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!  

(edit rather than thread bump)

As it was foretold, all efforts to hand off knowledge were futile, but I was able to laugh about it this time around.  Although I mostly dislike Confluence, one nice feature it has is showing you who's viewed a page and when; at the start of my notice period, I announced that I would be collecting all of my accumulated knowledge on a Confluence page (docs I'd written, video trainings that I spent a few hours recording because a few people claimed they'd find that more useful than written docs, etc), and folks should review it before I was gone so that if anything was incomplete they could ask me about it and I could fill in the gaps.  (I scheduled a few "in person" trainings via Zoom; people didn't show up for those but asked if they could be recorded, so I obliged, giving "trainings" to an empty room and videoing them for the theoretical person who might someday want to listen to what I'd covered, adding all of those videos to the same page in Confluence.)

Toward the end of the two weeks, I took a screenshot of the visitor statistics and sent it to the boss, telling him "if later on someone tells you that the reason they don't know X is that Sam never trained them on it, you'll have this as a reference" -- zero people on my team had even clicked the link.    I of course was not surprised, but he'd previously demonstrated that he tends to believe people's bullshit and thinks I'm exaggerating when I say they're lazy frauds, so it was fun to have that to show him.

Anyway, just finished day one at the new job.  So far so good.

[HaemishM]

I built all of our websites, have had multiple in-person training sessions about them, and when I got the first one done a few years ago, I spent weeks on a manual complete with screenshots about how to edit the site. That information is mostly out of date now, but for the most part, the ones I trained only use the little slice that they need to use to do their regular jobs, and barely touch anything outside a very narrow focus. Hell, I even went so far as to train multiple people from different divisions to edit just their own content. I can count on one hand the number of people who actually used any of the training I provided, rather than just sending me emails when they need something changed.

People are lazy.

[Samwise]

The astonishing thing is how much more time and effort some people will put into getting someone else to do their work for them than they would have if they figured out how to do it themselves.  I'm too lazy to be that lazy.

[Chimpy]

I was on a call with one of my former coworkers and one of the guys who replaced me this morning to give guidance on a software update for a product that I am an expert on that they haven't upgraded since I left 2 years ago and the new guy thanked me for "all the documentation you left, it has been very helpful".

And I did almost NO documentation because I was too swamped to write stuff up because I was doing all the server/storage/networking/cloud architecture and administration.

So there are people that use information provided to them, but they are definitely rare.

[Samwise]

That or he was just kissing your ass.   

My first week back at the job that I recently quit (again), the guy who had putatively replaced me told me how he loved the paper I'd written on some algorithm or other.  When I (naively) asked him for details (what ideas did he have for further development?  what questions did he have?) he kinda stammered something about how he'd read it a few times and it wasn't totally clear to him yet but he slept with a copy of it under his pillow (he literally said this) and every time he re-read it he got something new out of it.  Bitch, it's not a poem, it's a technical document.  I immediately identified him as a halfway competent ass-kisser and entirely incompetent bullshitter, and I revised that estimation further downward in the year and a half of working with him that followed.

[Chimpy]

I said "that's funny because I didn't really write much documentation" and he specifically called out what it was he was speaking of which was stuff like: hardware inventory which included all the relevant hardware addresses and machine serial numbers, naming convention notes, and the comments added to firewall rules and such.

Mostly stuff I made for myself to keep track of things. (And also to fulfill audit requests, of course)

[Samwise]

Anyway, just finished day one at the new job.  So far so good.

Narrator: it would only go downhill from there.   

I'm just too old for this startup shit, man.  It's not even like the old days where maybe there was stress and drama but also it was exciting and people had good scotch at their desks and the parties were legendary.  With the new generation it seems like it's even more stress but also zero fun -- worst of both worlds!  Like, case in point: a couple of weeks ago I thought "be the change you want to see in your lame-ass office culture" and offered to buy a round for my team at a nearby bar at 5pm (the company is way too cheap to ever sponsor something as frivolous as "teambuilding"), and had zero takers because nobody felt comfortable leaving their desk that "early".

I also had the eye-opening experience just yesterday of watching another engineer on my team (this is his first job out of college) work on fixing a bug -- he was typing out a description of what he was trying to do, and at first I thought it was a comment or commit message, but no, it was an AI prompt.  The AI authored some code, he ran it without looking at it, and the thing he was trying to fix was still broken, so he tried another prompt, and after three iterations of that he gave up and I said he could reassign the bug to me. 

When AI code generation started to become a thing I was worried that new grads would be frozen out of the market by execs hiring fewer junior engineers, and that would screw them out of being able to acquire the experience to become senior engineers; now I realize that the junior engineers are going to fuck themselves over by using AI as a crutch and never developing the skills that would allow them to surpass it (because I do believe there's a pretty firm ceiling on what these AI models can do, and just because they can outperform a mediocre intern now doesn't mean they're going to outperform an actual engineer five or ten or even twenty years from now).

Anyway, I'm back on the job hunt again, having learned a new round of lessons (namely: no more fucking startups, ever), and after a couple of months of submitting applications I finally have some actual interviews at a couple of places, so here's hoping.

[HaemishM]

The AI coding is just really an insane thing, IMO. Granted, I think most of these GenAI/LLM's are utter useless trash, but for coding, it's probably even more so. These AI chatbot things are using next word prediction to try to sound like a human, right? Coders should instantly see the problem - code does not sound like human speech or language. It's full of very domain specific phrasings, definitions, shorthand, and contextual cues. While a GenAI bot whose data was very specifically culled, curated, and built using very domain specific training data COULD be very useful, that's not what these shitboxes are. Also, that kind of domain specific products aren't sexy enough to get the venture capital to be built in the first place, because their potential is not a hypergrowth market.

Also, the execs are going to use the GenAI as an excuse to hire either less engineers, or cheaper ones right out of college. They won't give a shit that the work product is trash, just that it costs less to build.

[Samwise]

I've seen AI work well as a sort of auto-complete in places where you're basically copying and pasting boilerplate; it's pretty good at figuring out via context what boilerplate you need, and suggesting it for you.  When I'm writing unit tests is mostly when I've found it somewhat useful.  It's still only right about 80% of the time, though, which makes it useful only insofar as I already knew what I wanted it to type and it's just saving me the keystrokes.

It's just one step further down the ladder from outsourcing engineering work to Eastern Europe and/or India.  Companies that lean heavily on that stuff eventually find out that they get what they pay for.  (Which gets back to my personal lesson being to just avoid startups, because the key word there is "eventually" and any company that's focused entirely on the short term will absolutely do all that stupid shit.)

[Chimpy]

Your "it works as an autocomplete" is the entirety of what it actually IS. It is just a fancy auto-complete with the added benefit (for the oil companies) that it burns a barrel of oil for every query.

[naum]

I've seen AI work well as a sort of auto-complete in places where you're basically copying and pasting boilerplate; it's pretty good at figuring out via context what boilerplate you need, and suggesting it for you.  When I'm writing unit tests is mostly when I've found it somewhat useful.  It's still only right about 80% of the time, though, which makes it useful only insofar as I already knew what I wanted it to type and it's just saving me the keystrokes.

Is obscene. Copilot and ChatGPT used to generate boilerplate, when once upon a time the whole purpose of higher level languages was to eliminate boilerplate, and silently "auto-generate" it in lower level machine code.

Can be useful, but you have to know what you're looking at.

[Samwise]

once upon a time the whole purpose of higher level languages was to eliminate boilerplate, and silently "auto-generate" it in lower level machine code.

Yup.  Something I think about a lot: if you have so much boilerplate that you need an AI to help you copy and paste it, you should be thinking about writing better frameworks/languages, not better copy/paste tools.

Unfortunately, designing better frameworks requires high level and long term thinking, and the industry as a whole hates those now.

[HaemishM]

There's no hyper growth in long-term thinking.

[Samwise]

me, giving notice with nothing else lined up amid a sea of industry layoffs, and getting a job offer from a better company (not another fucking startup, lol) eight days later

[Trippy]

Did they just not interview you?

[Samwise]

They did, it just took so long that I thought they'd ghosted me and was expecting to have to line something else up after quitting the current gig.  Instead the timing worked out perfectly. The interview process was weird in general -- no tech screening, just 5 rounds of shooting the shit with 5 different people.  Most of the people I talked to have been at the company for more than 20 years and say it's the best job they've had.  My last few gigs have been kinda miserable and ended with me quitting in frustration after about a year, but based on the extremely positive rep this place has I'm hoping this is the one that I can stay at until I'm ready to retire.