9 ms·
Always be ready to leave (even if you never do)
- Refreeze5224 10mo agoAbsolutely. You employer is willing and able to fire you and eliminate your healthcare coverage at the drop of a hat with no remorse, and we should all never forget, and always be prepared for that fact.
- rufus_foreman 10mo agoExcept for gross misconduct, COBRA. Yes, you will need to pay for the coverage that the employer was paying for, but that's not "eliminate your healthcare coverage at the drop of a hat with no remorse".
- theoreticalmal 10mo agoAlso don’t forget you can delay paying for COBRA for up to 59 days after loss of employment and still be able to retroactively pay and be covered. It’s a gamble that you get to go back on if you cards break the wrong way
- georgemcbay 10mo agoI agree with the gist of what you are saying wholeheartedly. Always be prepared to be thrown under the bus by your employer, no matter how unlikely it seems... but that isn't really the message of the original blog post beyond the possibility space of the headline. The actual contents are almost the opposite, the blog poster stayed around in their role for an entire year while letting their employer know they were unhappy. I'm all for professionalism when leaving a job. For any full-time position I've held I've always followed the 2 week notice standard as a minimum and have even done part-time work past the 2 week period in a couple of special cases where I understood the burden on the company I was leaving was more than a 2 week transition could handle. ... but I don't see how it counts as being ready to quit at any time if that quitting is the result of the company not being able to fix a job situation you've told them isn't working out for you over the course of an entire year.
- BinaryIgor 10mo agoVery wise; have been following this approach since years and I highly recommend it. This one (from the article) is a gem: "I’ll work like I might stay forever, and like I might leave tomorrow" Besides practical benefits of this approach mentioned in the article, it's the attitude that brings you closer to stoicism that just makes your whole life, not only professional one, better.
- sfpotter 10mo ago[flagged]
- sph 10mo agoNo em dashes, but there’s enough “it’s not X, it’s Y” give aways of LLM usage.
- pstuart 10mo agoI've used double dashes for years and now they get automatically turned into em dashes, and I'm not an LLM (that I can tell so far).
- readthenotes1 10mo agoI asked Perplexity to provide a witty reply--but none of the ones provided were amusing enough.
- goopypoop 10mo agothanks
- setopt 10mo agoI manually type en- and em-dashes, which on Mac is easily typed using the Option key and on Linux is easily typed with a Compose key, and even on iOS you just long-press the hyphen key. I had to learn the difference between hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash when typesetting scientific papers and theses in LaTeX, and after that it just doesn’t feel right to not use them "properly".
- MikeTheGreat 10mo agoand I'm not an LLM (that I can tell so far). Maybe ask your doctor to administer a Turing test?
- pstuart 10mo ago
- greatgib 10mo agoThe best time to document isn’t two weeks before leaving. It’s right now. Clearly AI written or virtue-signaling post, because this doesn't make any sense. If you are leaving it is that you are unhappy with the company, and you owe them nothing and they owe nothing to you, I don't see why you would stress yourself with documenting your work when you are leaving... Their loss if you go. But even more, why a small employee in his right mind would make himself replaceable for the good of the company...
- radley 10mo agoGood habits and reputation carry forward.
- xdfgh1112 10mo agoBefore AI people would still say things like this. "The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time is now". Among the set of such constructs, some are overused by LLM and have become a symbolic of it, but they will still show up in human writing with the same frequency as before.
- andreacanton 10mo agoThank you for your comment. yes, english is not my first language, so I use AI to helping me structure the article, but I've edited and fully reviewed and take responsibility for every word in it. (Anyway I will trust less AI next time, so thank you) What I was trying to say is that if you do less because you don't like where you work, you are losing opportunity to learn skills, or worst: you are learning to do less in general. How can you find a new and better job if you are doing less?
- greatgib 10mo agoThank you for your reply. First, you can do your job but not be overzealous. Second, it is not because you are not "doing more" for your employer that you miss opportunities to learn skills. You can do that for yourself on your personal time to your own benefit. In addition, with what you wrote, it didn't look that like that you were suggesting to learn skills: You said to document what you already know, "transfer" your knowledge, so that it is easier for others in the company to live without you (or get ride of you).
- Ecstatify 10mo agoHonestly, it sounds like the usual clichéd advice. I was expecting something more practical, like doing an interview every six months or something along those lines. Supervisors and HR just smile and nod. Maybe if he had a better relationship with his manager, he would’ve realised sooner that he was just wasting his time. Documentation is like an untested disaster recovery plan. When a major issue happens, you’ll be the one called. You should delegate or automate the task and remove it from your workload, especially if it carries high risk. I’d actually love to read the dark arts equivalent of this article.
- neilv 10mo ago> I was expecting [...] like doing an interview every six months Incidentally, I hear advice like that (especially a variation, of "practice" interviews) on HN, but I really wish people wouldn't do that. Actually, please don't do this resource burning with startups or other SMBs, unless it's clear they want to burn resources. But feel free to burn the resources of FAANGs, who mostly created the idea that interviews should be a series of performance rituals that you have to practice and refresh on. (Though the related phenomenon, of techbro frequent job-hopping, wasn't the fault of FAANGs. It seemed to start during the dotcom boom, pre-Google, especially in the Bay Area, AFAICT, where a lot of people were chasing the most promising rapid IPO. At the time, the rumors/grumbling I was hearing from the Bay Area made me want to do a startup in Cambridge/Boston instead, just to avoid that culture. After the dotcom IPO gold rush ended, it seemed that job-hopping for big pay boosts and promotions became a thing, and that job-hopping culture never went away. But I don't think we'll find much team loyalty anywhere anymore, not from companies nor from colleagues, so that's no longer a reason I'd avoid the Bay Area specifically.)
- atherton94027 10mo ago> Actually, please don't do this resource burning with startups or other SMBs, unless it's clear they want to burn resources Startups are fine scheduling candidates for 5-6 rounds of interviews, they should be fine with the occasional tire-kicker
- bayarearefugee 10mo agoWell written blog post, but its a bit too adjacent to LinkedIn slop-posting in actual message, for me. I can't help but think the real take away is that you should trust your gut and quit a lot sooner and the poster basically wasted a year being jerked around. If you are telling your employer you are unhappy for a whole year and they don't fix the conditions leading to your unhappiness, they are telling you they don't value you enough to make those changes (for the sake of simplicity, I'll just assume the employee's specific points of dissatisfaction were reasonable fixes and not ridiculous asks). You don't owe them a year of soft landing when you quit, in the vast majority of cases they wouldn't have given you anywhere near that if they let you go.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- bitwize 10mo agoRemember that immediately after Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which the CCP solicited "honest feedback" about how well they were doing, came the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which the complainers were identified and punished, sometimes executed. If the decision makers are welcoming honest feedback, chances are pretty good it's to put you on a potential troublemaker list so they'll know just who to hand pink slips to at the next round of needed layoffs (if not before). Unless you're prepared to lose your job TODAY, treat your employer like the Roman Empire, and the CEO like Caesar.
- mathattack 10mo agoI’m amazed how many people leave on bad terms. Over any medium and long term time horizon it’s a terrible strategy. You never know who will do a quiet back channel reference, and many times we wind up working for the same people. The other piece of advice about documentation is important beyond leaving for a new job. Many people lose promotions because “who could possibly backfill them?” Creating a high talent well documented organization is a great signal for promotion readiness, and takes a roadblock away from it too.
- tschellenbach 10mo agoYes it's crazy. There's the founders podcast about Elon Musk. Apparently he stayed in good contact with the Paypal people, even though they fired him and later on that relationship saved Spacex.
- mathattack 10mo agoAnd now he appears on their podcast.
- throwuxiytayq 10mo ago[flagged]
- alpineidyll3 10mo agoThe author left out the most important detail: - Before being ready to leave, make sure you either have, or will have, another opportunity or no need for an employer. VERY often (especially in tech!) employers/managers will have employees, not for their labor, but for vanity, to build a pyramid to themselves, or for image reasons. Such people will immediately send you packing for complaining about non-productivity. Your perception of your superior's alignment can easily be wrong. Given that precondition... I agree with the premise.
- andreacanton 10mo agoThank you for sharing this important detail! Yes, I have done it 10 years ago: I've left a job because of burnout without another opportunity. After that, I've panicked for 6 months without a job. Never again: I promised myself to never leave a job if I was without energy.
- weinzierl 10mo ago"Always be ready to leave" Big yes "For a year before leaving, I talked openly with my supervisor and HR about my dissatisfaction" Big, big, big no. Might have worked for OP this time but in general this will backfire drastically. In many European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.
- bartvk 10mo agoIt completely depends on the management. Be sure to know them.
- grumbelbart 10mo ago> In many European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee. Huh, where?
- caminante 10mo agoHuh, why would openly complaining about your job to your boss/HR be protected in a "just cause" regime?
- ahtihn 10mo agoWhy would complaining reduce existing protections.
- caminante 10mo agoYour question makes no sense because nobody said this and if a protection can get reduced, then it's not a real protection, lol.
- theoreticalmal 10mo ago“European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.”
- more_corn 10mo agoSome of the best work I’ve ever done has been in preparation for leaving. Documentation, automation, security, reliability. Theres nothing like the clarity of leaving to show the gaps.
- iku 10mo agoWhen I read the title, I was curious: is it about a business setting, or, maybe, about a private relationship / marriage context? As someone, who has walked away from more than one relationship, I see this perfectly applicable and sensible advice in both contexts, really. Thanks.
- idiotsecant 10mo agoAlways being ready to leave a relationship sounds like personality flaw, not sensible advice.
- theoreticalmal 10mo agoBeing willing (even ready) to walk away from marriage completely defeats the point of about half of the intangible benefits of marriage.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoThey don't mention having a large pile of cash. You really aren't ready to leave at a moment's notice if you're in debt and need to eat.
- throwuxiytayq 10mo agoOh yeah, that’s the other protip: don’t get in debt, maybe?
- adt 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#Negative_parallelisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...
- andreacanton 10mo agoThank you English is not my first language so I trusted AI for my article. I will study better this behavior
- stack_framer 10mo agoMissing a promotion is extremely challenging. I started working toward a promotion to staff engineer at the beginning of 2023. By the end of the year, my manager said I was ready, but he had been asked to step back into an IC role, so he couldn't start my promotion paperwork. My new manager felt I wasn't ready for promotion, but she claimed I wouldn't have to start over. It felt like starting over though, because it took another year to convince her. During that time I consulted regularly with her and my director of engineering—seeking and taking every possible opportunity to demonstrate that I could operate at the staff level. My manager then spent six months writing an 18-page promotion packet, highlighting my accomplishments, and outlining why I deserved the promotion. The packet was approved by my director of engineering, so they both felt I was ready. It was then presented to an anonymous promotion committee, which ultimately makes the promotion decision. Despite two and a half years of effort, the committee rejected my promotion. They even provided a list of 12 bullet points where they felt I was coming up short. I gave up trying for the promotion, for my mental health. Sheesh.
- caminante 10mo agoTalk to an employment attorney. This sounds like potential "bait and switch" practices that have strung you along for less pay/accumulated earnings. I'm sorry you got such a mixed signal from your engineering tree and the promotion committee. Need to do more research on that promotion committee. This sounds like the committee nightmare that many PhD candidates face.
- einsteinx2 10mo agoSame type of BS happened to me at my last company, which ultimately let to me being extremely unhappy there and leaving. If I hadn’t gone for the promotion at all I’d probably still be there. I’ll never understand why companies as an almost universal rule make it as difficult as possible to get promoted or get a raise but will hire less qualified outsiders for those positions at higher pay without blinking an eye.
- TwoNineFive 10mo agoSome good advice but terrible form. Some of you software people have a loud, pretentious, and arrogant ego problem. With self-serving advertblogs like this, I always imagine that Simpsons episode where Bart has a pot on his head and is banging two pans together, yelling "I AM SO GREAT, I AM SO GREAT, EVERYBODY LOVES ME, I AM SO GREAT!" lol
- andreacanton 10mo agoThank you for your comment. This wasn't my intention, but I'll consider this aspect in future.