Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? - <AUTHOR> Each of us have limits as to the things we're willing to put up with at a job. What's taking you near your threshold? <comment><USER3> On my last job, a new manager called me for a meeting on Friday 4PM. I spent the whole month on an extremely stressful project.

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

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

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

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

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

I got fired on Monday morning.

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

I'm happy now.

<comment><USER4> This is one of the reason I hate about PIP( performance improvement program). They set ridiculous goals for you in very short amount of time that nobody can possibly complete, then fire you on grounds of incompetence. A friend of mine who works in Facebook told me that an employee committed suicide due to the pressure of PIP. I suspect that guy was put into PIP due to poor rating (meet most), then was given a ridiculous task which is impossible to complete. That guy was stressed out and that eventually lead to depression and suicide. RIP

<comment><USER5> It's a sad story; but PIP is really the pink slip; you take it as an advance notice that you're going to be fired, and start looking for jobs. I've heard stories of people completing PIP programs successfully, but quite honestly, I don't get it. Once you got to that point, you're not a good fit to the team and/or they don't appreciate you. Makes no sense to stay. I could understand staying with the company & switching teams/departments, but staying in the same place makes no sense to me.

<comment><USER6> PIP isn't a pink slip at all companies. I once got a PIP when working at a mid-sized corporation. Fortunately my performance wasn't an issue, they just didn't like that I was frequently late to the daily morning standup (which upper management refused to allow us to reschedule to later in the day despite my insistence), didn't appear attentive in meetings, and was working from home too much. I started coming in to work on time and stopped coding during meetings and they took me off the PIP a couple weeks later.

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

<comment><USER7> Companies want to look 'Agile' so they will treat it as though it is a religion. The daily stand-up bullshit gets taken to such an extreme that it becomes counter productive. If you work at such a place, simply get out. There is nothing that spells long term disaster more than rigid adherence to voodoo process.

<comment><USER8> Eh, the first place I worked didn't claim to be agile or anything. The daily meeting wasn't a stand-up (we sat and usually ate breakfast at a cafe or chatted in the lobby). It was still a really useful meeting.

<comment><USER9> it's a literal stand up so people don't dither.

lot easier to become restless standing around than sitting down.

<comment><USER10> I guess if you drop the facade that it's supposed to be fast and allow people to sit down, eat breakfast and drink coffee it doesn't sound that bad (even if it's still not a productive meeting).

<comment><USER11> Well, it's supposed to be fast because it's supposed to be done by a small team, of fie or six engineers. If you got fifteen people taking turns it doesn't really work. Even worse when the whole point is for middle management to check your progress, rather than an engineer-only meeting where you can discuss actual technical issues you're having so the more senior members can give you a pointer etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm the sole developer working on my current project, which is overhauling a massive DOS era application, as well as overhauling an early 2000s era CRM/business management tool, that almost all of our work happens through.

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

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

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

<comment><USER13> You do know that HIPAA violations can land ___you_ __in jail, right? Run. Don 't walk. Vacate immediately. Leave.

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

<comment><USER14> You won't go to jail if you do nothing wrong, but legal fees. Ugh, yeah, you'll be in court as a witness and possibly defendant if you don't leave ASAP.

<comment><USER15> Or if they have a better lawyer than yours.

<comment><USER14> Well that would be the OCR. It's doubtful they would waste a lot of resources going after a developer, unless they really thought he had done something. Usually they go after leadership.

<comment><USER16> And then leadership hires good lawyers that do their best to deflect the blame to the developer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I didn't know this format was a thing and am _so_ very excited to discover it. I hope you folks enjoy reading horror stories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Employment duration: unknown. My ulcer has had a baby. I think I may have had a psychotic break. I Googled HIPAA. I simultaneously shat and pissed myself, which I didn't think was possible during a panic attack, but the human body is an amazing thing. I took Thursday and Monday off from work to read through a PDF I found of this most enlightening "HIPAA" legislation. It says "SAMPLE" or "UNOFFICIAL" or some such on it, so I'm not sure how accurate it is, but whatever - I need to educate myself somehow. I spent a thrilling four days reading, re-reading, and summarizing what I understood of the several hundred page document - printed in three-column layout because why not make it more abysmal. It doesn't seem completely dire; it looks like there is some stuff we need to do if we are storing this mythical PHI, but it isn't terribly complex (at least technically!). I had already been planning encrypting everything we own, and all of our sites are already behind SSL, so this should be cake. Phew! Calm down, baby-ulcer, don't think about grand-kids quite yet. Also I found a few great summaries of the Act which I could share with my COO - <USER2> really, we need to sit down with Legal and have them explain why this was never brought up. And let's be honest, I'm not a lawyer - the professionals can handle this!

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

<comment><USER17> I have no idea the right way of posting long posts. Here's the rest: [https://pastebin.com/k0tYZYgY](https://pastebin.com/k0tYZYgY)

<comment><USER18> I've merged it into your comment above so the whole thing is one piece.

<comment><USER19> there's a lot of stuff in the pastebin that hasn't been added to the comment

<comment><USER18> Ah ok. Thanks! I'll uncollapse the GP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So many ideas in my head that I really want to be working on, and I can't seem to separate myself from the mental model of having a set position in a heirarchy, taking confused and/or hostile direction from seemingly arbitrary sources of authority. Some kind of fear, not even financial, more like the idea of getting lost, losing touch, never finding my way back, being abandoned and undesirable, dying alone. And beyond that, I can't seem to rationalize why my job is so stressful; I've kept my head in war zones and extreme sports, but corporate politics feels like it's killing me. I don't know why, or whether I should give up hope that it will get better. The lay-off fantasy disappears when it becomes reality. Dreams give way to fears, preparing for interviews, obsessing over things which I have no control, thinking I'm the only one that feels this way.

<comment><USER21> I love writing software, but I think there's something about the psychology of it that is really unnatural.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER22> Not too long ago we also learned how to make plants, animals, and other humans work on our behalf (voluntary or not, the whip or the carrot).

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

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

\---

Do not be the squirrel.

\---

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

\---

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wrote about my experience at my current job a few weeks ago [1]. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for all your support. I recently got an offer for the field I've always wanted to be in, with around a $25k pay raise too. It's such a huge weight off my shoulders to finally see a way out and I feel so much better, basic things like my appetite are back and I don't dread waking up. I already have so much more free time now that I'm not searching for jobs 2 hours a day after work. I gave my two-weeks notice this week and I'll have around 3 weeks off to decompress before starting - I'm planning on visiting Seattle, anyone have any recs?

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

<comment><USER21> Seattlelite here. So glad to hear you found a better job! Those hell gigs can really crush you.

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

Recommended:

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

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

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

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

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

Not recommended:

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

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

Have fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This fucking year...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyways, thanks for an opportunity to rant.

<comment><USER25> > Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast > machine.

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

<comment><USER26> I've had to work in some gnarly monorepos where pulling the dependencies down itself took an hour and a hundred gigs. Local builds were not fast. I usually ended up hacking the build system to build individual projects manually and copying things where they needed to go. _sigh_ much much happier now that I'm living in a smaller repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> (Throwaway, for obvious reasons.) I work for a boring start up remotely half of the week (2 days in the office) and I run my own SaaS business on the side (making a few $k MRR after 5+ years). I do sometimes day dream about being fired, selling my company and quitting tech entirely for a damn good while. I have well exceeded my threshold. Perhaps I will continue to watch Twitch instead of work, sabotaging my job, or perhaps I will get my shit together. I am not really sure.

</comment><comment><USER28> What really gets my goat...

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

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

<comment><USER29> That sounds exactly like my ex-boss. Never stopped going on about how he once worked for Qinetiq and they had him implement an FFT on an FPGA... last I checked that was a fairly common student assignment in FPGA courses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> My boss (effectively) prohibits us from displaying negative emotions towards each other, as he pulls us aside to chide us when we do. I think the intention is to encourage more constructive conversations, but his bar for what he considers inappropriate is so low that it ends up stifling disagreements. We have a tough time making decisions because of it. It's also difficult to tell him about other problems I have, because if I show any annoyance, he'll criticize my tone. He, of course, gets visibly angry with people on our team on a weekly basis. It's driving me nuts to have to walk on eggshells all day.

<comment><USER31> Yeah that's seriously unhealthy. I've been in that situation. Get out, you'll immediately be happier for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I do! I work at a failing startup. I find the direction and strategy of the company lacking. My advice is often ignored or they wait years and then claim it as their own. Sluggish sales. Sluggish revenue. Haven't been profitable in the 5 years I've been there.

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

<comment><USER33> I can relate, I haven't gone more than a week without a job in that same amount of time. I fantasize about just straight up taking a week or a month or a year off and doing absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER32> I'm not good at getting fired. I am personable and don't slack off. Those positive qualities are having a negative impact on my dream. I've wanted to collect unemployment for years.

<comment><USER34> Everyone makes mistakes. You can as well, you just need to want. Some suggestions (read aloud in an enthusiastic, you-can-do voice): Deploy to production! On Friday evening! Something that doesn't even build on your machine! Hardcode an universal password into the auth backend ("toomanysecrets" is a classic)! Invert a few conditionals in almost unreachable code! Enforce an overly complicated review system! Be horribly pedantic with every review you do! Skip review for your own commits! Re-write an important component from scratch! In OCAML, C# and TypeScript! While drunk! With no version control!

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

<comment><USER32> I'll try harder...wait, you know what I mean. The first step is to stop being a workaholic, be more like the CEO.

<comment><USER35> Who is in his position because he doesn't feel sufficiently bad about driving others to generate money for him. Or something along those lines.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Please sign me up!

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER37> It sounds that your additions aren't values by your team. It might be because (like you say) you are the only expert on X. If you are in such a situation you should be in charge for X, if not you'll be fighting these battles every time.

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

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

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

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 7 years ago I was hired as the sole developer in a train wreck situation. 14 year old company had just relaunched their site to early and without any testing. It was like eBay but for an expensive niche market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER39> You did great! Congratulations. For anyone reading this and considering doing the same, one minor tweak.

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

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am an acquired founder working in the bay area. The acquisition made me rich, I'm liquid, and I love my product and my team. Everyone did really well in the acquisition.

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

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

<comment><USER41> If you're fired, do you vest fully? We got acquired recently and it seems like my vesting doesn't jump ahead if I got fired (without cause)... not totally sure though.

<comment><USER42> If you're in a situation where your vesting schedule incentivizes your acquirers to fire you without cause your lawyers may have ripped you off.

<comment><USER41> How does it usually work? Does one fully vest upon firing? Vest several months upon firing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't want to be fired. I absolutely love my job and the people I work with. But I can just smell that we are about to hit a sticking point with how I don't do on call (it was never mentioned in the interviews or part of my contract) and I don't respond to work after 5pm.

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

<comment><USER44> In professional settings, when it comes to these kinds of awkward topics, I have found a method that has served me very well:

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER45> This approach really depends on the manager. A manager who has a habit of bullying people will have no issues laying on more pressure/guilt/whatever... in this situation.

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

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

<comment><USER44> As an introvert, what I like about this approach is that it does not close any doors, it just opens a discussion. Ofttimes that discussion is rapidly helpful. When it is not—when the manager is a bully, or oblivious—I still have the option to be more blunt. It's a diplomatic first foray into tricky topics.

<comment><USER45> Whatever works for you is great. I'd just suggest you be careful that you don't first establish yourself as somebody who will tolerate bullying. Once you've laid the groundwork for that, undoing it can be much harder than just avoiding it in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I was just recently fired, but honestly I was about to leave. I work in a two person branch of my current gig. The other person is my supervisor and is learning how to be someone. He's constantly looking over my shoulder and decided to fire me because I missed the goals, that he forced me to quote. The project wasn't ready for a deadline. I honestly got tired of all the little supervisor experiments as well.

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

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

<comment><USER47> > _The project wasn 't ready for a deadline._

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

<comment><USER48> I interpreted it as "the project wasn't ready [in time for] a deadline". But I agree, the concept of a project that is somehow too immature or unprepared for a deadline is though provoking.

<comment><USER46> It's more that the project was immature. If I have a bucket of data and an unknown part of the data is either incorrect or unknown then I can't give a full quote on completion all data in the bucket. Especially if the data accuracy/discovery is contingent on other team members also uncertain of the quality of the data. This will and did lead to burnout.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Oh boy. Not even gonna bother with a throwaway, draw your own inferences about whether I'm taking the thread title too literally. My current responsibilities:

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER50> Side note:

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

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

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

This makes firing someone with enough tenure an expensive deal.

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

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

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

<comment><USER51> If you say that it fails in practice, is that your opinion or is that a general opinion? Presumably, in some cases the regulation that you mention works the way it was intended?

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER50> It is not just my opinion. I have friends that are HR managers and this view seems to be generally accepted among them.

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

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

<comment><USER51> > employment law and regulation is not easy to change as it impacts the lives > of so many

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Most people leave their bosses and not their jobs. The inverse is also true. My last job as a programmer was not so great but I stayed there for many years because my boss was quite great and supportive.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER53> My last day at work is Friday.

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER54> This is both funny and sad, but it just leaves me curious what did you spend your time doing for three full years working like that?

<comment><USER53> I'm exaggerating at the situation, but not too far off. For the past year, I've been working on an ETL app. I used Go at my last job, so I really got to hone my skills especially in regards to threading challenges. Kafka and Cassandra were also new to me.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I wouldn't hate it. They'd be doing me a favor if there were more mouths than mine to feed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER56> In theory I have the perfect job: I create developer tools to be used with my company's platform. I choose the tech, decide the features and when to deliver. The commute is OK - about 30 minutes from door to door. I get reasonably paid but the workload is just too little. I have to come up with things to do just to fill in the mandatory 40 weekly hours in Jira. There aren't that many developers using our tools and there isn't a "push" to improve/evolve them so I just drag any tasks endlessly so I have enough to do all week. Still everyone is quite happy with my performance as I get shit done. I know I am not the only one. Other departments have people just idling most of the time. I feel that I am completely useless. I've already mentored a junior developer so I guess he could handle it on his own. I am seriously done with this and I would consider moving to a new job if it weren't for two problems: I am having my first baby in a few months and there aren't any product companies around (I don't want to go to a consulting company again). If I stick around my unit test code coverage will be 200%.

<comment><USER57> If you're going to be sticking around, is there someway you can (perhaps covertly) pivot within the company? You didn't mention what the platform does, but is there some featureset you could work on in your free time, and then surprise the company?

<comment><USER56> I don't think I could do something within the platform itself because it's a different team, a different tech stack and a different mindset. They are disconnected from reality and build whatever features the product owner & CTO puts on their plate. The only thing I could do is to try to convince Sales or Account managers that we need new integrations and POC projects...

<comment><USER35> Okay, how about: make extremely casual friends with the developers you can resonate with the easiest, and unofficially learn about any and all pain points and so forth. Maybe even hint at the truth about not having enough work to do, if you think it would be understood correctly (something to play by ear), and point out the specific area of tooling you work on.

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I just walked from a job after a week and a half. Applied and interviewed for a junior full stack java/angular developer position. Really excited for it.

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

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

<comment><USER59> Heard that a friend of mine had to use something similar at one of his jobs, and he was miserable. Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay.

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

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

<comment><USER58> > Even though the colleagues were nice and the place was more or less okay.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> 2017, due to a misconfiguration or lack thereof, the system that manages 250k employees marked me as terminated. Security came to my desk and escorted me out of the building like a criminal.

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

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

<comment><USER61> interesting. I thought it only happens in movies.

<comment><USER62> Based on the gp's handle, I believe the full story [0] had been posted here [1] before:

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Employer making me choose between career advancement and LOB success and then tying my job security to the latter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER64> I do, but I need some filler on my resume so I'm toughing it out as long as I can.

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

</comment><comment><USER65> A pissing match between two unrelated branches of an enormous org chart has caused monumental waste and discord where I work as a software engineer.

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

Toxic hell, I should be gone in weeks.

</comment><comment><USER66> I work in a factory and I see all of the problems my older coworkers have. Along with that I think the company wants to move the whole plant to Mexico so there is no long-term job security. I've learned programming in my spare time but when I've tried applying for jobs I didn't get a response, which I assume is because I don't have a degree. I've been trying to get back into university but I'm not sure that it will happen anytime soon. We've been working a lot of weekends too so programming time is limited. I'd quit but this is the best paying job I've been able to get.

<comment><USER67> I decided to make an account to comment on this. Build things, put them on github, write 500 words about it, add to resume, repeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> There's a team at my workplace that I think is almost literally making our product worse every time they check in code. They rejected a security fix I made because they didn't want to test it. The manager makes incomprehensible decisions and just blatantly lies about what they are doing. My entire team has a policy of just not interacting with them to avoid problems. How am I supposed to respect the management skills and decision making of execs who keep these people around?

</comment><comment><USER69> Getting told by my director that the product manager thought it was rude when I answered a question by sending them a link to the answer in the relevant documentation.

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

<comment><USER57> Not the rudest but it is basically saying RTFM. I deal with it like, here's the info you're looking for, but in the future you can read here instead of having to wait on me :)

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

<comment><USER69> Tried that approach and got told I was condescending.

<comment><USER70> Thats cause it is. its snarky. solving someones problem and telling them they could be doing something better are two different things. its often offensive to mix the two. it also shows an incredible lack of empathy—sometimes someone is asking you something because theyre swamped and you seemed helpful, if you respond like that theyll go from thinking youre helpful to thinking you're a know it all jerk.

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

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

<comment><USER57> > "here it is! <link> its a pretty good resource, the docs are fairly > extensive, theyve saved me a couple times in the past"

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Well honestly I have had a lot of sleep problems in the last 2 years. It seems I have CPPS[1], where I am up all night with an overactive bladder. The result is 5 or 6 out of 7 nights I get very little sleep.

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

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

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

<comment><USER72> I have the same issue and it was completely resolved with Amytriptalene. Until I found the right doctor it felt like my life was over, and they kept giving me useless treatments. Contact Dr Hanno at Stanford; he's the only competent one I have found.

<comment><USER73> I assume your doctors have considered it, but have either of you had a vasectomy or undescended testical?

<comment><USER71> I have had a vasectomy (which my urologist knows, cause his office did it). I'd be curious why you say that. Is there a link?

<comment><USER74> Unfortunately, age is probably the most obvious link.

<comment><USER73> In addition to age, most of us have been sitting most of the day for all of that time. That probably doesn't help either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I work remotely for a company in the Bay Area, doing mostly web development.

\- Compensation is great.

\- Few calls, very little micro-management.

\- People I work with are great.

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

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

<comment><USER76> I haven't been in your exact shoes so forgive me if this sounds judgmental. I have worked remote for several years and if there's one thing I can say, it's that I don't think your job is your problem. The problem is that you don't feel challenged, and you're expecting your work to fulfill that for you.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I was told that I wasn't doing enough code reviews, even though I am the only person on my team, because the 3 other engineers left over the previous 9 months. When I pointed this out to my manager, she said that I should have found code to review on other teams instead of waiting for people to ask me. I started studying that evening and quit the next month.

</comment><comment><USER78> Well I actually just got "fired" today. I'm doing an infosec traineeship right now, and I supposedly don't put in enough effort at home. Employer told me the company expects people to put in another ~20hrs of studying by themselves on top of the 40 in the office, I hope this is not industry wide...

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

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

<comment><USER79> Do you want to mention the company name? I'm curious as I have an idea about which company this is.

<comment><USER78> I can neither confirm nor deny before I get another gig, I don't want to burn any bridges prematurely just in case. What company are you thinking of?

<comment><USER79> The one in the Zaltbommel area. I don't want to be too specific either, I know a few folks over there. :)

<comment><USER78> Nope, that's not it. You're saying I should avoid Zaltbommel then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> I work in this place where I've made quite a few nice products the management are selling, they are, in part, keeping the company competitive. However they spend all their time trying to convince me that the work I do is crap and they could do it themselves easily (they're developers to - its a small company).

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

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

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

(It feels good sharing this :-) )

</comment><comment><USER81> That'd be great. I'm actively searching, but a 40 year old junior dev isn't in high demand. I took my present job hoping for some mentor-ship to better develop my skills. My days are spent in my office, with no concrete understanding of what is expected of me. I have projects that are "mine"... and by that, I mean that no other developer has a clue what I do. There is no team. No goals. No targets. I just work on whatever I feel like working on, and it's slowly driving me crazy.

<comment><USER82> Wow, this rings true for me. Slow days are depressing and fast days are anxious and frustrating, and on all days it's down to me, myself, and I to figure out what to do. I ameliorated this by getting a couple of mentors, they have diff projects but they know my workflow decently well so can guide me generally.

<comment><USER81> I have one person I go to regularly... he's in DevOps, doesn't know my code at all, but he's good at testing and being blunt. Often, my workdays are spent working on whatever criticism he levelled to me the day before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Once when I was a recruiter I got a call from one of my clients because they said that my consultant was being irritable. I called the consultant and he told me that it had been a week and a day and he still hadn't been issued a company computer to work on.

<comment><USER84> My first job was as an SQL database manager. It took them over a month to get me access to the database I was supposed to be managing.

<comment><USER85> Someone I know is a manager at a really large government contractor. They once had a poor engineer sit in another building for 6 months waiting to get his clearance. Poor guy finally quit after sitting at an empty desk reading books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> The company I work for is active in an industry I have zero relation to. I can't relate to the business at all and I'm working with ancient tech. It pays well though and was brought on board by a friend and I don't want to disappoint him by leaving after just 1 year.

<comment><USER86> 1 year is pretty much the modern standard for the minimum appropriate time before moving on in my experience, so I think it's fine.

<comment><USER79> Where I am from it's normal to get a 1 year contract when starting. Then if you did well you either get another temp contract or a contract of indefinite duration.

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

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

<comment><USER86> Yes, it is very culturally specific so I guess that should be taken into account.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I work at a pretty well known (in our field) and well respected digital production agency. I've been here for a bit over 7 years now. I started as a developer and learned almost everything I know. It was a really fun job and I loved my coworkers, the managers, the culture, the work was exciting and cutting-edge. Everything was great.

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER88> I want to be fired. Joined as Staff Software Engineer in pretty well-known company. Turned out they work a lot. There is no too much work-life balance. 95% of these folks don't have kids, and I have. I need to go home at 5, often earlier, cos commute sucks. They allow to work from home 1 day a week. Now I'm in jeopardy - need to stay for 6 more months to have my stocks and sign-in bonus vested. Also new change won't look good on my resume. Next time I'll bet on WFH and WLB. F$ck the money.

<comment><USER89> Ah I see we are playing the guessing game.

Facebook ?

<comment><USER90> I bet AMZN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Getting fired from a bad job is like having the best sex of your life but with the worst human being ever.

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

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

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

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

(I say it with love from past personal experience)

<comment><USER92> Soo it's like dating a borderline?

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Not with the job in particular, just want to take a break from tech especially from being a programmer.

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

<comment><USER94> > Sick of people in this industry making you feel you're not smart enough, > that you're not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past > work.

Dealing with this in the heavy right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER95> I'd recommend trying the graded exercises in [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures- alg...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-algorithms) or [https://www.edx.org/course/data-structures-an-active- learnin...](https://www.edx.org/course/data-structures-an-active-learning- approach) — unfortunately, for the most benefit (online automatic grading), you'll have to pay either EdX or Coursera, but EdX offers a small sample of exercises to start, if I recall correctly. And there are a few more courses after those.

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

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

<comment><USER95> A follow up, if ES6 JS doesn't come easy to you — pick a language you like best and look for its equivalents to Set, Map, .filter (or select) and .map (or collect). Bonus tip, look for .find or .first, to short circuit looping and stop at the first thing that matches. Yes, you can memorize for loops or why one thing is more efficient than another, but if you start with Set and Map where each makes sense, you'll solve 80-90% of algorithm questions pretty easily and usually in a way that's straightforward to read and understand later, especially if you start naming some of your functions to make them a bit easier to read. (Like naming selectors in Redux...)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> I've got one and a half feet out the door of a well known fruit company, after going through a half dozen re-orgs in 4 months, in an infrastructure org that has an overtly sexist management chain (down to 1 female manager in a 600+ person org).

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

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

</comment><comment><USER97> I hate all of my jobs. Computer programming just doesn't seem worth it for 100-120k. I could work an easier job for a better money/bullshit ratio. My therapist is concerned. So am I.

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER98> I don't know you, but it doesn't sound like programming is the problem. 100-120k is objectively a lot of money and it sounds like you're comparing yourself to others who have shinier jobs and higher salaries. Maybe it would be healthy to focus less on accomplishment/prestige and more on enjoyment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> This isn't nearly as bad as the others here but recently our scrum master came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively over pointing stories because apparently it looks so bad to management if you don't complete something within it's estimate.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER100> Fuck my job. I make more money than ever but a bunch of chodes want to meet all day. I do NOT like meetings. Pairing is a NIGHTMARE. I'm a hardcore sysadmin, let's debug some drivers. Instead we run php web apps where I can't grep.

</comment><comment><USER101> Today was really close to it. I'm a team leader and I texted my boss in the morning that I'm sick today, he called me 10 minutes later asking me how I feel, and also telling me there is an alert in production, asking me if I saw it, and asking if I talked to my team members to check this. My throat hurts and I have fever, so no, I didn't do it.. I feel that I need to hold his hand with anything and if I'm sick he can't handle anything alone. 2 hours later he called me again, just wanting to ask a "small question" that a sales guy had, regarding the product. My boss is the VP of engineering.. I really don't understand how he got this job, he can't handle anything alone and don't have empathy for his employees when they are sick.

<comment><USER102> Silence your phone, let it go to voicemail. When he asks why you didn't answer, say "I was sick with a fever and a sore throat. I didn't answer my phone because I was sleeping, trying to get better."

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I won't tell tales about my current employer, but I'll tell the one about my previous one (without naming them).

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

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

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

<comment><USER104> Always be refactoring - work that shit into the ticket.

<comment><USER103> Yeah, that was my intention when I saw what I had to work with. But it was also specifically prohibited.

<comment><USER104> How do you prohibit making code better?

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

And all that jazz...

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

<comment><USER103> > How do you prohibit making code better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> If you actually want to be fired, find a new job and quit.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER106> I've been working as a developer at a shitty company with no mentorship or room to grow for 2 years. My co-workers are obnoxious, loud sales people which drives me insane. I've tried my best to get out but due to visa constraints/random shit I've not been able to find anything.

</comment><comment><USER107> I sure hope this format doesn't take off.

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

How about this:

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

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

<comment><USER108> I'm a third world sweathop worker. I was forced to make clothes here ever since I could walk. There are hundreds of people packed in to this tiny windowless room, and every time there is a fire I die. My coworkers can't even afford alcohol. Every time I hear decadent American line cooks complain about their working conditions, all I can think is, they have it so easy.

<comment><USER107> Yes, this illuminates the point even better. Software devs are among the best treated first world employees. In a global perspective, most (but not all) complaints are laughable.

<comment><USER109> Stop complaining, there are starving children in Africa!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> I once worked for a company that was purchased and we were tasked with signing new employment papers for the new owner.

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

</comment><comment><USER76> Rewind to 1996 or so. I was around 20 and living in Reno NV at the time and was really good at fixing computers. There were a number of local mom and pop computer shops, and I needed a job. A working interview consisted of 10 breakfix cases inside of a day. They'd have been happy with me handling 5. I was hired. I was confident that I'd do a good job for them.

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER111> My team runs a mission critical application nearly all of us were duped into supporting. Ops engineering turned into "process champion" and now I yell at people about ticket structure (bane of my existence) instead of diagnosing db performance issues (things I gleefully lose sleep over.) Now I question my passion for IT daily, fall asleep at lunch and wait for the day I do bad enough to be fired.

</comment><comment><USER112> Happened to me a couple of times. The common denominator in all cases is managers and an organization preferring opinions over facts. The last case took three months to reach that point. During that I had to manage a serious raw material shortage situation everybody tried as hard as possible to ignore. After three months that wasn't possible anymore and all of a sudden the business decided it was up to me find a solution, prioritize customers and markets and it was also me who was responsible for sales to miss their targets due to that raw material shortage. That the root cause was a force majeure incident at a single source supplier, we were most likely in a dominant market position and the global market for the raw material was empty didn't matter. The last straw was my new manager who insisted to provide numbers impossible to extract from the ERP system and present numbers I knew were wrong simply because they showed that there was no problem. Also he directly said that apparently I was incapable of doing my job. The day after that I quit.

</comment><comment><USER113> I took a role which relates to a strategic goal aligned with correctness of data held. Its public-trust information. From time to time, pragmatism around "can't we just change this record..." makes my blood boil: Its explicitly _not_ what I took the role to do: fixing pragmatic bad choices time after time, makes me want to go do something else, when the intent was to defend a line of historical accuracy and completeness.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER114> Probably any founder of an acquired startup with vesting acceleration REALLY wants to be fired (without cause):

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

<comment><USER115> Not sure why you got voted down, the US has very poor protections for employees when a company is taken over.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> In a previous job I got very close to a 'them or me' ultimatum. Then I got over it. Then we _all_ got laid off.

</comment><comment><USER117> Nobody. Perhaps you want to be _laid off_ when you know your employer may be about to lay off some employees, you'll have an easy time finding a new gig, and the severance will be nice. But if you want to quit, then quit, and whatever else you do, don't get yourself fired for cause, ever.

</comment><comment><USER118> Recently, the business I've been working for the last few months, threw me in a project where I (and my whole team really) ended up realizing that they didn't even understand what the problem was. Specifically, I had to develop an integration with our system and an external provider but we ended up realizing that our system wasn't even close to being integrated with this provider. So what we thought it would be a few months work, we started hitting walls on every step and realizing that it was just impossible, at least based on our initial assumptions. The project ended up stale after working on it for three months, I ended up being completely demotivated and eventually quitting the company for what I thought an incapable executive layer for taking business decisions.

</comment><comment><USER119> Working on 20+ years of bandaids on an MFC C++ ERP Application with no documentation and some crazy ass shit going on. The goal make it a 'web app'... The corporate office is constantly waging political fights between management. We can't get anything done. Stymied.

<comment><USER120> This gets my vote for worst technical situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> * three planning layers

* no reasonable reaction on devastating feedback

* purely numbers driven. Ignoring tech debt and creativity

* no new recruits in years

* not honoring experienced programmers

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

* naive and reactional cargo culting

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

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

</comment><comment><USER122> I thought this was a counter-thread to the Who wants to be hired one lol

<comment><USER123> It is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> Organization I work for is in experimental phase about what roles would be more efficient, last December I switched to be a DevOps from Software Engineer role, partly because of "Organizational Needs". but now, they want to move all the DevOps into a room extracting them out of their Scrum Teams, and they've asked few guys (including me) to be "Multi-Functional" which I don't get it.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER125> I worked for a startup that was only founder and myself at the beginning. I took responsibility to build the product, the company grew from us two to 24 in 3 years.

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

</comment><comment><USER126> I was hired to write firmware but we lack hardware for me to run and if we do get it the hardware people are too overloaded to build it for me. As a result I have no hardware to test my code against and I'm constantly shooting in the dark.

</comment><comment><USER127> I've quit a couple of places. If the management is incompetent or just out of their depth; if they company can't make good use of my skills and talents.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER128> _raises hand_ I'm a freelancer in the position of an interim department head. I've never had such ungrateful and hard to work with team members. Somehow the people above me and around me want to keep them. On top of that, getting anything done with other departments is like pulling teeth. Of course I'm judged on how much I get done, which means that I end up doing a lot of the work myself. Sometimes I wonder if it's all my fault but that doesn't help me either. I just want out but the money is too good.

</comment><comment><USER129> I think I do, though not for the reason everyone else seems to be posting. Like I do hate my job, like most people do but that's not why.

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

</comment><comment><USER130> I just recently left a startup that was giving me Theranos vibes.

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER131> After 8 hours total interviewing at one company, I kinda feel like I was hired and fired in a single day

<comment><USER132> WOW! That would very exhausting.. is this norm these days to have full day interview sessions?

<comment><USER133> A couple years ago I had TWO full-day interview sessions with a single company. That I had to take time off of my then-current job to attend. After a one-hour phone screen. Who ended up not hiring me anyway.

<comment><USER134> Unless the position was for serious fuck you money and I really needed it, there's no way in hell I would tolerate 2 full day interviews.

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

<comment><USER133> I fell prey to the "sunk cost" fallacy - after the first full day when they asked me to come back, I thought: a) it would be a shame to "waste" that first full day of interviewing by saying no now and b) surely nobody would be a big enough asshole to ask me to take two full days off of work to interview with them only to reject me after the second day, so surely this second day is just a formality.

Apparently I was wrong.

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

<comment><USER57> I have found that lightly pushing back on such requests makes them value you a little more. Doesn't matter too much since they should've valued you in the first place. I've had a couple processes expedited in this way, sometimes skipping a call here or there or changing a second onsite to a call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> I'm out the door pretty soon if I'm alone in dealing with a bully or an insecure pr$&k who builds himself up by putting putting you and others down.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER136> Had a job working for an online gardening shop, where I was on minimum wage and despite being a junior I was probably one of the more switched on devs there (I had to convince everyone to use a git when joining, previously they edited files directly via SFTP on the prod oscommerce site that had not been updated in 6 or so years and had lots of config.php.2009.barry.bak type shit going on).

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER137> 6 or 7 years ago I did some freelancing to fund my open source project (some nice algorithms and stuff). After two or three clients I had the idea to build some parts around it to make it a real product and invested 2 months into this, which meant no money in that time. After that I urgently needed a new client as money on my bank account ran out. I did not plan this properly.

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

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

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

Lessons learned:

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER138> In my country we have a two main employment contracts. One with full benefits and one with partial benefits. Second is usually used for your first contract or for hiring students on half time job.

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

</comment><comment><USER139> I've shared parts of this before but it seems apropos of the topic at hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER140> Sometimes it's nice to step away for some perspective and start again fresh somewhere new!

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER141> I was asked to implement "passive data analytics", so our iOS app could soak up data on age, gender, etc. I put in my notice the following Friday.

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

</comment><comment><USER142> When there are stupid and idiotic power trips in the workplace, then I can't put up with the situation and will quit.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER143> (throwaway) every day I debate whether to quit or stay on unhappy and trying to do things the way I feel is right until I'm fired.

</comment><comment><USER144> I love my job but at an earlier one, every day I wanted to quit. My boss was threatened by me and did not value me. He tried to show he had my skills. He valued another engineer more. I felt jealous, stifled, and miserable. I learned a valuable lesson though. Don't quit because you have an impulse. Wait until you have figured out your next move.

</comment><comment><USER145> Management which prefers to recruit only "offshore" talent, believing the offshore talent is inherently superior to all other talent that is not from their county. Discrimination? Yep. Happening anyway? Yep. Obvious? Usually, but it's subtle. Anyone important taking notice? Not really. The higher ranks from offshore support the offshore model first.

</comment><comment><USER146> I'm utterly bored, I changed jobs a year ago because of family reasons. The company is great in a lot aspects (team culture, benefits, technology). I got asigned a project where I did a successful POC which was already shown the costumers and management. But after the POC the project is now on hold, there is no decision from managment since 4 months. I still have weekly calls with the PM, which tells me how he wants the project to continue, but rumor is he'll change positions shortly. My boss won't assign me to another project as he doesn't know how the project continues and wants to hold me back as resource. So since months I'm dabbling around trying to support my teammembers with random scripts and tools to do at least something useful. I've got an offer from another local company which I'll probably will take, just to do something useful again.

</comment><comment><USER147> On my current job most of the engineers have little engineering experience. Mostly we use modern tools but it's obvious that they had been set up once and since then nobody took care to maintain/tweak them. That makes the workflow very disorganized and sometimes tedious.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER148> Working at 1000+ person companies and moving 'up' the ladder, but if it wasn't for the paycheck I'd be in a small shop actually building things.

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

</comment><comment><USER149> The magnitude of this post is very distressing to me. (Also, HN is an unfortunate format for this kind of thing). I hope plenty of employers will read this thoroughly and take heed. I always try to assume positive intent, though it's obvious that's not what many commenters here are experiencing. Expectations seem to need to change industry-wide. To the employers that do (supposedly) care about your employees mental health: you may not know what you're asking for sometimes. To the employees: you need to be better at expressing your troubles and needs. I don't know what a solution might be. But I'm praying for y'all.

</comment><comment><USER150> They're tearing down some walls to fit a few more desks in (the openest of open offices). I've been living like a college student for 10 years now following FIRE blogs, so getting fired wouldn't be completely unwelcome.

</comment><comment><USER151> My limit was that after a decade of single-handedly spec'ing, programming, supporting and otherwise being in charge of all internal app development efforts for the $6 billion North-American arm of a $50 billion multinational corp... I still wasn't deemed worthy of the opportunity of a green card, or a salary commensurate with my responsibility and impact on the corp. The day I got my GC by other means and thus was no longer stuck working for them, I gave my 2 weeks, to everyone's surprise and disappointment! And that was with no jobs lined up after that.

</comment><comment><USER152> I have work at a bank long enough to hear stories about people having mental breakdowns. Everything from just walking out of there office naked to people using the stairway as bathrooms to help deal with the stress and anxiety that some jobs at the bank can cause. At the first bank I worked at I never witness it myself, but when I got a new job at another one it started to become a normal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER153> what country?

<comment><USER152> America

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER154> People who have money and power today are on average less intelligent and less competent than people who don't. I guess this is the result of the past 10 or so years of expansionary monetary policy. It enabled greedy people with very little talent to capture a lot of money. Value creation was sacrificed for the benefit of value capturing (rent-seeking) activities.

</comment><comment><USER155> Why would you want to get fired at the limits? Why not talk to your managers or you know resign.. I mean if you get fired you don't get unemployment benefits.. I think you mean you'd rather as to be laid off. Getting fired in the best case means taking a moral position against the company that is righteous... Does being laid off mean you were lazy?

<comment><USER156> In California, so long as you do not get fired for misconduct you are (generally) eligible to collect unemployment benefits whether you are fired or laid off. The definition of misconduct in California law is actually quite narrow—there are four standards and you must meet all of them in order to be ineligible for unemployment.

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

<comment><USER157> Sad thing is that the money from unemployment hasn't gone up for years. $1800/mo pre-tax. I was pretty pissed when first on it that the feds tax the unemployed, seems like kicking someone when they're down, but at least in CA there's no state tax, which I learned occurs in other states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER158> Any amount of blaming from management onto the employees will get me to decide to leave immediately.

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

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

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

<comment><USER158> Every one of these decisions to quit led to the next job being better in terms of managers, experience I got and compensation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER159> It's not hell on earth but I think about "oh my god dude get another job!" at least once a week. My job is this "hybrid" of 50% software developer, which I want to do, and 50% of, let's just say, flippin' burgers. It's not flipping burgers literally but the metaphor applies pretty well because being a short- order burger chef does take some skill, but it's repetitive, and subject to requests/orders that come in intermittently, each of which is urgent. So, it's like the interruptions everybody complains about from noisy co-workers and Nina from Corporate Accounts Payable, except the thing interrupting you, is the other half of your own job, and it continues all day long. So really with all the interruptions I'm doing close to zero programming.

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

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

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

<comment><USER160> "they figured hey, what better way for him to find all the pain points and automate them"

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

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

<comment><USER159> In a nutshell I'm spending most or all of my time using the tools (keeping up with a queue) not working on them. To work on them I need either permission to fall behind in the queue (probably not an option) or someone else to cover for me. I'll probably pursue that latter option.

<comment><USER153> that's like something out of Kafka. It would be fitting to incorporate Kafka, the technology, into your solution .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER161> Artificial harmony. Where people smile and nod about some decision face to face, then subvert it quietly afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER162> I work at a tech company that just lost 70% of its stock price in under a year, my team was laid off from 15 people down to 3 people, my boss quit, and the app I've been working on for a year is questionable to be shutdown.

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

God love capitalism!

<comment><USER163> "And I'M going to look like the jerk on my resume for quitting before a year is up." \- this problem is in your head. Capitalism has nothing to do with that. You can quit at any point, even after a couple weeks. If you can't bubble-wrap an explanation for future interviews then work on that. Soft skills are also important.

<comment><USER162> I thought resumes exist to GET the interview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER164> Don't want to be fired.

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

Also, a terrible salary makes for a low tolerance.

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

</comment><comment><USER165> This reminds me of being fired from a cult for willfully disobeying ridiculous rules

</comment><comment><USER166> 996.

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

</comment><comment><USER167> I keep pressing my work to never take a job from AIPAC again because as a "progressive" company you can't be "progressive until palestine"

</comment><comment><USER168> Leaders that claim to be leaders but are actually managers.

</comment><comment><USER169> I am living the startup to big corpo movement. Goddamn, how amateurs people with a huge amount of money can be. Toxic management? YES, a lot :)

</comment><comment><USER170> Anyone successfully pull off an "Office Space"?

<comment><USER171> I did. 11.5 years ago before starting as freelancer and never looking back.

<comment><USER172> Freelancing sounds like fun, but it looks like a real pain getting started. From what I can tell, it means working for free or next to it on sites like upwork. Any tips or suggestions?

<comment><USER171> I can't say for others but for Upwork is not that bad. You do need to grow your profile with successful jobs to be able to charge more later, so start lower but do make a polished profile. Show lots of projects, including those from open source, if you have any, and fill all fields as well. Also state that you're at beginning and you're going for low prices only to establish your reputation. Also don't give up, keep on bidding on jobs even if it looks like a number game. In the end if you're persistent enough you get your break and can start build your clients base. After that it's a breeze, given you're indeed good at what you claim. Otherwise, it's a harsh environment for those trying to scam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER173> I love this question!

</comment><comment><USER174> The never-ending battle of sales vs. marketing. :)

</comment><comment><USER175> Every day.

</comment><comment><USER176> Half the time TBH

</comment><comment><USER177> always being happy to help and people using that as an excuse to be their shit dumping ground because they are [lazy|incompetent|arseholes]

</comment><comment><USER178> TopTal's CEO... if he could be...

</comment><comment><USER179> I clicked expecting a _What 's the worst / most creative thing you'd do to get yourself fired?_ thread.

But I'll play.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which makes me feel trapped.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER180> My reason is different from most. I am working on difficult problems, more technically difficult than I ever have before. Maybe I will succeed, but I may fail because I'm way in over my head.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER181> My office mates audibly fart throughout the day and act like it's normal. Pretty sure it's not.

<comment><USER182> It's not. They should do what I do -- silently "crop dust" the other cubicles as I drift past on my way to an unimportant meeting.

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

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

<comment><USER183> He clearly reads McSweeney's - [https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-brush- my-teeth-at-work...](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-brush-my-teeth-at- work-just-to-make-you-feel-bad-about-yourself)

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

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

<comment><USER184> I guess it's all a matter of perspective, but I'd just be thinking he's some kind of weird loser with OCD that can't manage his own personal grooming at home, but for some reason isn't bothered by spending a lot of time in a public toilet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER185> All I can say is every time I've been fired it was a huge relief.

</comment><comment><USER186> Having to touch any Windows machine.</comment>