I’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.
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.
The 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...
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?
Before 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.
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.
Same 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.
Talk 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.
Very 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.
> 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.)
> Startups are fine scheduling candidates for 5-6 rounds of interviews,
Not all startups are like that, and you might not know in advance.
Though, incidentally, I did find one about a month ago, and I will take this moment of inspiration to complain about it, constructively.
I bowed out of an imminent offer, because I thought that the CTO's gauntlet of evaluation steps was a sign of the day-to-day I should expect: that I would only be valued like an untrusted junior commodity worker.
(I have a lot of experience, my detailed resume shows that, and I'd been patient and met more than halfway with the process.)
Meanwhile, the initial pitch about why I might want to work there had worn off, after 5+ calls and a takehome. I wasn't going to invest any more time+energy+soul, submitting to the final grilling/hazing step, of a job I no longer wanted.
ProTip: Unless you are a FAANG, or are paying FAANG-like money, don't act like one towards prospective hires/colleagues. Otherwise, you should expect to hire only people who are moderately good at interviewing (good enough to pass your nonsense, but not the nonsense of the people who pay more). And you should expect them to hop without loyalty, because you do FAANG arrogance and nonsense, without paying for the privilege.
There's probably some happy-ish medium of people toughing it out through a bad situation they don't feel they can change--and jumping at the first instance of itchy feet (which is admittedly harder at the moment).
Not sure when the job-hopping culture--especially on the west coast--really came in. I do associate it with post-dot com but I'd really have to look at the data. Certainly wasn't really true pre dot-com at large tech employers.
Honestly, if companies cared enough about the interviewees time as well, people wouldn’t do this. I was looking for a few months, and companies put you through the wringer of 6-9 interviews these days. Two should tell you whether a candidate is a good fit or not. Then there’s the case interviews where candidates put in dozens of hours prepping decks and what not, and then get rejected without any feedback at all.
And this was exclusively at SMBs and startups. At least, the FAANG companies have structure and you know what to expect.
I don’t think SWEs realize just how many companies out there will look at a resume of a job hopper (even if there is 10 years at FAANG, say 2 at each) and outright reject the candidate on those grounds.
You’re hiring a job hopper because they have skills you need NOW.
They are job hopping because they want high level compensation and maybe a position on an high-impact team, instead of being sidelined and powerless against the disrespect of their manager.
Your company can make those work together.
I’m not saying every job hopper is the right hire. I am offering a reason they get hired anyway (availability!) and leave anyway (respect and $$).
“they have skills you have NOW” is exactly like saying “she/he cute NOW I need to get married” :) Needing something now is a recipe for disaster and I am happy I never needed (nor will need) anyone now
Respectfully, didn't you just reject such reasoning 2 days ago with a valid counterargument by you? [0] Except this time, you didn't provide any rationale.
Scratching someone out for being an alleged job hopper on the surface is pre-mature optimization for hiring talent. What is your concern that you can't mitigate? e.g., call their referrals, backload their comp, etc.
I am building a team to play with for a long haul, not grabbing someone for a pick up game cause we are one player short.
the best analogy I can give is that at work I (and many companies) are looking for a marriage, not a one-night stand. no matter what your technical provess is, it takes a while for you to learn the domain and get gelled with the team. While this is happening, we are all putting a significant effort to make this happen. if you then turn around and leave the entire has wasted a whole bunch time/effort and even if you are some “rock star” SWE we lose
Not trying to be difficult, but you're not really addressing my question.
Why can't you address this with mitigants I mentioned? It sounds like you do some of that with "other non-$ comp" (mandatory PTO, parental leave,...) that's use it or lose it, but those are table stakes these days.
I love the idea of thinking about a long term marriage and contracting accordingly, but at some point it's a leap of faith.
Your bias has a presumably unforced handicap. Losing that 100x programmer may not matter to your business/personal goals to make GOOD wealth accumulation, but it will hurt your changes to go from GOOD to GREAT outcomes.
great question. weeding out people up front that are not team players and job hop goes a loooooong way. once you immediately root that out the rest of it:
Absolutely. I had a stretch of consulting gigs for a couple years and I recently was denied an interview because they "didn't like the short periods of employment" even though they were specifically indicated as short term contract jobs!
A recruiter gave me the terse feedback about "too long consulting" from one company.
(And it didn't fit any rational objection I could think of, if they'd actually looked at the resume, beyond triggering on a keyword.)
I think a root problem is that many companies are bad at hiring, and many of those get confidently bad at it. In institutional emergent behavior terms, as well as individual actor terms.
> I think a root problem is that many companies are bad at hiring, and many of those get confidently bad at it.
Precisely. And who are we kidding? I know a lot of people that have performance objectives to grow $ or cut $. I don't know anyone who has a comp clawback for making bad hires.
Spending too long (vague) consulting for one company doesn't measure your competencies or value you bring to the team. I bet they just needed a reason to knock you out and shortlist the hiring manager's preferred candidate who they don't know personally, but know via close friend referral.
One of the hiring problems that companies face is they're now flooded with resumes. And the easiest thing to do is have many false-positive declines. That alone can explain lots of random declines.
This can also dovetail with illegal hiring discrimination: when there's an exec/manager who doesn't want to hire women, people with kids, people likely to feel pressure to have kids soon, military veterans, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc... it's really easy for those resumes to be among the ones quickly discarded, with or without pretext. It's plausibly deniable, because of all the random declines of good resumes.
Based on the parent's confirmation, this is the implicit reason.
They're screening job-hoppers as a "rule of thumb" that shrinks the candidate funnel at the cost of losing out on 100x programmers or 1-10x programmers that can commit to 2y.
I don't get the cost-benefit other than time and a lack of need for 100x programmers.
Well 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.
Absolutely. 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.
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".
Also 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
I 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.
"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.
Indeed. I _have_ been able to (mostly) talk about things that I was dissatisfied about, but out of dozen bosses I had, that was with only two. I wouldn't trust the others to start looking into a replacement the moment I gave even a hint of dissatisfaction. For some others, I could express disagreement about outcomes or company policies, but in some cases even pushing too much on those topics can get you fast tracked out. I have seen it happen.
To be able to have (again, mostly) honest conversations with a boss or HR is a privilege. In 99% of the cases, HR is there to protect the company, there were only a handful of HR employees that went above and beyond. And even then, you had to make sure not to use some triggering words. I mean this in the literal sense, there are a few things that, if you say, that triggers an automatic HR response, regardless of who you are talking to. Hinting of leaving, even with an unspecified timeframe, is one of them.
Reread the comment chain, because I literally quoted a comment saying that repeatedly voicing your dissatisfaction to your boss can reduce the robust employment protections in some countries in Europe.
Where is "change in law" coming from? How could it possibly mean that in context?
Of course the meaning is "reducing the protections you have". And I'm challenging the notion that complaining or voicing dissatisfaction could do that in any European country.
Therefore I would like examples of countries where it is the case that simply complaining to your boss has any impact on protections you have.
> And I'm challenging the notion that complaining or voicing dissatisfaction could do that in any European country.
'any' ?
See "cooperative problems" [0], the EU-wide "duty of loyalty" for (not relevant directly here for internal complaints, but paints a bright line), and countless posts on socials of EU people getting let go for complaining in the workplace.
If this doesn't challenge your perception, then we're wasting time.
Why did you conveniently skip over the first and primary exclusion for "cooperative problems" and "unfitness", which linked to the Danish Ministry of Employment's site?
> What protections did these people have that did not apply because they complained to their boss?
Is English not your native language? This question makes no sense. If the protection doesn't apply, then they never had it.
As for providing additional context,
1. "duty of loyalty" is something you probably weren't aware of. It sets a bright line, and would surprise people with your over-general view.
2. Dismissing social media posts [0] about claims of dismissal for complaining at the office that would satisfy your request... is bad faith.
Remember 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.
When 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.
Some 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.
- 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.
Some 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
They 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.
Oh yeah, that’s the other protip: don’t get in debt, maybe?
I’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.
Yes 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.
And now he appears on their podcast.
But even more, why a small employee in his right mind would make himself replaceable for the good of the company...
Thank 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?
Good habits and reputation carry forward.
Before 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.
Missing 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.
Same 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.
Talk 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.
Very 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.
Stoicism is probably one of the best candidates for a world religion, not that any philosophy or religion should be too limiting.
I learned of stoicism in the last year and it’s been transformational for me.
Honestly, 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.
> 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.)
> 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
> Startups are fine scheduling candidates for 5-6 rounds of interviews,
Not all startups are like that, and you might not know in advance.
Though, incidentally, I did find one about a month ago, and I will take this moment of inspiration to complain about it, constructively.
I bowed out of an imminent offer, because I thought that the CTO's gauntlet of evaluation steps was a sign of the day-to-day I should expect: that I would only be valued like an untrusted junior commodity worker.
(I have a lot of experience, my detailed resume shows that, and I'd been patient and met more than halfway with the process.)
Meanwhile, the initial pitch about why I might want to work there had worn off, after 5+ calls and a takehome. I wasn't going to invest any more time+energy+soul, submitting to the final grilling/hazing step, of a job I no longer wanted.
ProTip: Unless you are a FAANG, or are paying FAANG-like money, don't act like one towards prospective hires/colleagues. Otherwise, you should expect to hire only people who are moderately good at interviewing (good enough to pass your nonsense, but not the nonsense of the people who pay more). And you should expect them to hop without loyalty, because you do FAANG arrogance and nonsense, without paying for the privilege.
You can't know your market worth without putting yourself on the market.
There's probably some happy-ish medium of people toughing it out through a bad situation they don't feel they can change--and jumping at the first instance of itchy feet (which is admittedly harder at the moment).
Not sure when the job-hopping culture--especially on the west coast--really came in. I do associate it with post-dot com but I'd really have to look at the data. Certainly wasn't really true pre dot-com at large tech employers.
Honestly, if companies cared enough about the interviewees time as well, people wouldn’t do this. I was looking for a few months, and companies put you through the wringer of 6-9 interviews these days. Two should tell you whether a candidate is a good fit or not. Then there’s the case interviews where candidates put in dozens of hours prepping decks and what not, and then get rejected without any feedback at all.
And this was exclusively at SMBs and startups. At least, the FAANG companies have structure and you know what to expect.
I don’t think SWEs realize just how many companies out there will look at a resume of a job hopper (even if there is 10 years at FAANG, say 2 at each) and outright reject the candidate on those grounds.
You’re hiring a job hopper because they have skills you need NOW.
They are job hopping because they want high level compensation and maybe a position on an high-impact team, instead of being sidelined and powerless against the disrespect of their manager.
Your company can make those work together.
I’m not saying every job hopper is the right hire. I am offering a reason they get hired anyway (availability!) and leave anyway (respect and $$).
“they have skills you have NOW” is exactly like saying “she/he cute NOW I need to get married” :) Needing something now is a recipe for disaster and I am happy I never needed (nor will need) anyone now
Not true.
The talent view is that this candidate is in demand by peers, and it's the candidate's choice to put in a full 2y and leave early before vesting.
true because I am talking from personal experience (30 years of it, 10 in position making hiring decisions). and these are jobs you really really want
Respectfully, didn't you just reject such reasoning 2 days ago with a valid counterargument by you? [0] Except this time, you didn't provide any rationale.
Scratching someone out for being an alleged job hopper on the surface is pre-mature optimization for hiring talent. What is your concern that you can't mitigate? e.g., call their referrals, backload their comp, etc.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830434
I am building a team to play with for a long haul, not grabbing someone for a pick up game cause we are one player short.
the best analogy I can give is that at work I (and many companies) are looking for a marriage, not a one-night stand. no matter what your technical provess is, it takes a while for you to learn the domain and get gelled with the team. While this is happening, we are all putting a significant effort to make this happen. if you then turn around and leave the entire has wasted a whole bunch time/effort and even if you are some “rock star” SWE we lose
Not trying to be difficult, but you're not really addressing my question.
Why can't you address this with mitigants I mentioned? It sounds like you do some of that with "other non-$ comp" (mandatory PTO, parental leave,...) that's use it or lose it, but those are table stakes these days.
I love the idea of thinking about a long term marriage and contracting accordingly, but at some point it's a leap of faith.
Your bias has a presumably unforced handicap. Losing that 100x programmer may not matter to your business/personal goals to make GOOD wealth accumulation, but it will hurt your changes to go from GOOD to GREAT outcomes.
That sounds very sensible, for some of the better kinds of companies.
How do you handle retention, once you "marry" an employee?
If the manager retired, would the company keep nurturing that?
great question. weeding out people up front that are not team players and job hop goes a loooooong way. once you immediately root that out the rest of it:
- great team
- competitive compensation
- maternity / paternity leave
- mandatory pto
Absolutely. I had a stretch of consulting gigs for a couple years and I recently was denied an interview because they "didn't like the short periods of employment" even though they were specifically indicated as short term contract jobs!
I understand ever having done consulting is seen as a red flag now, so that might be more to blame.
A recruiter gave me the terse feedback about "too long consulting" from one company.
(And it didn't fit any rational objection I could think of, if they'd actually looked at the resume, beyond triggering on a keyword.)
I think a root problem is that many companies are bad at hiring, and many of those get confidently bad at it. In institutional emergent behavior terms, as well as individual actor terms.
> I think a root problem is that many companies are bad at hiring, and many of those get confidently bad at it.
Precisely. And who are we kidding? I know a lot of people that have performance objectives to grow $ or cut $. I don't know anyone who has a comp clawback for making bad hires.
Spending too long (vague) consulting for one company doesn't measure your competencies or value you bring to the team. I bet they just needed a reason to knock you out and shortlist the hiring manager's preferred candidate who they don't know personally, but know via close friend referral.
One of the hiring problems that companies face is they're now flooded with resumes. And the easiest thing to do is have many false-positive declines. That alone can explain lots of random declines.
This can also dovetail with illegal hiring discrimination: when there's an exec/manager who doesn't want to hire women, people with kids, people likely to feel pressure to have kids soon, military veterans, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc... it's really easy for those resumes to be among the ones quickly discarded, with or without pretext. It's plausibly deniable, because of all the random declines of good resumes.
Based on the parent's confirmation, this is the implicit reason.
They're screening job-hoppers as a "rule of thumb" that shrinks the candidate funnel at the cost of losing out on 100x programmers or 1-10x programmers that can commit to 2y.
I don't get the cost-benefit other than time and a lack of need for 100x programmers.
Well 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...
Thank you
English is not my first language so I trusted AI for my article.
I will study better this behavior
Absolutely. 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.
Except 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".
Also 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
I 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.
"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.
Indeed. I _have_ been able to (mostly) talk about things that I was dissatisfied about, but out of dozen bosses I had, that was with only two. I wouldn't trust the others to start looking into a replacement the moment I gave even a hint of dissatisfaction. For some others, I could express disagreement about outcomes or company policies, but in some cases even pushing too much on those topics can get you fast tracked out. I have seen it happen.
To be able to have (again, mostly) honest conversations with a boss or HR is a privilege. In 99% of the cases, HR is there to protect the company, there were only a handful of HR employees that went above and beyond. And even then, you had to make sure not to use some triggering words. I mean this in the literal sense, there are a few things that, if you say, that triggers an automatic HR response, regardless of who you are talking to. Hinting of leaving, even with an unspecified timeframe, is one of them.
In general, don't do this.
Also, exit interviews cannot benefit you. Decline.
> In many European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.
Huh, where?
Huh, why would openly complaining about your job to your boss/HR be protected in a "just cause" regime?
Why would complaining reduce existing protections.
Your question makes no sense because nobody said this and if a protection can get reduced, then it's not a real protection, lol.
Reread the comment chain, because I literally quoted a comment saying that repeatedly voicing your dissatisfaction to your boss can reduce the robust employment protections in some countries in Europe.
> I literally quoted a comment
Bold claim considering you left off a key part of the quote.
It's not reducing the protections (change in law). It's reducing the protections you have. The qualifier you left out changes the meaning.
Where is "change in law" coming from? How could it possibly mean that in context?
Of course the meaning is "reducing the protections you have". And I'm challenging the notion that complaining or voicing dissatisfaction could do that in any European country.
Therefore I would like examples of countries where it is the case that simply complaining to your boss has any impact on protections you have.
> And I'm challenging the notion that complaining or voicing dissatisfaction could do that in any European country.
'any' ?
See "cooperative problems" [0], the EU-wide "duty of loyalty" for (not relevant directly here for internal complaints, but paints a bright line), and countless posts on socials of EU people getting let go for complaining in the workplace.
If this doesn't challenge your perception, then we're wasting time.
[0] https://businessindenmark.virk.dk/guidance/employment-and-di...
"Duty of loyalty" is obviously irrelevant here.
"Countless posts of people getting let go for whatever reason" is irrelevant too.
What protections did these people have that did not apply because they complained to their boss?
LOL!
Why did you conveniently skip over the first and primary exclusion for "cooperative problems" and "unfitness", which linked to the Danish Ministry of Employment's site?
> What protections did these people have that did not apply because they complained to their boss?
Is English not your native language? This question makes no sense. If the protection doesn't apply, then they never had it.
As for providing additional context,
1. "duty of loyalty" is something you probably weren't aware of. It sets a bright line, and would surprise people with your over-general view.
2. Dismissing social media posts [0] about claims of dismissal for complaining at the office that would satisfy your request... is bad faith.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/vpsbp0/just_got...
“European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.”
This (GP) is different than phrasing of parent.
> In many European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.
Which countries specifically?
It completely depends on the management. Be sure to know them.
Remember 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.
I get the feeling that maybe Mao wasn’t always such a good guy.
Getting downvotes for this, but genuinely laughing over here
When 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.
Being willing (even ready) to walk away from marriage completely defeats the point of about half of the intangible benefits of marriage.
Always being ready to leave a relationship sounds like personality flaw, not sensible advice.
Some 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.
The 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.
Some 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
Thank you for your comment. This wasn't my intention, but I'll consider this aspect in future.