[HN Gopher] How long it takes to know if a job is right for you ...
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How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not
Author : zdw
Score : 258 points
Date : 2025-06-09 14:11 UTC (3 days ago)
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| JohnFen wrote:
| It takes me about a month to know for sure. If the job isn't
| right for me, it takes me a few more months before I consciously
| decide that there is no way to make the job right for me.
| mxuribe wrote:
| It takes me between 1 ~ 2 months, for me to have a very good
| feeling...then the next handful of months to validate those
| feelings. In my 30 year work history, i have had only 1 job
| where i got it wrong..and EVERY single other job through my
| entire career, all it took was between 1 ~ 2 months to get a
| feeling if the place is good or not, if the role is right or
| not, etc. Then again, all except for 1 role, my entire career
| has been at medium or large corporations...so i'm sure
| corporate America has enough similarities in so many areas to
| enable this "early warning system". ;-)
| therealfiona wrote:
| At about the 2 or 3 year mark I've known.
|
| Of course some places I've known sooner, but those are the
| exception.
|
| If it wasn't for the quality of life my current jobs is
| providing, I'd probably find something else. I just can't find
| anything right now that is intriguing enough and pays enough for
| me to make the jump without losing benefits.
| xattt wrote:
| A long time ago, I had a chat with a nurse executive who rose up
| the ranks. Her advice was to stick to a position until the
| butterflies settle (or approximately q 5 years).
|
| Nursing is known for lifers on single units, and personal growth
| doesn't happen unless you are cognizant and strive for it.
| busterarm wrote:
| I like this sentiment, yeah.
|
| Honestly every job has huge up and down swings. I've been at my
| current place for about a decade, which seems like an outlier
| in this industry. Also roughly 1/3 of the people I started my
| career with (roughly 40 or so) are no longer even in the
| industry. Another 1/5 or so have transitioned to adjacent roles
| like project management, etc.
|
| I make it a point to evaluate whether I want to stay where I'm
| at every six months and only leave if I want to leave two
| evaluations in a row.
|
| I get the salary optimization done by the 2-year hoppers, but
| it bites you down the road as a senior engineer and onward
| because you've never had to live with the consequences of your
| engineering choices. Hanging around for longer teaches you that
| even the seemingly-best decision made at the time can seriously
| bite you years down the road.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Takes me X months to discover where X is when I realise I don't
| like it. X is usually between 6 and 48. When X is nearer 6 it was
| a bad move. When X is closer to 48 it is because sands shifted. I
| never had a visceral reaction that I have been in a perfect job.
| But I know good from shit. Usually shit coincides with company is
| struggling to find PMF to fund growth through revenue. Also can
| mean company is sold to another company.
| latentsea wrote:
| This right here is my exact take too.
|
| Interestingly my current job I'm at the 48 month mark and sands
| definitely shifted after new management stepped in and slowly
| but surely gutted the culture, though I actually thought I
| wanted to leave almost immediately when I joined. It took me a
| little bit of adjusting initially to come to like the company
| at first, but it's been the longest place I've stayed since
| far.
| throwanem wrote:
| > That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the
| way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn't know
| (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become.
|
| Every time.
|
| I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and
| preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as
| long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that
| world.) But it will not take me a full day with access to your
| repos before I know whether there's anything you can do for me
| past signing the checks.
| ktbwrestler wrote:
| genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in
| security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a
| startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad
| even though we're using an ember frontend.
|
| What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you
| can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty
| environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting
| measured by output since "you should be able to ship fast?"
| throwanem wrote:
| If you mean about Rails specifically, it's that the total
| lack of discipline in both language and framework makes it
| impossible to build a product maintainable by more than one
| person, so every "successful" project has one or a few covert
| empire builders running it, usually with more political than
| technical success. That's not a kind of project that pays
| enough to be worth the trouble, even before we talk about
| opportunity cost, and the framework itself is a dead end that
| peaked in 2011 and has had about as many "renaissances" since
| then as there've been years of the Linux desktop. If I want
| to go live under that kind of rock, I'll do it with
| Salesforce, where the pay is better and no one thinks they're
| cool for poking at a keyboard all day.
| gleenn wrote:
| Strongly disagree. I've seen bad code or maintenance in all
| the languages. Sure, some ecosystems seem to attract worse
| practices, but the absolute best software engineering
| principles I ever learned in my multi-decade career were at
| a Rails shop. Everything was extremely well maintained,
| tested, CI/CD were great even before that was a thing. Not
| to start flame wars about refactoring or what it means to
| maintain code more, but that place was absolutely full of
| people who cared and kept those projects at the highest of
| caliber grade. You can find good, bad, and ugly in every
| ecosystem but I personally don't think Rails was ever even
| remotely bad. You can have an amazingly well-maintained
| setup and still be super productive. It's really about the
| people and the company spending the time, money, and energy
| to care. (Edit: typo)
| throwanem wrote:
| Which shop? When? Who with?
|
| It matters, far more in this ecosystem than others. If
| today there seems to be a history of pervasive testing
| culture in the Rails ecosystem, I can only assume there
| must exist some quiet mutual agreement to keep some
| history swept under what must be quite a large rug. Oh, I
| remember the same enormous amount of lip service about
| testing that you do! And I also remember what it was like
| to try to integrate a dependency into a Rails project in
| 2012, because that was a fair bit of what swore me off
| the platform. Rails was _famously_ the home of dogshit
| engineering practice in its day, every bit as much as
| PHP, excepting only among the coterie of too-good-for-
| finance Boston hipsters who invented the thing, and
| benefited from all the same traditional software
| engineering training and practice they built a culture
| (and, coincidentally, a reputedly quite lucrative
| consulting practice) around decrying. Just saying "I saw
| good Rails back in the day" thus really isn't
| dispositive.
|
| They were young, so was I, we all make some bad decisions
| at that age, it's fine, I don't care. But none of us is
| young any more, and as an aging hipster once said,
| there's nothing more contemptible than an aging hipster.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| First, props for your candor. It's refreshing.
|
| I do wonder if Rails is so bad compared to other frameworks
| that it deserves such a distinct treatment.
|
| Over the decades I've worked with at least half a dozen
| popular frameworks that fit this description, is the same
| for you or is Rails truly unique in this regard?
| throwanem wrote:
| Rails is uniquely compromised by its history and by its
| language of implementation. Ruby is good for many things.
| Writing maintainable software in the absence of
| conventions enforced by shotgun is none of them. And
| Ruby's American fanbase gets off way too much on holding
| the shotgun.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Worse than Python (without Typing)?
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| 100% yes. Python mostly encourages simple, stupid code.
| Code that you can still read while 2 beers in. Rails, on
| the other hand, encourages being as clever as possible at
| all times. Forget about local side effects when any part
| of the codebase can just reach in and patch another part
| of the codebase.
| throwanem wrote:
| Exactly so.
|
| I'm not actually averse to a programming environment
| where the only ground truth is the running image. I love
| that kind of environment! In my _editor,_ where worst
| case I dump some state when I restart, and I can just
| _not_ play such dangerous games when on call or there
| otherwise exists a risk of winning such stupid prizes.
| Production has _rules._ Or it had better.
|
| That said, if you want me to go back to dynamic typing,
| there's a fee. The grass really is a lot greener over
| here.
| whstl wrote:
| That's also my perspective.
|
| Debugging can be extremely hard when there are multiple
| complex frameworks/libraries doing magic stuff, plus
| extensions by the current team.
|
| In practice this is all very convenient when you're
| writing the code, but not so much when you have a
| production issue.
| 9rx wrote:
| The thing about Rails is that it does one thing really
| well and beyond that you are completely on your own.
| Without incredible discipline, this becomes a problem
| because people tend to fall in love with how well it does
| that one thing and start dreaming up how their other
| problems that inevitably show up in a project of any
| meaningful complexity can be solved with the same kind of
| 'magic'. But they don't have the multiple decades of
| refinement and literal thousands of developers supporting
| their solution to give it the same polish that the Rails
| core has. Which means that, with almost certainty, what
| they come up with is going to be a nightmare.
|
| The best of the best developers may have the resolve
| necessary to ignore their emotions and stick to writing
| 'magic-less' code when they move past the one thing Rails
| does well, but most projects are going to land in the
| laps of most developers who aren't that. I am sure we can
| find counterexamples of where exceptionally skilled teams
| have been able to wrangle Rails, but the exceptions do
| not make the rule.
|
| On the other hand, when beginning in a place where
| writing ugly, boring, but at the same time usable code is
| the norm, even the average developer tends to stick with
| it when they need to do things that are "off the Rails".
| They don't have the original enamourment to get caught up
| in. There are plenty of developers who can still manage
| to screw this up too, but, again, exceptions do not make
| the rule.
|
| Rails is just a tool, of course. The outcome ultimately
| is down to the operator. _But_ there is a certain
| psychology at play that introduces difficulty. It is kind
| of like giving the average daily commuter, who is a
| perfectly fine driver under normal circumstances, a
| supercar with features they can fall in love with. In
| theory it 's just a car to drive as they normally do, but
| they're bound to do something stupid with it when the
| emotions take over.
| jfinnery wrote:
| After a lot of consideration of this question (I have
| also all-but written off Rails work, after doing a lot of
| it) I think it's a combination of two things, one
| technical, one business-social:
|
| 1) Rails and Ruby will gladly let you make an absolute
| garbage fire out of your codebase, while it still
| technically works, and discovering how exactly the
| garbage fire is structured so you can start trying to put
| it out is unusually difficult in Rails. You don't _have
| to_ make it a garbage fire, but they won 't do a single
| thing to discourage it, and once it's bad, it's hard for
| an outsider to show up and figure out how to fix it,
| because of how the framework and language are designed.
|
| 2) Rails is often chosen by very price-sensitive
| companies trying to move fast, as cheaply as possible.
| This means high turnover, lots of enthusiastic juniors,
| outsourcing (often passing through _multiple_ outsourced
| teams...) and often mediocre or poor management
| oversight.
|
| The result is that a high proportion of Rails codebases
| in the wild are both remarkably terrible and
| impractically difficult to restore to some non-terrible
| state (i.e. they're the kind of cases where the right
| call _really is_ to just start over--one of the things
| that makes them hard to work with is that a bad rails
| codebase is especially hard to rewrite-in-place, it 's
| just a ground-up replacement job usually, but you won't
| actually be allowed to do that because see again: price
| sensitive, so you'll just live with an awful pace of
| development and poor application performance while
| management gets increasingly frustrated by the outcomes
| of their own choices)
| randmeerkat wrote:
| This must be a god level troll post.
| throwanem wrote:
| I was asked for an opinion and I gave one. Don't make too
| much of it. Rails devotees can't stand hearing a bad word
| about their baby, they always make a fuss.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| I've seen poorly-built code on rails circa 2014, and I've
| seen Rails done pretty well circa-2025. I'd say rails is
| pretty neutral. Saying it's PHP bad seems a bit much, but
| hey.
|
| The worst code I've ever seen by a country mile though
| was a huge Python 2 code base written on an old version
| of Tornado circa 2012, a library that basically hacked
| the Python language to get code to run asynchronously,
| but you had to contort yourself into knots to get it. You
| couldn't just call other async functions/methods, you had
| to `yield func()` when calling them. To return from a
| function, you couldn't use `return` you had to _throw an
| exception of type Tornado.Return_. Absolutely insane way
| to write code.
|
| Then all the business logic written on top of this
| bizarre framework was terrible. Half of the code broke
| the rules I just mentioned but still half-worked
| sometimes, but would perform terribly or have mysterious
| problems.
|
| One of my greatest accomplishments was getting it all to
| Python3 then onto more sane async-style code.
| throwanem wrote:
| I didn't say Rails was PHP bad, but if you'd asked I
| would say it is worse. Both have awful ergonomics that
| make mistakes easy, but at least with PHP it's hard to be
| foolish in a way that's very clever. Ruby meanwhile will
| happily hand you more than enough rope to David Carradine
| yourself before you really even notice, and the DHH/Katz
| crowd took full advantage.
| pianoben wrote:
| One of the largest codebases I've ever worked on,
| generating billions in revenue every year to this day, is
| in Rails. Over a thousand hands have touched it, and none
| of the original people are still around to hold an empire.
|
| I'm with you on the general lack of discipline _enforced_
| by Rails; this codebase isn 't fun to maintain, precisely
| for that reason. All the same, I don't think your critique
| is fair or even that accurate.
|
| But that's from my POV working at bigger companies. Maybe
| it looks different as a freelancer for smaller shops.
| throwanem wrote:
| By the sound of it, your POV working at _one_ big
| company. The codebases I 've worked on that did similar
| ARR numbers with similar depths of commit history were in
| Javascript and TypeScript, so "your argument is invalid,"
| right? Why not? It's just what you said and my
| credentials are better. What's the most in revenue one
| second of your life was ever worth? For me that's about
| $35k. But no, you go ahead, try to big league me with
| numbers some more.
|
| If you think my critique is unjust or inaccurate, then
| attack it, not my standing to speak on the subject.
| Especially not when I'm the more forthcoming of the two
| of us when it comes to professional history, anyway; mine
| is findable from my HN profile, while you prefer true
| pseudonymy. To argue from authority as you've tried is
| quite risible with none of that even in evidence, don't
| you think?
| pianoben wrote:
| I don't mean to say one of us has better bona-fides, only
| that there is an existence proof to the contrary of your
| post. You claim that rails' lack of discipline promotes
| unmaintainable code shepherded by empire-builders; I
| claim that this is not always so. I gave the numbers I
| did to emphasize that rails (and rails shops) can succeed
| even at that scale.
|
| Not sure what I said that came off as an attack on you or
| your standing. Not my intent.
| throwanem wrote:
| You should work on that. Technical discussion would I
| think better resume from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44254539 But I
| haven't said no Rails project ever meets _its_ definition
| of success. I assumed the scare quotes in my earlier
| comment would suffice to indicate my argument intended to
| contradict that definition.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I don't see an attack either, FWIW
| bigtunacan wrote:
| Hard disagree. I work on one of the largest Rails codebases
| out there. Millions of lines of code running in a monolith.
| I have learned more in this shop about scaling,
| observability, mature system designs, zero downtime
| upgrades, deploys, etc...
|
| I been in this field for almost 30 years and have worked
| with whatever tech the job required. Still I learned more
| at a Rails shop with more than 200 engineers all working in
| the same monolith shipping to production multiple times
| every day.
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm well aware there is a large Rails shop with famously
| strong engineering practices, which I believe deserve
| much credit that accrues for some reason instead to the
| framework.
| jfinnery wrote:
| Can confirm, I'd charge a laaaarge premium to ever work on
| an existing Rails codebase again.
|
| Did it several times over a period of 15 years and they
| were always a wreck and unreasonably painful to work with.
| Every single time.
|
| I'd start a _green field_ one, no problem, provided I get
| veto on gem choices ( "Let's use some twee fucking template
| language that's a ton worse-performing than the default and
| doesn't let you programmatically control nesting levels /
| end tags because it's terribly designed" yeah how about we
| _don 't_ do that because it's going to make my life a
| living hell) without charging a premium. But no more
| onboarding to rails codebases without enough money to make
| it worth my hating every second of work for the (assuredly
| short) duration.
|
| ... and I _like_ Ruby!
| __s wrote:
| I've worked with Ruby. It was a delight. But it has to be
| maintained, dynamic typing loses upfront safety & allows for
| a mess where you have to analyse the whole program to have
| any idea what some function is expected to take in & put out
|
| I'm glad static typing came back
| throwanem wrote:
| Ruby is a fine toy and an awful tool, the _other_ Perl that
| Python killed.
|
| Rails should have incurred some kind of criminal
| indictment.
|
| I wish I hadn't mentioned either, because now no one will
| talk about anything else.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Analyze the whole program? I steadfastly refused to ever
| attempt do that. "method(:foo).source_location" from the
| Rails console and I've got the only answer that matters.
| Most functions were monkey patched at least once anyways,
| so you'd never know by searching for the implementation
| where it was.
| zbentley wrote:
| But like...this is very telling, no? If major conventions
| in a language involve runtime debugging/printing actions
| to just find out _where a method is defined_ (and your
| approach here is the norm in every Ruby codebase I've
| worked on; this isn't an attack on you in the slightest)
| that doesn't say anything good about the Ruby ecosystem.
|
| Hell, just finding out _what methods can be called_ from
| a given code location is something that most Rubyists
| I've met answer either with a runtime debugger or hard-
| fought and non-transferable memory about a particular
| piece of code.
|
| Like, I don't need perfectly accurate programmatically-
| available answers to those questions in my IDE (though
| that would be nice). I'm fine reading code and working it
| out if things are added via reflection/metaprogramming.
| But if the domain of code to read to determine those
| things is "who knows/could be anything in the codebase or
| dependencies", this is a poor quality tool and/or
| community.
|
| If you read that and think I'm complaining about one
| specific instance, codebase, or Ruby community habit, I
| promise I'm not. It's not about the 2014 obsession with
| "DSL"s (that aren't really DSLs); it's not about
| method_missing, open classes, pervasive monkey patching,
| and so on. It's about all those things, and more, and the
| overwhelming _enthusiasm_ (with no small side of
| smugness) with which the Ruby ecosystem doubles down on
| them constantly.
|
| Is it the language itself? The community? I don't know,
| but I know there are plenty of equivalently capable
| alternatives to both, and that's enough for me to avoid
| the hell out of Ruby and Rubyists for a long time to
| come.
|
| Is Ruby the worst? No, that honor goes to a multimillion
| line Perl monolith worked on by far too many not-as-
| clever-as-they-thought-they-were people over far too
| long. But all the Ruby I've worked on is close enough to
| that experience to make me question the choice of tool.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Came back? Everyone and their cousin is falling over
| themselves to get on the AI train[1], and spending
| incomprehensible amounts of energy trying to "lint" their
| way to sanity as if the python ecosystem isn't fighting
| tooth and nail to "be dynamic"
|
| So, yeah, I look forward to the cycle tacking in the other
| direction but today ain't it
|
| 1: to say nothing of the fact that model servers exist so
| why the fuck are you writing business logic in a language
| that DGAF just because your data scientists have a hard-on
| for pytorch
| glenngillen wrote:
| As evidenced by the other replies by OP, it's a hyperbolic
| and bad take. There's plenty of companies doing just fine
| with Rails codebases. Many of which are a decade or more old
| now and have done just fine with the inter generational
| transfer that happens due to natural employee attrition and
| haven't been held hostage by one or two all-knowing
| engineers.
| throwanem wrote:
| I said "empire builders," not "engineers." Nor did I say
| "held hostage."
|
| My perspective on this is that of a working engineer who
| made a deliberate choice, now nearly 15 years ago, to avoid
| ending up stuck in the same decreasing-radius career spiral
| I saw Rails leading me toward - so I went and did some
| other things, then spent a decade building modern
| TypeScript instead, mostly on Kubernetes, without losing
| the ability to knock out a quick one-off script or
| architect a system top to bottom as I need. It's worked out
| splendidly for me! I suppose I might have done as well if I
| decided differently, but I admit I don't see how.
| alexjplant wrote:
| Ruby is only just now getting static typing and Rails has a
| lot of "magic" as part of its value prop. If you're trying to
| launch something of low to medium complexity quickly and stay
| on the happy path of the tools in the ecosystem then it works
| great. The lack of rigor from dynamic typing and latitude
| afforded by Ruby's expressive syntax can quickly become a
| footgun though.
|
| My pet theory is that LLM coding is going to give the upper
| hand to more verbose languages like Golang or Typescript
| because more of the execution flow will end up explicitly in
| the LLM's context. Convention over configuration-type
| frameworks ruled when one-person code bulldozers shipped MVPs
| but Continue is upending this paradigm.
| throwanem wrote:
| I wouldn't really call it a pet theory at this point; HN's
| front page daily further shows that LLMs suck at magic and
| excel at boring code, seeming quite immune to boredom. But
| I would argue what makes the difference for LLMs is not
| verbosity but locality, whether syntactic or analytical ie
| whether the type is just written here or you have an LSP
| server to query for it, the distinction is, being able to
| point to an arbitrary symbol and get lots of rich context
| about it.
|
| It's a game changer for human devs also, and not really one
| I would expect a serious Rails habitue to necessarily
| evaluate in a way that's reliable. What did someone call
| that once, the "Blub Paradox?" Silly name, but that's this
| industry for you.
| amackera wrote:
| Can you expand on why you avoid Rails? I'm legitimately
| curious!
|
| Edit: I see your other replies, nvm!
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| I found a correlation between Rails and lower salaries. Not
| sure why though. I was actively looking to move to Rails for
| a change of scenery, until I realised it comes with a tax.
| throwanem wrote:
| I mean, if you want to tie your fortunes to one team and
| company forever, then sure, it can make sense.
|
| I've had decades like that in my career, which began in the
| nineties. It would be nice to have another such decade; I
| don't _enjoy_ always keeping one eye on the exit and my
| back to the wall, rather than being able to count on a
| given environment to stay stable enough long enough with
| enough upside to really repay my investment.
|
| This doesn't feel to me like such a decade, though. Too
| much is changing too fast.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| What country were you searching in? I'm an American work-
| from-home Rails + React engineer (admittedly with 12 years
| of experience), and I'm in the 96th % income bracket for
| individuals of my age (mid-40s). And I just started this
| position a month or two ago, so it's not like I got this
| job during the time of ZIRP.
|
| IMO it completely depends on the company you're working
| for. I've seen job ads targeting my skill level offering
| $200k/year, and others offering $130k or even less. There
| will always be companies out there either trying to lowball
| people, or who genuinely don't operate in a vertical which
| is profitable enough to pay top-band salaries.
| throwanem wrote:
| What's the delta on Rails + React vs Rails without?
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| The delta in terms of salary? The median is roughly
| similar, maybe a slight edge for Rails + React depending
| on region or company. But the big difference is volume.
| There are way more Rails + React roles out there, and the
| Rails-only ones tend to be more variable in scope, stack,
| and compensation.
|
| On the developer experience side, I haven't worked
| extensively with the latest versions of Rails, so I don't
| have a strong opinion yet on whether Hotwire provides a
| better frontend experience than React. That said, people
| I respect in the Rails community speak highly of the
| Hotwire approach to building modern, interactive UIs
| without the overhead of a full SPA. I'm sure I could pick
| it up with a little effort, but it's not a top priority
| for me right now.
|
| From a technical perspective, my sense is that teams
| adopting or reverting to a pure Rails stack, especially
| with Hotwire, tend to be more conscientious about keeping
| versions up-to-date, and generally more opinionated and
| deliberate about tech choices. A few years ago, replacing
| Rails views with React SPAs was not uncommon. But now
| that Rails has caught up with tools like Turbo and
| Stimulus, some teams are intentionally moving back toward
| server-driven UIs.
|
| In terms of employability, most of the job listings I
| came across during my recent search were still Rails +
| React. And given that being fluent in multiple tech
| stacks broadens my opportunities, I plan to stay in the
| Rails + React camp for now.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Australia. Typ would be 50k converted to USD when I was
| looking a few years ago.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Rails is so good that all the issues become political until you
| get to stupid large scale.
| busterarm wrote:
| Such an insightful comment and the most underestimated
| feature of Rails.
| throwanem wrote:
| It does cause serious problems if you ever start needing
| engineers, though, unless you're a better politician than
| people who imagine themselves skillful politicians almost
| ever are.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| Oh no, where will you find people with some web
| fundamentals who are able to learn a crud framework.
| throwanem wrote:
| Yeah, yeah. In a year or two it will probably be in
| fashion to say "dev" or something again. I'm talking
| about the other kind, the one that's recently been
| fashionable to call "staff" or "architect."
| danaris wrote:
| I dunno; maybe I'm hopelessly naive or out of touch, but I'd
| pay attention to the compensation, benefits, work environment,
| and colleagues to know whether this is a place I'd actually
| like working at _long_ before I pay attention to whether this
| is a job that always uses the latest cutting-edge tech so I can
| make sure my resume has the best words in it for the _next_ job
| I look for...
| throwanem wrote:
| Unless desperate, why would I have accepted an offer or taken
| a contract if all of those didn't already seem in line? Why
| would you have?
|
| The thing is, people can lie about all of those, but whatever
| social problems exist in the environment will invariably be
| evident in the code.
|
| What's the old saw about how if you have four teams working
| on a compiler, you'll get a four-pass compiler? Conway's law
| [1], that's the one. That one works in both directions. When
| you're reading code that seems like it would be 0.1x as
| complicated if any of the people involved in writing it ever
| spoke to one another, the wise engineer new to this
| environment begins asking, _why do these people never speak
| to one another?_ But not too loud!
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
| danaris wrote:
| ......and the tech stack is usually obvious in the _job
| posting_.
|
| If it's that vitally important to you to only work at jobs
| with tech stacks that will "advance your career" beyond
| that job, why would you even _apply_ to a job that doesn 't
| show one you consider worthy?
| throwanem wrote:
| Why indeed? Some of my very first quotably direct words
| in this thread were "I don't care about your stack:"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44253569
|
| I made an exception for one specific technology that in
| my experience draws a particularly intolerable crowd,
| while offering peculiarly poor pay to make up for the
| unusual degree of tolerance for abuse that is required to
| navigate the social dysfunctions such people invariably
| create and foster. What gets so up your nose about that,
| anyway?
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| > That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the
| way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn't know
| (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had
| become.
|
| Yeah, yet their job listed a bunch of shiny "modern" cloud
| stuff they were doing, but they actually have three busted
| serverless functions and some dusty Java IBM Websphere things
| floating around running the whole business, while the job
| description listed 432 different things they were "looking
| for".
| fn-mote wrote:
| I think the depth of relationship with a job is more complex than
| comments and the article talk about.
|
| What is you reaction to the kind-of-shitty company that gives you
| an opportunity for great personal growth and creativity?
|
| Great colleagues but a real monoculture?
|
| ///
|
| I liked most of TFA but the end where the author claims that
| management is more committed than IC's seems _really_ strange to
| me. Is that something people look for? It seems like it would
| come across as totally fake cheerleading. Anyway, outside my
| experience.
| tomlockwood wrote:
| For me it generally takes six months, because as a reflection on
| my own headspace, it takes that long for me to trust that my
| intuition isn't just imposter syndrome/anxiety.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Good article. Very grounded. Sometimes a job sucks, but not
| enough to justify immediately job hopping and you just check out
| and take the payslip each month. Agreed it takes about a week for
| my gut intuition to work itself out, then if it's bad you just
| need to decide whether it's something you can stick out for
| awhile or if you need to leave ASAP.
| homeonthemtn wrote:
| I've suffered so many fools that I just consider that to be a
| practical part of standard work.
|
| Question is what is the value of suffering these fools? New
| skill? New perspective? What's the result of this transaction?
|
| That to me is what defines staying power. If there's just no
| value, or a bad imbalance of toil to value, it's time to go.
| crowcroft wrote:
| You can usually find out if a job is wrong for you within days,
| sometimes hours.
|
| You might never know for sure if a job is right for you though.
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| something something law of excluded middle
| petesergeant wrote:
| and sometimes before starting ... at two weeks' out, they'd had
| to change the salary offer (down) because they had screwed up
| the salary calculation, expressed surprise I'd said I planned
| to use the unlimited vacation policy to take a fixed four weeks
| a year (they felt it was a lot), changed the offer from
| employee to contractor, referred me to their accountant for
| what was really the simplest of accounting queries, sent me an
| equity calculator with an assumption of a $10bn sale price, and
| some other weird stuff. Really should have known better, and
| only lasted a few months -- my old company reached out to check
| I was happy in the new role, and had me back within a fortnight
| of checking in.
| jll29 wrote:
| A good smell test for a job that isn't right for you is whether
| you ask yourself if it is the right job early on, or if you
| even have thoughts of quitting in the first year/month/week,
| apart from being overwhelmed by all the new faces.
|
| The only "bad" job that I had was with a very good company
| (wonderful people, great benefits, just the code absolutely
| sucked), so that was making the decision very hard to quit. In
| larger corporations, one might be able to engineer moving
| departments if that helps.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I remember finding my predecessor's lunch in my desk drawer
| on the first day at one job. He had left several months
| before so it definitely failed the smell test.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > The only "bad" job that I had was with a very good company
| (wonderful people, great benefits, just the code absolutely
| sucked),
|
| I'm sort of in this situation right now
|
| Lots of good things about the people, the pay, the benefits
|
| But man
|
| We are a "microservice" architecture with something like 5x
| more git repos than software devs
|
| It's a nightmare
| timzaman wrote:
| Bad take. Depends on the situation, sometimes it takes a while to
| find your gig. Ignore OP
| parpfish wrote:
| i worry that i've job hopped a bit too much and have a series of
| 2-3yr gigs on my resume.
|
| part of my problem is that I get unhappy (or bored) with a job
| but sit in denial for too long. so by the time I start looking
| for a new position, I'll desperately jump headfirst into a new
| gig instead of lining up the _perfect_ gig.
|
| Or maybe not. maybe it's impossible to tell if a place is a good
| fit from the interview.
| mastazi wrote:
| 2-3 yr gigs in 2025 is completely OK, we're not in the 80's and
| people are not expected to work many years for an employer,
| especially in the modern workplace where the "normal" way to
| get a promotion is job hopping.
|
| FWIW I have several shorter gigs in my resume. A combination of
| me being still young and not evaluating things correctly, and
| employers not being honest about working conditions. I even
| once stayed at one job for less than 2 months, but to be honest
| I have left that one out of my CV.
|
| One more thing: I've been on the hiring side a few times and I
| have observed that candidates with very long gigs (5+ years in
| the same job) are often seen negatively (Why did they stay in
| the same job for 6 years? Do they lack ambition? Don't they
| like a new challenge? Etc.)
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| Same company same title for 5 years is slacker zone. Same
| company getting promoted is a good sign. 10 jobs in 10 years
| is a never ever.
| mastazi wrote:
| You're right I should have clarified that - in my previous
| example, by "same job" I meant same company AND same title.
| If you have promotions over time, then of course it's fine
| to stay with the same company for many years. In my
| experience this is becoming rare nowadays but might be more
| common depending on industry & location
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| > One more thing: I've been on the hiring side a few times
| and I have observed that candidates with very long gigs (5+
| years in the same job) are often seen negatively (Why did
| they stay in the same job for 6 years? Do they lack ambition?
| Don't they like a new challenge? Etc.)
|
| Even so, there's some companies with notorious reputations
| for culling staff (often only loosely correlating with
| performance). I'd be wary of hiring someone with long tenure
| from one of those places, to survive, you have to be a
| certain type of ruthless.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Is it realistic to find a perfect fit job right now?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I'm the same as you. A series of 2-3 year gigs. Some I left
| because I was bored and not getting any new challenges. Some I
| was laid off from. Some I left because for some reason
| everything I enjoyed about the job fell apart. My favorite
| coworkers left, the executives clawed back all the nice perks,
| etc
|
| I'm in this situation right now. Just passed the three year
| mark and the new executive team is starting a rodeo
|
| I honestly feel very down on myself, as if I'm incapable of
| staying at a job more than 3 years. Like I'm making excuses for
| moving on, not reacting to a change in reality
| LinuxAmbulance wrote:
| Don't feel down on yourself in the least. Two to three years
| is a good run in the tech industry.
|
| If I'm not learning new things that will get me the next
| better job that's a rung up the ladder, there's no point in
| staying. I've never had a job where that's the case three
| years in.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I hear this quite a bit, and I appreciate it, but it is
| still difficult to shake off the feeling I'm defective. My
| Dad worked at a Tool Store for 25 years, you know?
|
| Also the company I'm currently at boasts a lot of engineers
| who have been with the company 10+ years, some who have for
| 20+. It's an abnormal software company for sure
| parpfish wrote:
| I feel this.
|
| I can't help but feel like I'm being some soft and prissy
| when I switch jobs after a couple of years. Previous
| generations worked jobs they hated for decades and got
| paid way worse than I do. Why can't I just deal with it?
| It's a _job_ , it's not supposed to be fun it's supposed
| to be a thing I do in exchange for money.
| calrain wrote:
| I find that I pick companies to work with when my goals and their
| goals align.
|
| I visualize this alignment like two boats travelling on the ocean
| together, with a rope that runs between them, connecting them.
|
| When the alignment is strong, the tension on the rope is low, and
| it's a great place to work at.
|
| But over time, the direction of either party can change, and it
| results in a better alignment, or a drift from each other that
| starts to put the rope under increasing tension.
|
| It's possible that the tension on the rope is good, and your
| trajectory will adjust. But due to the size of the company it's
| unlikely your small boat can adjust the heading of the company,
| but you might succeed, if you try.
|
| The key is to know when the rope is about to break, and then
| disconnect from that company and start the process again with
| another company, aligned in your direction.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > The key is to know when the rope is about to break, and then
| disconnect from that company and start the process again with
| another company, aligned in your direction
|
| This post helped me a lot tonight, thank you
|
| I've been feeling this tension building like crazy over the
| past few months as my employer has been pushing AI mandates and
| metrics hard. It's been making me miserable, my productivity is
| crashing and I wish I could ask them to just lay me off already
| so I can move on
|
| I am very discouraged about the job market right now and I do
| not relish jobhunting at the moment, but I think you're right.
| It's time to move on for my own sake and try to find something
| new
| calrain wrote:
| Not a problem, being able to put a story to what you are
| feeling is important.
|
| You control when to disconnect from the company, that's 100%
| in your power.
|
| Happy sailing!
| quesera wrote:
| This also works for people, but sometimes you choose a longer
| rope. :)
| methuselah_in wrote:
| Well, i guess it also depends on how much your coworkers are
| helpful to you as well. Because there are times some people are
| kinda introvert and they require a bit of more time to settle
| down. In certain situations you end up looking for work from home
| jobs as well. But that's just my perspective.
| ch33zer wrote:
| This isn't at all a rebuttal of the post, more a different
| perspective. I started a new job while basically deeply
| depressed. It colored all my opinions of the company and my
| coworkers. As I'm coming out of that through a combination of
| medication and intensive CBT I'm realizing that a lot of the
| negativity I felt towards my job was the result of the
| depression. As things improve I'm realizing that the job is
| mostly neutral but my impression of it was colored by my mental
| health struggles. This isn't at all to say not to take the
| authors advice, just take care of yourself and be aware of the
| possibility that you may be distorting reality if there's any
| chance you're depressed
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| On the other hand, some studies show that mildly depressed
| people have a more accurate model of the world. So what if you
| were right about your job initially, and the CBT is basically
| just gaslighting you into spinning things in a positive way?
| incompleteCode wrote:
| Mildly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What does mildly
| depressed mean?
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| The idea that there are varying degrees of depression is
| not a difficult concept to grasp.
| BostonFern wrote:
| Functioning, presumably.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| It is a well established clinical term. It's not doing any
| heavy lifting.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Assuming that is true, does a more negative way of viewing
| things actually benefit you (even if it would be slightly
| more "accurate")?
|
| If one has a choice (that means if there is no case of
| clinical depression):
|
| At least anecdotally a bit of optimism improves my life
| quality a lot and results in a higher productivity, proactive
| solution finding and a more pleasant work environment.
| Constantly looking at the negative side of things (with a
| healthy serving of snark) contributes, in my opinion, to
| burnout and fatigue.
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| It's not difficult to imagine a number of scenarios where
| that perspective could bite you in the ass.
|
| If you have a false impression of a person's character
| because you've jedi mindtricked yourself into not thinking
| the worst of people, you might end up trusting an
| untrustworthy person.
|
| If you are in a toxic work environment, and you convince
| yourself it's not so bad, you might end up staying in a
| situation that is actively harming you.
|
| We are speaking in the abstract and I can't comment on
| anyone else's experience. But I personally find toxic
| positivity and the endless drive to be more productive much
| more dangerous than being too negative.
| mlsu wrote:
| The counterpoint is that seeing things "as they are"
| (which is the mind of a depressed person -- ask me how I
| know) can lead you to not give people the benefit of the
| doubt, it can lead you to be miserly, unmerciful,
| pessimistic, cowardly. There is always a reason to be
| distrustful. But the only way good things can happen in
| your life is to be generous with your spirit and you
| should seek to do so as a matter of course, even if the
| rational part of your mind has inhibitions.
|
| This isn't to say, be foolish. But on the other hand, the
| mindset that leads to this kind of deprivation can be
| more difficult to cure, since it always appears from a
| place of rationality.
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| The problem with these kinds of discussions is, we tend
| to get more abstract and further and further away from
| real-world examples. And it all hinges on what you
| actually value. I could come up with positive adjectives
| for every single negative attribute you listed. I can
| only speak for myself when I say that I have never
| regretted not giving someone the benefit of the doubt. I
| have regretted the contrary. Good things often just
| happen to people because of chance, and they attribute it
| to some mystical property of the universe--generosity of
| the spirit, for example. Conversely, being generous does
| not guarantee that good things will happen to you. I'm
| afraid it's far more random than most are willing to
| admit.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| > If you are in a toxic work environment, and you
| convince yourself it's not so bad, you might end up
| staying in a situation that is actively harming you.
|
| I hate a toxic work environment too, but let's be real,
| everything is fake at software companies, so there is no
| "harm" happening if you stay. So what if leadership is
| terrible, if you can play their little games, take their
| money, and not tailspin into a depression... congrats?
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| There's a mental cost to that. Essentially having to put
| on a mask and performatively "play their little games" is
| taxing. Some are better at it than others. But in those
| quiet moments, don't you ask yourself what percentage of
| your life you have to be a different person?
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I ask myself a lot of things, but they all require money
| to do. This is just the society we made, you do some shit
| that doesn't matter for a few decades, get some money,
| then go do whatever you want. I'm fine with it. Would I
| rather not do it? Absolutely!
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| I'm saying there's a cost to that mentality. There's a
| personal cost, which is you giving up a part of yourself
| --not just your time, but your personality--to grow your
| net worth. And there's a societal cost to this level of
| cynicism being so pervasive. When the intellectual
| laborers of a society just go through the motions instead
| of being invested in what they do, the society as a whole
| suffers.
|
| If you have to repeat thought eliminating cliches to
| justify this, it seems like there's a level of self
| deception going on. The chickens will come home to roost
| eventually.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Oh you're assuming I just go through the motions. I do
| care about the craft of my work. Eh okay.
| bustling-noose wrote:
| I agree. While depression and negativity leads you to see
| things practically rather than in an optimistic and hopeful
| way, the quality of life and satisfaction in a little
| optimistic world is much better. I am yet to read Daniel
| Kahneman but he talks about optimism a lot.
| mettamage wrote:
| I recommend Martin Seligman. I've read some of Kahneman's
| academic work. Martin Seligman changed my life with
| Learned Optimism.
| bustling-noose wrote:
| Sounds like my next read. Thinking fast and slow was
| something I just started but it seems like something I
| want to read when I'm functioning better.
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| My preferred modality: "Pessimism of the intellect,
| optimism of the will."
| moffkalast wrote:
| The trick is to be positive about yourself and the people
| you can trust, but slightly negative about the world at
| large.
| vermilingua wrote:
| Unfortunately the one of the tricks of severe depression
| is to make you feel like that circle of people you can
| trust is ever-shrinking.
| lazide wrote:
| Sometimes, unfortunately, it also is true.
|
| The issue with all of these is that if something is a
| problem, it's probably because it's maladaptive to the
| actual circumstances someone is in.
|
| And for the same reason 'no one can tell if you're a dog'
| online, no one can tell if what you're feeling is
| actually useful/adaptive or not, especially if the common
| root to many of the actual disorders is various degrees
| of bias/delusion
| benji-york wrote:
| Personally, I employ/enjoy a highly skeptical form of
| optimism.
|
| I think things could be great, but there are many obstacles
| along the way to be aware of.
| nindalf wrote:
| That's the kind of optimistic attitude I'd expect from
| Emperor Vespasian, builder of the Colosseum. You're role-
| playing your persona really well!
| rxtexit wrote:
| It isn't true, it is obvious bullshit.
|
| It is like making the argument that the most accurate view
| of life is doing nothing because we are all going to die
| anyway.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| That may be a subset of people, you also don't need to be
| depressed to have an accurate view of the world
|
| There exists another subset of people that merely tolerate
| the overly optimistic general populace and don't need that as
| a coping mechanism to understand and mold the world
| bustling-noose wrote:
| I would like to add to this. I have been depressed since I
| was a teenager. Anxiety Panic attacks, poor sleep, s*ci*l
| tendencies. I was able to finally get a job at 29 and first 3
| months into it, I realized this is not a right fit and the
| company and its management is chaotic at best. It was a red
| flag right from the start but I ignored it because I was
| desperate for a WFH job. After 3 years of therapy, my views
| had changed that it's not so bad (something that I think the
| optimistic view changed). I was also looking to move to North
| America so I kept stalling to find a new job but that was a
| different thing. After I slipped back into depression a while
| ago, I again started seriously considering quitting because
| now in 3 years the company has grown somehow and some of the
| employees are really toxic. In 3-5 months I seriously want to
| quit this time whether I switch or no as I will complete 4
| years at a company I never planned on working beyond 6
| months. So there might be some truth to this. When I am
| depressed I see all the realistic things going on. When I am
| doing well I tend to ignore lot of the red flags.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| The studies don't show they have a more accurate model of the
| world. The studies overwhelming only test the immediate
| judgements of their own behaviour and performance.
|
| The more limited studies with different methodologies have
| found their judgement of other people's behaviour and
| performance is wrong. And that if you ask them after a delay
| (e.g. forcing them to use recall) instead of immediately,
| they are also wrong.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more
| accurate model of the world
|
| This is called the "depressive realism" hypothesis and
| there's more evidence against it than for it.
|
| The studies don't show "more accurate model of the world"
| like the depressive realism pushers claim. They show isolated
| things like depressed patients performing slightly better in
| some arbitrary gamified task. There are studies that have the
| results going the other way, too.
|
| It's well understood that depressive episodes cause cognitive
| distortions that lead to overestimating the effort required
| for tasks, underestimating how easily things can be changed
| for the better, or ruminating on things that don't matter.
| geysersam wrote:
| What is even an "accurate model of the world" in this
| context? Isn't it all just perception and impression and
| interpretation?
|
| For example, a depressed person might think: "this company is
| shit and will go under in 6 months because my coworkers and
| management are so incompetent and malicious"
|
| Let's say their prediction was true. Good job!
|
| What if the depressed person missed that there were a couple
| of people at the office who actually were not incompetent and
| malicious, maybe people they would enjoy to get to know. What
| if there were opportunities to learn interesting things while
| the company crashed and burned.
|
| To determine what worldview is most realistic you _have_ to
| weigh what aspects of reality are most significant.
| cweld510 wrote:
| What does it mean for someone's model of the world to be
| accurate? My experience with mild depression is that you
| notice many negative things which are true but then lack
| perspective about how much they matter. When you feel better
| you just don't pay any mind to these negative things.
| whstl wrote:
| I'd argue that you can still have an accurate model of the
| world without the depression part.
|
| I can't back it up but recovering from depression by simply
| putting "rose colored glasses" is a recipe for bouncing back
| later. Happened to me.
|
| In HN's case: admitting that companies are quite toxic and
| more often than not working against you, that most people
| around you is probably an incompetent if put under a
| microscope and that the things you're working on aren't
| exactly changing the world for the better.
|
| The trick perhaps is not letting those things make you
| cynical, and not acting on them. And forgetting yourself
| because you're also a bit incompetent too, so you can let you
| and everyone else off the hook.
| McAlpine5892 wrote:
| > admitting that companies are quite toxic and more often
| than not working against you, that most people around you
| is probably an incompetent if put under a microscope and
| that the things you're working on aren't exactly changing
| the world for the better
|
| It would be so much easier to deal with if I wasn't
| surrounded by people, especially management, that act like
| we're on a mission from $DEITY. Seriously, I can get over
| on working on whatever inane unimportant thing. It's the
| entire circus acting like we're not that drives me nuts.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine plumbers get talks
| along the lines of "We're top-notch leaders in our industry
| for fitting pipes! True innovators. Pushing the envelope.
| We are world-renowned for our culture and are continually
| pushing the limits of what's possible. Every day we inspire
| people to live their best lives and be their true selves. "
| Add on to that, plumbers are actually important! And they
| know it.
|
| Related: did you do anything specific to help with your
| depression? I've been getting into TMS / ketamine /
| whatever else territory for mine.
| cardanome wrote:
| CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But
| then, if it helps you cope, so what?
|
| It is the same with religion. Even though gods objectively do
| not exist, at least not in a literal sense, it can still help
| people to cope better with their life and be an overall
| positive force. Or extremely harmful when abused.
|
| The world is pretty depressing. Everyone is telling
| themselves little lies one way or another just to be able to
| function. And no, Atheists are not more rational than
| religious people per se, they tend to have other delusions.
|
| Personally I think striving to have a realistic model of the
| world is still the best long term strategy and that those
| little lies are like drugs that will help you in the short
| term but wreck havoc in the long term but who knows. It is
| complicated.
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| >CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But
| then, if it helps you cope, so what?
|
| That's myopic. There's only so much "reframing" you can do
| before the tension begins to rear its head. Serenity now,
| insanity later.
| cardanome wrote:
| Yeah, that is why I wrote:
|
| > Personally I think striving to have a realistic model
| of the world is still the best long term strategy and
| that those little lies are like drugs that will help you
| in the short term but wreck havoc in the long term but
| who knows. It is complicated.
|
| Though to be fair much of CBT can also be getting rid of
| false believes that hold you back.
|
| Ultimately CBT has a lot of empirical research backing it
| up that shows that it is very effective for certain
| conditions. Though people should also be more aware that
| it works less well or can be harmful for certain people.
| It is not a silver bullet but nothing to sneer at.
|
| Ultimately we all cope one way or another. If you believe
| that you have no delusions, you are more delusional than
| most of us.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| Yeah, reading this I thought the author should suggest to their
| friend that they talk to a therapist.
| spimmy wrote:
| This is a good insight, but they already have a therapist. :)
| (I am the author)
| profsummergig wrote:
| Steve Jobs said it most profoundly: "love what you do".
|
| This is the opposite of "do what you love".
|
| I wish I understood where he learned this.
|
| It's very profound (and true).
| Nate75Sanders wrote:
| Possibly from the 1970 Stephen Stills song "Love the One
| You're With"
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Possibly his well known interest of Buddhism ?
| auggierose wrote:
| It is not the opposite. If you do what you love, you love
| what you do. So its more of, "love what you do" is what to
| aim for, and "do what you love" is one way to achieve this.
| lazide wrote:
| It's a flip on the framing, and a non trivial one.
|
| One is love what you do - which assumes regardless of what
| you're doing, love it.
|
| The other, do what you love - means choose things that make
| you love them.
|
| They're completely opposite in what choice they're telling
| people to make.
| auggierose wrote:
| No, it doesn't tell you "regardless". It tells you, if
| you do something, you better love it. So if you start
| doing something, and it turns out you don't love it, you
| better stop doing it, and do something else instead. As
| an extreme example, take Nazis managing a concentration
| camp. If it turns out you are not a bad enough person to
| love it, you better stop doing it.
| lazide wrote:
| That is not at all what 'love what you do' means. You're
| talking about 'do what you love'. That means what you are
| talking about.
|
| Both of these sayings can of course be applied to evil as
| well as good, and be either positive or pathological in
| impact depending on the situation.
| auggierose wrote:
| I think we both interpret the mere words in specific
| ways. It is just that my interpretation is more logical,
| and also more general, than yours.
| lazide wrote:
| It's basic English grammar. But you do you.
| mettamage wrote:
| My ex-girlfriend [1] did this with us and household
| tasks, especially cooking. I've gone from hating
| household tasks to being slightly positive about it. I've
| gone from hating cooking to loving it.
|
| I've tried this with programming. After 15 years, I'm
| only mildly positive about programming. That has more to
| do with the culture though, not the activity. I wish
| there was a business analyst/entrepreneurial programmer
| hybrid role. Spot opportunities from data, then build out
| a solution. Or if a solution doesn't need to be built out
| but it's more of a human/political thing, then do that.
|
| I'm currently a data analyst and get some room
| (informally) to do just that. It's a really fun role, and
| I'm programming way cooler things than I ever did as a
| software engineer.
|
| [1] Mentioning this detail because I don't think I
| could've learned this any other way. Well, parents maybe,
| but they didn't have this attitude.
| maccard wrote:
| Those roles exist but they're really senior staff+ into
| director level roles (at a smaller org). The problem is
| that they're really two roles bundled into one -
| discovery and development . You need to be aware of
| business impact, pain points, upcoming tech, your
| competitors, and you need to be able to execute to just
| the right level of finish.
|
| The bad ones identify solutions that work for huge orgs
| and try to apply them to everyone and don't implement
| them. This is your typical architecture astronaut. Or,
| they get bogged down in perfection and are massively
| hands on when they should have stopped long ago. Also
| your typical micromanaging vp of engineering.
|
| But one or two good ones can be utterly enormous force
| multipliers.
| mettamage wrote:
| Maybe I'm suffering from the Dunig Kruger effect but I
| think I'd be pretty good at it. I guess the only way to
| show that is by setting up my own company. I'm just
| afraid of the risk. Finding product market fit seems
| extremely hard.
|
| Companies that gave me the chance a bit, it seems that I
| always fulfilled those expectations.
| mettamage wrote:
| If you do what you love, then you love what you do.
|
| If you love what you do, you didn't necessarily get there
| by doing what you love.
|
| Reminds me of: a duck is a bird but a bird isn't
| necessarily a duck.
|
| I agree it's not the opposite.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> If you do what you love, then you love what you do._
|
| While it is possible to both do what you love and love
| what you do, often if you do what you love you are apt to
| find out that you don't actually love doing it. Hence the
| common refrain that cautions against turning your love
| into a job.
| detourdog wrote:
| I think the subtle difference is "Do what you love" is
| passive one is not actively doing anything. They have ideal
| in their head that may not match reality. "Love what you
| do" in my eyes is being present and actively loving the
| moment while doing the work.
| muzani wrote:
| A very common example is art. Most people love to draw
| things like characters or landscapes. But the real world
| application of art is usually ads, logos, and posters.
|
| There's significant skill overlap, but little passion
| overlap.
| a_c wrote:
| Smile more, you will be happier. On how long to know if a job
| is right, it depends how much you know what you are looking
| for.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| One of many platitudes that kept me in working conditions and
| religion which were detrimental to my career and mental
| health.
|
| Maybe it's useful to some who are in objectively good
| circumstances which they haven't learned to appreciate. I'd
| still advocate for getting other perspectives from
| trustworthy folks about ones specific situation.
|
| And not taking advice from billionaires who think their
| fruity diet will cure their cancer.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| to play devils advocate, you can try to "love what you do"
| while continuing to better your circumstances. No?
|
| The quote doesn't suggest "the job/career you have now is
| perfect for you, ignore all red flags".
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| The advice is reductive and wide open for interpretation.
| Also rich coming from a lucky sociopath who cheated even
| his closest coworker for (relative) pennies.
| mcv wrote:
| I've recently had a job that started out reasonably good, but
| after a year and a half, I started wondering what I was doing
| there, was I really in the right place? Some of the tickets I
| worked on went nowhere, and I didn't enjoy the stuff I was
| working on. That lasted a couple of months, and I was seriously
| considering quitting. And then came a complaint from a user
| that opened up a whole cesspit of necessary improvements,
| optimisations and bugs for something I'd previously worked on,
| and that turned into 9 months of the best fun I've ever had at
| work. Made a factor 20 improvement to a hideously complex
| algorithm that nobody understood, found and fixed a bunch of
| bugs in the algorithm that we had always thought was perfect --
| you know, fun stuff. And then my contract ended. But on a high
| note.
|
| This isn't general advice or anything, but I'm glad I didn't
| quit a year earlier.
| rurp wrote:
| The times I've really had to scramble on something at work
| describe both some of my best working experiences and some of
| my worst. I think a big differentiator is clarity. If I know
| that X needs to be done, and it's important and urgent I'm
| happy to dig in.
|
| The bad emergencies tend to be scenarios where I'm told OMG
| we need to fix A, it's an emergency, only to be told a short
| time later that actually never mind problem B is the real
| emergency, and then jumping to problem C after that, and so
| on. That kind of scattered direction can be soul crushing,
| where I invest in a problem and get far along on a good
| solution, only to be told that oh actually that urgency was
| BS, but trust us this new emergency is totally important.
| mcv wrote:
| Exactly. In this particular case, it was fun because I
| recognised the problem and had/took the freedom to get to
| the bottom of this and fix it as thoroughly as I could. I
| could easily have decided to accept that the big import
| process took an hour, but I stubbornly thought it could be
| faster, and reduced it to 3 minutes. Biggest dopamine boost
| ever. Still coasting on that. And in doing so, discovered a
| bunch of bugs, undocumented behaviour users depended on,
| and ended up addressing all of it in the way I wanted.
|
| That freedom was absolutely key. The same job could have
| been frustrating and stupid if someone else had been
| ordered to do what I did.
| 9rx wrote:
| How have you controlled for the possibility that you originally
| saw clearly and that the therapy is what has distorted your
| reality?
| agumonkey wrote:
| That is true, our own perspective is to be taken into account.
| Sometimes it's worth trying to adjust your own view, but
| sometimes it's important to bail out before you gaslight
| yourself.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| >> How long does it take to form an impression of a new job?
|
| >> Zero. You should give it 0 time. You already know, and you've
| known for a long time;
|
| Oh boy, how developers are clinging to the illusion this is still
| 2021.
|
| How long till they interiorize that they are now immigrants
| crowding at a day laborer site, hoping some farmer with a truck
| will pick 10-20 of them for a round of picking strawberries.
|
| So when you're penniless with no perspectives and the countryman
| picks you out of a crowd of hundreds hungry and desperate, you
| arrive at the strawberry farm and realize instantly: nah, this is
| not for me!
| Krei-se wrote:
| You forget there is a distinction between a plumber and an
| architect. The plumbers might get streamlined and need to
| compete, but if you design the whole house, do all the work
| yourself or know how to manage the contractors you will be
| totally fine.
|
| I don't want to correct you on your stance, your pov may vary,
| but i haven't noticed any downsizing in orders and i don't want
| fearmongering happening here for youngsters.
|
| If you design a clean product and maintain it you will be
| totally fine - some social skills and experience are ofc what
| you learn along the way.
|
| There is no data backing up the ever repeating horror stories
| of mass-layoffs or people not getting hired because some magic
| AI now does all the job and if you learn the matter you can
| understand how to leverage these tools and why they will not
| make you "penniless and desperate" anytime soon.
|
| For me as freelancer what actually was replaced was the farmer
| - i can have bookkeeping now, marketing and even legal
| assistance from AI, but i cannot have it do anything over a
| simple morphism or terminal object without it carrying
| technical debt 10x what you get when you just code down some
| manager-wanted functionality (and you may not want to work in
| places that operate on these hierarchies anyway)
|
| https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/05/19/can-ai-take-you...
|
| You can keep your fear-first stance here no problem, but it's
| either misunderstanding of what AI can do or what software
| engineering is about.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| My job criteria has not been as profound.
|
| Will it help me get my n+1 job? Will the technology I'm using
| look good on my resume? Will I just be a code monkey who pulls
| well defined stories off the board?
|
| Does it pay me market rates?
|
| Is the bullshit/pay ratio worth it?
|
| Post 2020 the rules have changed for me.
|
| Is it remote and is it a remote first culture?
|
| Does it pay "enough" to take care of my short and long term
| goals?
|
| And funny enough, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a
| cactus than ever work for any large company or BigTech (again).
|
| These days, I don't care if the company is a shit show. I do 40
| hours a week and money appears in my account - that's the deal. I
| don't work for "passion", "alignment" or the "mission". I work
| for the paycheck.
|
| I do like the company I work for now. It's the best job I've had
| in 29 years across 10 jobs.
| tartoran wrote:
| > I work for the paycheck.
|
| Would you be open about this in an interview? The majority work
| for the paycheck but preferred the job had less BS or shitshow.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Of course not. I've been playing the game long enough to know
| how to bullshit my way through behavioral interviews.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| Every time something has been off in an interview, that thing has
| ended up being a long term problem with the organization.
|
| It doesn't take long to figure out.
| geocrasher wrote:
| If the real job doesn't match the interview, then it's the wrong
| job.
|
| Simple as that.
|
| I once took a position at a company that I had known because they
| were a customer of my then current employer. We'd always gotten
| along, they were nice folks, had a good interview.
|
| In a _very_ short time, I wondered what the heck was going on.
| There was so much drama, infighting, and backbiting, and it was
| the complete opposite of the company 's external persona. People
| were constantly being moved to different desks with no rhyme or
| reason- as in, a whole department rearranged 4x in the 8 months I
| was there. I had 3 or 4 different desks in that time.
|
| People were regularly worried about their jobs and whether the
| company would even be around after family fights. And when they
| no longer needed me they started playing games with me, writing
| me up for things I hadn't done etc. Anything to avoid having to
| pay unemployment.
|
| I knew in the first couple of weeks. But a bit of me died at that
| job. Eventually they fired me. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't
| given them the opportunity and fired them instead. But I had
| mouths to feed besides my own.
| mparnisari wrote:
| I've always known within a week if I was going to like a job or
| not. I was right every time.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| "It depends, Charity. As always."
| spimmy wrote:
| Word.
| wiseowise wrote:
| It takes less than a minute, provided they post salary ranges.
| fjfaase wrote:
| I agree with the article, except for the last section, because
| many times the reason for me to quit was a manager who did not
| give himself, but was playing the game of pleasing upper
| management and not giving a shit about the hard working team.
| Also thr suggestion that you as a software engineer does not
| bring yourself to the table, is wrong, otherwise there would not
| be any developers suffering from burn-outs.
| varsketiz wrote:
| I like companies that do tryouts. In the last 15 years I worked
| for 3 employers. Two of them did tryouts - a day or two literally
| working in their environment. One did not.
|
| The two that did it both were great, the one that did not turned
| out to not be for me.
|
| I'm with the last employer for the last 9 years, and not looking
| to quit :))
| will5421 wrote:
| You haven't happened to find a list of companies that do
| tryouts, have you?
| varsketiz wrote:
| Haha, I wish. Very random that this has happened. One of them
| was Assembla - Boston based. The other, that I work in now -
| Vinted - Lithuania based.
| haraball wrote:
| A couple of rules I have that have worked for me so far is:
|
| Colleagues, tasks, compensation - if at least two of the three
| are good, it's fine to stay. If not it's time to look for
| something new.
|
| The first year is a learning year, the second is a productive
| year, and the third is a "what else can I get out of this place"
| year. If nothing changes in the third year, then there's not much
| more to learn from the company and it's maybe time to move on.
| marklubi wrote:
| Culture is a fourth one.
|
| Currently working towards the end of a contract/earn-out at a
| company where people just toss stuff they don't want to deal
| with over the fence for others to handle with usually zero
| communication about why/what/how. Just suddenly get a new
| project with no context. Also, three different bosses in two
| years because they keep leaving.
|
| Second worst company I've ever worked for.
|
| The worst one involved multiple c-suite executives that would
| throw objects at employees when they didn't get the answer they
| wanted. Thankfully I wasn't under contract there and got out
| ASAP.
| ramon156 wrote:
| My first job was the only job I just went home from and just
| cried because of how useless thah job felt. We were building a
| SaaS that took weeks for a simple update with 8 devs (of which 2
| were actually good).
|
| This was purely because of the legacy stack and poor management.
| The boss wanted to scale but did not care about tech, so we just
| never made real improvements. Sure, a feature got implement at
| least a week. We saw revenue grow a ton. We never saw time to
| improve our stack.
|
| Safe to say I felt like I was adding nothing to that company.
| They just didn't want to grow despite saying the opposite. I get
| that the shiniest framework will not improve the project, but
| there were some serious bottlenecks that just got shoved under
| the rug
| ownagefool wrote:
| I'm a bit confused by your post here.
|
| > The boss wanted to scale but did not care about tech... We
| saw revenue grow a ton.
|
| Sounds like the boss was largely getting the scaling they
| wanted?
|
| Every situation is different and there are people with way more
| experience than me here, but in general terms I've seen the "we
| need to rewrite / write a component library" from immature
| tech. Problem is, they're never satifised, so after they're
| happy and they've moved on, the next person will say the exact
| same thing.
|
| That's not to say your code didn't have real problems.
|
| But experience tells me that there's tons of well written
| projects with no users or revenue, and lots of broken shit
| making money hand over fist. All else being equal, unless
| you're in a bubble, you're better off with the money.
|
| ( Not intended to imply the job wasn't terrible and the product
| didn't have real actual scaling problems making your life
| terrible, I've seen that too ).
| ObiKenobi wrote:
| I do not agree with the "you know within a week"-take. I'm now 14
| years working in IT-Security. 9 of those years for the same
| company.
|
| I got my next job through a headhunter. The first weeks I had a
| really good feeling of the company I liked it there after a few
| months it got worse and worse like they couldn't hide all the bad
| things anymore. I quit, next job was more or less the same. I
| quit. My current job? The first month I thought to my self "oh my
| god, where do I got here?", but now a six months in I really like
| it.
|
| Maybe also other factors have some plays here like my move from
| consulting into an internal role, colleagues, the overall
| freedom, but imho it's hard to generalize something like that.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Assuming no big red flags (stuff like toxic boss, work culture,
| misrepresenting the JD), I'm with you on the 6 months thing, in
| most decently paid jobs there's a lot of complexity, give
| yourself 6 months to not just learn but gain confidence to
| start applying and trying to push against the machine a couple
| of times.
| Huxley1 wrote:
| The first few weeks at a new job always feel fresh and exciting.
| It usually takes a few months before I start to really get a
| sense of whether the job is a good fit.
|
| Over time, I begin to see how I feel about the work itself, how I
| get along with coworkers, and how the daily pace and expectations
| fit me.
|
| Curious if others have their own rule of thumb for figuring this
| out.
| ownagefool wrote:
| I quit a job via a consultancy to a bank at about lunchtime on my
| first day.
|
| I'm just not at the stage in my life where I'm willing to onboard
| to a transformation that starts with a half a day call
| authenticating so you can login to a remote VM to do your
| development.
|
| Similarly I had a 2 week gig where they send me some shitheap of
| a windows laptop that takes 20 minutes to login, where they
| wanted future engagements.
|
| Nope. Nada. No way.
|
| You can see the value of your productivity straight out the gate.
| It's not valued and you will never be able to change it from your
| vantage point of IC or middle manager.
|
| It doesn't really matter that they say otherwise, the evidence
| tells the story.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Got hired for a contract to "integrate this crypto[0] protocol
| sdk" but it turned out that they actually meant "implement this
| crypto protocol from scratch in an async manner" and by day four
| I was out[1].
|
| Shortest perm job was about 5 months. Tiny office, 4 other people
| on the phone all day, impossible project (writing software for
| unreliable hardware), not a difficult choice.
|
| [0] actual crypto, not currency.
|
| [1] not just because of the bait-and-switch but because crypto is
| miles out of my wheelhouse.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Huge yes to this one -- especially on the part about how
| important this is for managers to get right. I spent two years
| white-knuckling the wrong job for the wrong reasons. Pretty much
| every day I am reminded in some way of how thankful I am for
| having left and found a job with a culture I'm a better fit for.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| > It's only been six months, but it's starting to feel like it
| might not work out. How much longer should I give it?"
|
| It takes a lot longer to tell if the job is right than if it's
| wrong. Six months is orders of magnitude longer than you need to
| give a bad job. Don't rage quit, but if it feels wrong it
| probably is, so start looking.
|
| Had one job with a guy I had worked with for years elsewhere, and
| within my first couple weeks we sat down for a coffee and I said
| "so this isn't it a 5 year gig is it?" and he shook his head in
| agreement. Unfortunately COVID & life caused us to both overstay
| a bit.
|
| You early don't owe anyone anything to stick with a bad gig.
| martindbp wrote:
| Had no idea .wtf was a thing
| TomMasz wrote:
| Way back in the 80s, I had started a new job, and they held a
| meeting to discuss the results of a recent employee opinion
| survey. The results were overwhelmingly negative. It made me
| realize I had made a serious mistake. I quit before a year had
| passed.
| motohagiography wrote:
| maybe we need better tools for assessing the dynamics of orgs
| from the outside. it's not just personalities, it's incentives.
|
| I have opinions about it based on funding stages, but what it
| really comes down to is that culture is a function of growth. as
| an employee with a career success comes from hunting growth. the
| only real growth is from market fit, and even if you have market
| fit, if you aren't growing non-linearly you're going to get into
| a negative sum attrition game in the org culture (e.g. linear
| long term private equity returns).
|
| questions to find answers for on the way in are:
|
| - does anyone actually use their product and like it?
|
| - how is that number growing? (non-linear, linear, attritive)
|
| - what was their last funding round or change in equity
| ownership? (e.g. who runs it and what do you have to do to
| satisfy their investment)
|
| - what's their staff turnover and where do they go?
| nkotov wrote:
| Shortest I've been at a job was 3 months. I knew around the end
| of the first month that I needed to get out for two simple
| reasons - I didn't match with the company culture and the company
| was a sinking ship. I ended up completely leaving my time at that
| company off my resume because I realized it's not worth going
| into details.
|
| Ironically, the skills (devops / cloudsec) I picked up in those
| three months have helped me double my salary.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Wow 3 months! I stayed 2 days!
|
| I was still a student and I immediately had to fix a bug they
| had about hitting the memory limits with an awful SQL query. I
| fixed the query and they said "no we will just keep patching
| sqlite to increase the memory limits forever instead". So I
| quit because I didn't want to be the most senior person when I
| was still a student and I didn't want to be ignored.
| aeze wrote:
| For my past several jobs, I've put together a job satisfaction
| matrix that I fill out once a month. If it scores below a
| threshold three months in a row, that triggers a job search.
|
| It helps me because I have a habit of fixating on the team's
| mission and ignoring my own happiness, so the monthly check-in
| keeps me from staying somewhere longer than I should.
| layer8 wrote:
| How many times have you switched jobs already, and what was
| your average tenure?
| aeze wrote:
| Over ~15 years I've switched four times. Three if you don't
| count being brought over in an acquisition.
|
| - 6 years
|
| - 3 years -> triggered by matrix
|
| - 3 years -> until acquisition
|
| - 5 months -> acquiring company, triggered by matrix
|
| - 2 years, on-going
| physicles wrote:
| Would you mind sharing this? Seems really valuable.
| aeze wrote:
| Sure - it's fairly personalized based on what I'm looking to
| get out of my career, but it has questions roughly like this:
| - Am I free from feeling frustrated/stressed at work once a
| week or more? - Am I free from work stress/anxieties
| outside of work hours? - Am I keeping up with my
| hobbies? - Do I feel respected and valued, with the
| ability to influence my work environment? - Do I feel
| proud of my work and confident discussing my job with others?
| - Am I learning/growing? - Am I excited about the
| company's direction and secure in its stability? - Do I
| feel like my job is secure?
|
| I score each item 1-5 (1 = rarely, 5 = always) and track the
| total. If that total stays below my cutoff for a few months
| in a row, that would trigger me to start looking. Sometimes I
| include notes beside any low/high scores for context.
|
| Friends have challenged this, asking if I can't just feel
| when it's time to move on, which I can, but I've found this
| leads to me being more thoughtful and proactive about it.
| ctkhn wrote:
| I think most jobs you can tell from a combination of the
| recruiting process and then onboarding and your first week. I
| have felt the "I hope this isn't how it is every day" that the
| author mentions at a few of my jobs and they've all been
| stinkers.
|
| Recruiting gives me an idea of how much the company generally
| cares about their processes. I like when am I given a timeline of
| the process and steps and now when I get a random call from the
| recruiter in the middle of a meeting at my current job because
| the new co didn't ask when I'm free.
|
| Onboarding tells me how much the team is haphazardly shipping vs
| actually owning their product. The teams that have sucked are the
| ones where the onboarding doc is heavily out of date (like all
| covering a now-unused access request system) or I can't even get
| help from the team within my first week to have someone send me
| access requests to copy for the things that are missing. The good
| teams are where my manager already provisioned my access before I
| joined and immediately addresses any misses when I flag them. Or
| if they have good enough docs for me to quickly handle it myself.
|
| Career development is another one that takes a little longer to
| suss out, but if I can have a good first-week chat with my
| manager where they will explain what my baseline performance
| expectations are and what I need to do to overachieve and get on
| promotion/raise track, that's a good flag. The teams I haven't
| been able to get that early from are the ones where manager
| usually doesn't care not only about your career but also about
| app maintainability or anything past their next meeting with
| their own manager.
| spimmy wrote:
| insightful; cosign. (i wrote the piece)
| ryandvm wrote:
| It takes me about 3 years. And it turns out that no job has ever
| been right for me.
| theonething wrote:
| I hated my last job. Love my current job. The difference is good
| managers and good coworkers.
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