add to the burnout. I did a few job changes and eventually took a step back career and salary wise, but that was the best decision I made for my long term sanity.
3. Highwaylights already said this, but learn when to care and when to not care. Too much caring = burning out
4. When you are ready, try to find the joy in your personal hobbies without any timeline pressures. There's this Richard Feynman letter or article where he talks about how he felt burned out on Physics and found the joy again by doing physics for fun in his free time, not for work or for publishing another paper. Work on stuff without pressure. Take a year to go through a technical (or non-technical) book/course that would take a month under other circumstances. Finding a tiny bit of joy somewhere is the first step to finding more of it.
5. Realize that you may never fully recover and maybe that is a good thing. Feeling like something permanently broke in you helps with caring less.
6. I feel like I've got some sort form of PTSD against a certain type of manager/management. Certain personalities and keywords really upset me. Finding ways to manage that has helped me a lot as I learned I need to be more confident with setting boundaries.
7. Did I say Time already?
I think there's a nuance in this that's easy to be missed. It's possible to care about the quality of your work but not care about the various forms of insanity in your management chain.
I think a lot of people fear that not caring means you turn into a totally useless person - that extremely unproductive person in the company that everybody hates but management and HR refuses to fire.
Not caring doesn't mean you have to become that person.
> I find I’m more productive than I’ve been in years because I’m not worrying if something takes longer than expected or is bigger than I realised. I can just enjoy the problem solving and shipping without the stress.
100% this. Care about the quality of your work. If you work for a place where that's never possible due to constant unrealistic expectations, start looking for another place to work.
I've actually found that some managers like employees who don't care so much because they need much less care and feeding. People who care too much also complain too much. And even if you do good work, constant complaining can overshadow that.
1.Active directory password expires every 60 days
2.Extremely crazy requirements around the AD password
3.Only place you can change password is using the Windows login screen
4.No easy place to lookup the password requirements because the IT Intranet site was a completely mess and Windows login only says "Password doesn't meet requirements"
5.Bitlocker password required on laptop
6.2FA via a PKI card
7.Requirements for Bitlocker, PKI, and AD password were all different.
8.Extremely convoluted process to reset your password, usually resulting in a call to the IT help line
This is the only job in my life where I ended up writing down my passwords on paper because my passwords were always some crazy nonsense I couldn't remember. I know I wasn't the only one as I saw people with post-its on there laptop with their passwords.
This was a large software company. The whole process was just stupid. If you have a terrible process people will have no choice but to find a way to work around it.
In the undergraduate institution I attended grading on a curve was not common outside of Chemistry classes. I specifically remember taking a chem class where the majority of the class failed on a percentage basis, but most people passed after the curve.
What was the goal of that class exactly? To learn something? To ensure people passed and repeated the same experience in the next class which was also graded on a curve? What did it mean exactly to have passed Chem 1/2 and Organic chem? It was taught poorly and you were tested on concepts that were not taught properly and not understood.
I know people who opted to take the same Chemistry sequence at a local community college and they learned way more than we did, simply because the teacher wasn't trying to haze them.
With regards to Developer Relations versus PreSales, you should ask yourself what you want to focus on. Do you want to work with customers on actual use cases (usually POCs) and show them how your company's product will address their use case? Then it's PreSales/SA. Do you want to evangelize a product more broadly? Then it's Developer Relations.
Regarding PreSales, I would really recommend you evaluate if you want to stay technical or not. Some products require PreSales and SAs to be quite technical. Other products really need a sales person who understands when to say "Oh yes, we expose our database through JDBC or a RESTful call" and maybe walk through how that is done - but nothing really all that much beyond talking. So it's important to make sure you pick a role that fits what you want.
Given that you have a strong technical background, I'd recommend you find a role that can utilize your understanding of technical matters. It's a good differentiator. Lots of PreSales/SA folks aren't that technical outside of talking the talk.
I think this is a necessary attitude to adopt, even as an employee. You need to draw boundaries about what you care about, and one of those ways is to evaluate if people you work with actually care about something or if they only say they care about it. If you're not responsible for it and others don't really care, you should also try to not care.
I'll give a concrete example. I worked on a project recently where I was dependent on somebody else to finish something. They are perceived as a somewhat competent but lazy person and they took a very long time to get it done. Certainly much longer than other people would have done. Despite claims from our management that this was urgent, no additional people were added to that task to speed it up. Actions speak louder than words - if it really was urgent they would have asked somebody else to do it. So when my part was delayed I simply said I was blocked and tried my best to let it go and not get frustrated.
I had a major burnout years ago and one of the big reasons was because I took responsibility for my management layer understaffing projects that were supposedly a top priority. The priorities were always talk, but no action to add people or manage expectations with the user/customer(s). It look me years to realize that instead of fully putting the blame on my management, I should have stood up for myself and said I can only do what I can do and that's it.
>So don’t play that game: only take responsibility for, only worry about, the things you have control over. And for most employees, that’s just themselves.
100% Agree. You can strive to do the best you can do so you don't feel like you, personally, are doing a half-baked job. But beyond that, it's not your problem anymore.
I think the only exception is if the person has clearly lied about everything on their resume. I don't mean people who have stretched the truth - I really mean the type of person who insists they "I did X" but they clearly did not. I'll just end the meeting early and that's the end of it.
As an interviewee I think it really depends on the situation. If the company and job seem interesting, I definitely try to ask questions to learn more about what they are really doing in their jobs. If the person who interviewed me is an a-hole or clearly not engaged in the interview I just say thanks and end the call.
I think this is a new risk when it comes to hiring engineers. This kind of fraud has been present outside of Engineering orgs for a long time.
I used to be a hiring manager in a well known company that was 100% onsite. This was on the business side, not IT/Engineering. We were looking for a BI person as a contract hire. Our HR org said they had a staffing agency they had worked with for years. The staffing agency sent us a bunch of resumes that were surprisingly similar, filled with every buzzword and feature (e.g. I made a bar chart) and obviously weren't written by the candidates. After throwing those out, there were a few that looked decent. We had some phone screens and then a single onsite interview, but concluded there was something fishy going on.
I confronted rep from the staffing agency with with this and their response was that typically somebody in a managerial position (at our company) picked a few resumes, had a phone call (not video, just phone) with them, then hired somebody based on the phone call. My team was the first one that had actually done more than that.
Who showed up on the first day, who actually did the work, I don't think anybody had any clue.
The non-technical managers didn't have the skillset to properly evaluate these candidates. So they saw the keywords and picked the person that sounded the best.
Engineers hopefully have the skillset to evaluate and interview other Engineers, so the fraud is different and more sophisticated now.
IMHO, if you're the type of manager who hires somebody like this and what you wanted done gets done, you've probably got bigger problems than a staffing agency scamming you. If you think it's rocket science to build a couple of charts in a BI tool and you're happy when the person you hired takes 6 months to build a couple of dashboards at $100/hr...good luck to you.
I've got a story that illustrates this well. I'm older than you and a few years ago I submitted an online application for a job (at a large company) that was a great fit. I didn't hear anything for a month so I found a recruiter on LinkedIn. They referred me to the recruiter responsible for that position. They said they had never seen my resume in their system but she'd forward it to the hiring manager (my future manager). I got the job and became the hiring manager for other positions. Very few good resumes were sent to me from our HR system so I started checking. Turns out the HR IT system was filtering out good candidates and the HR person was filtering out a bunch of good candidates that made it past the HR applicant tracking system. There are so many applications for every position that good people just get caught in the programmatic and human filters to screen out people who aren't a fit for the job.
Use LinkedIn to find the recruiter or find your connections who work that that company. Get your resume into the hiring manager's hands.
Every job I've ever had is like this. Even if you get a promotion and a raise, the raise will be a fraction of what somebody getting the same title from outside will get. So what's the point? It's easier to switch jobs.