[HN Gopher] Forced to settle for a nonideal job? Here's how to m...
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Forced to settle for a nonideal job? Here's how to make the most of
it
Author : Lwepz
Score : 16 points
Date : 2021-12-04 20:35 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| axegon_ wrote:
| I was in a job I absolutely hated up until not that long ago.
| Initially I was very happy with it - as a developer, I loved the
| fact that there were no calls lasting hours filled with made-up
| acronyms and the usual "we should", "we must" and all that. But
| to be honest there were other red flags from the very beginning
| which I completely ignored(and I shouldn't have). The tech stack
| was horrible: infrastructure was 2010-ish at best, the
| deployments were absolute rat shit(45 minutes to deploy a new
| version on single digit number of servers, just deploy, which
| included no tests and no builds), the code was equally horrible -
| linters were a no-go(the so-called head of engineering had his
| own understanding of how code should be formatted), open a random
| file and you will see every anti-pattern known to man. Dependency
| tree was 500 lines long. Every common problem had a custom
| solution instead of the freely available industry standard ones.
| And speaking of the code, it felt like seeing the large perl
| codebases with 30k+ line files from the mid 2000's: mixing
| paradigms in a way which only makes sense to the person who came
| up with them and no one else. Needless to say that a few months
| into it I hated every single bit of it. Worst of all is that for
| one reason or another, the developers were not only fine with all
| this, they had picked up every single last bad habit - mixing
| functional and object oriented programming, the wretched
| formatting, everything invented past 2010-11 was considered
| witchcraft and so on. I admit, I tend to swear when I don't like
| something I work with. But here I was swearing all day, every day
| from the depths of my throat. I can't describe how awesome it
| felt to do a $find -iname {company_name} | xargs rm -rf after my
| last day.
|
| Two very important lessons:
|
| 1. Never EVER ignore red flags. Ask about tech stack, procedures,
| code-reviews, opinions on basic programming principles and
| everything you can think of. Generally the interviewers should be
| asking these questions but it's equally important to see how they
| see the world. A simple thing to keep in mind is that if someone
| thinks they know better than the veterans in the industry with
| dozens of textbooks on the subject, chances are they are morons.
| If you see something odd, ask more questions. For instance why
| use mercurial over git: If you get an answer such as "well we
| evaluated the two options and there really wasn't any benefit to
| git and only made things more complicated" - run for your life.
| In the case described here, it turned out that the head of
| engineering didn't know how to use git and was confused by it.
|
| 2. Ask as many questions about the tech stack as possible - there
| are 3 possible options: One is the company uses what it uses
| because it was inherited from someone else and they stuck with
| it. Two, they picked some technology because they wanted to use
| it and not because they had to. Three is they picked what seemed
| the most appropriate but are willing to explore alternatives.
| Ideally you should be looking for the third option.
| flyingchipmann wrote:
| 1. found out that the current position is not worth it 2. keep
| working as usual (don't overwork) and spend rest of the time
| interviewing 3. ??? 4. profit
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