Reading this made me think why there are so few middle-aged engineers in tech. There have been several theories for this, such as ageism and the field's rapid expansion. Reading this made me wonder if they just get sick of it and leave.<p><i>Friends had reached out to me. "We need a director for our reliability software engineering stuff". They asked for my help. They wanted to build something good, like the early days of a few former places I had worked at. I was willing to help out, but honestly, only as a contractor. I had enough of the full time tech thing for one lifetime already.</i><p>Tech has an image of itself as a magical place where we're changing the world while getting to indulge our inner geeks. And yet a director title for an individual contributor and top 1% pay is not enough to close a hire. The top people are essentially taking early retirement. People in other fields (doctors for example) continue working long after retirement age. Maybe tech is not such a magical place?
> What's odd is that at some point, I managed to stumble onto the Google spreadsheet (yep) they were using to track feedback for the process. There were dozens of entries, and they were all gushing about it, like oh it was so good, and so fun! Please do more!<p>> Part of me wonders if this is genuine, like these people actually enjoyed being gaslit<p>100%, yes.<p>I once took a class from someone who was, let's say, not my favorite professor. He was one of those young "fun" types. Despite being a science/engineering class in a department with a reputation for being rather tough (with the previous instructor, just retired), it was not particularly deep or rigorous. All the other students loved him because he was "cool".<p>At one point, we had to do a standardized Scantron survey about the course and the professor. I looked at each question and answered truthfully: "Did the professor provide a syllabus?" Easy: no. "Did the professor make it clear how you would be graded?" Haha, definite no. And so on.<p>Normally that's the end of it, but the next week, he was chatting with some students before class about the survey. "I think someone answered all the questions backwards just to mess with me or something. Funny!" "Yeah, that's weird, dude!"<p>Apparently when you're giving feedback on a popular leader, the correct response is to ignore the questions and simply give them the maximum score in every category. And when you're a popular leader reading feedback, if there's any responses that don't match this, you can safely ignore them.
I've left new jobs over things much less annoying than this. That she stuck it out is incredible.<p>If you start at a company and they can't have a computer/desk/whatever you need ready without a good reason, that's a terrible start. I've worked with people with very little money or resources who still manage to create a quick, sane, respectful onboarding process. There's no excuse for anything else, and in my experience it's a great indicator of things to come.
To OP: I wish you all the best. I didn't read or comment on the original article.<p>One thing to consider is to not engage with the critics. It's hard, I know -- really I know. An engineering mind set might make you not want to "flip the bozo bit", and to learn as much from your detractors as possible.<p>There may be strategic reasons to get your story out -- e.g. if your co-workers or potential clients are getting a distorted story, but the personal cost in time, annoyance, and loss of peace of mind is high.<p>So maybe, if possible, take a usefully arrogant / narcissistic view as a form of sanity-protection. Why do you need to respond to a bunch of internet nobodies? Why waste your time dealing with HN's mental illness?<p>Anyway, hope this doesn't poison your day.<p>EDIT> Everyone even moderately notable eventually learns that you don't read the comments.
Haha, the original story is straight out of The Daily WTF. I'm cracking up. I'm not really going to read the HN responses or the responses to the HN responses since the whole thing seems like Internet Drama™ but the original post is condensed comedy.<p>2 minute timers to finish tasks like naming a dog! Love it.
It's weird how what I consider the same <i>kind</i> of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision.<p>If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories.<p>You change a few details, however, to the "My nightmare onboarding with a new company", and suddenly the comments dogpile on "Wow, this person must be incompetent!" sentiment.<p>What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter?
As a manager/lead who has personally fielded similar concerns from new hires, I understand where Rachel's frustrations come from, specifically with painful onboarding processes. I'm not commenting on Rachel's specific experience, but just in general for those that might feel empowered by her response; I just don't think it's generally appropriate.<p>The process was surely designed with good intentions, perhaps by committee. And it's been designed to help those that need help.<p>For those that don't need help, these things suck.<p>Providing an out for new hires who don't need this handholding is problematic. You can't just make this stuff optional. You don't know what you don't know, and junior devs often think they know more than they do. Too many people would miss information they actually need. I think a senior-level engineer needs to understand this, and be able to cope with the anguish. Sometimes there are actually useful processes in place, but only useful for a select few, but because it's impossible to know who those few are, everyone must go through it.<p>There are usually ways for anyone to affect change in an organization, but unless you've been specifically hired to make changes, you're going to have to wait a while, and even then, you may never be able to make the changes you really want. But such is life. Figure out what truly matters to you, in the long term, and you'll likely find you'll become much more influential amongst your peers, and even upper management. If you can't change the things that matter to you, don't torture yourself further; it's probably time to move on.<p>On the flip side: if you just want to work for a smooth-running, well-oiled machine that aligns with your ideals already, good luck on your search!
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I don't send out e-mails that are like this:<p>Please get on your phone, turn off your wifi, and then navigate to HN, then to new, then find the post, THEN upvote it. Don't upvote it from the post itself.<p>The company, however, does. A LOT. (Explains a few things, doesn't it?)
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I do still hate JWZ for that. I hardly ever comment, and I'm punished for it.<p>He's like those teenaged IRC admins who only let you on their server so they can choose your nick for you. The web's not a dumb pipe, it's a pipe I can beat people up with, apparently.
I can relate to the author 100%. The on-boarding process just sounds absurd. I have been there. It was awful. I hated it.<p>The worst that I experienced was a requirement that all new hires complete a training course for Splunk, the log aggregator. Why? Apparently, Splunk was a shared resource for this massive company. As a result, careless queries or logging could result in degraded performance for other teams needing to query their logs in Splunk.<p>Ok, no big deal, right? That's what I thought too. I dutifully started working on my training to get it out of the way. I took detailed and copious notes like my job depended on it. After an entire week of eight hour days doing nothing but taking Splunk trainings I was finally done...with section 1.<p>What the hell? There is another section? As it turned out, it took most new hires 2-3 weeks to complete the trainings. If a new hire did not complete the training they could not access Splunk, and apparently this meant they could not do their job. Absurd on many levels. To add insult to injury, this was a new requirement and many on my team were given access and were never required to complete the training. Those very same people kept telling me "oh, just do it, we don't expect you to be productive right away".<p>Well, I didn't do it. I refused. I told anyone that asked that I thought the requirement was unnecessary and a waste of time. Eventually, my manager got very pushy about it. I continued to stand my ground. In particular, I told my manager he needed to go to bat for me and get me access if he wanted me to do my job.<p>LO AND BEHOLD, I was given access.<p>The author is right for not wanting to be forced to do stupid things and have their time wasted. I don't know where some commenters get off calling the author "entitled" or "not a team player". Why are they so invested in this?
The original article is clearly talking about Lyft, and having started at there at the same time, I thought the onboarding process was much better than at other companies that I have worked at (others are either too broad/corporate or just a README).<p>Not having a desk to work at is inexcusable, and definitely seems like a fluke rather than the norm.<p>What’s wild to me is the amount of people who are berating the author for an <i>opinion</i> post. She is describing what sounds like a garbage experience, and it shouldn’t be that hard to understand/empathize with
I think it's kind of weird how a lot of commenters feel a need to take one side or the other in these stories. IMO both of the following were true:<p>1. The onboarding process at this company was absurd.<p>2. The author's response was to show contempt and derision to everyone else involved. The "everyone responsible for this is an idiot" vibe was so strong throughout both posts.<p>Running large, complex organizations is extremely difficult. I wouldn't want to work at that company, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to work on a team with the author, either.
Most corporations are inefficient to the point that nothing about them makes sense so there is no need to complain about minutia.
It's like being on a sinking ship and remarking to other passengers about how bad the interior design is.
The team player thing was a huge lesson I learned recently. If you just defer to what other people say you’re likely to get things wrong, people hire you as a software engineer because they expect you to share your thoughts and that sometimes means disagreeing with the team.
Who is rachel? I keep seeing her on the front page here, and I mostly find the blog entries boring or just weird.<p>Is she famouse somehow that she gets to HN frontpage? It can't be because of writing quality, it's pretty mundane.