[HN Gopher] Career advice, or something like it
___________________________________________________________________
Career advice, or something like it
Author : SchwKatze
Score : 64 points
Date : 2025-06-20 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brooker.co.za)
(TXT) w3m dump (brooker.co.za)
| wavemode wrote:
| > Every organization and industry has watering holes where the
| whiners hang out. The cynical. The jaded.
|
| I wish. I've worked for startups where I would've killed to have
| such a space, where people actually felt free to criticize the
| way things were going.
|
| Toxic positivity is a thing too.
| ge96 wrote:
| Blind (a watering hole)?
|
| edit: ehh this is external though
| golergka wrote:
| Too toxic to take it seriously
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| TC or gtfo .... As they say
| buggy6257 wrote:
| For me in every startup I've worked this ended up just being a
| self selecting group slack DM where we would mock things. We
| didn't hate the places but there's always stuff to have fun
| with like that. We would just recognize each other and keep
| adding people.
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| In my experience this is the same group who is actually
| fixing things.
| only-one1701 wrote:
| Toxic positivity, you mean the entire tech industry since 2013
| or so?
| nine_zeros wrote:
| There is some truth to avoiding whiney echo chambers. But these
| watering holes also give insights into the dirty.
|
| E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures. Their
| terribleness got exposed via whiney digital watering holes, at
| scale. This is useful information for anyone considering jobs at
| these places. Without these insights, you wouldn't know that you
| are merely being hired to be fired.
|
| Avoid whiney watering holes but after collecting required
| information.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Every large company sucks. You are always just a number. They
| serve a purpose though. They have a lot of money and allow you
| to exchange your labor for more of that money and publicly
| traded RSUs than enterprise development or government.
|
| Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to
| death, promise you "equity" that will statistically be
| worthless and they pay less.
|
| I'm not negative. I know the deal - I give a company labor and
| expertise for 40 hours a week and they give me money. It's a
| transaction it's just that simple - I don't care about "your
| mission" and they aren't my "family".
|
| When that transaction of money for labor isn't agreeable for
| either party, it's time to move on like I've done 9x in my
| career.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That's one third true. The other two thirds are work
| experience and networking, which you can't do at a job that's
| a dead end with a good pay check.
| stackskipton wrote:
| You had a pretty good career if you have gotten RSUs at your
| jobs, most large companies outside FAANG and types don't give
| any stock options outside some pitiful purchase plan.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Just 3.5 years out of close to 30. I would rather get a
| daily anal probe with a cactus than ever go back to
| BigTech. It served its purpose.
| le-mark wrote:
| If traditional large companies do give stock options
| they're at the closing cost of the date of the award
| (strike price). Not the zero dollar purchase price of big
| tech, which makes the much less attractive and profitable.
|
| I was at an insurance company that made a big deal about
| offering rsus to engineers. We were like is this a joke?
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| The stock purchase plans at the two non-FAANG companies I
| worked for that offered them were amazing.
|
| One of them took money out of each paycheck for a quarter
| and then gave you the better of the price of the stock at
| the start or end of the quarter. So you got a chance at
| risk free profits if the stock jumped. I was told that some
| people put their entire paychecks into it until they put a
| limit on the percentage of the paycheck you could put in.
|
| The other one was a 15% discount off the stock price,
| again, done quarterly. Which doesn't sound huge until you
| calculate the annualized return. The annualized return on
| the first paycheck of the quarter was around 80%, the
| annualized return on the last paycheck of the quarter was
| around 3,000%. No lock up period and the smart thing to do
| would be to sell immediately and pay the short term capital
| gains tax.
|
| I'm not smart, I still have the stock from that one. It
| keeps going up but it could also go to zero at any time. I
| don't want to pay the capital gains tax though. I should
| probably look at put options. First world problems.
| BeetleB wrote:
| ESPP programs are great, and I encourage everyone to
| participate. But do keep in mind that the IRS limits how
| much you can gain from them. My company allows you to put
| 15% of your paycheck into them, and almost everyone I
| know hits the limit. Which means the company is
| withholding 15% of your pay, but only using about 7-10%
| in purchasing the stocks. They simply refund the rest at
| the end of the cycle.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I worked at a huge, non-FAANG but you all have heard of it,
| tech company, and it actually had a great, supportive culture
| and great people. The only issue was that the work itself was
| soul sucking - everything moved slowly, and the product was a
| joke compared to newer competitors.
| golergka wrote:
| > Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to
| death, promise you "equity" that will statistically be
| worthless and they pay less.
|
| That has been exactly the opposite of my experience with VC-
| backed companies. Great culture and support. Companies that
| stand by their employees and their words when it counts.
|
| I worked at a company which ran out of runway once. Not the
| first, not the last time I was in this situation. But before
| it actually did, CEO decided to close doors sooner so he
| could give everybody effectively a three-month severance. We
| were all contractors, not employees. He didn't have to do it
| at all, and I think that if he wished to, he would have found
| a dozen ways to safely pocket this VC money himself. But he
| made a choice to do a solid for his employees instead.
|
| This was just the most striking example, but overall it is
| pretty typical of my experience with VC-backed startups. I'm
| a cynical, pessimistic person from Russia and Israel, so
| every time I encounter another super-positive American, my
| first thought is that they're just phony. But in this
| particular industry, it just so happens that a lot of them
| are actually genuinely like that.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Look no further than YC.
|
| https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-
| performance...
|
| YC doesn't care about the long term value of the companies
| it invest in. All VC companies want to extract the maximum
| value out of the company before they get sold to the bigger
| fool - either acquisitions or an IPO.
| golergka wrote:
| That's not the thesis I'm arguing with. You were talking
| about relationship with employees. Now you're talking
| about relationship with later stage investors. I am not a
| later stage investor, I have no knowledge about and no
| horse in this race.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If you took equity in the company in lieu of your market
| value, you are an investor. Since you probably would also
| have a lock up period, you would suffer losses.
|
| Your employer is beholden to its investors.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Indeed. Years ago, someone I know worked at a VC backed HW
| startup. It failed. The founder personally met with several
| CEOs of other companies saying "Hey, we're going to fail.
| I've got great employees. Do you want to hire them en
| masse?"
|
| He wasn't selling his company. Just finding a home for the
| employees.
|
| Who ended up hiring them?
|
| Jensen Huang. This was at a time Nvidia's survival was at
| stake. He personally traveled to the site (not Bay Area),
| gave a presentation to the engineers, and tried to convince
| them to join. Treated them well - it wasn't a case of "Hey,
| you've got no options other than me" but "Please consider
| joining me."
| Magmalgebra wrote:
| > E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures
|
| This is like saying "Switzerland has a terrible work culture".
| These companies are _literally_ the size of a small country -
| culture ends up being much more fine grained.
|
| Anecdotally - most people I know at Meta love working there -
| fewer people love their jobs at Amazon, but many of them enjoy
| it. I've enjoyed all of my own big tech jobs despite much
| public griping about what it's like to work at these companies.
|
| I'm not saying my network is represnative - but my experience
| strongly suggest the following:
|
| - the way you experience work culture at a company is much more
| determined by your director/vp (e.g. the 50-200 person group
| you're most closely tied to) than the overall company culture.
|
| - many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural
| mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories
| of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I think these watering holes are just called "the IT department".
| The toxic BOFH vibe should've never caught on.
|
| </whiny rant>
| volkk wrote:
| learned this the hard way. got stuck with people in a big company
| that i thought were "cool" but literally hated tech (this
| included engineers in the group) and the company which they
| worked for. Constant complaints, everything bad, etc. I joined a
| much better company after and made friends with really
| curious/smart people--my own level of care, curiosity and side
| projects catapulted. I am a completely different person.
| Complaining is fun, and super fucking easy. Actually doing
| something about it is a different beast and I want to be friends
| with the people that understand the world isn't perfect and want
| to actively make it better by doing rather than incessantly
| whining and throwing their hands up in the air.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| The article is bad advice because nothing improves without
| criticism.
|
| The real problem with criticism is that management doesn't like
| bad news to be advertised, so they punish those who speak out. As
| such, it's not wise in the short term to illuminate bad truths if
| one seeks job security. If one seeks firm security, however, then
| honestly addressing all criticisms is the way to get there.
|
| Another observation about criticism is that it can often be
| falsely mistaken for cynicism.
| criddell wrote:
| Criticism can be great. Cynicism is usually pretty toxic.
| latentsea wrote:
| I'm not so sure about that...
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The article is bad advice because nothing improves without
| criticism.
|
| You're referring to the article that is saying complaining can
| be helpful?
|
| I'm 100% with the article, BTW. My first job was in a crappy,
| dysfunctional team (and department, and org). After 4 years, I
| got out and changed careers.
|
| Every so often, I have lunch with those who stayed. They whine
| just like they did over a decade ago. And literally _nothing_
| has changed. And almost every time I point out "You want to
| improve your situation? You need to leave."
|
| I'd go the extra mile and say that the reason such watering
| holes exist is because they are in an environment where
| criticism usually changes _nothing_. So the engineers need to
| find a place to vent. The places I 've worked where management
| is receptive to negative feedback didn't have these negative
| watering holes.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-20 23:00 UTC)