

Ask HN: Should I stay in a company if I know they are selling smoke? - gaelow

I&#x27;ve recently started working for a medium-sized start up (~100 employees, 8 years old) as a junior developer. Up until now I&#x27;ve been working as a freelancer in direct contact with the client&#x2F;end user, and all my projects translated into something useful: a product or some extra functionality on a product that satisfied a particular demand. Very small contracts lasting only a few months and comprising just a few thousand lines of code each.<p>Now I just do whatever management throws at me, which is usually work handed to them by account managers who get contracts to work on big projects (hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code and several months or even years of development).<p>One of the first things I&#x27;ve noticed on my new job is that a good number of projects never reach production or, if they do, they are useless products retired or restarted from scratch by a different company a few months later. Specially when it involves government contracts or collaboration with other companies.<p>Should I worry about this smoke&#x2F;functional product ratio and start looking for a new job, or is it what I should expect from any software development company handling many big projects at once?<p>What should I do if I stay between a few months and a couple of years and become project manager to avoid any products I am put in charge of ending up as vaporware?<p>What should I do if despite my best efforts I still can&#x27;t avoid it?
======
laughfactory
I suspect what is driving your question is that you're mystified how you can
be paid to produce work which isn't meeting some need, or being tangibly
important in some way. If you're working on stuff which never reaches
production or is immediately retired or restarted then it probably seems to
you like a bad way to run a business.

I can sympathize. I worked for a bank in a role doing tasks which, to me,
clearly did not meaningful add to the companies bottom line. In my estimation,
my (and my department's) existence was a drag on the bottom line. I constantly
found myself amazed that the company spent so much money in inefficient
counterproductive ways. So I wasn't honestly all that surprised when my
department was wiped out last week and I was laid off.

I think ultimately you're right: when it's all vapor then there will likely
come a day or reckoning. But you never know how soon they day will come. Maybe
it's a proactive restructuring of the company and they downsize and cut
because they realize the error of their ways (and pivot to producing more
value), or maybe it happens when the economy tanks and money gets tight.

I think you'd just be smart to continue to diversify your options however long
you work in your current position. Play your cards in such a way that if you
ever wanted to leave or had to leave, you would be able to frictionlessly
pivot to something else. If you can do that then I say don't sweat making a
buck off your employer's vapor production. When and if the gravy train comes
to a halt, you'll be ready to do other things.

On the other hand, if you're not happy in your job--i.e., if you don't like
your work, your colleagues, the environment, or your boss then consider
staying there just long enough to make it legit (probably about a year) and
then go looking for something else.

Good luck!

~~~
gaelow
Thanks :-) I'm actually quite happy. The pay is decent, the colleagues are
great, smart and they have a good deal of experience. Plus the office is not
far away from home. From what I know from my college partners, such a
combination is quite difficult to achieve.

I enjoy what I do and I am learning a lot. I see many things I like and many
other I would do on a very different way, such as:

\- There is no automated testing at all,

\- No separation of duties either,

\- The version control system is ridiculously outdated, misused and underused,

\- The deployment strategy is practically non-existent,

\- The upper management constantly tries to push technical decisions that sell
great to the client but make little to no sense on the project context, adding
many man hours to achieve the same results.

Fortunately everybody identifies this issues and they do what they can to fix
them (except for the automated testing, it seems like they all think it's
worthless), but the company is growing and external image is all they can care
about for most of the time...

------
fsk
I currently work for an MLM business. It literally is a pyramid scheme.

I'm shopping around for something better, but the pay is decent.

Standard Advice for your situation. Do the best you can in your current job,
while looking for something better. You already have a job, so you can be
somewhat picky about your next project. Knowing that you will have an new job
in 1-12 months means that it's easier for you to put up with their foolishness
for now.

~~~
gaelow
Good advice, indeed. I don't think I'd have any problems getting a new job
right know, because everybody wants junior developers, and practically none of
them are as experienced as I am.

A few years from now it might be very different, so if I intend to switch I
should better do it ASAP.

The only problem is: What do I do to avoid ending up in the same situation? I
did my research on this company before and during the interview, and it's
almost impossible to know what happens inside the office beforehand (Even
people you might know already working there usually won't tell you anything
about what's going wrong, because it can damage the company image...)

That's why I want to know if that's something every company has to deal with,
and what are the chances of finding one where it doesn't happen.

~~~
fsk
There are no guarantees. It's hard to size up a place until you're there a few
weeks/months.

For example, at my current job, the boss admitted on the interview that their
system was a mess and they wanted to clean it up. But, once I was working
there, I'm doing 100% maintenance with no real opportunity to refactor or
clean up the old system.

Also, after a management change, a good job can turn bad. When my current boss
was hired, all the programmers hired by the previous boss quit in the next few
months.

I had a job turn sour when a coworker was fired. I had double the workload,
and the easier tasks my ex-coworker was doing wound up on me.

It does get a lot harder as you get older. If a job ad says 2-5 years of
experience, then 15 years of experience makes you ineligible. Also due to
technology churn, your experience in older languages has a market value of
zero (even though it does have real value).

I have had jobs that I liked. In one job, most of the team interviewing me
seemed awful. The guy I wound up working with was very nice, but he only spoke
for me for 2 minutes during the interview. I thought I flunked the interview
and it would be an awful job, but it wound up being nice.

