It's a shame, though - I think I would have had a lot of fun working there and believe I would have made good contributions to the team. I'm disappointed, but I consider it their loss. Oh well.

The company never hired me again. I would call it a mutual separation, since they went ahead and worked on that project without me, and I won't work for a company that is so greedy they'd throw morals and ethics to the wind on that kind of contract.

One staffer even admitted to me he felt icky about the whole thing. Why do it then? You sold out, bud.

I read some essays by Paul Graham, started my own business, and never listened to some faceless entity above me making bad decisions again.

I hope you don't put up with this nonsense.

Politically there is no winning:

- Your peer competitors (other VPs) are after you - Your direct reports are after you (or you are accountable for them) - The direct reports of other VPs are after you - Your CEO is after you

You only have ways to lose. I dont know why anyoner would ever want one of those jobs, they are horrible.

The company was managed by capricious, get-rich-quick types that kept making us perform dumb stunts and acting in really terrible promotional videos rather than finding customers. I didn’t exactly see the crash coming but I knew I wanted out. I think the trigger was the owner saying in total seriousness, “Red Herring is my Bible,” clutching a copy of the magazine. Who remembers Red Herring?

What a time to be alive.

When I got back in March from a great trip the company had totally imploded and sacked almost everyone but were pretending that everyone still worked there when I popped in to say hi to my friends/team - ‘out to lunch’.

I had a bit of hassle getting back into work, took me about three months I think to land a decent gig but then that was that.

I poured everything into that role, shunning personal relationships with all but a few very close friends.

I made the calculus that, like others in the same company before me, I'd put my time in and after 5-7 years I'd downshift roles. Write some papers, some patents, put everything I'd learned into product and service development.

Thing is, I didn't appreciate how much the company and company culture was changing even as I was helping drive that change.

The company changed from focusing on experience to certifications. Personal loyalties were almost frowned upon. If you were a technical professional you had to demonstrate that you filed for multiple patents per year (in my role I was actively discouraged from filing patents for corporate politics reasons…I could always file later).

In very short order I lost my team and lost my role. It turned out that while I was excellent at "internet stuff", I sucked at corporate politics. Once real money started being spent on infrastructure and applications I grew a target on my back large enough for its own corporate task force.

Multiple executives pulled me aside to tell me bluntly that I had no future at the company, but I didn't listen, I'd been there close to a decade, doing "internet stuff" most of that time, how could they throw that all away?

I got a consolation role in another organization at the company which lasted a year and then the entire organization was disbanded.

In parallel in my limited personal life, both of my parents were dying, with their deaths bracketing 9/11 by months on either side.

9/11 destroyed the neighborhood I had been living it.

By 2002 I walked away from all of it.

And I've mostly stayed away since then. I made quite a bit of money in the 1990s, not enough to be a VC, enough to semi–retire.

Every now and then I resurface and work with a startup for awhile, but I just can't pour myself in anymore the way people expect. It's just a job. I hope the startup does well, but I've become too jaded.

I briefly tried raising money, but found VCs were turned off that I walked away from the 7x24 lifestyle and my conservative approach to growing a business did not comport with their goals for portfolio returns.

So, yeah, it was a meh experience. I remain surprised that I survived the final year of working insane hours for the company even as I knew that they would jettison me as soon as I was no longer capable of working 18 hour days 6 days a week.

I'm in a much better space mentally, but it took over a decade after that experience before I "felt better".

My family and personal relationships take priority, and I actively turn down gigs and new work if they conflict with that choice.

I don't really have any advice. I feel like I wasted a decade creating capital value for a company way out of proportion to my compensation. And another decade wasted "recovering" from rejection from that company.

I guess my only advice would be, when you do burn out figure out an acceptable cover story if you decide to ever return to tech. Recruiters & head hunters, let alone hiring managers, will avoid at all costs anyone who admits to having burned out.

I stopped interviewing with them, forever.

Several times I was provided a list of my team members that needed to go, and when I asked "why this guy?" or "why her?", the answer was never performance related. A few times I was able to argue the team member to safety, but most of the time it was already a forgone conclusion.

Each faction would come into and out of favor with upper management as the rounds of layoffs came and went, and the business priorities changed. Enemies of that faction were always targeted, irrespective of the cost to the business of the loss of that talent.

The way I avoided all this WITHOUT choosing a side was to quietly make myself invaluable to the upper management as the key "goto guy" for skunkwerk projects, to always accept technical due-diligence projects on upcoming acquisitions, and keep showing "projects I'm working on in my spare time" to the uppers.

by the time i got there, the company was pretty much dead. we were working on the Sony eVilla, which nobody believed in. it was a massive failure.

after that, i lost my taste for “the big leagues.” i am not willing to go through the standard “implement a b-tree on a whiteboard” interview, and i always want to work remotely, so no google, microsoft, facebook, amazon (etc) jobs for me. i have been working in small shops since then.

I had been at the company for over a decade, and had gotten quite lucky in the RSU lottery & thought, wait, I have enough money to last forever, so why do I do this to myself?

My health was bad, I was overweight, smoked, was depressed. I felt like it was going to kill me if I stayed another decade.

So I quit. In the years since, I stopped smoking, lost 1/3 my bodyweight & really got my shit together. I dink around on personal projects and learn new things. I follow HN because I'm genuinely interested in tech & now I can pursue what things I want, rather than those I need for $JOB or $NEXT_JOB.

I miss the good people I used to work with, but this is almost completely offset by how much I don't miss the assholes and the hassles (annual review, recruiting, meetings, explaining basic math to MBAs, etc).

Confirmation that you’re hated can be just as satisfying and cathartic.

I'd been promised a leadership role (VP/Eng "unofficially", the title becoming official after 6 months) and this would have been my first official duty: fucking over some seriously capable engineers. Reasons for this were not given to me. It was just "something you have to do if you want to lead". Seriously, WTF? Since when is leadership about fucking innocent people over?

The back story is that the CTO was leaving and the "tech lead" was a protege who wanted to take some shots before the CTO left, in order to cement his position until the next CTO came in. How he managed to convince the real execs that this was a good idea, fuck if I know. My guess (which I can't prove) is that some of these people had "too much" equity and the firm was looking to manage them out, and that having a 28-year-old, who knew nothing about their work, sign horrible performance reviews would disgust them enough to quit.

I didn't sign the papers. After I refused to cave when they extorted me out of a promised severance, the CEO embarked on a months-long campaign to ruin my reputation after I was gone.

I bounced back with a bit more resolve. When I build a company, I want to make sure that kind of nonsense never fucking happens. Yes, there will be disagreements and "politics" related to which ideas are more important. Fine. That's okay. But if I am running a company, extortion and sabotage will never happen on my fucking watch.

After that experience, I don't judge people for how they make money. Domain squatting is not my favorite activity, but it's an honest living compared to a lot of the stuff I've seen in the supposedly legitimate white-collar world.

I guess I'm a good example of what not to do.