I hate my job. I stick with it because it seems that nothing better exists. All the other job postings seem terrible. One thing I will do is post to other positions internally. Sometimes just being on a new team will give you a very brief period of hope that the work or tech is interesting, or that the political environment is more friendly. Sadly, this fades quickly. Every team I've been on violates company performance management policies.
My experience with toxic teams is that they're always a career step backwards. They don't attract talent, builds enemies, burns you out, sometimes even costs you money. Burnout is probably the worst part. Lots of people quit tech not for the tech itself but because of the people.
First job I left to go back to college, but quite honestly I had checked out of that place and hated the team I was on. Was a pretty large networking company, spent all my time writing RFPs and vendor specs, zero time writing software.
Next one was a cheap tech startup that worked by recruiting people for peanuts, including hiring cab drivers doing night courses in IT, and placing them in telcos looking for business analysts for multiples of what they were actually getting paid. Hated the cheapness, left after a few months.
Then it was a FAANG company, which looked after it's people really well, but the frickin politics really grind you down, left there after a few years after my team got shuffled around on a whim from some exec.
Last role was a utility company, and it was a total mess internally. Vested interests, complete underfunding of the data processing systems, and major consulting firms scamming them for millions a year to produce meaningless reports. Impossible to make an impact, or even bring things up to code... For example, there was zero version control on software, zero! Things were tested on production. I stayed there far too long, should have left the first day, like a few hires actually did.
I had a similar experience. I had a great manager on a very insulated, experimental team working fast and delivering results. Our Program Manager changed teams, soon our Product Manager changed teams, and we got merged into another team with new managers. I was told by my old managers I was on track to promotion and found out at the end of that cycle that I had a negative performance review and it was going to be even longer. I was delivering during this, but so was the whole team.
I swapped teams hoping that a new manager for an old colleague's team would be better and things didn't really improve. I stayed for a year before quitting due to my mental health. I think it can be hard to find the right team at a big tech company and even if you do, there's no guarantee of how long it will stay that way.
I recently joined a big tech company. It was a long term project and something quite new to me as I switched career and was working in a different context. There are pros and cons, but it's a bit of a disappointment.
I've got the impression very quickly that absolutely nobody cares about me in this company and that employees mostly don't love what they do. Specifically
- There's a high turn-over
- Everybody is focused on their performance, compensation and on improving evaluation metrics
- Right after joining, I found the form explaining how to resign. Extremely easy.
- People do get fired: including a skilled, friendly, colleague of mine (didn't meet expectations for two semesters).
- Management knows how to keep the pressure high (in a friendly manner)
- I can't like my project: there are too many things to do and broken things to fix, also no feeling of ownership, no incentives to refactor or redesign.
The worst, most abusive, exploitative job I've ever had was with a company that was a startup/tech darling (not Stripe).
I thought I was landing my dream job at the time. Every conversation on tech websites had nothing but praise for the company and everyone applauded me when I got the job. But secretly, it was terrible. Organizational chaos, constant verbal abuse from executives (while they put on a friendly face for public PR), the most exploitative management practices I've ever seen.
The weirdest part was that the company was full of good people. We all joined thinking we were going to do great things, but we all mutually understood that it was a mess and that the management situation was not good at all.
But the catch is that it's really hard to say anything negative about a beloved tech company. The few times I tried, people scoffed at my complaints because they had only heard great things about the company. When everyone is bombarded with positive news and conversation about a company, they assume that anyone diverging from this narrative must be wrong, lying, or deserved whatever treatment they got. It's a bizarre phenomenon.
It gets even worse, though, because I quickly realized that my own resume and professional reputation now depended on the positive reputation of this company. I felt like I also had to say good things about the company in public, or else risk damaging my own professional reputation in the process. Would anyone want to hire me if they knew I was part of such a poorly-run company?
So, most of us quietly put up with the company for long enough to cash out our signing bonuses and vesting schedules (all of which were weighted for retention) and to avoid having too short of a stay listed on our resumes. Then we got out and moved on, relying on the positive reputation of the company to help others assume we were coming from a great company.
Whenever I see universally beloved companies like this with scattered anecdotes of chaotic or terrible behavior behind the scenes, I wonder if it's the same story: Beautiful company on the outside (due to PR) with built-in protection against the negative stories leaking because nobody on the inside wants to ruin the good reputation of the employer that is currently boosting their own personal reputation.
Or maybe Stripe is really a great company inside and these are isolated anecdotes from a few incompetent middle managers. The thing is - It's impossible to know due to all of the mixed incentives shaping the public narrative.
I’ve been doing this for 8 years and I have the unfortunate pattern of quitting my job after a year or two because it goes to hell.
One job had us logging our time in two different places- we needed to log exactly what we were working on and for how long. For example, I would have to keep track of and report that I spent “1.5 hours on ticket 72926” or “2 hours on code review”. I left for a higher-paying job.
One job was a startup that was recently bought out, and the new ownership was tightening the belt. The culture/environment got worse and worse and I started getting pain in my mouse hand/wrist by mid afternoon. I was moved to a project working with tech I wasn’t very familiar with (management knew this) and hit with a PIP so I dragged the PIP out knowing the last guy on a PIP was on it for 6 months before he was canned. I quit on month 6, and that was right before Covid hit so I had a little sabbatical for a few months. Ended up getting a higher-paying job.
When I was at Allstate I worked with an actual sociopath who made everyone’s lives more difficult. He did that thing sociopaths do where they sabotage others and I was effectively demoted to some bullshit grunt work. He was eventually fired when management figured out he wasn’t qualified to be a software engineer. Anyway I left for a higher-paying job.
I love writing code, but loathe everything else. Especially the people. I’m all for being a team player, but that phrase doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody, and managers seem to think it means “do whatever I say”.
I had a bad experience. I have top tech companies on my resume and they made the role look cool and I was trying to slow down a little . They instead put me into support . The codebase wasn’t in source control ; it was just a few scripts in any case . They didn’t have a sane deploy. The people that they had me working under had been there for decades but were not good . They talked down to me and did not give me tasks that aligned to my experience. I thought I would ruin my career if I stayed so I left. Much happier with a principal role where I’m at now .
I actually enjoy work more after being at the team a bit longer - after I proved myself and they trust me. When you change the team/company, there is that period when they do not trust you and you have to be proving yourself constantly + dealing with colleagues who try whether you are suitable for being micromanaged or try to socialize by picking on you etc.
I like the work much more once these factors are settled - e.g. once I established boundaries and once I am trusted.
Right now? I'm pretty unhappy. I don't think I want to talk about exactly why publicly while I'm still in this job, but to give you an idea of how bad the situation is, literally all of my friends have been trying to get me to quit for months, with the exception of people who have given up because they think I must be insane.
On the other hand, I have a decade of full-time experience and I've been happy for about seven out of ten years. All things considered, that's not too bad. The other way to look at it is that I've had maybe five roles at one company, two another another, and one at a third, and I'd say four of those have been good. That's only 4/8, but it's possible to bail on bad roles and stay in good ones, which is how it's worked out to being good 70% of the time. Considering how other folks I know feel about their job, I can't complain about being happy 70% of the time.
In retrospect, some of my decisions have been really bad. If I could do it over again, I'd bail more quickly on bad roles and stay in good ones for longer.
My dumbest mistake was the time I was in an amazing position (great manager & team, really interesting & impactful work), except for two problems: an incredibly arrogant and disruptive person whose net productivity was close to zero who would derail all meetings and weird political shenanigans way above my pay grade. When I transferred, management offered to transfer the guy the guy to another team so I'd stay and I declined because I felt bad about the idea of kicking someone off the team.
From what I've heard, the problematic dude ended up leaving the team later anyway, so not having him kicked off didn't make any difference, and the political stuff resolved itself around the same time. The next role I ended up in was the worst job I've ever had. And the one after that is my current job, which is, well, at least it's no the worst job I've ever had. Prior to leaving the amazing job, I thought that it was really easy to find great jobs, so it wasn't a big deal to just go find another one. Turns out it's not always so easy :-). If I hadn't bailed on that and just fixed it, I'd be 4/6 and I could say I was happy with my job 80% of the time. Oh well, lesson learned. Looking back, I was incredibly lucky to get the roles that I did, but that same luck blinded me to the fact that it was luck and that there are some really bad jobs out there.
Whenever I sense politics is more important to promotion that great job, I am leaving. I went into this field idealistic, driven for creating technology that can change lives for the better, and way too often artificial red tape is put everywhere by clueless or outright evil managers in order to drive their agenda and increase their chances for promotions and more $ into their pockets. It's literally negation of every single value I stand for and often have no choice but to leave and work on my own projects. Even the best companies like author mentioned aren't immune to human nature and have many blind spots.
I decided I NEVER wanted to manage anyone at a large or even medium sized tech company.
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.
I had a job at Apple for two years, which paid very well and had very good stock grants, but I absolutely hated. I hated most (not all) of my managers, I didn't really enjoy the work, and my team in particular would routinely have meetings until 9pm, multiple times a week. I would sign off from my computer, and lie down on my bed nearly catatonic because I was so unhappy, to a point where my wife was getting a bit worried.
Eventually I got in yet another argument with my manager's manager, and decided enough was enough, and put in my notice, and two weeks later I was gone. The first day after I woke up and realized that I didn't have to work for Apple anymore, this wave of relief swept over me. I was so happy that I didn't even care that I had to give up several hundred thousand dollars of stock.
You only have one life, and you get maybe 100 years to live it. Don't waste it in a job that makes you miserable.
I've had a very similar ride over the last couple of years. I can't help but feel that the environment you're in cannot do much to enhance performance, but it sure can make it worse. I also feel it has little to do with the company and more to do with which part of it you are in. I once worked for the same company twice - pretty good but with a shitty manager the first time, and really very bad the second. I'm now doing some honestly really great work for a bank of all things.
This is where I'm ending up too. Word of mouth from people I trust is really the only way to go any more. Too many companies have dogshit cultures, and I'm happy where I am. Unless my current job suddenly goes downhill, why dance through this insane bullshit for some comp that will barely make me any happier?
I think you probably know the answer already. Given the wealth of forums inside Google where you could ask for this advice, you've decided to post anonymously to Hacker News. That probably means there's some underlying issue, like you think your manager is going to punish you if he or she finds out that you aren't happy with your position, or you think future teams you may want to work with will look upon you unfavorably if they read the post. As soon as you stop trusting your coworkers, it's probably game over. (And I'm not saying you're doing the wrong thing, or that your concerns are unwarranted. They are probably legitimate concerns.)
I was extremely happy at Google for many years. I liked my coworkers, I liked my work, I liked my manager. I did get burned out from time to time, but usually there was something interesting to keep me going through the rough patches, and my team, coworkers, and managers were all very supportive of what I needed to do to stay productive and happy (which in a lot of cases was "sleep for 2 days and maybe wake up to have a meeting that would be inconvenient to move"). It was quite wonderful. I had no trouble getting promoted, got "strongly exceeds" performance reviews, and had a lot of fun. Good times.
All good things must come to an end eventually, however. I came into work one day and my project was cancelled (and not like "wind it down over the next 6 months", but literally "might as well delete the CLs you're working on") and I hastily transferred to another interesting-sounding team that, in retrospect, I kind of got the hard-sell to join.
As it turned out, I didn't really care for the other team that I transferred to, and thought to myself "everyone else on my old team got 6 months to sit at home and research other projects to transfer to, so I'll just look for another project." I did not get that option. I was basically told "you just transferred, so you can't leave." And then told, "you really aren't getting enough work done on your own hours, I want you to be here at 9am so I can make sure you're working." That went as well as you'd imagine. A bunch of people advised me "you're depressed, you should take 3 months off and get some antidepressants". I talked with my doctor and did that. In the end, it had no effect. The third-party company that handles paid leave denied my claim, so it was unpaid leave. I decided to take a vacation right at the end of my leave... which the vacation system decided was invalid and silently discarded. When I was on vacation without cell phone service, Google started calling my parents (I'm 32 BTW) looking for me. It was quite a production when I finally got cell phone service back. 3 months of de-stressing, instantly erased.
I got back and started working on a new project under the supervision of my existing manager. He decided that, based on git commit timestamps, I wasn't programming quickly enough. (I got that from another very new manager once, and it was also an App Engine project. I'm not sure if that says more about me or App Engine, but I digress.) To be brutally honest, I'm kind of offended that he didn't consider me to be capable of forging timestamps on git commits. I thought about it, honestly, but in the end decided that experienced managers knows that some things are easy and some things are hard. But in the end, I thought honesty was the best policy.
I was pretty stressed out at this point because my manager and I clearly didn't get along, and the project I wanted to work on didn't have official headcount so I couldn't really get out of a bad situation. At that point I wrote up some email to the relevant concerned parties and realized "I do not want to read the response to this email", so I didn't. Some time passed and someone from HR called me saying "you know if you are gone for 3 days, you're voluntarily resigning, right?" I said, "yup." And that was the end of my experience working for Google. I still have my laptop and badge. They still have a box of my stuff (including my beloved Realforce 87UB keyboard!) Oh well.
My point is, there are other places to work. Google is a huge company and some people are happy and some people aren't. If you're unhappy, maybe you can find happiness elsewhere. I'll tell you one thing, though... antidepressants won't make you happy about a job you don't like.
Hi team, today I feel low. Over a year ago, I decided to change job (many years working there) and, after two intents working with some other teams/companies, I realized that I do not want to work as a team lead anymore.
Although I should consider changing industry or even job/sector, I want to say that IT job recruiting sucks, tech interviews suck and, last but not least, people who deliberately use MongoDB as a relational database sucks too, and still our is the most beautiful job in the world.
I feel your pain. I was there too not long ago; slightly different circumstances and reasons, but same idea, and same low feelings.
> I realized that I do not want to work as a team lead anymore
This is essentially what I ran into as well. I've been in the software industry for over 15 years. Over time I became a team lead and continued into management. For too long I had convinced myself this is what I wanted; that it was too much to keep up with tech, managing people was easier. Unfortunately I kept doubling down on this notion until I finally burned out. Sadly that's what it took for me to realize I'm not a manager, I'm an engineer.
> and still our is the most beautiful job in the world
100% agree. I played with the idea of changing industries, but I knew this is where I belong; I just needed a reset.
I decided to find another company where I could start again as a software engineer; no more management. Even if it meant a pay decrease, rejuvenating my mental health was far more important.
> tech interviews suck
Again I agree. Tech interviews on average are horrid. I've been on both sides many times, as interviewee and interviewer. And sadly as an interviewer I've contributed to the suck.
But what I've learned from my most recent endeavor is that this is not true across the board. There are actually some great companies out there with great culture and great interviewing practices. You just need to know how to find them; which involves knowing exactly what is you want.
> people who deliberately use MongoDB as a relational database sucks too
Yep. But it's good that you're able to identify this as something you don't like. Keep that in mind and consider everything else that you do and do not want as part of your job or the company that you work with; and then bring that with you into your interviews. _You should be interviewing the companies and teams just as much, if not more so, than they are interviewing you._
For myself, I knew exactly what I wanted: no management, no team lead, just software engineering so I could get back into the code and recover from my burnout. I also considered any position I found to be potentially temporary; maybe after a year I'd move on again; wherever I landed didn't need to be where I'd be stuck for the remainder of my career.
I went through a lot of interviews, wrote a lot of cover letters, did a lot of coding in front of others. Sometimes I did great, sometimes I totally bombed. But each time I learned something new that I brought with me into the next one.
Fast forward to today (this all happened about 1.5 years ago) and I couldn't be happier. I found a great company that made me realize culture is vitally important and it doesn't matter what the company claims their culture may be, it is inherited top down from the leaders. Realize, though, that this is a two way street as well; meaning don't just expect a company to be a perfect fit without some contribution from yourself as well.
I started over as a software engineer and soon realized there are aspects of leadership I do enjoy and so am now pursuing a path within this company that I can increase my influence as an engineering lead without shifting my role into management.
Admittedly I also have an incredibly supportive wife by my side, helping and encouraging me all along the way. Before I left my previous company, and before I burned out, she could see me slipping and shared this with me, which I wish I had listened to sooner; could've avoided a lot of misery:
"Recognize when a phase, job, a life stage, or a relationship is over and let it go. Allow yourself to gracefully exit situations you have outgrown. Moving on doesn't have to be a catastrophic dramatic event. You can simply chose to move forward with peace and clarity."
Hang in there. It gets better; just own the situation and move forward.
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