
Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? - billions
Each of us have limits as to the things we&#x27;re willing to put up with at a job. What&#x27;s taking you near your threshold?
======
jhoutromundo
On my last job, a new manager called me for a meeting on Friday 4PM. I spent
the whole month on an extremely stressful project.

The meeting was about an app that integrates credit card payments, billets and
bank account on a terminal that is going to be available to the general
public.

The deadline? 11PM of the same day. Final version. From 0 to 100% in 6 hours.

I said that it was impossible. He said that I was incapable.

I remember coming back home with a feeling that I was incompetent, even with
my 11 years of experience with JavaScript. I didn't sleep that night, trying
to build it even with delay.

Saturday morning I had a burnout. I was afraid to lose my job because I
sustain my family. I thought throwing myself from my apartment window. That
was one of the worst days in my life.

I got fired on Monday morning.

Got another job on the same day. Almost twice the salary.I told them that I
need a little time to cleanup my mind and they gave 2 weeks to recover from
that situation.

I'm happy now.

~~~
halfer53
This is one of the reason I hate about PIP( performance improvement program).
They set ridiculous goals for you in very short amount of time that nobody can
possibly complete, then fire you on grounds of incompetence. A friend of mine
who works in Facebook told me that an employee committed suicide due to the
pressure of PIP. I suspect that guy was put into PIP due to poor rating (meet
most), then was given a ridiculous task which is impossible to complete. That
guy was stressed out and that eventually lead to depression and suicide. RIP

~~~
virgilp
It's a sad story; but PIP is really the pink slip; you take it as an advance
notice that you're going to be fired, and start looking for jobs. I've heard
stories of people completing PIP programs successfully, but quite honestly, I
don't get it. Once you got to that point, you're not a good fit to the team
and/or they don't appreciate you. Makes no sense to stay. I could understand
staying with the company & switching teams/departments, but staying in the
same place makes no sense to me.

~~~
RealityNow
PIP isn't a pink slip at all companies. I once got a PIP when working at a
mid-sized corporation. Fortunately my performance wasn't an issue, they just
didn't like that I was frequently late to the daily morning standup (which
upper management refused to allow us to reschedule to later in the day despite
my insistence), didn't appear attentive in meetings, and was working from home
too much. I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during
meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.

Of course I took this as a sign to gtfo of the company, so I started applying,
left for a massive promotion and 40% raise, and now I work remotely at a
company where we only have standup once every couple days and it's not first
thing in the morning. Nobody's micromanaging my work schedule or nagging me
for not clocking in at a certain time, and I'm making way more money
especially since I don't have to live in SF/NYC anymore and pay nearly half my
compensation in taxes and cut a third of my paycheck to a landlord. Funny
thing is that I'm actually more responsive/available now because I value my
job more, enough to enable Slack notifications on my phone and respond asap
(within reason). Couldn't be happier.

~~~
jacquesm
Companies want to look 'Agile' so they will treat it as though it is a
religion. The daily stand-up bullshit gets taken to such an extreme that it
becomes counter productive. If you work at such a place, simply get out. There
is nothing that spells long term disaster more than rigid adherence to voodoo
process.

~~~
zbentley
Eh, the first place I worked didn't claim to be agile or anything. The daily
meeting wasn't a stand-up (we sat and usually ate breakfast at a cafe or
chatted in the lobby). It was still a really useful meeting.

~~~
purple_ducks
it's a literal stand up so people don't dither.

lot easier to become restless standing around than sitting down.

~~~
dev_dull
I guess if you drop the facade that it’s supposed to be fast and allow people
to sit down, eat breakfast and drink coffee it doesn’t sound that bad (even if
it’s still not a productive meeting).

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Well, it's supposed to be fast because it's supposed to be done by a small
team, of fie or six engineers. If you got fifteen people taking turns it
doesn't really work. Even worse when the whole point is for middle management
to check your progress, rather than an engineer-only meeting where you can
discuss actual technical issues you're having so the more senior members can
give you a pointer etc.

------
rjplatte
I'm the sole developer working on my current project, which is overhauling a
massive DOS era application, as well as overhauling an early 2000s era
CRM/business management tool, that almost all of our work happens through.

Did I mention that the DOS application is a HIPAA billing application that
must meet all HIPAA guidelines as well as write EDI X12 billing files?

I'm very junior, been coding for ~5 years, 3 professionally, but this is my
first real dumpster fire. We were about to hire a second developer, but turns
out he had a record. Not for just anything, which we don't really worry about,
but for _embezzlement_ on the _healthcare billing application_ he used to own.
So, no. No can do.

So now poor 18-year-old me is knee-deep in a ton of shit I don't understand,
working on non-version-controlled code, having been expressly forbidden from
using ANY VC by the CEO, and trying to get details out of my older supervisor
who built the code we're using, but he's near retirement and has so many
vacation days saved up that he spends maybe 10 days a month in the office. I
honestly can't blame him, but I either need resources to help me deal with
legacy code, or a nice entry-level rails job, because I want to finish
learning rails.

~~~
bloopernova
You do know that HIPAA violations can land ___you_ __in jail, right? Run. Don
't walk. Vacate immediately. Leave.

I'm finding myself hoping that this is a fake, because I wouldn't wish this
situation on anyone at all.

~~~
hacknat
You won’t go to jail if you do nothing wrong, but legal fees. Ugh, yeah,
you’ll be in court as a witness and possibly defendant if you don’t leave
ASAP.

~~~
rovr138
Or if they have a better lawyer than yours.

~~~
hacknat
Well that would be the OCR. It’s doubtful they would waste a lot of resources
going after a developer, unless they really thought he had done something.
Usually they go after leadership.

~~~
bmarkovic
And then leadership hires good lawyers that do their best to deflect the blame
to the developer.

------
throwaway58129
I didn't know this format was a thing and am _so_ very excited to discover it.
I hope you folks enjoy reading horror stories.

I got a job as a Software Engineer in my current company 4.5 years ago;
friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. The company had an apparently disastrous
piece of software that was their main LOB. They had gone through pretty much
every local consulting agency - at least once, on a few occasions they had
gone back to one they had already used. It was about 10 years old and
consisted of a mix of VB6(!), VB.NET, C#, F# and somehow now Node. At the time
tackling a disaster like that sounded fun and I was miserable at a consulting
gig. It was a 20k bump but no benefits (health or retirement), but as a single
guy 6 months away from paying off his college debt I wasn't worried. I figured
I'd dump a few years in then move on.

Three months in, I'm absolutely baffled at what the company does. I was told
they handle insurance claims, basically acting as a TPA. (Important detail: I
had no idea what a TPA was at the time. It's gonna matter later.) The software
_does_ handle claims, but they also have 10 other projects that cover a bunch
of random business use cases. Apparently the CEO is a self-described "idea
man" and would task the previous developer to 'prototype' his ideas from time
to time. The problem was his idea of a prototype was a fully-functional
application that he could sell to investors and clients - until he got bored
with it and shelved it. This ended up with the company having around a half-
dozen actively used products in a half-dozen markets. In addition to the TPA
side of the company that was about 50% of revenue, the other half was split
over 1) check cashing software, 2) HR/onboarding software, 3) some sort if
discount medical visit scam, 4) some sort of MLM scam that the CEO's brother-
in-law co-opted him into, 5) a random cannabis and self-help website run by
some yoga guru type dude the CEO knew and finally 6) a piece of software that
let helped churches organize events and donations that took about 50% of _any_
transaction that was run through it as "fees" for our company. Now I could
talk about any of those monstrosities at length, but this is already shaping
up to be a wall so I'll skip that.

1.5 years later. I've wrangled the mix of VB6, VB.NET, C#, F#, PHP4, PHP5,
PERL, ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL still using
MyISAM, god knows what other horrors I've forgotten. All of this without
version control - just folders copy-pasted over and over on a 10 year old
server in the closet that has no redundancy, two failing disks and one PSU out
of order. The last guy had started some positive changes: moving everything
over to Azure, porting everything related to the claims business into a more
modern MVC app. I finished his work. I squashed about a dozen Wordpress
instances into a single, multi-tenant host. Squashed out all the other
languages and databases into just C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server. Ended up reducing
the Azure spend by about $2000 a month. Felt good! CEO loved me. COO (my
direct manager) loved me. CFO was pleased. All throughout this, I had
convinced the COO to cut out all the shady, near-illegal, morally bankrupt
garbage we did. No more check cashing (awful, awful industry), no more MLM of
any sort, no more stealing money from churches (we kept that going, just
changed our fees to a nominal amount). All the work I had done lead to a
decrease in onboarding time from 2-3 days to 10 minutes and the TPA side of
things was now about 85% of our revenue. Happy ending, right? Just you wait...

Somehow, I had not encountered a single brilliant "CEO Idea" for 1.5 years. He
decided to fix that on one delightful summer day in the mid-west by announcing
that we would be acquiring a healthcare startup that a buddy of his ran. Now
this pissed most of the folks at the company off and is probably a good point
to talk a little about the structure of said company. As mentioned, we had a
CEO, COO, CFO, and "Chief of Sales" (never heard of a COS myself, but who
knows). We didn't call ourselves a startup and had none of that Bay-style of
startupness; we were just a small business with some investors. After the C's
we had myself as the lone engineer, two sales guys, three admin-types and six
or so customer service folks. None of which had healthcare or retirement
benefits, mind you. So there was a bit of rancor when Mr. CEO started talking
about dropping $5 mil to acquire this fancy new healthcare company. Somehow
me, Mr. Software Engineer, ended up being the guy that needed to take this
head-on (well, to be fair, the COO and I had great relationship). That's a
tale in and of itself, but at the end of the day we ended up getting a 6%
matching 401k and $500/$1000 single/family monthly reimbursement for health
insurance, stopped 3-4 people from quitting, got me a whole lot of respect in
the office and a fancy new title of "Chief Technical Officer" (not related to
the benefits; CEO was just happy at how efficient I'd made everything) and 20k
base salary increase. CTO at a company with 1 engineer. Neat. Happy ending,
right? Just you wait...

We also got a brand new healthcare startup for about $2.5 mil in cash, $2.5
mil in stock. We got sheisted and it was our fault. While I'm no MBA, I know
what due diligence is, and I intended to do it from the technical angle while
our CFO handled it from the financial. Before we bought the company I made
every effort to actually review what their software looked like, but was
single-handled blocked by my own CEO. "We're never going to do that,
Throwaway," he would say, "Other CEO is my friend! I've known him for twenty
years and if he says his software is solid, it is! Just trust me." Diligence
took about three months and despite dozens of arguments, I was denied _any_
access to _anything_ technical. All I ever got was: "Our software is in Node
using MongoDB and is hosted in the cloud." Great. I was never even allowed to
meet or speak to their development team (apparently 5 engineers, all of which
were phenomenal). The only human being I ever spoke to at this company was the
CEO. So I tried other angles, the big one being: what the hell does your
software actually _do_? Their big claim to fame was 'modernizing concierge
medicine using AI'. If you're like me and have no idea what concierge medicine
is, it basically means your doctor comes to you because you're a rich yuppie
and can't be bothered to leave your beach house to visit him. How do you
enhance that using AI? I had no idea. Still don't. And so we bought the
company with zero diligence done, though the CFO did say their books looked
good, whatever that means. So the nightmare begins...

2 years in. We start onboarding people, I start onboarding the project itself.
I am finally given direct developer contacts, which are a bunch of emails that
_don 't end in the same domain as the company we just bought?_ Pardon? They're
all @BobsRandomConsultingCompany. I reach out, explaining who I am, that we
just acquired Project X and I need access to the code, environment, engineers
- the whole nine. I get a very lovely, professional response from a Project
Manager over at Bob's who lets me know that they will be sending over a
contract so we can get started right away, along with their rate sheet! I'm
baffled! I thought Project X had 5 internal engineers, Mr. Other CEO?! At this
point I promptly aged 6 months in 6 minutes and I felt the first twinge of an
ulcer growing.

Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO and explain that we have been
duped. COO is angry; CFO is not concerned until I show him the contract that
Bob's sent over. The contract ye olde healthcare startup signed apparently
agrees to pay for 5 fixed resources (at $200/hr!) for 40 hours of work each,
per week, for a _period of a year_. Now I'm not unfamiliar with being
outsourced as a resource, from a consulting company, for a fixed amount per
week - but never have I seen a contract that binds you for a year, especially
for 5 resources, with not one deliverable mentioned _anywhere_. Maybe my five
years of consulting wasn't enough, but that blew my mind. Additionally, they
sent us the server bills (AWS) and informed us we paid directly for
utilization in addition to a "HIPAA Monitoring and Compliance Fee" of
$3000/mo. As I had not a year ago lowered our own cloud costs to about
$800/mo, this number struck me as staggering. $3000/mo base + around $2000 for
the servers currently running. Also, "what the _fuck_ is HIPAA" I said aloud,
the only answer being the two confused shaking heads of my COO and CFO. Uh-
oh...

Segway. The actual Project Manager of the acquired company (not the one from
Bob's Hair Care IT Consulting Nail and Tire Salon) has moved in and I've
finally got a victim to victimize with my _many, many_ questions. She already
looks harrowed before I begin my interrogation. Are people actually using
this? How much do we make per visit? Visits per month? I forget the answers to
these, but the end takeaway was: we bring in about $10k/mo net right now. I'm
no accountant, but I'm fairly confident you can't pay the expenses of a
company + a half dozen employees on $10k/mo. PM agrees - they've burnt through
about $7 mil of investor cash over their 6 years of existence. No path to
profitability is in sight.

Around the same time I've got the Project X repository (whew, at least they
used source control) moved over into my world and have started reviewing the
actual source. I'm no Node wizard, but I'm immediately confused as I see both
Express and Hapi (two server frameworks, generally considered competition to
one another) used in the same project. That's...odd. Investigation
intensifies: it's a simple CRUD project that takes a form submission from a
registered user, saves it in Mongo and slaps it into a queue for delivery to
the given doctors email. That's really it. There's some back-end admin that
allows the doctor to write some notes about their visit. Like a little baby
EMR (though I had no idea what an EMR was at that time). Amusingly, it's got
an Angular front-end (1.x, because why not spread salt on my wounds) that hits
an Express endpoint that then _proxies the call to a Hapi endpoint_. For no
reason. I can't find a single comment or piece of documentation explaining
why. Icing on the cake? Their is in fact authentication used from Angular ->
Express. The Hapi endpoints, however, are wide open - but surely not from the
ELB, right? Certainly it's just an idiotic architectural decision that isn't
_actually_ exposed to the public? Nope. There's a rule in the ELB. Sweet Baby
Ray's someone help me, there is a publicly accessible, completely open API
that anyone could discover that gives away patient and doctor information.
Huh, I wonder if the US has any sort of regulation on that kind of stuff? I
should really take some time to investigate that HIPAA thing I found earlier,
maybe that's got something to do with it...

Employment duration: unknown. My ulcer has had a baby. I think I may have had
a psychotic break. I Googled HIPAA. I simultaneously shat and pissed myself,
which I didn't think was possible during a panic attack, but the human body is
an amazing thing. I took Thursday and Monday off from work to read through a
PDF I found of this most enlightening "HIPAA" legislation. It says "SAMPLE" or
"UNOFFICIAL" or some such on it, so I'm not sure how accurate it is, but
whatever - I need to educate myself somehow. I spent a thrilling four days
reading, re-reading, and summarizing what I understood of the several hundred
page document - printed in three-column layout because why not make it more
abysmal. It doesn't seem completely dire; it looks like there is some stuff we
need to do if we are storing this mythical PHI, but it isn't terribly complex
(at least technically!). I had already been planning encrypting everything we
own, and all of our sites are already behind SSL, so this should be cake.
Phew! Calm down, baby-ulcer, don't think about grand-kids quite yet. Also I
found a few great summaries of the Act which I could share with my COO - but
really, we need to sit down with Legal and have them explain why this was
never brought up. And let's be honest, I'm not a lawyer - the professionals
can handle this!

Legal has never heard of HIPAA. That's not good. I convince COO to ask Legal
to reach out to a different Legal who specializes in healthcare. We sit down
with them a few days later and our new Legal turns white after I lay out
everything we do, our concerns, and the simple question: "Do we need to do any
of this stuff I read about?" Turns out, having your CTO read a complex, many-
hundred-pages legal document is _not_ the best way to get accurate legal
advice. We're fucked. We're a TPA filing insurance claims - we absolutely,
100% must comply with this Act. Oh and guess what? The Act has a delightful
addition called an Omnibus, passed back in '13, that makes any possible
defense we _might_ have had to not comply...completely null and void. We're in
what is called 'Breach'! We have fucked up. Royally and legally. Icing? We're
all _personally_ liable, at least to the letter of the law. But don't worry -
we didn't _know_ we fucked up, so the fees are an order of magnitude less.
They'll only bankrupt the company 5 times over, instead of 10! Hurray!

~~~
throwaway58129
I have no idea the right way of posting long posts. Here's the rest:
[https://pastebin.com/k0tYZYgY](https://pastebin.com/k0tYZYgY)

~~~
dang
I've merged it into your comment above so the whole thing is one piece.

~~~
zem
there's a lot of stuff in the pastebin that hasn't been added to the comment

~~~
dang
Ah ok. Thanks! I'll uncollapse the GP.

------
jl2718
So many ideas in my head that I really want to be working on, and I can’t seem
to separate myself from the mental model of having a set position in a
heirarchy, taking confused and/or hostile direction from seemingly arbitrary
sources of authority. Some kind of fear, not even financial, more like the
idea of getting lost, losing touch, never finding my way back, being abandoned
and undesirable, dying alone. And beyond that, I can’t seem to rationalize why
my job is so stressful; I’ve kept my head in war zones and extreme sports, but
corporate politics feels like it’s killing me. I don’t know why, or whether I
should give up hope that it will get better. The lay-off fantasy disappears
when it becomes reality. Dreams give way to fears, preparing for interviews,
obsessing over things which I have no control, thinking I’m the only one that
feels this way.

~~~
epiphanitus
I love writing software, but I think there's something about the psychology of
it that is really unnatural.

Not long ago we were just hominids hanging out in small bands, and our
psychological sense of worth and reward were tied to our capacity to find and
kill something big enough for everyone to eat. Or perhaps to turn that mammoth
into shoes and clothes to survive the winter.

I wonder if this system fires the same way when we're coding. The contribution
we offer is valued by the market and desperately needed by society but it's
very abstract compared to bringing home a fresh mammoth.

We may be solving hard problems for great compensation, but as far as our
subconsciousness is concerned we're just sitting at our desks all day long
making symbols dance on screen. Its the polar opposite of the lives humans
used to lead.

Not that I'd want to turn the clock back. I'm very fond of coding, modern
medicine and hot showers. Though I do wonder if mammoth meat was any good...

~~~
foxhop
Not too long ago we also learned how to make plants, animals, and other humans
work on our behalf (voluntary or not, the whip or the carrot).

For many of us, our lives have been shifted to the work of squirrels.

We climb tall trees and knock down nuts for other men to capitalize on.

\---

Do not be the squirrel.

\---

Find or form your true tribe and help them understand your contributions and
together you will fuel each other to thrive.

\---

As for hot showers, and clean clothes, you can still work with nature and have
both.

------
theanine
I wrote about my experience at my current job a few weeks ago [1]. I just
wanted to say thanks to everyone for all your support. I recently got an offer
for the field I've always wanted to be in, with around a $25k pay raise too.
It's such a huge weight off my shoulders to finally see a way out and I feel
so much better, basic things like my appetite are back and I don't dread
waking up. I already have so much more free time now that I'm not searching
for jobs 2 hours a day after work. I gave my two-weeks notice this week and
I'll have around 3 weeks off to decompress before starting - I'm planning on
visiting Seattle, anyone have any recs?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951953)

~~~
epiphanitus
Seattlelite here. So glad to hear you found a better job! Those hell gigs can
really crush you.

Just to warn you it can get dark and rainy this time of year but there's
plenty to do.

Recommended:

\- The Underground Tour. A fascinating historical tour of the seedy gold-rush
roots of the city.

\- Pike Place Market. It's an iconic Seattle spot that has great food, a great
view and great people watching.

\- The Ballard Locks. This is the mechanism that keeps Lake Washington from
draining into the ocean while allowing fish to pass through. Go when the
weathers good.

\- Mt. Rainier, the Cascades, great for hiking and skiing if the weather
permits

\- Breweries. We have tons of great craft beer, and our coffee is legendary
too

Not recommended:

\- The gum wall. This landmark is the grossest excuse for a tourist trap ever
conceived.

\- Driving in, out, or around the city on weekdays between 7 and 11AM or 3 and
7 PM. You're going to have a very bad timmeee...

Have fun!

------
74847399281
This fucking year...

So, for starters I'm already really depressed and low energy due to a death of
a really close family member. I have particularly low tolerance and high
fatigue due to this.

So, we shipped a product, successfully on time in a company that has had many
years of difficulty of shipping products in our target market. Which was the
goal. So the new management decides to disband the team, most of the team is
already laid off.

I get moved into an adjacent org, onto a ~15 person team building a
complicated piece of technology that I have great expertise in, and have built
3 versions at other companies to commercial viability, sounds great.

Well, the team has nobody else anymore who has the experience building the
tech we are trying to build. Has existed for nearly one year, and (almost?)
the entire team has changed through attrition already (maybe more than once).
We have the sunk cost of almost 150k lines of code, that is immensely over-
architected, and still doesn't provide any customer visible features for
what's expected of this type of software. The team is stuck thinking way to
big, and the few people who will focus are kept chasing around the rest of the
team like cats. At this rate we will build something that can solve any
conceivable problem in about 20 years.

There are already a lot of hands in "architecture". Politics, and honestly my
previously mentioned fatigue are preventing me from fighting the engineering
fight I need to try to get a handle on it myself.

I honestly like the new manager enough. He listens to my complaints and
recognizes my experience, but solving the problems are more difficult, and
honestly I think we really should just scrap everything. This is already a
rewrite and we have an old version of the code base that would be a better
start, or I have enough experience to properly build a new one. But the sunk
cost fallacy is ohh so stronger when you have this much of a sunk cost, and a
lot of expectations from execs and external teams.

Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast
machine.

Anyways, thanks for an opportunity to rant.

~~~
chupasaurus
> Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast
> machine.

Reminds me one of my past colleagues who worked at some_proprietary_compiler
with so many tests for corner cases that it took 6 hours for each build on a
top enthusiast grade PC each person in a project was provided. Also the
presence in office for 8 hours a day was mandatory, imagine the whole team
spread around the place for the most part of the day doing nothing with an
excuse "I'm compiling!"

~~~
sterlind
I've had to work in some gnarly monorepos where pulling the dependencies down
itself took an hour and a hundred gigs. Local builds were not fast. I usually
ended up hacking the build system to build individual projects manually and
copying things where they needed to go. _sigh_ much much happier now that I'm
living in a smaller repo.

------
3D21133181
(Throwaway, for obvious reasons.) I work for a boring start up remotely half
of the week (2 days in the office) and I run my own SaaS business on the side
(making a few $k MRR after 5+ years). I do sometimes day dream about being
fired, selling my company and quitting tech entirely for a damn good while. I
have well exceeded my threshold. Perhaps I will continue to watch Twitch
instead of work, sabotaging my job, or perhaps I will get my shit together. I
am not really sure.

------
throwawaybeebs
What really gets my goat...

Working for a boss who's a dangerous cocktail of arrogance, incompetence, and
is self-conscious of it. He's the kind of person who keeps a copy of Steve
Jobs' biography and _The Design of Everyday Things_ around his desk. If you
ask him a yes-or-no question he responds with, _well that depends_. And if you
ask him to clarify be prepared for a journey through tales of the south,
hippie communes, anthropology, and how it all relates to the tragedy of choice
and material design. He has an opinion about absolutely everything. He always
tries to get the last word. He gives speeches about failure way too much. And
if you get on his bad side be prepared for a word-tsunami. You will know it's
coming because you can hear him typing furiously from across the office -- the
little _typing_ notification flickering on and off in Slack for ten minutes
while he composes the _final word_.

He's the kind of person who will swear he's your friend and has your back. And
in one on ones he'll make you feel like people are saying things about you.
He'll put you down in front of your direct reports. Will insist on winning an
argument even if he's obscenely, incontrovertibly _wrong_ because he's too
embarrassed to admit he doesn't know. He once told me that I _wasn 't using
abductive reasoning and if I was smart I would be able to figure it out_. I
had asked him if we could cut one or two columns from a table in a view so
that we could ship on time with a nice user experience after patiently
explaining why. And he collected negative feedback from people about my work,
without telling me, in order to throw me under a bus at an important meeting
with _advisors_. Then he rolls with my ideas as if they were his own.

~~~
philpem
That sounds exactly like my ex-boss. Never stopped going on about how he once
worked for Qinetiq and they had him implement an FFT on an FPGA... last I
checked that was a fairly common student assignment in FPGA courses.

------
pyridines
My boss (effectively) prohibits us from displaying negative emotions towards
each other, as he pulls us aside to chide us when we do. I think the intention
is to encourage more constructive conversations, but his bar for what he
considers inappropriate is so low that it ends up stifling disagreements. We
have a tough time making decisions because of it. It's also difficult to tell
him about other problems I have, because if I show any annoyance, he'll
criticize my tone. He, of course, gets visibly angry with people on our team
on a weekly basis. It's driving me nuts to have to walk on eggshells all day.

~~~
rubyfan
Yeah that’s seriously unhealthy. I’ve been in that situation. Get out, you’ll
immediately be happier for it.

------
systematical
I do! I work at a failing startup. I find the direction and strategy of the
company lacking. My advice is often ignored or they wait years and then claim
it as their own. Sluggish sales. Sluggish revenue. Haven't been profitable in
the 5 years I've been there.

I'm looking for a job but I rather just be laid off and collect unemployment
for a while. I've been working for 17 years with no employment gaps. I'm
tired.

~~~
jmuguy
I can relate, I haven’t gone more than a week without a job in that same
amount of time. I fantasize about just straight up taking a week or a month or
a year off and doing absolutely nothing.

~~~
systematical
I'm not good at getting fired. I am personable and don't slack off. Those
positive qualities are having a negative impact on my dream. I've wanted to
collect unemployment for years.

~~~
archi42
Everyone makes mistakes. You can as well, you just need to want. Some
suggestions (read aloud in an enthusiastic, you-can-do voice): Deploy to
production! On Friday evening! Something that doesn't even build on your
machine! Hardcode an universal password into the auth backend
("toomanysecrets" is a classic)! Invert a few conditionals in almost
unreachable code! Enforce an overly complicated review system! Be horribly
pedantic with every review you do! Skip review for your own commits! Re-write
an important component from scratch! In OCAML, C# and TypeScript! While drunk!
With no version control!

You get the idea. Or, probably better, ask your boss to fire you for all the
good work you did? ;-)

~~~
systematical
I'll try harder...wait, you know what I mean. The first step is to stop being
a workaholic, be more like the CEO.

~~~
exikyut
Who is in his position because he doesn't feel sufficiently bad about driving
others to generate money for him. Or something along those lines.

You're right about the first step being more like the CEO. But you don't have
to give up the 100%-work-hard track record. Just shift your focus toward
working hard at finding a style of ever-so-slightly psychopathical
indifference that can work for you.

------
throwawaymyjob
Please sign me up!

I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed
state, then canceled.

I'm on a very small team, I am the only expert in infrastructure, but all
infrastructure code is reviewed by the lead engineer who is a complete novice
at AWS/GCP. I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire
weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind
decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my
docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.

In my other areas of responsibility I am prompt, spot-on, and thorough. I
bring experience and perspective, challenge half-baked ideas gently and
constructively, and have shipped tons of solutions. I keep proving myself, and
I do my best to celebrate my other team member's wins.

I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over,
misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default. Plain wrong
solutions get approval, and prudent, cost-effective ones are ignored or even
ridiculed.

I would understand a bit of politics and orthodoxy on a large team, but for
such a small team I'm stymied as to why that needs to exist. I keep losing
bits of myself as my genuine efforts are met with forceful rejection, day in
and day out. I've sought direct feedback and gotten vague responses if any,
followed by closed door meetings about me as I do.

The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.

~~~
askmike
It sounds that your additions aren't values by your team. It might be because
(like you say) you are the only expert on X. If you are in such a situation
you should be in charge for X, if not you'll be fighting these battles every
time.

> I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of
> phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions.
> Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have
> been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.

Great that you were writing all of that, but it sounds like even before that
wiki reorg your docs weren't read or used by anyone else. Especially if you
are the only person who understands what you're writing, why are you writing
it? The only possible reason I see for spending all that time is for the
situation where they hire someone else who knows about cloud as well.

> I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over,
> misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default.

Note that if you give common-sense suggestions about not X (backend code, or
databases for example) but you are not the person who is responsible for it /
in charge of it, you are telling people (who think they are more expert in
that topic) what they should be doing. I'd probably fight that to. If you are
given common-sense suggestions about X that impacts how they need to do non X,
well that's work they don't want to do. I don't like lawyers or compliance
guys telling me how I need to arch my code either (if I could ignore them I
probably would ;))

Look at it from the other side: here is our colleague throwawaymyjob who is
our cloud guy, whenever he is in whatever meeting (that's not purely about
cloud) he is telling everyone else how they can do things better. But he's not
responsible for doing that nor how that turns out.

------
brightball
7 years ago I was hired as the sole developer in a train wreck situation. 14
year old company had just relaunched their site to early and without any
testing. It was like eBay but for an expensive niche market.

The primary developer walked after the launch. The new site was buggy and the
whole thing had been rebuilt without any of the previous security tooling.
Phishing and fraud against the user base were everywhere.

I spent a year fixing this site, combatting fraud, building anti fraud tools,
setting up DMARC, learning both the old Perl system and the new rails system,
adding new features, running the servers and being on call 24/7 at the expense
of my home life.

I did it too. I stabilized the site, rendered the fraud and phishing
ineffective and saved the company.

At my review they thanked me for saving the company...and told me they didn’t
think I was working hard enough.

I realized that if they actually believed that after the year I just put in
there was nothing I could do to change their mind and I was really, seriously
depressed for most of the next month. As you might expect, during that month
my work actually did suffer and the CEO sent me a nasty note over a weekend
while my wife and I were out. She saw the note and told me to quit because she
didn’t want me working for somebody like that. It was the biggest relief in
the world to hear that from her because I was struggling with how to tell her
any of it. I internalized it all. I asked what about money? She said we’d
figure it out.

So I called and resigned immediately and told them I’d write up transition
documents for the next developer. Told him what he needed to do moving forward
to make the company work and he actually listened to exactly what I told him
to do and paid me an extra 2 weeks after my last day to actually thank me for
saving his company.

Couple of months later I got a good job for the next 5 years and now that
experience has me working in the email security and antiphishing world...very
happily.

~~~
joncrane
You did great! Congratulations. For anyone reading this and considering doing
the same, one minor tweak.

> I called and resigned immediately and told them I’d write up transition
> documents for the next developer

...or any other task they want at an appropriate hourly rate. That rate being
at least 3x what you were making previously. Also you have to be totally OK
with them not hiring you.

Depending on the relationship, perhaps the hours are only sold in packs of 10
and must be prepaid. (e.g. hourly rate is $300, no work done until each $3000
check clears)

------
ctoinhiding
I am an acquired founder working in the bay area. The acquisition made me
rich, I'm liquid, and I love my product and my team. Everyone did really well
in the acquisition.

The acquirer means well, but as a public company there is little intellectual
honesty and projects are going off the cliff while my fellow executives not
sharing the truth of how bad things are going and asking for help from one
another for the good of the company. I'm increasingly demotivated having to
deal with lying and intellectual dishonesty at every turn.

I can quit, but then I lose out on almost a million bucks that's unvested, not
much compared to what I've made so far but I'd really like to just be fired
(without cause) and get to walk away and start a non-profit.

~~~
rytill
If you're fired, do you vest fully? We got acquired recently and it seems like
my vesting doesn't jump ahead if I got fired (without cause)... not totally
sure though.

~~~
naniwaduni
If you're in a situation where your vesting schedule incentivizes your
acquirers to fire you without cause your lawyers may have ripped you off.

~~~
rytill
How does it usually work? Does one fully vest upon firing? Vest several months
upon firing?

------
Waterluvian
I don't want to be fired. I absolutely love my job and the people I work with.
But I can just smell that we are about to hit a sticking point with how I
don't do on call (it was never mentioned in the interviews or part of my
contract) and I don't respond to work after 5pm.

If it does come to that sticking point I'm trying to figure out how to be the
most assertive and diplomatic. I.e. How do I convey that I badly want to keep
this job but those new terms are a non start?

~~~
DamnInteresting
In professional settings, when it comes to these kinds of awkward topics, I
have found a method that has served me very well:

A. Meet with the person who is applying the unwanted pressure (it works best
one-on-one, so if more than one person is pressuring, you may need to figure
out who is best to speak to).

B. Frame your concern as asking for advice. For example, "I'm struggling with
how to handle this on-call thing. Work-life balance is EXTREMELY important to
me, but I love my job, and I don't know how to set that boundary without
upsetting management. What would you do?"

In my experience, this approach makes the listener very sympathetic and
pragmatic, and they advise you to do what you already want to do (and
subsequently stop pressuring you to change). I think this is because people
like being asked for this sort of help, and when they enter "advice mode" they
take a step back and look at the situation from an impartial distance.

YMMV, IANAL, etc., but it's served this awkward introvert quite well.

~~~
AmericanChopper
This approach really depends on the manager. A manager who has a habit of
bullying people will have no issues laying on more pressure/guilt/whatever...
in this situation.

Personally, if I feel as though a manager has expected me to do something
outside my contract, I just don’t even give it any thought. That’s their
problem. If they bring it up I just tell them no in a rather blunt way.

I’ve worked with plenty of bully managers, but have myself never really been
bullied by any of them. I’ve watched all of them bully my less assertive
colleagues though.

~~~
DamnInteresting
As an introvert, what I like about this approach is that it does not close any
doors, it just opens a discussion. Ofttimes that discussion is rapidly
helpful. When it is not—when the manager is a bully, or oblivious—I still have
the option to be more blunt. It's a diplomatic first foray into tricky topics.

~~~
AmericanChopper
Whatever works for you is great. I’d just suggest you be careful that you
don’t first establish yourself as somebody who will tolerate bullying. Once
you’ve laid the groundwork for that, undoing it can be much harder than just
avoiding it in the first place.

------
yepthatsreality
I was just recently fired, but honestly I was about to leave. I work in a two
person branch of my current gig. The other person is my supervisor and is
learning how to be someone. He's constantly looking over my shoulder and
decided to fire me because I missed the goals, that he forced me to quote. The
project wasn't ready for a deadline. I honestly got tired of all the little
supervisor experiments as well.

When he fired me, he asked me if I would have liked a warning that my
performance was effecting my job. I told him yes. Then asked what the reasons
were that I was being fired. "You're a good developer but this team needs more
speed." Whatever that means, there goes my 10% at a startup...who saw this
coming (hint: everyone)?

He fired me before I went on a 2 week vacation. During said time he got a good
taste of the difficulty of the project and why I was resistant to quoting
times. Would a manager ever admit a mistake?

~~~
pcl
> _The project wasn 't ready for a deadline._

I really like that way of looking at deadlines and project lifecycles. I
haven’t ever heard the relationship expressed that way.

~~~
andyjohnson0
I interpreted it as "the project wasn't ready [in time for] a deadline". But I
agree, the concept of a project that is somehow too immature or unprepared for
a deadline is though provoking.

~~~
yepthatsreality
It's more that the project was immature. If I have a bucket of data and an
unknown part of the data is either incorrect or unknown then I can't give a
full quote on completion all data in the bucket. Especially if the data
accuracy/discovery is contingent on other team members also uncertain of the
quality of the data. This will and did lead to burnout.

The bigger issue is that I've been treated by a robot. Just talk to me and
quit trying to social engineer a solution out of me or try to make me discover
the results you're expecting.

Final note, my supervisor said he really enjoyed working with me the past
year, but they're trying to improve the "shitty parts" of the company. Doesn't
that make me some of the "shit"?

------
tfehring
Oh boy. Not even gonna bother with a throwaway, draw your own inferences about
whether I'm taking the thread title too literally. My current
responsibilities:

(1) Architect for significant updates to one of our financial projection
models. The requested timeline for results from these changes has been changed
(directly by C-suite) from mid-November to late October to ASAFP over the
course of the last week. Said model was built by non-programmers using a
20-year-old modeling platform; the lead architect was a new grad with a CS
minor. Ever tried debugging a runtime error in a >1000-line C++ function, with
no error messages, using nothing but cout? Try it sometime, if you've got a
good therapist.

(2) PM for an internal application that executes the projection model in (1)
on our in-house grid computing platform. The developers and tester for this
are great, which helps. But none of them had seen the codebase until a month
ago, since the previous developers and tester all moved to different teams
since the last time we worked on this application. They also don't fully
understand what the application is doing (I haven't had time to get them
totally up to speed, though I'm working on it!), which means I get to build a
lot of the testing tools myself, the highlight of which has been writing a
FoxPro DBF parser in R (long story).

(3) Reviewer for the twisted hellscape of Excel workbooks that makes up one of
my old (~2 years ago) team's processes, since the guy who was supposed to be
reviewing them quit out of the blue (can't say I blame him) and my old team
apparently couldn't find anyone else to do it. The old team _usually_ gives me
a heads up when they make substantial changes to parts of the process while
I'm reviewing them, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

I should mention that I'm ostensibly a data scientist, but sometimes
management seems to take the idea that data scientists should be generalists a
little too literally.

------
PeterStuer
Side note:

Over here employers must give you a notice of termination, the length of which
depends on how long you worked for the company. For employees with over a
decade of loyalty, this period can be a year or more.

The intent is that a worker can get enough time to find a new employment.

The regulation has a perverse effect. As an employee who is on notice is
generally no longer trusted to prioritise the company's best interest, the
practise is to just pay out the wages for the notice period but prevent
further access to the business and its clients.

This makes firing someone with enough tenure an expensive deal.

There are two ways around this. (1) If you can fire someone for 'grave and
urgent resons', let's say you caught them stealing from the till, the the
termination period does not hold, and you can fire them on the spot. Problem
is that 'grave and urgent' is not a very well defined concept, and therefore
is open to abuse. You got ill and did not submit a doctor's notice within
24hrs to HR? That is formally 'illegal absense' and could be a 'grave and
urgent' termination offense.

(2) The notice period is reversed in case it is the employee quits. Then they
have to give the company the lengthy notice. Same as above the employee is
usually alowwed to leave much sooner if he agrees to tie up some loose ends
and do a handover. In practice many employees that a company wants to fire
will be nudged/pestered into quitting by making their work more difficult or
less attractive.

The regulation is well intended and for the right reasons, but fails in
practice.

~~~
mikorym
If you say that it fails in practice, is that your opinion or is that a
general opinion? Presumably, in some cases the regulation that you mention
works the way it was intended?

I wouldn't mind not working in the notice period; it would be a plus for me.
The other question is also of course: What kind of a law should supercede such
a law?

I am not saying I disagree with you or anything like that, but what I am
saying is that developing countries (for example) usually have concrete
problems that make some scenarios around regulation in developed countries
look somehow immaterial or even amusing.

By the way, newer labour regulation in South Africa are also causing problems.
Our particular problem is that you don't want to hire people anyway; you would
rather downscale. If you hire someone who turns out to be a incapable
employee, you have a harder time letting them go. This disincentivises "giving
someone a chance" with an uncertain ability or a unusual background.

But we have >60% youth unemployment (I think that is defined as aged 18–35)
and that overrides most arguments or high level laws—there are simply more
pressing matters at hand.

~~~
PeterStuer
It is not just my opinion. I have friends that are HR managers and this view
seems to be generally accepted among them.

The hiring is another issue. Over here there is always a 6 month 'trial'
period when you hire someone. During those first six months, both the employer
and the employee can end the contract without repercussions. This acknowledges
that no screening/hiring process will be perfect, and that bad matches do
happen.

Employment law and regulation is not easy to change as it impacts the lives of
so many. My personal opinion is that even then this is just part of an even
larger rethink we need in an age where _most_ 'work' (not all) has long ceased
to be a productive contribution to society, and has mealy become a game for a
polarized redistribution of 'wealth', that is not just viciously usurping our
lives and the environment, but due to its penchant for 'growth' those of
future generations as well.

~~~
mikorym
> employment law and regulation is not easy to change as it impacts the lives
> of so many

OK, so assuming a significant amount of people disapprove of these laws, why
are they not changed? Do you suggest that it is institutional inertia or
populist pressure?

I know about the 6 month rule; it seems like a logical and useful feature.

In South Africa the answer is simple about why our practical implementation of
regulations is not good: our government is dysfunctional. From a point of view
of our actual laws, they are well written and better than many European
countries, but they are selectively implemented.

------
s3nnyy
Most people leave their bosses and not their jobs. The inverse is also true.
My last job as a programmer was not so great but I stayed there for many years
because my boss was quite great and supportive.

Now, I run a tech recruitment consultancy and if programmers come to me about
changing jobs, in most cases the reason is the boss.

Most programmers invest a lot of time in coding and related activities but
neglect most other aspects of their career. This Ask HN is a proof of this.
(Shameless plug: I am writing a guide on how to be more efficient in the
workplace and get better compensated, pre-order "Coderfit: Make more money as
a programmer" here:
[https://gumroad.com/l/cdrft](https://gumroad.com/l/cdrft))

------
snapetom
My last day at work is Friday.

I was hired three years ago to write web apps for a major children's hospital,
but given no web servers to run the apps. That hasn't changed much.

Let me repeat that. My job is to write web apps. I have no servers.

The first "servers" I was given were three old RedHat boxes that were used in
a share environment by researchers. Ports to the box weren't open and
basically everyone was root to install whatever they wanted.

The second set of "servers" I was given was this "enterprise solution" called
BlueData. It basically runs crippled versions of open source software and to
top it off, our "DevOps" team did things like not open any ports to the farm
and set up one command line ingress to it.

I spent years arguing this was insane and I finally had it. It was low stress
and I hardly did any work, but at the end of the day, I didn't feel good about
taking salary for money that can go directly to children's care.

~~~
james_s_tayler
This is both funny and sad, but it just leaves me curious what did you spend
your time doing for three full years working like that?

~~~
snapetom
I'm exaggerating at the situation, but not too far off. For the past year,
I've been working on an ETL app. I used Go at my last job, so I really got to
hone my skills especially in regards to threading challenges. Kafka and
Cassandra were also new to me.

Still, the VMs these are running on are a complete mess. Frequent, unannounced
infrastructure changes, spin drives, old Java in Docker are just some of the
issues that made the environment completely unstable. They chase sexy
buzzwords like "big data" and "machine learning" but give us spin drive
machines to do it.

------
dvtrn
I wouldn’t hate it. They’d be doing me a favor if there were more mouths than
mine to feed.

A company merger resulted in lots of engineering talent leaving with multiple
unfinished projects and very little documentation. We’re at a point now where
only 2% of the original team remains.

I was hired to complete these projects and clean up the technical debt left
behind. That priority shifted to work on new products. That priority changed
again. It changed a third time. Now I’m being tasked back with coming back to
cleaning up the technical debt and security mitigation’s I was originally
hired for after a weekend outage that affected the wrong client. Suddenly the
critical infrastructure weaknesses I pointed to needed our full attention and
system reliability became the first class citizen I long argued it should be.

Except every time I make progress on patching up and stabilizing one system, a
new hole springs in the dam.

I’m the Dutch Boy of DevOps at this place.

Despite recent increase in funding, management refuses to backfill any of our
open vacancies, project management refuses to budge on timetables, and as a
result we’re putting out fires daily with water guns and spray bottles.

Meanwhile we’re on our third VP of product in two years, and our second
Director of Infrastructure.

Two years more later and I’m well beyond the threshold. Hoping there’s an
offer letter coming soon after interviewing the last few weeks.

------
throwaway_xpto
In theory I have the perfect job: I create developer tools to be used with my
company's platform. I choose the tech, decide the features and when to
deliver. The commute is OK - about 30 minutes from door to door. I get
reasonably paid but the workload is just too little. I have to come up with
things to do just to fill in the mandatory 40 weekly hours in Jira. There
aren't that many developers using our tools and there isn't a "push" to
improve/evolve them so I just drag any tasks endlessly so I have enough to do
all week. Still everyone is quite happy with my performance as I get shit
done. I know I am not the only one. Other departments have people just idling
most of the time. I feel that I am completely useless. I've already mentored a
junior developer so I guess he could handle it on his own. I am seriously done
with this and I would consider moving to a new job if it weren't for two
problems: I am having my first baby in a few months and there aren't any
product companies around (I don't want to go to a consulting company again).
If I stick around my unit test code coverage will be 200%.

~~~
whynaut
If you're going to be sticking around, is there someway you can (perhaps
covertly) pivot within the company? You didn't mention what the platform does,
but is there some featureset you could work on in your free time, and then
surprise the company?

~~~
throwaway_xpto
I don't think I could do something within the platform itself because it's a
different team, a different tech stack and a different mindset. They are
disconnected from reality and build whatever features the product owner & CTO
puts on their plate. The only thing I could do is to try to convince Sales or
Account managers that we need new integrations and POC projects...

~~~
exikyut
Okay, how about: make extremely casual friends with the developers you can
resonate with the easiest, and unofficially learn about any and all pain
points and so forth. Maybe even hint at the truth about not having enough work
to do, if you think it would be understood correctly (something to play by
ear), and point out the specific area of tooling you work on.

If you play your cards right, you might be able to go up your chain at the
same time you get your new friend(s) to go up their chain, producing a most
odd coincidence where some random idea you offhandedly mention to your boss
one day happens to be exactly what the boss heard the developer team lead
really wanted :) or something to that effect.

Basically figure out how to engineer a planets-aligning moment in terms of
approval. If possible, mix things up so it looks like your initiative was key
in the new feature happening.

Maybe (more playing by ear) you could skip the coincidence stuff and just
mention that you happened to grab lunch with a developer and heard they really
wanted XYZ feature (that happens to be exactly the kind of thing you'd be
perfect to implement etc etc). Sort of sounds a tad less impressive put that
way, but could still work.

------
hn_temp_10_1_19
I just walked from a job after a week and a half. Applied and interviewed for
a junior full stack java/angular developer position. Really excited for it.

Got and accepted an offer just to show up day one to a weird point &
click/drag & drop visual programming thing called BluePrism. Tried to make
myself like it, but couldn't stick it out.

Moved 800 miles for that job too, just to get bait & switched.

~~~
noway421
Heard that a friend of mine had to use something similar at one of his jobs,
and he was miserable. Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was
more or less okay.

I think it felt like an extremely arcane thing to learn and just not something
exciting to work with.

Sometimes we forget how blessed we are with the DX in mainstream programming
languages.

~~~
hn_temp_10_1_19
> Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay.

I made an honest effort to get into it for more or less those reasons. Now I'm
just bumming around unsure of what to do.

------
ibudiallo
2017, due to a misconfiguration or lack thereof, the system that manages 250k
employees marked me as terminated. Security came to my desk and escorted me
out of the building like a criminal.

I was hired back 3 weeks later, with a small apology and no pay. I looked for
another opportunity right away and quit the job.

Today, I design and build automated systems for a startup. I made sure that
the "AI" has a big red button that stops the process and spits out a backtrace
of all the steps it took so we can be accountable and reverse any damage.

~~~
croh
interesting. I thought it only happens in movies.

~~~
sah2ed
Based on the gp's handle, I believe the full story [0] had been posted here
[1] before:

0: [https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-
me](https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me)

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645)

------
plausibilities
Employer making me choose between career advancement and LOB success and then
tying my job security to the latter.

I usually have comparable or better options available at any given time due to
the sheer number of recruiters who are constantly floating things my way.

An up-to-date, relevant skillset is worth a potential 5 figure pay bump in the
near future, which tends to be much more lucrative than slightly increased job
security at my current pay rate.

They usually get one screw-up before I skip out for a better paying gig.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Have more than tripled my salary in the last 6 years hopping around like this.

But honestly, I'm also just not a fan of management styles which attempt to
extract additional value via appeals to fear.

Usually if I see workplace management react to crunch time by letting shit
roll downhill while making negative implications about how resistance might
impact job security, that instantly puts me in job hunting mode.

I might stick around for a bit to help out people on my team that I actually
like, but at that point I'm already mentally checked out and looking for my
next gig.

------
throwawaaarrgh
I do, but I need some filler on my resume so I'm toughing it out as long as I
can.

Just finished four months of overtime to meet an arbitrary executive-decision
deadline. Now I'm on a new project, and I'm finding out just how horrible the
_other_ teams had it: legacy systems from the dark ages of tech that are being
shoved into the cloud, critical account access is shared with everyone,
everything was built by hand two years ago by people who are no longer here,
nothing is documented, and 4am maintenance windows are a weekly thing. There's
aloof parent companies imposing draconian pointless restrictions, finance has
a strangle hold over everything (hiring, new hardware, new software, etc) and
kills any funding no matter how much we need it, but somehow execs will buy a
giant pointless thing that we never use, all the bosses refuse to take
responsibility to push back or even fix problems we can control, and we have
to go through three different teams to get changes made outside a single cloud
account. Developers don't want to have any responsibility whatsoever for how
their code actually runs or is supported, scrum masters impose ridiculous
process requirements that have nothing to do with productivity, we never
actually see a single customer/client until we launch a product, we have
almost no tests, and almost no plans for what to do if we can't just build
more cloud stuff to fix any problem. There are 10 architects whose sole job is
to tell you to use arbitrary technology with absolutely no context or
consultation, security is one guy who doesn't know what metasploit is, and the
people building shared services for internal use don't want to actually
support the users using them. I'm the only one trying to improve anything
because I'm new. Everyone else is either job hunting or is super green and in
love with the constant free food and beer.

------
planxty
A pissing match between two unrelated branches of an enormous org chart has
caused monumental waste and discord where I work as a software engineer.

My employer is also allergic to open source, even though we are a huge
publicly traded software company, so we're reinventing wheels for things that
are already solved problems.

Toxic hell, I should be gone in weeks.

------
huntie
I work in a factory and I see all of the problems my older coworkers have.
Along with that I think the company wants to move the whole plant to Mexico so
there is no long-term job security. I've learned programming in my spare time
but when I've tried applying for jobs I didn't get a response, which I assume
is because I don't have a degree. I've been trying to get back into university
but I'm not sure that it will happen anytime soon. We've been working a lot of
weekends too so programming time is limited. I'd quit but this is the best
paying job I've been able to get.

~~~
ju577ry
I decided to make an account to comment on this. Build things, put them on
github, write 500 words about it, add to resume, repeat.

------
lazyasciiart
There's a team at my workplace that I think is almost literally making our
product worse every time they check in code. They rejected a security fix I
made because they didn't want to test it. The manager makes incomprehensible
decisions and just blatantly lies about what they are doing. My entire team
has a policy of just not interacting with them to avoid problems. How am I
supposed to respect the management skills and decision making of execs who
keep these people around?

------
throwaway7137
Getting told by my director that the product manager thought it was rude when
I answered a question by sending them a link to the answer in the relevant
documentation.

I guess this is why nothing else at this company is documented, because why
write things down when you can waste multiple people's time repeating things.

~~~
whynaut
Not the rudest but it is basically saying RTFM. I deal with it like, here's
the info you're looking for, but in the future you can read here instead of
having to wait on me :)

The idea being to present it as a benefit for them and not an unburdening for
you.

~~~
throwaway7137
Tried that approach and got told I was condescending.

~~~
voidhorse
Thats cause it is. its snarky. solving someones problem and telling them they
could be doing something better are two different things. its often offensive
to mix the two. it also shows an incredible lack of empathy—sometimes someone
is asking you something because theyre swamped and you seemed helpful, if you
respond like that theyll go from thinking youre helpful to thinking you’re a
know it all jerk.

heres a better way to communicate the same thing without being snarky:

“here it is! <link> its a pretty good resource, the docs are fairly extensive,
theyve saved me a couple times in the past” that gives the person the hint
without simultenousely saying “i think you’re a dope for not knowingg how to
look up this doc” In fact the “next time you can just <x> :)” pattern in
general is nearly always snarky—the smily face is clearly not genuine and is
belittling.

~~~
whynaut
> “here it is! <link> its a pretty good resource, the docs are fairly
> extensive, theyve saved me a couple times in the past”

that's in the same vein as what I meant. The smiley face was not literal and
of course I would encourage anyone to find their own words.

------
throwarayes
Well honestly I have had a lot of sleep problems in the last 2 years. It seems
I have CPPS[1], where I am up all night with an overactive bladder. The result
is 5 or 6 out of 7 nights I get very little sleep.

I am in a role where I'm in leadership of a startup. I got there by being
ambitious and pushing my capabilities. Now that we've experienced some success
because of that, the company needs me to maintain a high level of performance.
Further, I have a lot of equity tied up in the company. I feel stuck from the
perspective of wanting to support the team, because of my equity, and honestly
because when I'm normal, this is what I WANT to be doing.

I would love to be "fired" and just spend time with my kids until I figure
this out.

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_prostatitis/chronic_pe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_prostatitis/chronic_pelvic_pain_syndrome)

~~~
gnachman
I have the same issue and it was completely resolved with Amytriptalene. Until
I found the right doctor it felt like my life was over, and they kept giving
me useless treatments. Contact Dr Hanno at Stanford; he’s the only competent
one I have found.

~~~
bonestamp2
I assume your doctors have considered it, but have either of you had a
vasectomy or undescended testical?

~~~
throwarayes
I have had a vasectomy (which my urologist knows, cause his office did it).
I'd be curious why you say that. Is there a link?

~~~
frenchy
Unfortunately, age is probably the most obvious link.

~~~
bonestamp2
In addition to age, most of us have been sitting most of the day for all of
that time. That probably doesn't help either.

------
ta2661dc3
I work remotely for a company in the Bay Area, doing mostly web development.

\- Compensation is great.

\- Few calls, very little micro-management.

\- People I work with are great.

\- They don't care about where I'm working from as long as the timezone isn't
too far off.

Somehow I feel miserable. I can't quite explain it. I think it's because the
work I do is boring and I've been doing it for a long time. I've been working
fewer and fewer hours because I just can't get myself to work more. Also I
don't really like being an employee, even if my relationship with my employer
is great. I yearn for the ultimate freedom of owning my own business. I wish I
could just be happy with my situation which is fantastic in every way.

~~~
geocrasher
I haven't been in your exact shoes so forgive me if this sounds judgmental. I
have worked remote for several years and if there's one thing I can say, it's
that I don't think your job is your problem. The problem is that you don't
feel challenged, and you're expecting your work to fulfill that for you.

Find a way to fulfill that on your own. Start a blog, side project, or a
hobby. I have all 3 going, plus more. Work is where I get work done and
support my family. LIFE is where I get fulfillment ;-)

------
ping_pong
I was told that I wasn't doing enough code reviews, even though I am the only
person on my team, because the 3 other engineers left over the previous 9
months. When I pointed this out to my manager, she said that I should have
found code to review on other teams instead of waiting for people to ask me. I
started studying that evening and quit the next month.

------
Grangar
Well I actually just got "fired" today. I'm doing an infosec traineeship right
now, and I supposedly don't put in enough effort at home. Employer told me the
company expects people to put in another ~20hrs of studying by themselves on
top of the 40 in the office, I hope this is not industry wide...

Had I known this I wouldn't have signed in the first place.

Any infosec companies with sane hours hiring trainees in the Netherlands?

~~~
shifto
Do you want to mention the company name? I'm curious as I have an idea about
which company this is.

~~~
Grangar
I can neither confirm nor deny before I get another gig, I don't want to burn
any bridges prematurely just in case. What company are you thinking of?

~~~
shifto
The one in the Zaltbommel area. I don't want to be too specific either, I know
a few folks over there. :)

~~~
Grangar
Nope, that's not it. You're saying I should avoid Zaltbommel then?

------
isthis1984
I work in this place where I've made quite a few nice products the management
are selling, they are, in part, keeping the company competitive. However they
spend all their time trying to convince me that the work I do is crap and they
could do it themselves easily (they're developers to - its a small company).

There is this continuing comedy where a bug or enhancement arrives and they
say they'll do it - we don't need you (implied). I say sure, and they fiddle
around for days or weeks, occasionally a small one is fixed, but usually they
just fiddle around the edges. Eventually they give up and I do the work, and
they spend all their time trying to poke holes in what I do so they can prove
that they don't need me.

I asked for a couple of pay rises initially and they don't want to pay me
more. Here's the bit that really gets me - this has been going on for a couple
of years, and competitors products are overtaking ours which were leading
edge. They spend all their time saying they don't need me and to the extent
that they're actually hurting their business.

I've given up a long time ago and have moved to part time and I'm developing
my own business, so I don't really care, the cash coming in is enough to keep
me going, so all good. They still keep asking me to go back full time, but
they don't need me, and they don't need anything changed. It truely is the
most bizarre experience.

(It feels good sharing this :-) )

------
Random_Person
That'd be great. I'm actively searching, but a 40 year old junior dev isn't in
high demand. I took my present job hoping for some mentor-ship to better
develop my skills. My days are spent in my office, with no concrete
understanding of what is expected of me. I have projects that are "mine"...
and by that, I mean that no other developer has a clue what I do. There is no
team. No goals. No targets. I just work on whatever I feel like working on,
and it's slowly driving me crazy.

~~~
Dumblydorr
Wow, this rings true for me. Slow days are depressing and fast days are
anxious and frustrating, and on all days it's down to me, myself, and I to
figure out what to do. I ameliorated this by getting a couple of mentors, they
have diff projects but they know my workflow decently well so can guide me
generally.

~~~
Random_Person
I have one person I go to regularly... he's in DevOps, doesn't know my code at
all, but he's good at testing and being blunt. Often, my workdays are spent
working on whatever criticism he levelled to me the day before.

------
MisterBastahrd
Once when I was a recruiter I got a call from one of my clients because they
said that my consultant was being irritable. I called the consultant and he
told me that it had been a week and a day and he still hadn't been issued a
company computer to work on.

~~~
ScottFree
My first job was as an SQL database manager. It took them over a month to get
me access to the database I was supposed to be managing.

~~~
wil421
Someone I know is a manager at a really large government contractor. They once
had a poor engineer sit in another building for 6 months waiting to get his
clearance. Poor guy finally quit after sitting at an empty desk reading books.

------
shifto
The company I work for is active in an industry I have zero relation to. I
can't relate to the business at all and I'm working with ancient tech. It pays
well though and was brought on board by a friend and I don't want to
disappoint him by leaving after just 1 year.

~~~
hnick
1 year is pretty much the modern standard for the minimum appropriate time
before moving on in my experience, so I think it's fine.

~~~
shifto
Where I am from it's normal to get a 1 year contract when starting. Then if
you did well you either get another temp contract or a contract of indefinite
duration.

I feel if you quit after a year other companies will assume you didn't make it
past the first period. So I'll try to stick around some while before making
moves.

Also just having had a kid makes me feel I don't want to burden myself too
much. A new job might be better, might be worse. For now at least I know what
I've got.

~~~
hnick
Yes, it is very culturally specific so I guess that should be taken into
account.

Here (Australia) it's common to have a 6 month probationary period where you
can be fired or leave with basically no notice as employee and employer
determine if it's a good fit, after that it becomes significantly harder to
fire and the employee needs to give a few weeks of notice to leave. So a year
is generally fine, you passed your test and were enough of an asset to make
hiring you worthwhile and repay any onboarding overhead.

A few 1-year gigs in a row though, yeah, people will definitely ask.

------
throwaway163256
I work at a pretty well known (in our field) and well respected digital
production agency. I've been here for a bit over 7 years now. I started as a
developer and learned almost everything I know. It was a really fun job and I
loved my coworkers, the managers, the culture, the work was exciting and
cutting-edge. Everything was great.

I went from medior to senior developer pretty quickly and eventually they
asked me to take on a technical manager role at a different office abroad.

After my move, I was assigned development work rather than management work,
and I assumed this was merely a transition to my new role. This continued for
2 years, even after I flagged it multiple times with my superiors.

Eventually, about 6 months ago, I was told I hadn't been taking on my new
role, and that they were considering letting me go or sending me back (I'm on
a visa and depend on this company for my stay here). This came directly from
the people who both asked me to take on this new role and who were not
allowing me to do said job. I was completely in shock by the absurdity of it.
We cut a "deal" where they'd allow me to do my "new" job and to reevaluate a
year later.

I'm 6 months in now and I think it's going fairly well. I'm learning a lot and
working really hard at this role. In reality though, I'm using the job to
learn how to perform in this role and I'm planning my leave to take on a
similar role elsewhere. This whole episode has left a really bad taste in my
mouth (that and a change in leadership which is more passionate about money
than craft), and I have no intention of staying after this year is over. I
hope I get fired, since it would require them by law to pay me a months salary
for every year I've worked there.

------
tmpacct002938
I want to be fired. Joined as Staff Software Engineer in pretty well-known
company. Turned out they work a lot. There is no too much work-life balance.
95% of these folks don't have kids, and I have. I need to go home at 5, often
earlier, cos commute sucks. They allow to work from home 1 day a week. Now I'm
in jeopardy - need to stay for 6 more months to have my stocks and sign-in
bonus vested. Also new change won't look good on my resume. Next time I'll bet
on WFH and WLB. F$ck the money.

~~~
udkl
Ah I see we are playing the guessing game.

Facebook ?

~~~
rjbwork
I bet AMZN

------
bryanmgreen
Getting fired from a bad job is like having the best sex of your life but with
the worst human being ever.

Feels amazing for a brief moment but you need a very long shower and a
doctor's appointment after.

Then confusion and anxiety sets in because you're afraid you'll never have
that high again and some part of you wants you to go right back for that
perverse rush even though your smart brain says "HELL NO".

You see all your friends working for their dream companies and wonder not if
you'll ever have that, but if ~anyone~ will welcome you again and you long for
that filthy job.

You're spiraling into darkness and come to HN for the Who's Hiring posts and
see all the other depraved lunatics and that's when you realize - you are not
alone and you are not special and that you're gonna be downvoted just like
everyone else - and it feels like home and it's ok that you're a miserable
aspiring founder like everyone else who isn't happily employed.

(I say it with love from past personal experience)

~~~
xenihn
Soo it's like dating a borderline?

------
throwaway29488
Not with the job in particular, just want to take a break from tech especially
from being a programmer.

Tired of staring at a screen for 80% of my awake time and constant puzzle
solving. Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart
enough, that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in
past work.

~~~
toop43
> Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough,
> that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past
> work.

Dealing with this in the heavy right now.

I've built a lot in my 10 years as a programmer. Infinitely, and automatically
scaled application server based on load. Hasn't crashed or had a single
downtime ever since release.

I've built mobile applications 100% myself being used by thousands still
today.

I've learned 7 different programming languages. I've done web, mobile, server,
and even bare metal firmware. The only 'domain' I haven't touched yet is ML.

Yet.... I truly feel DUMB. I feel like I'm nothing in this industry when one
phone screen call puts you into an 'online assessment' where I can't solve the
problem in better than O(N^2) time.

These fucking algorithms are killing me, and making me have a hard realization
that maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Yea, I've built shit... but you know
what... anyone could. I've plugged together a bunch of work other people did,
and wallah, working server. Working app. Working whatever. But I can't write
the libraries. I can't code a hyper scalable function that could handle
petabytes of data.

The only reason my fucking amazing server hasn't crashed is because it doesn't
handle anything close to the scale that many companies need. Hence why these
algorithms are so important. But I can't fucking get better at them.

~~~
lstamour
I’d recommend trying the graded exercises in
[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-
alg...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-algorithms)
or [https://www.edx.org/course/data-structures-an-active-
learnin...](https://www.edx.org/course/data-structures-an-active-learning-
approach) — unfortunately, for the most benefit (online automatic grading),
you’ll have to pay either EdX or Coursera, but EdX offers a small sample of
exercises to start, if I recall correctly. And there are a few more courses
after those.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll learn better if someone doesn’t ask you to
do the impossible, but instead leads you through enough solutions that you can
get an immediate confidence boost from the first few easy ones, then the
intermediate ones require more thought, and if you really get stuck, there are
discussions about how to solve some of the problems. Usually you have to think
algorithmically, not just write code, and some problems might just be harder
for you to understand because you haven’t done as much work in that area. I
won’t say it’s a complete look at algorithms—there’s a whole other course on
strings if I recall, but it’s a good start.

Also, here’s my cheat to pass those employer questions — if they let you use
JS, do EVERYTHING you can with ES6 Map and Set classes. Folks rarely look at
the code and don’t care if you’re using for loops or advanced classes, but
it’s way easier to use a Set than to worry about how many times you have to
loop over some result to reduce duplication, or sort things, or what have you.
If you need a unique sorted set, there are faster algorithms, but a simple
(new Set(arr.sort())) gets the job done, because Set is insertion-ordered by
default and any native JS function is generally faster than you writing your
own code, so it’s impossible to mark this solution as wrong unless you exclude
native functions (but who does that?). A bonus tip, if you need to figure out
the difference between sets, just get creative with .filter and .map. There’s
not much to memorize beyond that because there’s not much advanced
functionality, just building blocks flexible enough to do anything, relatively
expressively. [https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/ch_sets.html#missing-
se...](https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/ch_sets.html#missing-set-
operations)

~~~
lstamour
A follow up, if ES6 JS doesn’t come easy to you — pick a language you like
best and look for its equivalents to Set, Map, .filter (or select) and .map
(or collect). Bonus tip, look for .find or .first, to short circuit looping
and stop at the first thing that matches. Yes, you can memorize for loops or
why one thing is more efficient than another, but if you start with Set and
Map where each makes sense, you’ll solve 80-90% of algorithm questions pretty
easily and usually in a way that’s straightforward to read and understand
later, especially if you start naming some of your functions to make them a
bit easier to read. (Like naming selectors in Redux...)

If writing SQL as part of a quiz, learn the different joins because usually
the question is worded in a way where picking the correct join will deliver
huge performance benefits by reducing how much data you’re going through or
making things more efficient than looping through multiple subqueries. Left vs
Inner vs Right vs Outer vs Cross... remember that the less data the server has
to go through (the fewer records in the earliest sub query), the faster
everything will run, in these quiz scenarios. Yes, in real life how you store
data matters, what you index, but it’s rare you’ve any control over the index
or schema in these tests.

------
newacctwhodis
I’ve got one and a half feet out the door of a well known fruit company, after
going through a half dozen re-orgs in 4 months, in an infrastructure org that
has an overtly sexist management chain (down to 1 female manager in a 600+
person org).

I’ve reported these concerns to the HR team, but they’ve been completely
unresponsive, which makes sense seeing as their job is to protect corporate
interests rather than employees, as is the case with all HR teams.

It’s been over 10% attrition in the last few months, and we’re two weeks away
from annual bonus payouts. I sense a mass exodus coming as soon as that
happens.

------
honkycat
I hate all of my jobs. Computer programming just doesn't seem worth it for
100-120k. I could work an easier job for a better money/bullshit ratio. My
therapist is concerned. So am I.

What if I don't fit in anywhere? I'm extremely sensitive with a high EQ, am an
INTP. People really like me, and I make fast friends and can run a room
extremely effectively. I've always been "the funny guy."

I'm absurdly driven A-type and I go crazy if I can't hack and distinguish
myself through my natural work ethic and intellect.

I do EXCELLENT at both the interpersonal and implementation part of software
engineering. I've never had a bad review.

I've fucked my career up while actively trying to build my resume. I thought
building a successful start up would help my resume. It doesn't. Nobody cares.
People want to pay me the same mediocre pay for a harder job five years later.
They want to see Google and an ivy league on the resume.

I don't know what to do anymore. After 10 years and a 4 year degree, I'm
totally lost as to what to do next.

~~~
samvher
I don't know you, but it doesn't sound like programming is the problem.
100-120k is objectively a lot of money and it sounds like you're comparing
yourself to others who have shinier jobs and higher salaries. Maybe it would
be healthy to focus less on accomplishment/prestige and more on enjoyment.

------
notTyler
This isn't nearly as bad as the others here but recently our scrum master came
back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively over pointing
stories because apparently it looks so bad to management if you don't complete
something within it's estimate.

A week later I finished something early and was instructed to not bring
anything else into the sprint because, you know, visibility is more important
than actually being productive.

I get that deadlines and metrics are important. And I get that managers/mgmt
will never see eye to eye with developers about how long stuff takes. But this
is just sheer idiocy, encouraging doing the bare minimum and a culture of fear
instead of rewarding good work. If I actually told the next up the chain about
it, they'd absolutely sweep it under the rug.

So yeah I'm interviewing looking to go somewhere way, way smaller at this
point.

------
t34543
Fuck my job. I make more money than ever but a bunch of chodes want to meet
all day. I do NOT like meetings. Pairing is a NIGHTMARE. I’m a hardcore
sysadmin, let’s debug some drivers. Instead we run php web apps where I can’t
grep.

------
ariel_h
Today was really close to it. I'm a team leader and I texted my boss in the
morning that I'm sick today, he called me 10 minutes later asking me how I
feel, and also telling me there is an alert in production, asking me if I saw
it, and asking if I talked to my team members to check this. My throat hurts
and I have fever, so no, I didn't do it.. I feel that I need to hold his hand
with anything and if I'm sick he can't handle anything alone. 2 hours later he
called me again, just wanting to ask a "small question" that a sales guy had,
regarding the product. My boss is the VP of engineering.. I really don't
understand how he got this job, he can't handle anything alone and don't have
empathy for his employees when they are sick.

~~~
geekbird
Silence your phone, let it go to voicemail. When he asks why you didn't
answer, say "I was sick with a fever and a sore throat. I didn't answer my
phone because I was sleeping, trying to get better."

------
JohnFen
I won't tell tales about my current employer, but I'll tell the one about my
previous one (without naming them).

I left because the code base for their main product was incredibly bad.
Brittle, opaque, undocumented, buggy, and virtually unmaintainable.

That alone wouldn't have been a dealbreaker as long as the company saw the
problem and we were working to fix the situation. That wasn't what was
happening, though, because the Big Boss didn't agree that there was a problem
at all, even though literally every dev was telling him so. He saw any effort
to improve the code quality as a waste of time and money.

So, I had to leave in part because it was a terrible working condition, and in
part because I didn't want my personal professional reputation to be damaged
by being associated with that project.

~~~
etxm
Always be refactoring - work that shit into the ticket.

~~~
JohnFen
Yeah, that was my intention when I saw what I had to work with. But it was
also specifically prohibited.

~~~
etxm
How do you prohibit making code better?

> for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard),
> then make the easy change

And all that jazz...

Was your boss a super dev reading the code and calling out if it looked
better?

~~~
JohnFen
> How do you prohibit making code better?

By instituting a "minimal change" rule. No code changes were allowed for
general refactoring. If you're fixing a bug, only the bare minimum changes to
address it were allowed.

If fairness, the rule was not entirely irrational. It was very difficult to
make changes that didn't break stuff all over the place, and "minimal change"
helped to reduce the short-term risk.

This did allow some refactoring to get sneaked in, of course -- sometimes a
bug required rearchitecting code, which comes with the opportunity to
refactor. And if you're adding a new feature, the new code can be properly
done.

> Was your boss a super dev reading the code and calling out if it looked
> better?

Pretty much. He was involved in all code reviews. He single-handedly wrote the
initial implementation, and I believe that he took any criticism of it, overt
or implied, as a personal attack.

The truly scary part of this (for me) is that this is an enterprise product
that is pretty widely used by major corporations in system-critical
deployments.

------
kerkeslager
If you actually want to be fired, find a new job and quit.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to take responsibility for your part
in a toxic relationship. Don't wait for other people to make your life
decisions for you.

Before anyone starts in with the "but there aren't better opportunities"\--if
that's really true, you don't want to be fired, so what I'm saying doesn't
apply to you.

------
wronghorse
I've been working as a developer at a shitty company with no mentorship or
room to grow for 2 years. My co-workers are obnoxious, loud sales people which
drives me insane. I've tried my best to get out but due to visa
constraints/random shit I've not been able to find anything.

------
seizethecheese
I sure hope this format doesn't take off.

Having worked as a dishwasher, line cook, pool manager, business analyst,
software engineer, and startup founder, I have to say software engineer was,
by far, the most coddled job.

How about this:

I'm a line cook, and I can't afford to be fired. I make minimum wage, and burn
or cut myself badly at least once per week. I'm not allowed to take the day
off and have to work through it. I work 8 hours nonstop above a very hot
grill. I can't see any windows during my entire shift. Nobody respects me. My
coworkers are alcoholics.

Edit: of course this doesn't mean software engineers shouldn't work to improve
their well-being at work! Yeesh. Just adding some perspective. Earlier in
life, I would have killed to have 95% of the work situations described below.

~~~
whatshisface
I'm a third world sweathop worker. I was forced to make clothes here ever
since I could walk. There are hundreds of people packed in to this tiny
windowless room, and every time there is a fire I die. My coworkers can't even
afford alcohol. Every time I hear decadent American line cooks complain about
their working conditions, all I can think is, they have it so easy.

~~~
seizethecheese
Yes, this illuminates the point even better. Software devs are among the best
treated first world employees. In a global perspective, most (but not all)
complaints are laughable.

~~~
taneq
Stop complaining, there are starving children in Africa!

------
donretag
I once worked for a company that was purchased and we were tasked with signing
new employment papers for the new owner.

When HR asked why I still have not signed the papers, I said it was
forthcoming and BTW, can I collect unemployment if I don't? Mysteriously
enough, half hour later I get an email from the CTO. :) So I told him I want
to get laid off since the company was terrible. He promised to fix thing, but
of course nothing happened and I ended up quitting anyways a few months later.

------
geocrasher
Rewind to 1996 or so. I was around 20 and living in Reno NV at the time and
was really good at fixing computers. There were a number of local mom and pop
computer shops, and I needed a job. A working interview consisted of 10
breakfix cases inside of a day. They'd have been happy with me handling 5. I
was hired. I was confident that I'd do a good job for them.

The first sign that there was a problem was when the guy who also interviewed
that day got hired. If you go back that far, you might remember that there
were two piece power headers on motherboards. If you didn't install them
correctly (with the ground wires in the center) and forced them the wrong
direction, you'd let out the magic smoke. Somehow they thought hiring the guy
who made that mistake was a good idea.

The first week wasn't so bad, but then the bullying started. Verbal abuse.
Name calling. Giving me nickname that they'd use to remind me of every mistake
I made. Harassing me over mistakes I made to the point that I wanted to cry.
If I didn't know something that they knew, even if I couldn't be expected to,
I was berated and treated like an idiot. I was young, and so badly needed that
job because I was living with my grandparents at the time and they made it
clear that I was to get on my own ASAP. They were kind, and didn't kick me out
(and it wasn't threatened) but I wanted to be a Good Boy and Do The Right
Thing. But it wasn't easy.

Then there was the shop talk. Sometimes they'd talk about work, but most of
the time it was talking about strippers and drugs. I was in a shop full of
coke addicts.

8 weeks in, I was let go. I was never more glad to be fired from a job in my
life.

------
swtrs
My team runs a mission critical application nearly all of us were duped into
supporting. Ops engineering turned into "process champion" and now I yell at
people about ticket structure (bane of my existence) instead of diagnosing db
performance issues (things I gleefully lose sleep over.) Now I question my
passion for IT daily, fall asleep at lunch and wait for the day I do bad
enough to be fired.

------
hef19898
Happened to me a couple of times. The common denominator in all cases is
managers and an organization preferring opinions over facts. The last case
took three months to reach that point. During that I had to manage a serious
raw material shortage situation everybody tried as hard as possible to ignore.
After three months that wasn't possible anymore and all of a sudden the
business decided it was up to me find a solution, prioritize customers and
markets and it was also me who was responsible for sales to miss their targets
due to that raw material shortage. That the root cause was a force majeure
incident at a single source supplier, we were most likely in a dominant market
position and the global market for the raw material was empty didn't matter.
The last straw was my new manager who insisted to provide numbers impossible
to extract from the ERP system and present numbers I knew were wrong simply
because they showed that there was no problem. Also he directly said that
apparently I was incapable of doing my job. The day after that I quit.

------
ggm
I took a role which relates to a strategic goal aligned with correctness of
data held. Its public-trust information. From time to time, pragmatism around
"can't we just change this record..." makes my blood boil: Its explicitly
_not_ what I took the role to do: fixing pragmatic bad choices time after
time, makes me want to go do something else, when the intent was to defend a
line of historical accuracy and completeness.

The agency is a community benefit NFP, consensus led policy. The decisions we
take off-policy worry me intensely. But realistically not all things can be
done by consensus. I do think there are some pressures in this space which are
similar to the above: if your own moral compass and how the enterprise is
driving don't align well, you really need to talk to yourself about why you
are doing things. _(I am not so far mis-aligned i have this problem, but I
have in the past)_

Friends left e.g. the IETF, precisely because of this. If you can't adhere to
the norms, you need to ask why you're going.

------
philip1209
Probably any founder of an acquired startup with vesting acceleration REALLY
wants to be fired (without cause):

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/05/30/what...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/05/30/what-
you-need-to-know-about-vesting-acceleration/)

~~~
walshemj
Not sure why you got voted down, the US has very poor protections for
employees when a company is taken over.

You might have wanted to use "redundant" and not "fired" or "laid off" as
these have quite different meanings in labour law.

------
kps
In a previous job I got very close to a ‘them or me’ ultimatum. Then I got
over it. Then we _all_ got laid off.

------
cryptonector
Nobody. Perhaps you want to be _laid off_ when you know your employer may be
about to lay off some employees, you'll have an easy time finding a new gig,
and the severance will be nice. But if you want to quit, then quit, and
whatever else you do, don't get yourself fired for cause, ever.

------
kostarelo
Recently, the business I’ve been working for the last few months, threw me in
a project where I (and my whole team really) ended up realizing that they
didn’t even understand what the problem was. Specifically, I had to develop an
integration with our system and an external provider but we ended up realizing
that our system wasn’t even close to being integrated with this provider. So
what we thought it would be a few months work, we started hitting walls on
every step and realizing that it was just impossible, at least based on our
initial assumptions. The project ended up stale after working on it for three
months, I ended up being completely demotivated and eventually quitting the
company for what I thought an incapable executive layer for taking business
decisions.

------
kraig911
Working on 20+ years of bandaids on an MFC C++ ERP Application with no
documentation and some crazy ass shit going on. The goal make it a 'web
app'... The corporate office is constantly waging political fights between
management. We can't get anything done. Stymied.

~~~
i_am_nomad
This gets my vote for worst technical situation.

------
vast
* three planning layers

* no reasonable reaction on devastating feedback

* purely numbers driven. Ignoring tech debt and creativity

* no new recruits in years

* not honoring experienced programmers

* no working creative process to bring the product to the next level

* naive and reactional cargo culting

I have great colleagues. Workload is usually fine, except too many topic on
the table. We have quite a lot freedom how to handle things, but not so much
about the what. Our tech management is quite horrible. The top manager has
unsolved conflicts with the majority of coders. Mostly because he has no idea
about tech and never gives reasonable feedback. Fluctuation is currently
extreme and I will be leaving soon with only 2 tech people remaining that have
been there long term.

Our company has the potential to break the 1bn threshold next decade, just to
give an idea about the scale.

------
eanthy
I thought this was a counter-thread to the Who wants to be hired one lol

~~~
patrickthebold
It is.

------
ninjahatori1
Organization I work for is in experimental phase about what roles would be
more efficient, last December I switched to be a DevOps from Software Engineer
role, partly because of "Organizational Needs". but now, they want to move all
the DevOps into a room extracting them out of their Scrum Teams, and they've
asked few guys (including me) to be "Multi-Functional" which I don't get it.

as they're moving backwards from what really DevOps means, I want to move out
as I fail to see any outcomes of this move which will turn out to be good for
either of us.

also, if I start back up with Development I'll be treated as a Junior
developer and will be shoved to work on non-interesting parts of the project.

------
ramtatatam
I worked for a startup that was only founder and myself at the beginning. I
took responsibility to build the product, the company grew from us two to 24
in 3 years.

At some point he invited manipulative manager into the team who had a very bad
habit of making friends with people by badmouthing other people. Founder did
not want to read these signs until the point that manager got private phone
line with investors and started badmouthing founder and everyone else. Half
year later founder was fired, that manager took over. Soon after I was told
off, but I was on my way out anyways after I found him shouting at his
subordinates. Anyways this was way too long after I was stripped off from any
voice in the company.

------
howard941
I was hired to write firmware but we lack hardware for me to run and if we do
get it the hardware people are too overloaded to build it for me. As a result
I have no hardware to test my code against and I'm constantly shooting in the
dark.

------
carapace
I've quit a couple of places. If the management is incompetent or just out of
their depth; if they company can't make good use of my skills and talents.

I'm an outlier, but I've been homeless and I have no wife nor children to
support, so I don't fear just quitting if any BS comes up.

My advice, FWIW, is to always have your "FU" money.

(Money is a technology, here's a good simple manual: "The Richest Man in
Babylon"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28book%29)
)

------
llampx
_raises hand_ I'm a freelancer in the position of an interim department head.
I've never had such ungrateful and hard to work with team members. Somehow the
people above me and around me want to keep them. On top of that, getting
anything done with other departments is like pulling teeth. Of course I'm
judged on how much I get done, which means that I end up doing a lot of the
work myself. Sometimes I wonder if it's all my fault but that doesn't help me
either. I just want out but the money is too good.

------
tayo42
I think I do, though not for the reason everyone else seems to be posting.
Like I do hate my job, like most people do but that's not why.

I think it would force me to get out of my comfort zone, find something new to
be excited about. I'm pretty sure I'm to comfortable at the job I hate. I
guess it would be interesting to see what I end up doing without work sucking
up time. Maybe ill find time to be excited about programming again. Maybe get
good at something that I want to be good at.

------
throwaway162853
I just recently left a startup that was giving me Theranos vibes.

The founder seemed far more interested in attending conferences and becoming a
"thought leader" in the industry than actually building the product and the
company. I'd consider myself as someone who enjoys working in a startup
setting with ambiguity and the opportunity to shape the product vision. But
there never seemed to be any effort to try to resolve the ambiguity.

Instead, we had major problems with secrecy/lack of communication and the
inability to be honest with the current state of the product. A lot of people
in the company (including myself) tried to introduce some rigor and establish
common ground, but none of us were successful.

And honestly, this felt like it was by-design. Every employee was only privy
to understanding part of the problem and only the founder held all the cards.
My opinions would frequently be superseded by "you're wrong because you only
understand the user side, not the customer side" while my colleague who worked
on sales/business-development would hear the opposite.

At a certain point, it just felt like an uphill battle with the founder that
was no longer worth the debating and shouting. Any effort to measure efficacy
was dismissed. No one could actually articulate the problem we were trying to
solve, how our product solves it, and whether or not it was effective.

It's a real shame because on paper the domain and vision of the company is
exactly what I'd want to focus my career on, but this was starting to feel
more like a shell of a startup than an actual one.

------
0xDEFC0DE
After 8 hours total interviewing at one company, I kinda feel like I was hired
and fired in a single day

~~~
120bits
WOW! That would very exhausting.. is this norm these days to have full day
interview sessions?

~~~
commandlinefan
A couple years ago I had TWO full-day interview sessions with a single
company. That I had to take time off of my then-current job to attend. After a
one-hour phone screen. Who ended up not hiring me anyway.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Unless the position was for serious fuck you money and I really needed it,
there's no way in hell I would tolerate 2 full day interviews.

I'm also guilty for spending lots of after work days studying for jobs I
really wanted and getting rejected but at least I didn't burn any of my
precious vacation days.

~~~
commandlinefan
I fell prey to the “sunk cost” fallacy - after the first full day when they
asked me to come back, I thought: a) it would be a shame to “waste” that first
full day of interviewing by saying no now and b) surely nobody would be a big
enough asshole to ask me to take two full days off of work to interview with
them only to reject me after the second day, so surely this second day is just
a formality.

Apparently I was wrong.

And no, it was just a regular programming job, nothing special.

~~~
whynaut
I have found that lightly pushing back on such requests makes them value you a
little more. Doesn't matter too much since they should've valued you in the
first place. I've had a couple processes expedited in this way, sometimes
skipping a call here or there or changing a second onsite to a call.

------
paul7986
I'm out the door pretty soon if I'm alone in dealing with a bully or an
insecure pr$&k who builds himself up by putting putting you and others down.

Two years ago I reported a female colleague whom I witnessed being harassed.
After reporting it I was harassed by different employee ..nothing came from
reporting my harassment and so I left. That place was terrible and no longer
exists.

Overall There's too many jobs out there in our field to have deal with b.s.
and stress.

------
antihero
Had a job working for an online gardening shop, where I was on minimum wage
and despite being a junior I was probably one of the more switched on devs
there (I had to convince everyone to use a git when joining, previously they
edited files directly via SFTP on the prod oscommerce site that had not been
updated in 6 or so years and had lots of config.php.2009.barry.bak type shit
going on).

Someone not in the IT department went around our back (held us in disdain
because we pushed back with his silly demands and deadlines) and got an
outsourced team to build us a solution to replace our proprietary accounting
software, which needed to tap into the accounting software's MSSQL db, and our
ageing OSCommerce MySQL database.

Because he didn't talk to us, the spec was completely absurd and he didn't
even mention that there were two completely different databases.

So my task was basically to take the immensely poor quality, wrongly specced
code, and "make it work". Think having to chew through a giant class with
literally thousands of mysql_ (no escaping or anything like that) queries and
having to rewrite them either using PDO or the mssql extension. I think I
lasted about a week on this project before I got up from my desk and left,
never to return.

------
karussell
6 or 7 years ago I did some freelancing to fund my open source project (some
nice algorithms and stuff). After two or three clients I had the idea to build
some parts around it to make it a real product and invested 2 months into
this, which meant no money in that time. After that I urgently needed a new
client as money on my bank account ran out. I did not plan this properly.

Unfortunately it took weeks to find a new offer and so I accepted the first
that came in and it was a completely crazy contract that required me to do
parts I never did before (e.g. database and mobile related) in a very short
time. Additionally it was a few weeks before X-mas where I should have planned
with some holidays.

The other ugly downside of this task was the contact person behind this. He
was unfriendly and put huge pressure on me, insisting on the contract
deadlines and adding requirements (I know now this is not uncommon, but I
hadn't this with my few older clients). Additionally or logically I got ill a
few days before X-mas, which made the already crazy project now impossible.
The client called me one day after X-mas about the progress (was still ill)
and I got crazy and didn't know what to do. Luckily my wife earned money too!
Still I needed to find a solution of how to end this and still get a bit money
for the done tasks. After my health got back I discussed with the client of
how to define the next milestone and I tried hard to avoid to state that I
cannot fulfill the contract although in retrospect no one could have done
this. This process took 2 weeks and I was able to remove many requirements
from the contract and somehow was able to deliver this and got some money.

A few months after this I got a shock when I got another Email from this
company and thought now they'll sue me, but luckily the original contact
person left the person and they just wanted to know how a few things work. So
finally I was really able (with 2 other founders) to rescue my plan to make
the open source project a product, which is now a smoothly running, small
company.

Lessons learned:

* as a newbie define smaller milestones, include holidays in your plans, include at least monthly payouts

* never give your clients your private phone number and let them know when you are available (e.g. not on weekends)

* do freelancing with enough money in the bank or enough clients

------
breathtakingjob
In my country we have a two main employment contracts. One with full benefits
and one with partial benefits. Second is usually used for your first contract
or for hiring students on half time job.

In my IT department, everybody gets two monitors, unless of course, your
contract is a "partial" one. Then you get work with one monitor, regardless of
doing the same job everybody else does. They buy you second one, after they
sign you with the full contract...

------
klenwell
I've shared parts of this before but it seems apropos of the topic at hand.

I was working a Fortune 500 corporation. Been there 5 or 6 years. Pay was ok.
Culture was meh. Technology was open source. I was happy enough but figured it
was time to start looking around for other opportunities. Coincidentally, just
about this time I get promoted to senior and the senior gets promoted between
me and my current boss to be my new boss. He was not really prepared to manage
people, was not given any training or preparation for the new role, was still
expected to mainly write code, and probably preferred it that way. Because I'm
pretty good at expressing myself and he wasn't so much, I think he also felt
threatened by me.

We had had a perfectly fine working relationship before this. But I started to
hear from other team members that new boss was badmouthing me behind my back.
Didn't make me feel good, but shit I'm doing my job and, you know, you can
count up my story points at the end of the sprint if anyone's worried.

Things came to head during my first annual review under new boss when boss
gives me a mediocre review. Tells me I ask too many questions, and says I
don't have adequate knowledge of our applications. I'm kinda dumbfounded. I
point out to him that, besides having worked on most the applications for
several years, I'm the one who set up the wiki and has written most the
application documentation found therein. His reply: "That's not knowledge.
Knowledge is what's in your head." I'm at a loss. I felt like I was being
gaslighted before that word had entered the popular vernacular and provided me
just the word I was looking for to explain the strange feelings I was feeling.

I made the mistake of challenging the review with HR. It immediately became a
shitshow and I quickly learned what people mean when they say HR is not your
friend. Put on a PIP. Everyone I knew told me to put my head down and get the
hell out of there as soon as possible. So that's what I planned to do. Problem
was every other company I interviewed with seemed like it was the subject of
another post in this thread. Besides, my commute was only 10 minutes with no
freeways involved at current employer and I was being kinda picky on that
point.

Six months drag on. About everything that could go wrong while I was looking
for a job seemed to go wrong. At one point I had a couple decent offers in
hand I was ready to accept and then fumbled them both by trying to play one
against the other. Meanwhile, I am keeping my head down and doing my job. I
mean, my take on things is probably a little biased, but I'm pretty sure I was
the most productive and reliable member of the team and the objective data, if
management could have been bothered to try to collect any, would have backed
me up. After all, in the not so distant past, they had promoted me to senior.

So the period assigned to the original PIP expires. I'm ashamed to still be
there. But at least I figure they'll let that go. Nope. Boss comes back with
new PIP. Totally fabricated stuff. Like "On project X, Klenwell did work to
which he was not assigned." I point out that I was updating everyone on the
project every morning on what I was doing in the daily daily standup.
Including my boss. "You were standing right there!?" I'm furious, demoralized,
ready to quit. On advice of a family member, I talk to an employment lawyer.

Best $300 I may have ever spent. "Yeah," he tells me. "You're fucked. They're
papering your file. But don't quit. You'll sacrifice any benefits, including
unemployment." I learned something that day. And the screw turned. That point
forward, I'm not taking shit from anyone or anything. My boss. My boss's boss.
Fire me? Cool! I'll take my unemployment checks and have my new best friend
lawyer be in contact with you!

It was a very satisfying two weeks. I was like a kid peddling around on over-
inflated bicycle wheels. But all good things must come to an end and the final
straw came in a sit-down with my boss when boss said boss's boss (my old boss)
was questioning why I was writing tests for a critical piece of ancient real-
money-processing infrastructure that we needed to upgrade. My response: hey,
is Boss's Boss writing code again for us? Great. Let him take over this story
and I'll move on to something else.

I was fired the next morning. Walked out of the building with my belongings in
a garbage bag. And a shadow was lifted off my little world.

Lawyer never returned my call. Took me exactly 6 months to find a new job.
Things have been much better since then.

------
bonquesha99
Sometimes it's nice to step away for some perspective and start again fresh
somewhere new!

People do actually read these comments so please give it a shot (even with a
throwaway) just to see what's out there at least:

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? October 2019
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126012)

What do you have to lose, you want to be fired anyways!

------
metalgearsolid
I was asked to implement "passive data analytics", so our iOS app could soak
up data on age, gender, etc. I put in my notice the following Friday.

That was almost a month ago. Currently struggling with the realities of
unemployment and depression. Not sure where things will go from here. I
haven't discovered any kind of support system for software developers who left
their jobs because of their personal morals.

------
DreamScatter
When there are stupid and idiotic power trips in the workplace, then I can't
put up with the situation and will quit.

Nothing annoys me more than people exerting power over somebody else
unnecessarily, especially to coerce or bully somebody in a social or work
related way.

Also, if there is gossip about other people, then I don't want to work in that
environment. Social gossip is toxic.

------
3f8347343f4
(throwaway) every day I debate whether to quit or stay on unhappy and trying
to do things the way I feel is right until I'm fired.

------
cleandreams
I love my job but at an earlier one, every day I wanted to quit. My boss was
threatened by me and did not value me. He tried to show he had my skills. He
valued another engineer more. I felt jealous, stifled, and miserable. I
learned a valuable lesson though. Don't quit because you have an impulse. Wait
until you have figured out your next move.

------
wowandflutter
Management which prefers to recruit only “offshore” talent, believing the
offshore talent is inherently superior to all other talent that is not from
their county. Discrimination? Yep. Happening anyway? Yep. Obvious? Usually,
but it’s subtle. Anyone important taking notice? Not really. The higher ranks
from offshore support the offshore model first.

------
somebody_sw
I'm utterly bored, I changed jobs a year ago because of family reasons. The
company is great in a lot aspects (team culture, benefits, technology). I got
asigned a project where I did a successful POC which was already shown the
costumers and management. But after the POC the project is now on hold, there
is no decision from managment since 4 months. I still have weekly calls with
the PM, which tells me how he wants the project to continue, but rumor is
he'll change positions shortly. My boss won't assign me to another project as
he doesn't know how the project continues and wants to hold me back as
resource. So since months I'm dabbling around trying to support my teammembers
with random scripts and tools to do at least something useful. I've got an
offer from another local company which I'll probably will take, just to do
something useful again.

------
blablabla123
On my current job most of the engineers have little engineering experience.
Mostly we use modern tools but it's obvious that they had been set up once and
since then nobody took care to maintain/tweak them. That makes the workflow
very disorganized and sometimes tedious.

Decisions are often made very spontaneously, the process (Scrum) is often
skipped and a lot of blaming happens even in meetings. One guy sometimes
spontaneously walks up to others and starts loud arguments or blaming. Also
there seems to be low trust among the department heads. Many tasks I work on
the agreed upon solution changes back and forth.

It's a real mess, so getting fired would be the easiest option. But probably
I'll just have to keep my eyes open for a new job and then switch.

------
thrwwy90876
Working at 1000+ person companies and moving 'up' the ladder, but if it wasn't
for the paycheck I'd be in a small shop actually building things.

Every day is another bunch of meetings, political posturing, or just dealing
with people who don't care.

------
kylek
The magnitude of this post is very distressing to me. (Also, HN is an
unfortunate format for this kind of thing). I hope plenty of employers will
read this thoroughly and take heed. I always try to assume positive intent,
though it's obvious that's not what many commenters here are experiencing.
Expectations seem to need to change industry-wide. To the employers that do
(supposedly) care about your employees mental health: you may not know what
you're asking for sometimes. To the employees: you need to be better at
expressing your troubles and needs. I don't know what a solution might be. But
I'm praying for y'all.

------
jimcsharp
They're tearing down some walls to fit a few more desks in (the openest of
open offices). I've been living like a college student for 10 years now
following FIRE blogs, so getting fired wouldn't be completely unwelcome.

------
yr1337
My limit was that after a decade of single-handedly spec'ing, programming,
supporting and otherwise being in charge of all internal app development
efforts for the $6 billion North-American arm of a $50 billion multinational
corp... I still wasn't deemed worthy of the opportunity of a green card, or a
salary commensurate with my responsibility and impact on the corp. The day I
got my GC by other means and thus was no longer stuck working for them, I gave
my 2 weeks, to everyone's surprise and disappointment! And that was with no
jobs lined up after that.

------
smilesnd
I have work at a bank long enough to hear stories about people having mental
breakdowns. Everything from just walking out of there office naked to people
using the stairway as bathrooms to help deal with the stress and anxiety that
some jobs at the bank can cause. At the first bank I worked at I never witness
it myself, but when I got a new job at another one it started to become a
normal.

So a friend of mine got hired by a bank that needed to hire 100 technical
people in 30 days time. He told me how awesome of a job it was, because they
had nothing to do so he spent his day doing whatever he wanted and getting
paid mad money. Something happen and 2 people got fired so they needed them
replace asap. He ask me if I wanted to throw my hat in the ring. I got such a
gleaming referral from my friend they skip the interview process and hired me
on the spot. In the week time of those 2 people getting fired though
everything had changed.

We came to find out those 2 people got fired because the project was suppose
to be 80% done by then, but instead it was more like 10%. They fired them 2 to
show they meant business and they had the lowest performance score out of the
entire 100 people so they were made a example. New policy was created no more
headphones, meetings everyday, only work allowed on your computer screen, no
smartphones out, and a old grumpy man was put at the back end of each isle to
watch us. To make it worse all the cubicals were only shoulder height. So you
had all the disadvantage of a open office with all the disadvantages of a
cubical farm in a neat little package. The cubes were also smaller then normal
with only enough space for your chair to slide back against the wall so you
could slide out.

This is when stuff gets really strange you would think with all this distress
and work needing to be done everyone would have there head down pounding out
whatever they were suppose to be doing? That is the thing there was no work to
be done. In my 6 month contract there I probably spent 3 hours actually doing
work. In reality a 10 person team could have easily done what we had to do in
a month time, but because of how the bank and management had structure
everything it was impossible to do anything. There was also another strange
thing people were expected to work 50 hours a week no matter what. When I
started I put down 40 hours and got told by my manager, my recruiter, and a
higher up I need to work more to help them catch up. The following week I work
only 40 hours and the talks turn into threats so I started to work 47 hours a
week and the threats went away. If you work 51+ hours a week it would give you
the awesome option to work weekends as well.

So with all this stress, anxiety, and boredom a good number of people started
to act really strange. A handful of people had stop taking showers leaving a
noticeable smell in certain areas. Some people would squirrel food away
leading to infestation of bugs and a underground market for trading and
selling junk food. Some of the higher ups notice people were wearing the same
cloths every day so after a talk those people started to wear jackets and such
so the higher ups couldn't say anything to them. It became a normal thing for
some to just sleep at there desk the entire day. Office supplies were
constantly going missing even with the higher ups guarding them. Fights would
break out randomly some just shouting a couple physical ones. Every other week
a women would normally have a break down and cry in her cube because managers
had started to use them as there own punching bags over emails/IMs. Lunches
became more group therapy then a enjoyable outing. At some tipping point the
main recruiting agency came in and had us all sign something basically
pledging we would act professionally from that point forward and they were not
held legally for our own actions and such.

To make the matter worse the recruiting agency was adding more anxiety and
stress on the people. Most of the people there had work VISA and needed a job
to stay in the country. The agency bully them into working 6 days a week.
Someone accidentally sent out a email letting some of the people know they
were no longer need on the project would be let go in 2 weeks. All the
recruiters instantly contacted all 25 contractors that email went to saying
that was a mistake and not true. They said they would be on the project for at
least 6 more months and to ignore that email. 2 weeks later they were all let
go.

I was told my contract was only going to be 3 months, I ended up 6 months
there. When I hit the 3 month period I started to do whatever I wanted
thinking I would get fired, but it never happen. I repeatedly reached out to
my recruiter telling her to put in my 2 week notice, and it never happen. It
finally hit a point where I told my manager my recruiter told me this was my
last week. After my last day my recruiter contacted me 6 days later asking me
why I wasn't at work. My friend that got me the job stayed on for another
week, but ended up getting fired. A manager that leaned on him heavy for
answering technical questions got scared he might replace her and told the
higher ups he attacked her during a meeting. Security came and lead him out of
the building.

~~~
abledon
what country?

~~~
smilesnd
America

------
cryptica
People who have money and power today are on average less intelligent and less
competent than people who don't. I guess this is the result of the past 10 or
so years of expansionary monetary policy. It enabled greedy people with very
little talent to capture a lot of money. Value creation was sacrificed for the
benefit of value capturing (rent-seeking) activities.

------
sjg007
Why would you want to get fired at the limits? Why not talk to your managers
or you know resign.. I mean if you get fired you don't get unemployment
benefits.. I think you mean you'd rather as to be laid off. Getting fired in
the best case means taking a moral position against the company that is
righteous... Does being laid off mean you were lazy?

~~~
athriren
In California, so long as you do not get fired for misconduct you are
(generally) eligible to collect unemployment benefits whether you are fired or
laid off. The definition of misconduct in California law is actually quite
narrow—there are four standards and you must meet all of them in order to be
ineligible for unemployment.

Obviously this is only one state in a large country in an even bigger world,
so this may not be applicable to where you are. But wanted to clarify for any
SF/LA/other CA city readers that the legal distinction for unemployment is not
being laid off vs being fired, but losing your job for misconduct vs losing
your job for some other reason.

~~~
JBlue42
Sad thing is that the money from unemployment hasn't gone up for years.
$1800/mo pre-tax. I was pretty pissed when first on it that the feds tax the
unemployed, seems like kicking someone when they're down, but at least in CA
there's no state tax, which I learned occurs in other states.

------
gryzzly
Any amount of blaming from management onto the employees will get me to decide
to leave immediately.

Lying to employees. Army-type discipline at the office.

Any non-payment of salary (unless it’s not employer’s responsibility, but 3rd
party and I‘m given full transparency on why that is, like a bank transfer
issue etc. with a promise to sort this out).

Indeed, I quit a bunch of jobs for these reasons.

~~~
gryzzly
Every one of these decisions to quit led to the next job being better in terms
of managers, experience I got and compensation.

------
JetezLeLogin
It's not hell on earth but I think about "oh my god dude get another job!" at
least once a week. My job is this "hybrid" of 50% software developer, which I
want to do, and 50% of, let's just say, flippin' burgers. It's not flipping
burgers literally but the metaphor applies pretty well because being a short-
order burger chef does take some skill, but it's repetitive, and subject to
requests/orders that come in intermittently, each of which is urgent. So, it's
like the interruptions everybody complains about from noisy co-workers and
Nina from Corporate Accounts Payable, except the thing interrupting you, is
the other half of your own job, and it continues all day long. So really with
all the interruptions I'm doing close to zero programming.

Why this arrangement? Because they figured hey, what better way for him to
find all the pain points and automate them, than to have him use this crappy
cobbled-together system himself! Well sure, I'm all about seeing it from the
user's point of view. So yep, did that, figured out long ago everything that's
wrong with it, but now what? I'm stuck. Forget burger flipping, let's say this
time, that I'm an axe maker. A craftsman of fine chopping implements. And the
job they gave me is to chop wood all day with somebody else's dull axe. Um
that is a different thing, that is not what axe makers do! And it's not like,
okay make us a new axe, here's everything you need; they _need_ someone to
chop the wood! Pretty much the stupidest situation to be in.

Then there's the team - it's totally silo'd, a bunch of little fiefdoms, run
by naysayers, and my every minor request for an enabling technology or
whatever-it-might-be, is met with an unanswered phone call or email. I'm still
kind of new, so I have no clout whatsoever, that is a truth, but I can also
see that it's not just me. You've read much about the conflicts between Dev
and Ops that led to "DevOps." Well on this team the Database people and the
Programming people (hello, those two are the same thing, or perhaps you are an
asshole) don't even see eye to eye.

Also - and this shouldn't matter - but the developers are somewhere else.
Instead of being surrounded by developers bouncing interesting ideas all
around (not that these particular ones would), I'm here physically sitting
with the other burger-flippers. Yes we're back to that metaphor. These are
people who either can't, or never wanted to, be anything other than burger-
flippers, and everything they talk about is in terms of burger flipping, and
life is just a big burger to be flipped. Starting to sound elitist, but keep
in mind I'm intentionally not telling you what they, what we, actually do.
They are skilled workers. Just not the same skills. I probably should've held
out for something else.

~~~
perl4ever
"they figured hey, what better way for him to find all the pain points and
automate them"

So, I'm not clear on why you haven't been able to do that?

I got to where I hated the developer culture, and got a job that was outside
of it, where I had access to nothing except MS Office, and had the epiphany
that it's Turing complete, I can do anything!

~~~
JetezLeLogin
In a nutshell I'm spending most or all of my time using the tools (keeping up
with a queue) not working on them. To work on them I need either permission to
fall behind in the queue (probably not an option) or someone else to cover for
me. I'll probably pursue that latter option.

~~~
abledon
that's like something out of Kafka. It would be fitting to incorporate Kafka,
the technology, into your solution .

------
tyingq
Artificial harmony. Where people smile and nod about some decision face to
face, then subvert it quietly afterwards.

------
nickthemagicman
I work at a tech company that just lost 70% of its stock price in under a
year, my team was laid off from 15 people down to 3 people, my boss quit, and
the app I've been working on for a year is questionable to be shutdown.

And I'M going to look like the jerk on my resume for quitting before a year is
up.

God love capitalism!

~~~
rinchik
"And I'M going to look like the jerk on my resume for quitting before a year
is up." \- this problem is in your head. Capitalism has nothing to do with
that. You can quit at any point, even after a couple weeks. If you can't
bubble-wrap an explanation for future interviews then work on that. Soft
skills are also important.

~~~
nickthemagicman
I thought resumes exist to GET the interview.

------
tfont
Don't want to be fired.

However, what would get me the most is the interaction/attitude between my
team and boss.

Also, a terrible salary makes for a low tolerance.

From a programmatic point-of-view, inadequate framework, legacy code, and
disagreeable methodologies.

------
drewbt
This reminds me of being fired from a cult for willfully disobeying ridiculous
rules

------
ospider
996.

My last employer was ByteDance, the creator or TikTok and Toutiao. Actually,
the situation was a little better than 996, we call it "big small week", we
work one more day per two weeks, not each week.

------
nimmo007
I keep pressing my work to never take a job from AIPAC again because as a
"progressive" company you can't be "progressive until palestine"

------
throaway123
Leaders that claim to be leaders but are actually managers.

------
luizfnmarques1
I am living the startup to big corpo movement. Goddamn, how amateurs people
with a huge amount of money can be. Toxic management? YES, a lot :)

------
algaeontoast
Anyone successfully pull off an "Office Space"?

~~~
unnouinceput
I did. 11.5 years ago before starting as freelancer and never looking back.

~~~
ziroshima
Freelancing sounds like fun, but it looks like a real pain getting started.
From what I can tell, it means working for free or next to it on sites like
upwork. Any tips or suggestions?

~~~
unnouinceput
I can't say for others but for Upwork is not that bad. You do need to grow
your profile with successful jobs to be able to charge more later, so start
lower but do make a polished profile. Show lots of projects, including those
from open source, if you have any, and fill all fields as well. Also state
that you're at beginning and you're going for low prices only to establish
your reputation. Also don't give up, keep on bidding on jobs even if it looks
like a number game. In the end if you're persistent enough you get your break
and can start build your clients base. After that it's a breeze, given you're
indeed good at what you claim. Otherwise, it's a harsh environment for those
trying to scam.

------
wintorez
I love this question!

------
ParkerContent
The never-ending battle of sales vs. marketing. :)

------
Chirael
Every day.

------
werber
Half the time TBH

------
vectorEQ
always being happy to help and people using that as an excuse to be their shit
dumping ground because they are [lazy|incompetent|arseholes]

------
verdverm
TopTal's CEO... if he could be...

------
tbyehl
I clicked expecting a _What 's the worst / most creative thing you'd do to get
yourself fired?_ thread.

But I'll play.

My $dayjob involves hosted healthcare software. Looks more like bespoke
outsourcing than SaaS. I'm on a two-person team responsible for a relatively
tiny number of systems within each customers' deployment. Officially I'm on-
call every other week. In reality, on a team this small, everyone is always
on-call.

During my first year here, we busted ass to reduce after-hours calls --
cleaning up our own messes, giving support teams access to handle certain
internal items, demanding better judgement of "Is this potentially affecting
medical outcomes, or can this wait until normal working hours?", etc.

This year the company launched a more formalized and automated Major Incident
process. Much human judgement has been removed -- if a Major Incident is
raised, every team is contacted by a PagerDuty-like system to join a WebEx.

At the start of implementing this process, I found myself being called out-of-
schedule by the automated systems. MIs weren't being raised that often so it
took a few weeks to figure out that we were both being called every time and
then months of venting to everyone up-the-chain as MIs were increasing in
frequency before they finally believed us and got the right person engaged to
fix it.

Then the reality of having a process with little human judgement really
started to sink in. People default to CYA behavior. We're getting called for
things that don't come close to meeting the criteria for a Major Incident.
Often the MI process is initiated after the right teams have been engaged and
are working towards resolution. We're getting stuck on calls for hours where
the incident manager doesn't want to release anyone, "just in case they're
needed later."

Right now I feel thoroughly abused by this process and automation and being
such a small team. We've removed too much human discretion, and where there's
any left, it's being exercised poorly. The anxiety I and my family experience
when my phone rings is palpable.

Apart from this aspect of my employment, my job is pretty cush. The work
itself isn't stressful, most of my coworkers are great to work with,
management is above-average, PTO is generous. I've been officially 100% remote
for three years now and at this point my life is completely structured around
the freedom it provides. My salary is relatively high for direct W2 employment
in my field -- nobody has come close to offering a big enough bump to make up
for the monetary expenses of a soul-crushing commute, loss of benefits for a
contract gig, and needing to pay for after-school care for my girlfriend's
twins. Nevermind the intangibles.

Which makes me feel trapped.

The girlfriend changed jobs last month, trading a negligible amount of salary
relative to shaving a dozen stressful commuting hours from her week and
getting home about the same time as the kids. So that's a massive improvement
to our lives -- I say 'our' because, aside from _happier wife happier life_ ,
I'd not fully appreciated the burden I was feeling this past year having to be
at home for the kids on an inflexible schedule -- plus we've removed the
greatest obstacle to my changing jobs...

Tho I still feel fairly pessimistic about finding another job that doesn't
leave me worse off financially or mentally.

------
codesushi42
My reason is different from most. I am working on difficult problems, more
technically difficult than I ever have before. Maybe I will succeed, but I may
fail because I'm way in over my head.

But if I am in over my head, I hope I get fired. Because at least I was
challenged enough where I hit my limit for the first time, from a technical
standpoint. And then I will be free to move on and do something else with my
life.

If I succeed, then I will be happy continuing to succeed in this role, working
on difficult problems. So it is a win win.

------
oldsklgdfth
My office mates audibly fart throughout the day and act like it's normal.
Pretty sure it's not.

~~~
anon4lol
It's not. They should do what I do -- silently "crop dust" the other cubicles
as I drift past on my way to an unimportant meeting.

But seriously, I have a cubicle-mate that goes through a box of tissues every
two days. He is constantly grunting and blowing his nose. He also spends 15
minutes brushing and flossing in the bathroom twice per day. I say 15 minutes,
because he has his phone propped up with a timer.

Every time my noise cancelling headset runs out of power and needs to be
recharged, I re-evaluate my life choices and my tortured existence.

~~~
selimthegrim
He clearly reads McSweeney's - [https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-brush-
my-teeth-at-work...](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-brush-my-teeth-at-
work-just-to-make-you-feel-bad-about-yourself)

> You retreat to the furthest stall for your afternoon constitutional. Perhaps
> you hope to wait me out, but you underestimate my resolve. Dentists
> recommend brushing for 2 to 3 minutes, but I will be here for a minimum of
> 10 minutes — possibly 15 — to ensure that I’ll be seen by as many coworkers
> as possible. Yes, I will still be here when you emerge, to the rhythmic
> sounds of Reach Extra-Firm bristles on flawless enamel. Each stroke brushing
> away any illusion of equality between us.

This is not about teeth. The teeth are merely 32 gleaming ivory towers from
which to look down on you. This is about what the teeth represent. It’s about
what else we both might surmise from this moment: That I am likely far better
positioned for retirement. That my houseplants enjoy regular watering and
seasonal fertilizer. That I have enviable cholesterol and triglyceride levels.
All of that with which you struggle in life, that which eludes you? These
things are effortless for me.

~~~
brokenmachine
I guess it's all a matter of perspective, but I'd just be thinking he's some
kind of weird loser with OCD that can't manage his own personal grooming at
home, but for some reason isn't bothered by spending a lot of time in a public
toilet.

------
droithomme
All I can say is every time I've been fired it was a huge relief.

------
remi_dez
Having to touch any Windows machine.

