7 ms·
Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? (June 2022)
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?
- rburhum 4y agoJust quit. Life is too short and as you get older, money is supposed to work for you, not the other way around.
- meepmorp 4y agoBut my family is used to living indoors and eating food every day.
- linuxlizard 4y ago"What is it with you kids? Every other day it's 'Food, food, food'" -- Bender
- MiscIdeaMaker99 4y agoOne could get a new job _before_ they quit.
- handmodel 4y agoI more or less have a no show job. I am a programmer but for a private company whose business is entertainment. About 5 years ago I came up with something that traceably earned the owner millions. The owner/CEO loves me but I report directly to him with no other co-workers so a bit hard to "move up" I get paid 150k a year to work maybe 40 (flexible) hours a month? For the last two years I've pursued side projects (more artistic than business) but haven't reached the brake even point. I've thought about leaving many times but it always feels like best case scenario I'd maybe get a 10%ish salary bump but one that is way more demanding. I know deep down this is bad for the long term but also hard to give up such a nice lifestyle especially when I've been able to fill it with other pursuits that were fulfilling.
- 999900000999 4y agoHow's it bad for the long term, you have a fantastic low stress job. If this really earned the company millions, maybe you could negotiate with the CEO where you start a new joint venture or something. 150k a year is not bad money, outside of fang, that's actually closer to the top of the market.
- handmodel 4y agoThank you. This is why I have not quit but why I responded to this thread of being "fired". I feel like it would make the decision for me and be a relief and work out in the long term. Just no time in the short term has it appealed enough to me to pull the trigger. I do the occasional job searching - but not a ton. And my network feels smaller than it was when I started the job.
- devKnight 4y agoI think the hesitation is that your skills might atrophy as well as your ability to work in non-chill environments, in case it becomes necessary to move on in the future. Company could go under, get acquired etc etc
- itsoktocry 4y ago>I think the hesitation is that your skills might atrophy Sounds like OP has more opportunity than the average person to keep skills up to date on company time.
- OJFord 4y agoTrue, but not the support of colleagues and work that puts it into practice. Reading about Foobars at Scale isn't the same as working on them at Netflix or wherever. (Even if you try to put what you read into practice and it's somehow free/cheap to deploy at massive scale and load test it, it's still not the same.)
- 4y ago
- rr808 4y agoColleague got laid off a month ago, but I'm still here. He has 3 months off over the summer before looking for work again. I haven't had a break more than 10 days since college, I'm super jealous.
- prewett 4y agoCompanies are usually okay with people taking unpaid leave. Tell your manager "I'd like to take a 3 month unpaid sabbatical to do $fun, would July - Sep work okay?"
- dougmwne 4y agoCompanies are not usually ok with this. Do not ask for a 3 month sabbatical unless you are already about to quit. Plenty of companies would consider firing you on the spot.
- lostcolony 4y agoYeah; they're paying you for the work you do. Even unpaid, it still leaves this gaping hole in what they need done. They won't be able to find someone to pitch in for 3 months for any sort of skilled work, and they actually will still be on the hook for your benefits. The paid part for many companies is almost immaterial; if they'll let you have unpaid time off, they'll let you have paid time off. If they won't let you have paid time off, they won't let you have unpaid time off. Even as a manager, it's easier for me to let someone have one day off a week PTO, with a wink and a nod, than it is to formally get someone to work 80% hours. And that barely is perceptible to upper leadership.
- rr808 4y agoI recall hearing another firm that did sabbaticals usually meant the employee was just getting ready to leave. People would spend a few months doing some travelling, relaxing, leetcode and interviewing - with safe fall back in case they didn't get anything.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoI am comfortable with my job situation, but sometimes I day dream about being fired just so I have a good excuse to take 6mo to a year off of work.
- caffeine 4y agoConsider taking a longish holiday (like 3 weeks)? If at the end of it you don’t want to come back, quit. But that might be long enough to scratch the itch and feel refreshed.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoEasy to say when you're confident you can get a job that's just as good as what you have. Fact is, I am not. The ads I read these days for IT positions all look terrible.
- hutzlibu 4y ago"Those who trade freedom for security will loose both in the end" But dramatic quotes aside, since I have kids myself, I am leaning towards security, too. But I feel that this has indeed been blocking me a lot and I felt stagnating. The world is big and full of opportunities, but only if you go out and dare to look at them. So I do recommend at least a long holiday ;)
- rschachte 4y agoTook > a month off after being burned out by a previous corp. It did wonders for my mental health and gave me time to learn a lot of fun stuff. I already had a new job lined up, but I highly recommend saving up a bit of cash reserves to do this. During this time I also moved to a new state, signed up for sailing classes and read several technical books. Way better than sitting in useless meetings and not growing (again, if you can afford it, do it)
- humourl3ss 4y agoI am doing the same thing, work felt pointless, just like you I was sitting in useless meetings and not growing, remote working made it worse. I got so depressed and stressed for nothing. Now I've been off for two months doing all sorts of fun coding stuff, and I feel like a new man. Too many big corps hiring developers for no reason, too many bullsh*t jobs (RIP David Graeber) that stifle our ability to enjoy life. We may get paid really well but for some reason, attending useless meetings and reacting to slack notifications and outlook pings kill my energy.
- memonkey 4y agoThis resonates with me. Waiting for people to message me. I have had so many issues trying to figure this one out. Zoom fatigue, slack fatigue, etc., etc. Maybe that's all it is just killing my energy.
- glitchcrab 4y agoWhat do you sail? I've been sailing since I was 10 and I've been teaching dinghy sailing for 17 years now (weekend volunteer gig, not my main job)
- rschachte 4y agoThat’s awesome! I haven’t started yet, just signed up! Super excited
- joeman1000 4y agoSounds cool! What did you read?
- cehrlich 4y agoFreelance clients who think that meetings don’t “count” as work and thus shouldn’t be invoiced. Obviously it’s up to me to fire these clients, but still…
- danielovichdk 4y agoWhat? Is this really happening?
- jokethrowaway 4y agoIt's not a bad idea to give free meetings and charge extra for normal hours. It also allows you to give free intro and consultations, subsidized by existing clients. Architects and lawyers (even a few doctors) frequently do this and it makes for a smooth way of onboarding new customers - I'm glad I'm not paying just for some basic info and I don't mind paying a bit more once I get the service.
- sudobash1 4y agoIts one thing if those meetings are for meeting a new client or discussing a new project with an existing one, but it is another thing altogether for (eg) weekly hour+ long status meetings.
- gwbrooks 4y ago^^ This. One of the biggest ways to boost billings is to be consistently -- even relentlessly -- easy to do business with. That applies to billing and time tracking as well. Tightly scope, fix a fee against that scope and set your rate high enough that you can accommodate dumb meetings, the occasional on-site, etc. When I was consulting full-time, I never even charged for travel because that removed a potential objection from out-of-market clients. But my rate? It was at the upper end of the range.
- jabroni_salad 4y agoI used to do a lot of incident response type stuff and I just got tired of everything being on fire 200mph gogogogo all the time. It was already pretty fast-paced and then new management rolled in and decided to 2x the metrics just to do it, and I wasn't the only one with big changes on their linkedin recently. I realized that everyone and their mother is hiring and decided to scoot off. Oh, and before [the ordeal] I was doing a lot of travel consulting. If it weren't for [the ordeal] I probably would have quit a lot earlier because the work-life balance was just abysmal.
- ryanmcbride 4y agoYup that's what happened to me at my last job. The stress and lack of sleep it caused me just wasn't worth it and it showed no signs of ever getting better. When I put in my notice they insisted that all these problems were going to disappear any day now but luckily I've been doing this long enough to know better.
- manuelabeledo 4y agoSame here. To this day I still don’t understand how some businesses expect devs to troubleshoot in production in the middle of the night, and fix underlying issues the morning after.
- dzhiurgis 4y agoI kinda get it, and I don’t wanna justify pointless pressuress - you are paid top percentile - there’s some expectation to work accordingly. The remaining 99% of population would do anything for such money.
- manuelabeledo 4y agoOne can only work 24/7 for so long, regardless of the money.
- barefeg 4y agoI’m curios to understand why everything was constantly on fire. Was it too many deployments bringing down stuff? Or flaky infrastructure?
- incone123 4y agoJust started a new job. Last place had people without technical or domain knowledge trying to lead a project that really needed both of those. New place seems much better. Also the new place only wants me on site when there's a specific need, not 'just because'. I hear from a former colleague that they interviewed for my replacement, offered the job to someone and he turned them down because he's not interested in being on site just because either.
- danielovichdk 4y agoI just entered a week of what is called PI planning in SAFe. What the fuck is going on in the world of software delivery. 100 people has to spend 4 days planing 3 months ahead based on headlines from the business. I have in my 22 years of professional experience never ever tried anything so shocking. Fire me. Please
- aunlead 4y agoJust went through our PI planning last week. For those who have experienced it - I feel your pain!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rglullis 4y agoHow is this different from quarterly OKR planning and KPI reporting?
- junga 4y agoI managed to survive three rounds of PI Planning before going nuts. Wasn't the only reason to leave that company but surely a big pain point.
- RealityVoid 4y agoAt least enjoy the free food and drinks! SAFe is bonkers. Let me guess the field... Automotive?
- danielovichdk 4y agoGreen energy. Windmill software
- fmakunbound 4y agoChrist what is PI planning? We're doing something "OKR" meeting related which I have neither the interest nor time to look up the un-abbreviation. Luckily one can Zoom with sound and video off at least...
- Kaze404 4y agoAnother week of releasing features and changing specs 2 hours before they're supposed to be shown to the public in a presentation.
- wnolens 4y agoI'm not sure what my boss does. He could be a deep-fake AI Zoom bot, only existing for our weekly 1:1 calls and I don't think anything would be different. Also the principal engineer on my team insists on well optimized solutions for new features when I just don't think it will matter. And it would take the same amount of time to implement later as it does now, except we'd have more understanding of the problem then.
- barefeg 4y agoAgree. Creating very optimized features is rarely achievable in an agile way. It will take so long before the user can see any value, and maybe they won’t like it in the end
- 1-more 4y ago> He could be a deep-fake AI Zoom bot, only existing for our weekly 1:1 calls and I don't think anything would be different. Sorry dude I got really into my animation side project and just wanted to see if I could pick up one of these extra wfh 9-5 salaries the WSJ keeps saying are out there. Things spiraled.
- thefourthchime 4y agoSorry, that principal engineer sucks. You are correct to not pre-optimize. Just tell him to google "the first rule of optimization"
- necessary 4y agoHaven’t been able to do work all day because policy dictates that we must do all work on a VM that we RDP into. Thing is, remote computers sometimes go down, and today, all of our VMs are down. I’ve tried bringing up the issue but everyone seems to either not care/want me to fix it myself by knocking on the right doors and pushing the issue to leadership. But I don’t want to do all that, I’m a developer, and I just want my work environment to work for me, not against me. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sigh. Should’ve got out early, but I liked the pay and flexibility. It’s not worth it though.
- cvhashim 4y agoMy problems aren’t extreme as yours but for the last couple weeks, we’ve been having niggling, and almost nonstop environment issues. It’s hard to get anything done or commit code when things beyond my control keep breaking :(
- necessary 4y agoThis happens all the time. Leadership wants us to keep developing new features while ignoring the foundational issues that cause us to keep taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back. My condolences; it's a frustrating experience for sure, but we'll get through it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kodah 4y agoI've been, for the last two years, asking my teams business leadership to open up remote hiring and start championing higher salaries for my team mates. My team works on internal infrastructure and we build tools and capabilities that are unlike many/most teams at my company, every one of which are on the critical path. One of the baseline requirements of this team is that engineers pick up four different working languages for our products (which are software development kits, CLIs, and some backends). I have now lost all of the original engineers I joined the team with (minus one who was promoted), my team of five has shrunk to two (twice), and management has been riding "people only use us for counter offers" (which can't be true because we're several orders of magnitude under our peer groups in competitive offers - ask me how I know). I'm now trying to interview, handle incidents, develop features, and release patches with the help of one other engineer. Please, for the love of god, take me out back and fire me like Old Yeller.
- fmakunbound 4y agoI complete a ticket, now I've got to spend a day writing another ticket about how it's supposed to be deployed so any regular jack off can deploy it. Then I've got to find a "champion" (aka. a middle manager) to "champion" the ticket I wrote about the ticket. Then I have to notify several Slack channels about it, wait a bit in case someone makes a stink, then finally press "deploy" in Jenkins. It's a Modern Stack™ – cookie cutter, untestable locally, horde of Golang services on Kubernetes pulling and pushing to various cloud services. Of course, it's ad-tech and for a company that seems to be the media equivalent of a Jerry Springer show.
- 1-more 4y agoI hated Ad tech. Wishing you the best.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway42614 4y agoI am relatively high up in the eng org for a medium-sized company that has a fair amount of natural churn in our userbase. The past 2 years or so, our revenue has been declining and at first it was hand-waved away as COVID-related, but now people are starting to try to figure out why. The reason is blindingly obvious - our new user input has dropped to multi-year lows and churn has stayed constant. For some reason, people are convinced it is something else, and we've had endless meetings about it. I am constantly being asked to pull up more and more contorted reports to answer people's pet theories about what is going on, none of which make sense, but we spend forever on them. Eventually if you torture enough data, you'll find something, I guess. But it feels odd to overlook the things that are well-supported by data and make intuitive sense as well. It is like going into the ER and complaining that you feel lightheaded and when they notice your left arm has been severed and blood is spurting out, they rush to treat it, but you instead say "I had a lot of bread this morning, maybe I'm sensitive to gluten.. Can we test that first?" We do not have basic operational metrics around things like signup conversion and whenever I've tried to draw attention to those, it devolves into trying to create a dashboard with thousands of mostly useless metrics instead. The last time I tried to get everyone to focus on collecting a few operational metrics at first, I got shouted down and told we didn't want to limit anything upfront, and I have sort of checked out of those meetings ever since. No raises/bonuses this year and everyone was forced back to the office. I'm torn between being more and more worried about losing people and being worried about them being left in a tough spot here as things get worse.
- zkirill 4y agoI am a technical co-founder and I can't wait to fire and replace myself with someone who is better than me so that I can go and do [another thing over there that's on fire].
- taternuts 4y agoI was burned out on start ups and wanted to join a larger company that had more support and a work life balance. I effectively joined a start-up within a larger company and have worked insane hours trying to help push out their V1 product with one other engineer. I pushed back on the hours and subsequently have been screamed at by HR for refusing to regularly start at 6am and work 70 hour weeks - they attempted to make me quit so they wouldn't have to pay me severance (I declined - said if they weren't satisfied with me they can fire me). Now that the V1 is out things /have/ gotten better work-wise, but almost in a completely opposite way where now we have to deal with compliance and I need approval from the technical manager just to sneeze. I know upper-management doesn't like me because I was a squeaky wheel (I even championed the other engineer on the team to threaten to quit to get a raise) and it's just a weird situation. I'm definitely not getting any kind of raise from this company and they for sure don't care about my growth (or any of their employees really). I've been trying to make it at least a year (coming close) before looking elsewhere for my resume's sake but it's been hell at times and I feel like I've been at this company for 2+ years. Even with the recent slow-down in hours, I would love to get fired, take a couple months off, and deal with some personal health issues while studying for the next gig.
- Mandatum 4y agoChurn. I've had 4 managers in 6 months. I'm ready to go consulting because at this rate I never have the same colleagues for more than a few months anyway, and I'll get paid more. Just waiting for that RSU cliff, or redundancy. Whatever comes first.
- mikesabbagh 4y agoI'm working in a dysfunctional team for several months now, every one wants to solve problems his way. Waiting for my contract to finish to hit the door. Bought a farm lately where I spend my free time and money. This brings me back to sanity every week-end. Nature heals, you just need to visit her often.
- bradlys 4y agoMe. Just want a good severance package. Already been planning for it and going to hopefully get them to convert. I know what buttons to push. Just start calling management out in larger meetings. ;) Making it clear that people don’t know what they’re doing tends to really send you out on the “not a team player” track.
- amatxn 4y agoI’d quit tomorrow if my company offered a decent severance package. I’m super burned out and with attrition and hiring freezes, I’m stuck with double the workload. I wake up in the middle of the night stressing and full of anxiety about going to work. I despise going to work on Mondays due to the slog of meetings all day long. Writing software used to be fun and I’d do it after hours as a hobby. Now, I can’t stand the thought and just hope I can get 3-5 more years in the industry before I bail out for good.
- putsjoe 4y agoJust a small tip for Mondays. I stopped going to the gym on Mondays and essentially got rid of any miserable activities for the evening, clearing it up. I still dread Mondays, just a little less because I know after work I can just relax and cook a nice meal.
- amatxn 4y agoI’ve cut out anything extra on Mondays. I’ve kept my exercise routine in the morning because it keeps me sane.
- Xoke 4y agoAbout four years ago I started pushing for MFA for everyone. Two years ago we finally got approved to enable it for all staff. Last year we got approval for all students. Now the CEO wants us to remove MFA because students are quitting over this (although everyone else I talk to hasn't heard a single student quit from it). I have to find legislation that requires MFA or he will ask to remove it. I'm thinking this will be the hill I die on...