Job thread

[Reg]

That absolutely sucks Rasix.

[HaemishM]

20 years? Yep, been there. Sorry man, fuck capitalism.

[Khaldun]

Fuck that shit.

[schild]

Yep. Laid off. 1 month before 20 years and with $60,000 worth of unvested stock options. Fuuuck.

edit: Just got an email for a laptop refresh. Fucking hilarious.

shit bro

[Teleku]

Yeah man, sorry to hear.  Not a fun moment I'm sure.  

What happens with the unvested stock?

[Soulflame]

Most likely it reverts back to the company.

[Salamok]

Got a private company coming after me for a General Counsel position. Having a hard time deciding if any amount of money is worth jumping out of the nice, comfy public sector where by defined benefit pension keeps accumulating.

For me personally, that amount of money is "at least twice what I'm making now with the exact same benefits before I will even talk to you, you private sector dickhead." The private sector can eat a fat bag of rotten dicks.

I'm in the exact opposite situation, the government job I left 5 years ago is still trying to find people for the same underpaid salary as when I left, I was the highest paid employee who wasn't a division director when I left and I now make 2.5 times what I did then.  I get calls from hourly contract recruiters all the time to work on state government projects and I just tell them "There isn't a dollar amount you can name that will convince me to bail out these incompetent lazy fucks at the state.   If they want help they can post an internal hire position at a rate greater than 50% of current market rates.".

[Samwise]

Had a phone call with one of my old employers today and they're now putting together an offer for me to go back to work for them at double my old salary.

herewegoagain.gif

so I've been back at this job for just about a year, and I've learned you can't go home again.  I'm at the "submitting applications and preparing notes for the exit interview" stage of frustration, which is a couple of notches shy of "quitting with no plan," but yeah, it's time. 

On the bright side, I know 100% for certain now that leaving the first time was the right call.   

[Samwise]

Other places I've worked have generally been much more reluctant to touch code that's old and moldy, but usually it's less "this is my baby, you can't touch it" and more "it's working fine already, we should focus on building something new that we can sell."

Since I wrote this, I've discovered a part of the spectrum beyond "this is my baby", which is "the existence of this useless and unmaintainable abomination that literally everyone hates gives me job security, so I'm going to add as many unnecessary dependencies on it as possible to make it hard to get rid of".

Luckily once the Q4 hiring lull passed, the recruiters showed up in droves.  Only a couple more weeks until I collect my hard-earned bonus (and PFL, which I'd also have to forfeit if I left before taking it) and then I'll be free to make my escape.

[01101010]

Other places I've worked have generally been much more reluctant to touch code that's old and moldy, but usually it's less "this is my baby, you can't touch it" and more "it's working fine already, we should focus on building something new that we can sell."

Since I wrote this, I've discovered a part of the spectrum beyond "this is my baby", which is "the existence of this useless and unmaintainable abomination that literally everyone hates gives me job security, so I'm going to add as many unnecessary dependencies on it as possible to make it hard to get rid of".

Luckily once the Q4 hiring lull passed, the recruiters showed up in droves.  Only a couple more weeks until I collect my hard-earned bonus (and PFL, which I'd also have to forfeit if I left before taking it) and then I'll be free to make my escape.

Godspeed to you...

[Samwise]

My 2023 bonus arrived today.  I'm still on leave for five more weeks, and have already agreed to start at the new job (better pay, better commute, better tech stack, better avenues for career growth, and most importantly nobody I interviewed with seemed like a stupid fuckhead) two weeks after that.

Kind of debating my options on how exactly to quit.  My boss is a nice guy who's in way over his head with a large team of incompetents, and my departure is going to suck for him.  I thought about notifying him right away so he has as much notice as possible (I had to wait until my bonus was in hand since upper management has a history of retaliating against people who quit and fucking with my bonus is a thing that would have been in their power), but quitting over Slack/email while I'm OOO feels excessively... cold?  And I'm not sure if letting him stew for five entire weeks while I'm not around to actually do any handoff stuff is really a kindness -- I'd already carefully extricated myself from any project commitments prior to going on leave so there are no plans that he needs to adjust.

In the old days I'd have knocked on his door first thing Monday when I got back, but everyone's hybrid now, and he only comes in on Wednesdays.  So it's gonna have to be over Zoom, and since we *never* do random 1:1s over Zoom, he will start freaking out as soon as he sees it land on his calendar, and his calendar is bound to be full if I wait until that Monday to schedule it.

I'm thinking that the best option might be to surprise him on the Friday before I get back (everyone fucks off early on Fridays so his calendar is bound to have some space) so he has the weekend to collect himself before our team standup on Monday morning which would be the logical place to break the news to the team at large (there will probably be a lot of panic among those ranks as well because I'm doing a lot of folks' jobs right now).

What would Nerf do?   

[HaemishM]

He's probably shoot something.

[Velorath]

As awkward as it might be to quit over e-mail or zoom, the more advance notice you can give for him will be better for him in the long run that waiting until you're able to do it in person.

[Chimpy]

Send him an email while also sending a formal resignation letter to him and the company's HR department.

Nothing wrong with resigning by email.

[Samwise]

Update: after a few weeks of dilly-dallying and failing to find intersections between "boss's calendar is clear" and "baby is napping," I finally ripped the bandaid today over Zoom, so he gets three weeks notice instead of two.  As I suspected, the early notice doesn't make much difference because the guys upstairs have frozen hiring on my team and will likely not open a req for someone to take my place, even if it were someone cheaper.  Boss was not at all surprised; we've already had a few conversations where it's been made clear that this job is a dead end for me career-wise and that I'm not feeling any of the job satisfaction that could hypothetically make that opportunity cost worth paying.

Formal email will go out later today; I'll probably have ChatGPT write it.  

Prior times I've quit a job, I've been a little stressed about doing handoff, but my entire last year at this job has been all about trying (and failing) to eliminate myself as a single point of failure by sharing knowledge and making sure that anything I'm working on is in a handoff-able state (not so much because I was imminently planning to leave, at least at first, but more because single points of failure are Bad and because I'm tired of continually doing stuff that I mastered twenty years ago because nobody else has learned how to do it), so I feel like there's nothing extra I could do toward that end in my last two weeks that I haven't already tried at some point during the preceding fifty.  Also, after I did the "frantically document everything" for a full month at my boss's behest the last time I quit this same job (in 2016), I was able to come back in 2022 and see firsthand that nobody had read any of it.  It was infuriating at the time, but now the knowledge that all my efforts here are futile feels strangely freeing.

Looking forward to less futility in the future!