This isn't at all a rebuttal of the post, more a different perspective. I started a new job while basically deeply depressed. It colored all my opinions of the company and my coworkers. As I'm coming out of that through a combination of medication and intensive CBT I'm realizing that a lot of the negativity I felt towards my job was the result of the depression. As things improve I'm realizing that the job is mostly neutral but my impression of it was colored by my mental health struggles. This isn't at all to say not to take the authors advice, just take care of yourself and be aware of the possibility that you may be distorting reality if there's any chance you're depressed
I've recently had a job that started out reasonably good, but after a year and a half, I started wondering what I was doing there, was I really in the right place? Some of the tickets I worked on went nowhere, and I didn't enjoy the stuff I was working on. That lasted a couple of months, and I was seriously considering quitting. And then came a complaint from a user that opened up a whole cesspit of necessary improvements, optimisations and bugs for something I'd previously worked on, and that turned into 9 months of the best fun I've ever had at work. Made a factor 20 improvement to a hideously complex algorithm that nobody understood, found and fixed a bunch of bugs in the algorithm that we had always thought was perfect -- you know, fun stuff. And then my contract ended. But on a high note.
This isn't general advice or anything, but I'm glad I didn't quit a year earlier.
The times I've really had to scramble on something at work describe both some of my best working experiences and some of my worst. I think a big differentiator is clarity. If I know that X needs to be done, and it's important and urgent I'm happy to dig in.
The bad emergencies tend to be scenarios where I'm told OMG we need to fix A, it's an emergency, only to be told a short time later that actually never mind problem B is the real emergency, and then jumping to problem C after that, and so on. That kind of scattered direction can be soul crushing, where I invest in a problem and get far along on a good solution, only to be told that oh actually that urgency was BS, but trust us this new emergency is totally important.
One of many platitudes that kept me in working conditions and religion which were detrimental to my career and mental health.
Maybe it's useful to some who are in objectively good circumstances which they haven't learned to appreciate. I'd still advocate for getting other perspectives from trustworthy folks about ones specific situation.
And not taking advice from billionaires who think their fruity diet will cure their cancer.
It is not the opposite. If you do what you love, you love what you do. So its more of, "love what you do" is what to aim for, and "do what you love" is one way to achieve this.
On the other hand, some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more accurate model of the world. So what if you were right about your job initially, and the CBT is basically just gaslighting you into spinning things in a positive way?
Assuming that is true, does a more negative way of viewing things actually benefit you (even if it would be slightly more "accurate")?
If one has a choice (that means if there is no case of clinical depression):
At least anecdotally a bit of optimism improves my life quality a lot and results in a higher productivity, proactive solution finding and a more pleasant work environment. Constantly looking at the negative side of things (with a healthy serving of snark) contributes, in my opinion, to burnout and fatigue.
> some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more accurate model of the world
This is called the “depressive realism” hypothesis and there’s more evidence against it than for it.
The studies don’t show “more accurate model of the world” like the depressive realism pushers claim. They show isolated things like depressed patients performing slightly better in some arbitrary gamified task. There are studies that have the results going the other way, too.
It’s well understood that depressive episodes cause cognitive distortions that lead to overestimating the effort required for tasks, underestimating how easily things can be changed for the better, or ruminating on things that don’t matter.
The studies don't show they have a more accurate model of the world. The studies overwhelming only test the immediate judgements of their own behaviour and performance.
The more limited studies with different methodologies have found their judgement of other people's behaviour and performance is wrong. And that if you ask them after a delay (e.g. forcing them to use recall) instead of immediately, they are also wrong.
What does it mean for someone’s model of the world to be accurate? My experience with mild depression is that you notice many negative things which are true but then lack perspective about how much they matter. When you feel better you just don’t pay any mind to these negative things.
I’d argue that you can still have an accurate model of the world without the depression part.
I can’t back it up but recovering from depression by simply putting “rose colored glasses” is a recipe for bouncing back later. Happened to me.
In HN’s case: admitting that companies are quite toxic and more often than not working against you, that most people around you is probably an incompetent if put under a microscope and that the things you’re working on aren’t exactly changing the world for the better.
The trick perhaps is not letting those things make you cynical, and not acting on them. And forgetting yourself because you’re also a bit incompetent too, so you can let you and everyone else off the hook.
I would like to add to this. I have been depressed since I was a teenager. Anxiety Panic attacks, poor sleep, s*ci*l tendencies. I was able to finally get a job at 29 and first 3 months into it, I realized this is not a right fit and the company and its management is chaotic at best. It was a red flag right from the start but I ignored it because I was desperate for a WFH job. After 3 years of therapy, my views had changed that it's not so bad (something that I think the optimistic view changed). I was also looking to move to North America so I kept stalling to find a new job but that was a different thing. After I slipped back into depression a while ago, I again started seriously considering quitting because now in 3 years the company has grown somehow and some of the employees are really toxic. In 3-5 months I seriously want to quit this time whether I switch or no as I will complete 4 years at a company I never planned on working beyond 6 months. So there might be some truth to this. When I am depressed I see all the realistic things going on. When I am doing well I tend to ignore lot of the red flags.
That may be a subset of people, you also don’t need to be depressed to have an accurate view of the world
There exists another subset of people that merely tolerate the overly optimistic general populace and don’t need that as a coping mechanism to understand and mold the world
CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But then, if it helps you cope, so what?
It is the same with religion. Even though gods objectively do not exist, at least not in a literal sense, it can still help people to cope better with their life and be an overall positive force. Or extremely harmful when abused.
The world is pretty depressing. Everyone is telling themselves little lies one way or another just to be able to function. And no, Atheists are not more rational than religious people per se, they tend to have other delusions.
Personally I think striving to have a realistic model of the world is still the best long term strategy and that those little lies are like drugs that will help you in the short term but wreck havoc in the long term but who knows. It is complicated.
What is even an "accurate model of the world" in this context? Isn't it all just perception and impression and interpretation?
For example, a depressed person might think: "this company is shit and will go under in 6 months because my coworkers and management are so incompetent and malicious"
Let's say their prediction was true. Good job!
What if the depressed person missed that there were a couple of people at the office who actually were not incompetent and malicious, maybe people they would enjoy to get to know. What if there were opportunities to learn interesting things while the company crashed and burned.
To determine what worldview is most realistic you have to weigh what aspects of reality are most significant.
That is true, our own perspective is to be taken into account. Sometimes it's worth trying to adjust your own view, but sometimes it's important to bail out before you gaslight yourself.
I find that I pick companies to work with when my goals and their goals align.
I visualize this alignment like two boats travelling on the ocean together, with a rope that runs between them, connecting them.
When the alignment is strong, the tension on the rope is low, and it's a great place to work at.
But over time, the direction of either party can change, and it results in a better alignment, or a drift from each other that starts to put the rope under increasing tension.
It's possible that the tension on the rope is good, and your trajectory will adjust. But due to the size of the company it's unlikely your small boat can adjust the heading of the company, but you might succeed, if you try.
The key is to know when the rope is about to break, and then disconnect from that company and start the process again with another company, aligned in your direction.
> The key is to know when the rope is about to break, and then disconnect from that company and start the process again with another company, aligned in your direction
This post helped me a lot tonight, thank you
I've been feeling this tension building like crazy over the past few months as my employer has been pushing AI mandates and metrics hard. It's been making me miserable, my productivity is crashing and I wish I could ask them to just lay me off already so I can move on
I am very discouraged about the job market right now and I do not relish jobhunting at the moment, but I think you're right. It's time to move on for my own sake and try to find something new
A couple of rules I have that have worked for me so far is:
Colleagues, tasks, compensation - if at least two of the three are good, it's fine to stay. If not it's time to look for something new.
The first year is a learning year, the second is a productive year, and the third is a "what else can I get out of this place" year. If nothing changes in the third year, then there's not much more to learn from the company and it's maybe time to move on.
Currently working towards the end of a contract/earn-out at a company where people just toss stuff they don't want to deal with over the fence for others to handle with usually zero communication about why/what/how. Just suddenly get a new project with no context. Also, three different bosses in two years because they keep leaving.
Second worst company I've ever worked for.
The worst one involved multiple c-suite executives that would throw objects at employees when they didn't get the answer they wanted. Thankfully I wasn't under contract there and got out ASAP.
> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become.
Every time.
I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that world.) But it will not take me a full day with access to your repos before I know whether there's anything you can do for me past signing the checks.
genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend.
What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since "you should be able to ship fast?"
If you mean about Rails specifically, it's that the total lack of discipline in both language and framework makes it impossible to build a product maintainable by more than one person, so every "successful" project has one or a few covert empire builders running it, usually with more political than technical success. That's not a kind of project that pays enough to be worth the trouble, even before we talk about opportunity cost, and the framework itself is a dead end that peaked in 2011 and has had about as many "renaissances" since then as there've been years of the Linux desktop. If I want to go live under that kind of rock, I'll do it with Salesforce, where the pay is better and no one thinks they're cool for poking at a keyboard all day.
Ruby is only just now getting static typing and Rails has a lot of "magic" as part of its value prop. If you're trying to launch something of low to medium complexity quickly and stay on the happy path of the tools in the ecosystem then it works great. The lack of rigor from dynamic typing and latitude afforded by Ruby's expressive syntax can quickly become a footgun though.
My pet theory is that LLM coding is going to give the upper hand to more verbose languages like Golang or Typescript because more of the execution flow will end up explicitly in the LLM's context. Convention over configuration-type frameworks ruled when one-person code bulldozers shipped MVPs but Continue is upending this paradigm.
I've worked with Ruby. It was a delight. But it has to be maintained, dynamic typing loses upfront safety & allows for a mess where you have to analyse the whole program to have any idea what some function is expected to take in & put out
As evidenced by the other replies by OP, it’s a hyperbolic and bad take. There’s plenty of companies doing just fine with Rails codebases. Many of which are a decade or more old now and have done just fine with the inter generational transfer that happens due to natural employee attrition and haven’t been held hostage by one or two all-knowing engineers.
I dunno; maybe I'm hopelessly naïve or out of touch, but I'd pay attention to the compensation, benefits, work environment, and colleagues to know whether this is a place I'd actually like working at long before I pay attention to whether this is a job that always uses the latest cutting-edge tech so I can make sure my resume has the best words in it for the next job I look for...
Unless desperate, why would I have accepted an offer or taken a contract if all of those didn't already seem in line? Why would you have?
The thing is, people can lie about all of those, but whatever social problems exist in the environment will invariably be evident in the code.
What's the old saw about how if you have four teams working on a compiler, you'll get a four-pass compiler? Conway's law [1], that's the one. That one works in both directions. When you're reading code that seems like it would be 0.1x as complicated if any of the people involved in writing it ever spoke to one another, the wise engineer new to this environment begins asking, why do these people never speak to one another? But not too loud!
> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become.
Yeah, yet their job listed a bunch of shiny "modern" cloud stuff they were doing, but they actually have three busted serverless functions and some dusty Java IBM Websphere things floating around running the whole business, while the job description listed 432 different things they were "looking for".
I found a correlation between Rails and lower salaries. Not sure why though. I was actively looking to move to Rails for a change of scenery, until I realised it comes with a tax.
> It’s only been six months, but it’s starting to feel like it might not work out. How much longer should I give it?”
It takes a lot longer to tell if the job is right than if it's wrong. Six months is orders of magnitude longer than you need to give a bad job. Don't rage quit, but if it feels wrong it probably is, so start looking.
Had one job with a guy I had worked with for years elsewhere, and within my first couple weeks we sat down for a coffee and I said "so this isn't it a 5 year gig is it?" and he shook his head in agreement. Unfortunately COVID & life caused us to both overstay a bit.
You early don't owe anyone anything to stick with a bad gig.
My first job was the only job I just went home from and just cried because of how useless thah job felt. We were building a SaaS that took weeks for a simple update with 8 devs (of which 2 were actually good).
This was purely because of the legacy stack and poor management. The boss wanted to scale but did not care about tech, so we just never made real improvements. Sure, a feature got implement at least a week. We saw revenue grow a ton. We never saw time to improve our stack.
Safe to say I felt like I was adding nothing to that company. They just didn't want to grow despite saying the opposite. I get that the shiniest framework will not improve the project, but there were some serious bottlenecks that just got shoved under the rug
> The boss wanted to scale but did not care about tech... We saw revenue grow a ton.
Sounds like the boss was largely getting the scaling they wanted?
Every situation is different and there are people with way more experience than me here, but in general terms I've seen the "we need to rewrite / write a component library" from immature tech. Problem is, they're never satifised, so after they're happy and they've moved on, the next person will say the exact same thing.
That's not to say your code didn't have real problems.
But experience tells me that there's tons of well written projects with no users or revenue, and lots of broken shit making money hand over fist. All else being equal, unless you're in a bubble, you're better off with the money.
( Not intended to imply the job wasn't terrible and the product didn't have real actual scaling problems making your life terrible, I've seen that too ).
and sometimes before starting ... at two weeks' out, they'd had to change the salary offer (down) because they had screwed up the salary calculation, expressed surprise I'd said I planned to use the unlimited vacation policy to take a fixed four weeks a year (they felt it was a lot), changed the offer from employee to contractor, referred me to their accountant for what was really the simplest of accounting queries, sent me an equity calculator with an assumption of a $10bn sale price, and some other weird stuff. Really should have known better, and only lasted a few months -- my old company reached out to check I was happy in the new role, and had me back within a fortnight of checking in.
A good smell test for a job that isn't right for you is whether you ask yourself if it is the right job early on, or if you even have thoughts of quitting in the first year/month/week, apart from being overwhelmed by all the new faces.
The only "bad" job that I had was with a very good company (wonderful people, great benefits, just the code absolutely sucked), so that was making the decision very hard to quit. In larger corporations, one might be able to engineer moving departments if that helps.
I remember finding my predecessor's lunch in my desk drawer on the first day at one job. He had left several months before so it definitely failed the smell test.
I think most jobs you can tell from a combination of the recruiting process and then onboarding and your first week. I have felt the "I hope this isn't how it is every day" that the author mentions at a few of my jobs and they've all been stinkers.
Recruiting gives me an idea of how much the company generally cares about their processes. I like when am I given a timeline of the process and steps and now when I get a random call from the recruiter in the middle of a meeting at my current job because the new co didn't ask when I'm free.
Onboarding tells me how much the team is haphazardly shipping vs actually owning their product. The teams that have sucked are the ones where the onboarding doc is heavily out of date (like all covering a now-unused access request system) or I can't even get help from the team within my first week to have someone send me access requests to copy for the things that are missing. The good teams are where my manager already provisioned my access before I joined and immediately addresses any misses when I flag them. Or if they have good enough docs for me to quickly handle it myself.
Career development is another one that takes a little longer to suss out, but if I can have a good first-week chat with my manager where they will explain what my baseline performance expectations are and what I need to do to overachieve and get on promotion/raise track, that's a good flag. The teams I haven't been able to get that early from are the ones where manager usually doesn't care not only about your career but also about app maintainability or anything past their next meeting with their own manager.
I do not agree with the "you know within a week"-take. I'm now 14 years working in IT-Security. 9 of those years for the same company.
I got my next job through a headhunter. The first weeks I had a really good feeling of the company I liked it there after a few months it got worse and worse like they couldn't hide all the bad things anymore. I quit, next job was more or less the same. I quit. My current job? The first month I thought to my self "oh my god, where do I got here?", but now a six months in I really like it.
Maybe also other factors have some plays here like my move from consulting into an internal role, colleagues, the overall freedom, but imho it's hard to generalize something like that.
Assuming no big red flags (stuff like toxic boss, work culture, misrepresenting the JD), I'm with you on the 6 months thing, in most decently paid jobs there's a lot of complexity, give yourself 6 months to not just learn but gain confidence to start applying and trying to push against the machine a couple of times.
Of course some places I've known sooner, but those are the exception.
If it wasn't for the quality of life my current jobs is providing, I'd probably find something else. I just can't find anything right now that is intriguing enough and pays enough for me to make the jump without losing benefits.
I think the depth of relationship with a job is more complex than comments and the article talk about.
What is you reaction to the kind-of-shitty company that gives you an opportunity for great personal growth and creativity?
Great colleagues but a real monoculture?
///
I liked most of TFA but the end where the author claims that management is more committed than IC's seems really strange to me. Is that something people look for? It seems like it would come across as totally fake cheerleading. Anyway, outside my experience.
I think the point is that, as a manager, you can’t fake it and still feel good about yourself. Whereas an engineer can just feel good about doing a good technical job even if you don’t buy into the company direction.
Takes me X months to discover where X is when I realise I don't like it. X is usually between 6 and 48. When X is nearer 6 it was a bad move. When X is closer to 48 it is because sands shifted. I never had a visceral reaction that I have been in a perfect job. But I know good from shit. Usually shit coincides with company is struggling to find PMF to fund growth through revenue. Also can mean company is sold to another company.
Interestingly my current job I'm at the 48 month mark and sands definitely shifted after new management stepped in and slowly but surely gutted the culture, though I actually thought I wanted to leave almost immediately when I joined. It took me a little bit of adjusting initially to come to like the company at first, but it's been the longest place I've stayed since far.
Huge yes to this one -- especially on the part about how important this is for managers to get right. I spent two years white-knuckling the wrong job for the wrong reasons. Pretty much every day I am reminded in some way of how thankful I am for having left and found a job with a culture I'm a better fit for.
Shortest I've been at a job was 3 months. I knew around the end of the first month that I needed to get out for two simple reasons - I didn't match with the company culture and the company was a sinking ship. I ended up completely leaving my time at that company off my resume because I realized it's not worth going into details.
Ironically, the skills (devops / cloudsec) I picked up in those three months have helped me double my salary.
I was still a student and I immediately had to fix a bug they had about hitting the memory limits with an awful SQL query. I fixed the query and they said "no we will just keep patching sqlite to increase the memory limits forever instead". So I quit because I didn't want to be the most senior person when I was still a student and I didn't want to be ignored.
It takes me about a month to know for sure. If the job isn't right for me, it takes me a few more months before I consciously decide that there is no way to make the job right for me.
It takes me between 1 ~ 2 months, for me to have a very good feeling...then the next handful of months to validate those feelings. In my 30 year work history, i have had only 1 job where i got it wrong..and EVERY single other job through my entire career, all it took was between 1 ~ 2 months to get a feeling if the place is good or not, if the role is right or not, etc. Then again, all except for 1 role, my entire career has been at medium or large corporations...so i'm sure corporate America has enough similarities in so many areas to enable this "early warning system". ;-)
For me it generally takes six months, because as a reflection on my own headspace, it takes that long for me to trust that my intuition isn't just imposter syndrome/anxiety.
I like companies that do tryouts. In the last 15 years I worked for 3 employers. Two of them did tryouts - a day or two literally working in their environment. One did not.
The two that did it both were great, the one that did not turned out to not be for me.
I'm with the last employer for the last 9 years, and not looking to quit :))
A long time ago, I had a chat with a nurse executive who rose up the ranks. Her advice was to stick to a position until the butterflies settle (or approximately q 5 years).
Nursing is known for lifers on single units, and personal growth doesn’t happen unless you are cognizant and strive for it.
Honestly every job has huge up and down swings. I've been at my current place for about a decade, which seems like an outlier in this industry. Also roughly 1/3 of the people I started my career with (roughly 40 or so) are no longer even in the industry. Another 1/5 or so have transitioned to adjacent roles like project management, etc.
I make it a point to evaluate whether I want to stay where I'm at every six months and only leave if I want to leave two evaluations in a row.
I get the salary optimization done by the 2-year hoppers, but it bites you down the road as a senior engineer and onward because you've never had to live with the consequences of your engineering choices. Hanging around for longer teaches you that even the seemingly-best decision made at the time can seriously bite you years down the road.
I agree with the article, except for the last section, because many times the reason for me to quit was a manager who did not give himself, but was playing the game of pleasing upper management and not giving a shit about the hard working team. Also thr suggestion that you as a software engineer does not bring yourself to the table, is wrong, otherwise there would not be any developers suffering from burn-outs.
Good article. Very grounded. Sometimes a job sucks, but not enough to justify immediately job hopping and you just check out and take the payslip each month. Agreed it takes about a week for my gut intuition to work itself out, then if it's bad you just need to decide whether it's something you can stick out for awhile or if you need to leave ASAP.
maybe we need better tools for assessing the dynamics of orgs from the outside. it's not just personalities, it's incentives.
I have opinions about it based on funding stages, but what it really comes down to is that culture is a function of growth. as an employee with a career success comes from hunting growth. the only real growth is from market fit, and even if you have market fit, if you aren't growing non-linearly you're going to get into a negative sum attrition game in the org culture (e.g. linear long term private equity returns).
questions to find answers for on the way in are:
- does anyone actually use their product and like it?
- how is that number growing? (non-linear, linear,
attritive)
- what was their last funding round or change in equity ownership? (e.g. who runs it and what do you have to do to satisfy their investment)
- what's their staff turnover and where do they go?
If the real job doesn't match the interview, then it's the wrong job.
Simple as that.
I once took a position at a company that I had known because they were a customer of my then current employer. We'd always gotten along, they were nice folks, had a good interview.
In a very short time, I wondered what the heck was going on. There was so much drama, infighting, and backbiting, and it was the complete opposite of the company's external persona. People were constantly being moved to different desks with no rhyme or reason- as in, a whole department rearranged 4x in the 8 months I was there. I had 3 or 4 different desks in that time.
People were regularly worried about their jobs and whether the company would even be around after family fights. And when they no longer needed me they started playing games with me, writing me up for things I hadn't done etc. Anything to avoid having to pay unemployment.
I knew in the first couple of weeks. But a bit of me died at that job. Eventually they fired me. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't given them the opportunity and fired them instead. But I had mouths to feed besides my own.
Well, i guess it also depends on how much your coworkers are helpful to you as well. Because there are times some people are kinda introvert and they require a bit of more time to settle down. In certain situations you end up looking for work from home jobs as well. But that's just my perspective.
My last job had some giant red flags right up front. “Who would I report to?” “We don’t know.” “Who would I work with?” “We’re not sure yet.” And then there was a high profile legal issue after I accepted but before I started, and it rendered the position I was hired for irrelevant.
I worked there for four years anyway. Every one of those red flags was a sign of a real problem. Three of those years were very good, but eventually the chickens came home to roost.
I quit a job via a consultancy to a bank at about lunchtime on my first day.
I'm just not at the stage in my life where I'm willing to onboard to a transformation that starts with a half a day call authenticating so you can login to a remote VM to do your development.
Similarly I had a 2 week gig where they send me some shitheap of a windows laptop that takes 20 minutes to login, where they wanted future engagements.
Nope. Nada. No way.
You can see the value of your productivity straight out the gate. It's not valued and you will never be able to change it from your vantage point of IC or middle manager.
It doesn't really matter that they say otherwise, the evidence tells the story.
Got hired for a contract to "integrate this crypto[0] protocol sdk" but it turned out that they actually meant "implement this crypto protocol from scratch in an async manner" and by day four I was out[1].
Shortest perm job was about 5 months. Tiny office, 4 other people on the phone all day, impossible project (writing software for unreliable hardware), not a difficult choice.
[0] actual crypto, not currency.
[1] not just because of the bait-and-switch but because crypto is miles out of my wheelhouse.
For my past several jobs, I've put together a job satisfaction matrix that I fill out once a month. If it scores below a threshold three months in a row, that triggers a job search.
It helps me because I have a habit of fixating on the team’s mission and ignoring my own happiness, so the monthly check-in keeps me from staying somewhere longer than I should.
Sure - it's fairly personalized based on what I'm looking to get out of my career, but it has questions roughly like this:
- Am I free from feeling frustrated/stressed at work once a week or more?
- Am I free from work stress/anxieties outside of work hours?
- Am I keeping up with my hobbies?
- Do I feel respected and valued, with the ability to influence my work environment?
- Do I feel proud of my work and confident discussing my job with others?
- Am I learning/growing?
- Am I excited about the company's direction and secure in its stability?
- Do I feel like my job is secure?
I score each item 1-5 (1 = rarely, 5 = always) and track the total. If that total stays below my cutoff for a few months in a row, that would trigger me to start looking. Sometimes I include notes beside any low/high scores for context.
Friends have challenged this, asking if I can't just feel when it's time to move on, which I can, but I've found this leads to me being more thoughtful and proactive about it.
The first few weeks at a new job always feel fresh and exciting. It usually takes a few months before I start to really get a sense of whether the job is a good fit.
Over time, I begin to see how I feel about the work itself, how I get along with coworkers, and how the daily pace and expectations fit me.
Curious if others have their own rule of thumb for figuring this out.
Will it help me get my n+1 job? Will the technology I’m using look good on my resume? Will I just be a code monkey who pulls well defined stories off the board?
Does it pay me market rates?
Is the bullshit/pay ratio worth it?
Post 2020 the rules have changed for me.
Is it remote and is it a remote first culture?
Does it pay “enough” to take care of my short and long term goals?
And funny enough, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work for any large company or BigTech (again).
These days, I don’t care if the company is a shit show. I do 40 hours a week and money appears in my account - that’s the deal. I don’t work for “passion”, “alignment” or the “mission”. I work for the paycheck.
I do like the company I work for now. It’s the best job I’ve had in 29 years across 10 jobs.
I wonder what society would look like once it becomes common to trust your gut instincts. It used to be that you never judge a book by its cover, but now that is increasingly never the case.
I think we'd find a broken society that becomes even more broken without anyone wanting to fix it. It'd more profitable to destroy and rebuild under a new regime.
Way back in the 80s, I had started a new job, and they held a meeting to discuss the results of a recent employee opinion survey. The results were overwhelmingly negative. It made me realize I had made a serious mistake. I quit before a year had passed.
This is the same advice I now dispense to anyone I'm mentoring in software. I didn't for a long time because I had to learn this lesson the hard way a few times.
>> How long does it take to form an impression of a new job?
>> Zero. You should give it 0 time. You already know, and you’ve known for a long time;
Oh boy, how developers are clinging to the illusion this is still 2021.
How long till they interiorize that they are now immigrants crowding at a day laborer site, hoping some farmer with a truck will pick 10-20 of them for a round of picking strawberries.
So when you're penniless with no perspectives and the countryman picks you out of a crowd of hundreds hungry and desperate, you arrive at the strawberry farm and realize instantly: nah, this is not for me!
You forget there is a distinction between a plumber and an architect. The plumbers might get streamlined and need to compete, but if you design the whole house, do all the work yourself or know how to manage the contractors you will be totally fine.
I don't want to correct you on your stance, your pov may vary, but i haven't noticed any downsizing in orders and i don't want fearmongering happening here for youngsters.
If you design a clean product and maintain it you will be totally fine - some social skills and experience are ofc what you learn along the way.
There is no data backing up the ever repeating horror stories of mass-layoffs or people not getting hired because some magic AI now does all the job and if you learn the matter you can understand how to leverage these tools and why they will not make you "penniless and desperate" anytime soon.
For me as freelancer what actually was replaced was the farmer - i can have bookkeeping now, marketing and even legal assistance from AI, but i cannot have it do anything over a simple morphism or terminal object without it carrying technical debt 10x what you get when you just code down some manager-wanted functionality (and you may not want to work in places that operate on these hierarchies anyway)
i worry that i've job hopped a bit too much and have a series of 2-3yr gigs on my resume.
part of my problem is that I get unhappy (or bored) with a job but sit in denial for too long. so by the time I start looking for a new position, I'll desperately jump headfirst into a new gig instead of lining up the perfect gig.
Or maybe not. maybe it's impossible to tell if a place is a good fit from the interview.
2-3 yr gigs in 2025 is completely OK, we're not in the 80's and people are not expected to work many years for an employer, especially in the modern workplace where the "normal" way to get a promotion is job hopping.
FWIW I have several shorter gigs in my resume. A combination of me being still young and not evaluating things correctly, and employers not being honest about working conditions. I even once stayed at one job for less than 2 months, but to be honest I have left that one out of my CV.
One more thing: I've been on the hiring side a few times and I have observed that candidates with very long gigs (5+ years in the same job) are often seen negatively (Why did they stay in the same job for 6 years? Do they lack ambition? Don't they like a new challenge? Etc.)
> One more thing: I've been on the hiring side a few times and I have observed that candidates with very long gigs (5+ years in the same job) are often seen negatively (Why did they stay in the same job for 6 years? Do they lack ambition? Don't they like a new challenge? Etc.)
Even so, there's some companies with notorious reputations for culling staff (often only loosely correlating with performance). I'd be wary of hiring someone with long tenure from one of those places, to survive, you have to be a certain type of ruthless.
I'm the same as you. A series of 2-3 year gigs. Some I left because I was bored and not getting any new challenges. Some I was laid off from. Some I left because for some reason everything I enjoyed about the job fell apart. My favorite coworkers left, the executives clawed back all the nice perks, etc
I'm in this situation right now. Just passed the three year mark and the new executive team is starting a rodeo
I honestly feel very down on myself, as if I'm incapable of staying at a job more than 3 years. Like I'm making excuses for moving on, not reacting to a change in reality
Don't feel down on yourself in the least. Two to three years is a good run in the tech industry.
If I'm not learning new things that will get me the next better job that's a rung up the ladder, there's no point in staying. I've never had a job where that's the case three years in.
Sometimes it is experience that comes with finding out a job is right for you. The job itself can be great, the projects fun, but if the companies structure is anti-growth and headed for some idiotic goals (like "we want to start making the software that our most expensive supplier makes" aka want to go up in the food-chain in a already well-established market) instead of working with the chances they got- you will go nowhere. And you will know it.
If all the ambitious people leave- or go into inner exile, while the work stays the same but the company goes nowhere, the job has quit on you and its time to walk.
This isn't at all a rebuttal of the post, more a different perspective. I started a new job while basically deeply depressed. It colored all my opinions of the company and my coworkers. As I'm coming out of that through a combination of medication and intensive CBT I'm realizing that a lot of the negativity I felt towards my job was the result of the depression. As things improve I'm realizing that the job is mostly neutral but my impression of it was colored by my mental health struggles. This isn't at all to say not to take the authors advice, just take care of yourself and be aware of the possibility that you may be distorting reality if there's any chance you're depressed
I've recently had a job that started out reasonably good, but after a year and a half, I started wondering what I was doing there, was I really in the right place? Some of the tickets I worked on went nowhere, and I didn't enjoy the stuff I was working on. That lasted a couple of months, and I was seriously considering quitting. And then came a complaint from a user that opened up a whole cesspit of necessary improvements, optimisations and bugs for something I'd previously worked on, and that turned into 9 months of the best fun I've ever had at work. Made a factor 20 improvement to a hideously complex algorithm that nobody understood, found and fixed a bunch of bugs in the algorithm that we had always thought was perfect -- you know, fun stuff. And then my contract ended. But on a high note.
This isn't general advice or anything, but I'm glad I didn't quit a year earlier.
The times I've really had to scramble on something at work describe both some of my best working experiences and some of my worst. I think a big differentiator is clarity. If I know that X needs to be done, and it's important and urgent I'm happy to dig in.
The bad emergencies tend to be scenarios where I'm told OMG we need to fix A, it's an emergency, only to be told a short time later that actually never mind problem B is the real emergency, and then jumping to problem C after that, and so on. That kind of scattered direction can be soul crushing, where I invest in a problem and get far along on a good solution, only to be told that oh actually that urgency was BS, but trust us this new emergency is totally important.
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Steve Jobs said it most profoundly: "love what you do".
This is the opposite of "do what you love".
I wish I understood where he learned this.
It's very profound (and true).
One of many platitudes that kept me in working conditions and religion which were detrimental to my career and mental health.
Maybe it's useful to some who are in objectively good circumstances which they haven't learned to appreciate. I'd still advocate for getting other perspectives from trustworthy folks about ones specific situation.
And not taking advice from billionaires who think their fruity diet will cure their cancer.
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Possibly from the 1970 Stephen Stills song "Love the One You're With"
It is not the opposite. If you do what you love, you love what you do. So its more of, "love what you do" is what to aim for, and "do what you love" is one way to achieve this.
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A similar quote from Nietzsche has really struck to me:
Happiness is not doing everything you want, but wanting everything you do.
Smile more, you will be happier. On how long to know if a job is right, it depends how much you know what you are looking for.
Possibly his well known interest of Buddhism ?
On the other hand, some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more accurate model of the world. So what if you were right about your job initially, and the CBT is basically just gaslighting you into spinning things in a positive way?
Assuming that is true, does a more negative way of viewing things actually benefit you (even if it would be slightly more "accurate")?
If one has a choice (that means if there is no case of clinical depression):
At least anecdotally a bit of optimism improves my life quality a lot and results in a higher productivity, proactive solution finding and a more pleasant work environment. Constantly looking at the negative side of things (with a healthy serving of snark) contributes, in my opinion, to burnout and fatigue.
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> some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more accurate model of the world
This is called the “depressive realism” hypothesis and there’s more evidence against it than for it.
The studies don’t show “more accurate model of the world” like the depressive realism pushers claim. They show isolated things like depressed patients performing slightly better in some arbitrary gamified task. There are studies that have the results going the other way, too.
It’s well understood that depressive episodes cause cognitive distortions that lead to overestimating the effort required for tasks, underestimating how easily things can be changed for the better, or ruminating on things that don’t matter.
The studies don't show they have a more accurate model of the world. The studies overwhelming only test the immediate judgements of their own behaviour and performance.
The more limited studies with different methodologies have found their judgement of other people's behaviour and performance is wrong. And that if you ask them after a delay (e.g. forcing them to use recall) instead of immediately, they are also wrong.
What does it mean for someone’s model of the world to be accurate? My experience with mild depression is that you notice many negative things which are true but then lack perspective about how much they matter. When you feel better you just don’t pay any mind to these negative things.
I’d argue that you can still have an accurate model of the world without the depression part.
I can’t back it up but recovering from depression by simply putting “rose colored glasses” is a recipe for bouncing back later. Happened to me.
In HN’s case: admitting that companies are quite toxic and more often than not working against you, that most people around you is probably an incompetent if put under a microscope and that the things you’re working on aren’t exactly changing the world for the better.
The trick perhaps is not letting those things make you cynical, and not acting on them. And forgetting yourself because you’re also a bit incompetent too, so you can let you and everyone else off the hook.
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I would like to add to this. I have been depressed since I was a teenager. Anxiety Panic attacks, poor sleep, s*ci*l tendencies. I was able to finally get a job at 29 and first 3 months into it, I realized this is not a right fit and the company and its management is chaotic at best. It was a red flag right from the start but I ignored it because I was desperate for a WFH job. After 3 years of therapy, my views had changed that it's not so bad (something that I think the optimistic view changed). I was also looking to move to North America so I kept stalling to find a new job but that was a different thing. After I slipped back into depression a while ago, I again started seriously considering quitting because now in 3 years the company has grown somehow and some of the employees are really toxic. In 3-5 months I seriously want to quit this time whether I switch or no as I will complete 4 years at a company I never planned on working beyond 6 months. So there might be some truth to this. When I am depressed I see all the realistic things going on. When I am doing well I tend to ignore lot of the red flags.
That may be a subset of people, you also don’t need to be depressed to have an accurate view of the world
There exists another subset of people that merely tolerate the overly optimistic general populace and don’t need that as a coping mechanism to understand and mold the world
CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But then, if it helps you cope, so what?
It is the same with religion. Even though gods objectively do not exist, at least not in a literal sense, it can still help people to cope better with their life and be an overall positive force. Or extremely harmful when abused.
The world is pretty depressing. Everyone is telling themselves little lies one way or another just to be able to function. And no, Atheists are not more rational than religious people per se, they tend to have other delusions.
Personally I think striving to have a realistic model of the world is still the best long term strategy and that those little lies are like drugs that will help you in the short term but wreck havoc in the long term but who knows. It is complicated.
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What is even an "accurate model of the world" in this context? Isn't it all just perception and impression and interpretation?
For example, a depressed person might think: "this company is shit and will go under in 6 months because my coworkers and management are so incompetent and malicious"
Let's say their prediction was true. Good job!
What if the depressed person missed that there were a couple of people at the office who actually were not incompetent and malicious, maybe people they would enjoy to get to know. What if there were opportunities to learn interesting things while the company crashed and burned.
To determine what worldview is most realistic you have to weigh what aspects of reality are most significant.
Mildly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What does mildly depressed mean?
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How have you controlled for the possibility that you originally saw clearly and that the therapy is what has distorted your reality?
Yeah, reading this I thought the author should suggest to their friend that they talk to a therapist.
This is a good insight, but they already have a therapist. :) (I am the author)
Good on you for figuring that out. Not everyone is able to deduce that, it's good for your own accountability
That is true, our own perspective is to be taken into account. Sometimes it's worth trying to adjust your own view, but sometimes it's important to bail out before you gaslight yourself.
I find that I pick companies to work with when my goals and their goals align.
I visualize this alignment like two boats travelling on the ocean together, with a rope that runs between them, connecting them.
When the alignment is strong, the tension on the rope is low, and it's a great place to work at.
But over time, the direction of either party can change, and it results in a better alignment, or a drift from each other that starts to put the rope under increasing tension.
It's possible that the tension on the rope is good, and your trajectory will adjust. But due to the size of the company it's unlikely your small boat can adjust the heading of the company, but you might succeed, if you try.
The key is to know when the rope is about to break, and then disconnect from that company and start the process again with another company, aligned in your direction.
> The key is to know when the rope is about to break, and then disconnect from that company and start the process again with another company, aligned in your direction
This post helped me a lot tonight, thank you
I've been feeling this tension building like crazy over the past few months as my employer has been pushing AI mandates and metrics hard. It's been making me miserable, my productivity is crashing and I wish I could ask them to just lay me off already so I can move on
I am very discouraged about the job market right now and I do not relish jobhunting at the moment, but I think you're right. It's time to move on for my own sake and try to find something new
Not a problem, being able to put a story to what you are feeling is important.
You control when to disconnect from the company, that's 100% in your power.
Happy sailing!
This also works for people, but sometimes you choose a longer rope. :)
A couple of rules I have that have worked for me so far is:
Colleagues, tasks, compensation - if at least two of the three are good, it's fine to stay. If not it's time to look for something new.
The first year is a learning year, the second is a productive year, and the third is a "what else can I get out of this place" year. If nothing changes in the third year, then there's not much more to learn from the company and it's maybe time to move on.
Culture is a fourth one.
Currently working towards the end of a contract/earn-out at a company where people just toss stuff they don't want to deal with over the fence for others to handle with usually zero communication about why/what/how. Just suddenly get a new project with no context. Also, three different bosses in two years because they keep leaving.
Second worst company I've ever worked for.
The worst one involved multiple c-suite executives that would throw objects at employees when they didn't get the answer they wanted. Thankfully I wasn't under contract there and got out ASAP.
Sounds like culture is colleagues
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https://old.stonecharioteer.com/posts/2022/two-of-three-rule...
I wrote something exactly like this a while ago.
> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become.
Every time.
I don't care about your stack; obviously I have taste and preferences but I'm a professional, I'll work with whatever, as long as it isn't Rails. (Because there is no good work in that world.) But it will not take me a full day with access to your repos before I know whether there's anything you can do for me past signing the checks.
genuinely curious what your take is here, I have been in security engineering for 5-6 years, then most recently a startup that's using rails. It honestly does not seem that bad even though we're using an ember frontend.
What is your thought process here? Is it the notion that you can ship as fast as possible, and that creates a shitty environment given that you're a hamster on a wheel getting measured by output since "you should be able to ship fast?"
If you mean about Rails specifically, it's that the total lack of discipline in both language and framework makes it impossible to build a product maintainable by more than one person, so every "successful" project has one or a few covert empire builders running it, usually with more political than technical success. That's not a kind of project that pays enough to be worth the trouble, even before we talk about opportunity cost, and the framework itself is a dead end that peaked in 2011 and has had about as many "renaissances" since then as there've been years of the Linux desktop. If I want to go live under that kind of rock, I'll do it with Salesforce, where the pay is better and no one thinks they're cool for poking at a keyboard all day.
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Ruby is only just now getting static typing and Rails has a lot of "magic" as part of its value prop. If you're trying to launch something of low to medium complexity quickly and stay on the happy path of the tools in the ecosystem then it works great. The lack of rigor from dynamic typing and latitude afforded by Ruby's expressive syntax can quickly become a footgun though.
My pet theory is that LLM coding is going to give the upper hand to more verbose languages like Golang or Typescript because more of the execution flow will end up explicitly in the LLM's context. Convention over configuration-type frameworks ruled when one-person code bulldozers shipped MVPs but Continue is upending this paradigm.
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I've worked with Ruby. It was a delight. But it has to be maintained, dynamic typing loses upfront safety & allows for a mess where you have to analyse the whole program to have any idea what some function is expected to take in & put out
I'm glad static typing came back
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As evidenced by the other replies by OP, it’s a hyperbolic and bad take. There’s plenty of companies doing just fine with Rails codebases. Many of which are a decade or more old now and have done just fine with the inter generational transfer that happens due to natural employee attrition and haven’t been held hostage by one or two all-knowing engineers.
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I dunno; maybe I'm hopelessly naïve or out of touch, but I'd pay attention to the compensation, benefits, work environment, and colleagues to know whether this is a place I'd actually like working at long before I pay attention to whether this is a job that always uses the latest cutting-edge tech so I can make sure my resume has the best words in it for the next job I look for...
Unless desperate, why would I have accepted an offer or taken a contract if all of those didn't already seem in line? Why would you have?
The thing is, people can lie about all of those, but whatever social problems exist in the environment will invariably be evident in the code.
What's the old saw about how if you have four teams working on a compiler, you'll get a four-pass compiler? Conway's law [1], that's the one. That one works in both directions. When you're reading code that seems like it would be 0.1x as complicated if any of the people involved in writing it ever spoke to one another, the wise engineer new to this environment begins asking, why do these people never speak to one another? But not too loud!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
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Rails is so good that all the issues become political until you get to stupid large scale.
Such an insightful comment and the most underestimated feature of Rails.
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> That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become.
Yeah, yet their job listed a bunch of shiny "modern" cloud stuff they were doing, but they actually have three busted serverless functions and some dusty Java IBM Websphere things floating around running the whole business, while the job description listed 432 different things they were "looking for".
Can you expand on why you avoid Rails? I'm legitimately curious!
Edit: I see your other replies, nvm!
I found a correlation between Rails and lower salaries. Not sure why though. I was actively looking to move to Rails for a change of scenery, until I realised it comes with a tax.
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> It’s only been six months, but it’s starting to feel like it might not work out. How much longer should I give it?”
It takes a lot longer to tell if the job is right than if it's wrong. Six months is orders of magnitude longer than you need to give a bad job. Don't rage quit, but if it feels wrong it probably is, so start looking.
Had one job with a guy I had worked with for years elsewhere, and within my first couple weeks we sat down for a coffee and I said "so this isn't it a 5 year gig is it?" and he shook his head in agreement. Unfortunately COVID & life caused us to both overstay a bit.
You early don't owe anyone anything to stick with a bad gig.
My first job was the only job I just went home from and just cried because of how useless thah job felt. We were building a SaaS that took weeks for a simple update with 8 devs (of which 2 were actually good).
This was purely because of the legacy stack and poor management. The boss wanted to scale but did not care about tech, so we just never made real improvements. Sure, a feature got implement at least a week. We saw revenue grow a ton. We never saw time to improve our stack.
Safe to say I felt like I was adding nothing to that company. They just didn't want to grow despite saying the opposite. I get that the shiniest framework will not improve the project, but there were some serious bottlenecks that just got shoved under the rug
I'm a bit confused by your post here.
> The boss wanted to scale but did not care about tech... We saw revenue grow a ton.
Sounds like the boss was largely getting the scaling they wanted?
Every situation is different and there are people with way more experience than me here, but in general terms I've seen the "we need to rewrite / write a component library" from immature tech. Problem is, they're never satifised, so after they're happy and they've moved on, the next person will say the exact same thing.
That's not to say your code didn't have real problems.
But experience tells me that there's tons of well written projects with no users or revenue, and lots of broken shit making money hand over fist. All else being equal, unless you're in a bubble, you're better off with the money.
( Not intended to imply the job wasn't terrible and the product didn't have real actual scaling problems making your life terrible, I've seen that too ).
You can usually find out if a job is wrong for you within days, sometimes hours.
You might never know for sure if a job is right for you though.
and sometimes before starting ... at two weeks' out, they'd had to change the salary offer (down) because they had screwed up the salary calculation, expressed surprise I'd said I planned to use the unlimited vacation policy to take a fixed four weeks a year (they felt it was a lot), changed the offer from employee to contractor, referred me to their accountant for what was really the simplest of accounting queries, sent me an equity calculator with an assumption of a $10bn sale price, and some other weird stuff. Really should have known better, and only lasted a few months -- my old company reached out to check I was happy in the new role, and had me back within a fortnight of checking in.
A good smell test for a job that isn't right for you is whether you ask yourself if it is the right job early on, or if you even have thoughts of quitting in the first year/month/week, apart from being overwhelmed by all the new faces.
The only "bad" job that I had was with a very good company (wonderful people, great benefits, just the code absolutely sucked), so that was making the decision very hard to quit. In larger corporations, one might be able to engineer moving departments if that helps.
I remember finding my predecessor's lunch in my desk drawer on the first day at one job. He had left several months before so it definitely failed the smell test.
> The only "bad" job that I had was with a very good company (wonderful people, great benefits, just the code absolutely sucked),
I'm sort of in this situation right now
Lots of good things about the people, the pay, the benefits
But man
We are a "microservice" architecture with something like 5x more git repos than software devs
It's a nightmare
something something law of excluded middle
I think most jobs you can tell from a combination of the recruiting process and then onboarding and your first week. I have felt the "I hope this isn't how it is every day" that the author mentions at a few of my jobs and they've all been stinkers.
Recruiting gives me an idea of how much the company generally cares about their processes. I like when am I given a timeline of the process and steps and now when I get a random call from the recruiter in the middle of a meeting at my current job because the new co didn't ask when I'm free.
Onboarding tells me how much the team is haphazardly shipping vs actually owning their product. The teams that have sucked are the ones where the onboarding doc is heavily out of date (like all covering a now-unused access request system) or I can't even get help from the team within my first week to have someone send me access requests to copy for the things that are missing. The good teams are where my manager already provisioned my access before I joined and immediately addresses any misses when I flag them. Or if they have good enough docs for me to quickly handle it myself.
Career development is another one that takes a little longer to suss out, but if I can have a good first-week chat with my manager where they will explain what my baseline performance expectations are and what I need to do to overachieve and get on promotion/raise track, that's a good flag. The teams I haven't been able to get that early from are the ones where manager usually doesn't care not only about your career but also about app maintainability or anything past their next meeting with their own manager.
insightful; cosign. (i wrote the piece)
I do not agree with the "you know within a week"-take. I'm now 14 years working in IT-Security. 9 of those years for the same company.
I got my next job through a headhunter. The first weeks I had a really good feeling of the company I liked it there after a few months it got worse and worse like they couldn't hide all the bad things anymore. I quit, next job was more or less the same. I quit. My current job? The first month I thought to my self "oh my god, where do I got here?", but now a six months in I really like it.
Maybe also other factors have some plays here like my move from consulting into an internal role, colleagues, the overall freedom, but imho it's hard to generalize something like that.
Assuming no big red flags (stuff like toxic boss, work culture, misrepresenting the JD), I'm with you on the 6 months thing, in most decently paid jobs there's a lot of complexity, give yourself 6 months to not just learn but gain confidence to start applying and trying to push against the machine a couple of times.
At about the 2 or 3 year mark I've known.
Of course some places I've known sooner, but those are the exception.
If it wasn't for the quality of life my current jobs is providing, I'd probably find something else. I just can't find anything right now that is intriguing enough and pays enough for me to make the jump without losing benefits.
I think the depth of relationship with a job is more complex than comments and the article talk about.
What is you reaction to the kind-of-shitty company that gives you an opportunity for great personal growth and creativity?
Great colleagues but a real monoculture?
///
I liked most of TFA but the end where the author claims that management is more committed than IC's seems really strange to me. Is that something people look for? It seems like it would come across as totally fake cheerleading. Anyway, outside my experience.
I think the point is that, as a manager, you can’t fake it and still feel good about yourself. Whereas an engineer can just feel good about doing a good technical job even if you don’t buy into the company direction.
Takes me X months to discover where X is when I realise I don't like it. X is usually between 6 and 48. When X is nearer 6 it was a bad move. When X is closer to 48 it is because sands shifted. I never had a visceral reaction that I have been in a perfect job. But I know good from shit. Usually shit coincides with company is struggling to find PMF to fund growth through revenue. Also can mean company is sold to another company.
This right here is my exact take too.
Interestingly my current job I'm at the 48 month mark and sands definitely shifted after new management stepped in and slowly but surely gutted the culture, though I actually thought I wanted to leave almost immediately when I joined. It took me a little bit of adjusting initially to come to like the company at first, but it's been the longest place I've stayed since far.
Huge yes to this one -- especially on the part about how important this is for managers to get right. I spent two years white-knuckling the wrong job for the wrong reasons. Pretty much every day I am reminded in some way of how thankful I am for having left and found a job with a culture I'm a better fit for.
Every time something has been off in an interview, that thing has ended up being a long term problem with the organization.
It doesn’t take long to figure out.
Shortest I've been at a job was 3 months. I knew around the end of the first month that I needed to get out for two simple reasons - I didn't match with the company culture and the company was a sinking ship. I ended up completely leaving my time at that company off my resume because I realized it's not worth going into details.
Ironically, the skills (devops / cloudsec) I picked up in those three months have helped me double my salary.
Wow 3 months! I stayed 2 days!
I was still a student and I immediately had to fix a bug they had about hitting the memory limits with an awful SQL query. I fixed the query and they said "no we will just keep patching sqlite to increase the memory limits forever instead". So I quit because I didn't want to be the most senior person when I was still a student and I didn't want to be ignored.
It takes me about a month to know for sure. If the job isn't right for me, it takes me a few more months before I consciously decide that there is no way to make the job right for me.
It takes me between 1 ~ 2 months, for me to have a very good feeling...then the next handful of months to validate those feelings. In my 30 year work history, i have had only 1 job where i got it wrong..and EVERY single other job through my entire career, all it took was between 1 ~ 2 months to get a feeling if the place is good or not, if the role is right or not, etc. Then again, all except for 1 role, my entire career has been at medium or large corporations...so i'm sure corporate America has enough similarities in so many areas to enable this "early warning system". ;-)
For me it generally takes six months, because as a reflection on my own headspace, it takes that long for me to trust that my intuition isn't just imposter syndrome/anxiety.
I like companies that do tryouts. In the last 15 years I worked for 3 employers. Two of them did tryouts - a day or two literally working in their environment. One did not.
The two that did it both were great, the one that did not turned out to not be for me.
I'm with the last employer for the last 9 years, and not looking to quit :))
You haven’t happened to find a list of companies that do tryouts, have you?
Haha, I wish. Very random that this has happened. One of them was Assembla - Boston based. The other, that I work in now - Vinted - Lithuania based.
A long time ago, I had a chat with a nurse executive who rose up the ranks. Her advice was to stick to a position until the butterflies settle (or approximately q 5 years).
Nursing is known for lifers on single units, and personal growth doesn’t happen unless you are cognizant and strive for it.
I like this sentiment, yeah.
Honestly every job has huge up and down swings. I've been at my current place for about a decade, which seems like an outlier in this industry. Also roughly 1/3 of the people I started my career with (roughly 40 or so) are no longer even in the industry. Another 1/5 or so have transitioned to adjacent roles like project management, etc.
I make it a point to evaluate whether I want to stay where I'm at every six months and only leave if I want to leave two evaluations in a row.
I get the salary optimization done by the 2-year hoppers, but it bites you down the road as a senior engineer and onward because you've never had to live with the consequences of your engineering choices. Hanging around for longer teaches you that even the seemingly-best decision made at the time can seriously bite you years down the road.
I agree with the article, except for the last section, because many times the reason for me to quit was a manager who did not give himself, but was playing the game of pleasing upper management and not giving a shit about the hard working team. Also thr suggestion that you as a software engineer does not bring yourself to the table, is wrong, otherwise there would not be any developers suffering from burn-outs.
Bad take. Depends on the situation, sometimes it takes a while to find your gig. Ignore OP
Good article. Very grounded. Sometimes a job sucks, but not enough to justify immediately job hopping and you just check out and take the payslip each month. Agreed it takes about a week for my gut intuition to work itself out, then if it's bad you just need to decide whether it's something you can stick out for awhile or if you need to leave ASAP.
maybe we need better tools for assessing the dynamics of orgs from the outside. it's not just personalities, it's incentives.
I have opinions about it based on funding stages, but what it really comes down to is that culture is a function of growth. as an employee with a career success comes from hunting growth. the only real growth is from market fit, and even if you have market fit, if you aren't growing non-linearly you're going to get into a negative sum attrition game in the org culture (e.g. linear long term private equity returns).
questions to find answers for on the way in are:
- does anyone actually use their product and like it?
- how is that number growing? (non-linear, linear, attritive)
- what was their last funding round or change in equity ownership? (e.g. who runs it and what do you have to do to satisfy their investment)
- what's their staff turnover and where do they go?
If the real job doesn't match the interview, then it's the wrong job.
Simple as that.
I once took a position at a company that I had known because they were a customer of my then current employer. We'd always gotten along, they were nice folks, had a good interview.
In a very short time, I wondered what the heck was going on. There was so much drama, infighting, and backbiting, and it was the complete opposite of the company's external persona. People were constantly being moved to different desks with no rhyme or reason- as in, a whole department rearranged 4x in the 8 months I was there. I had 3 or 4 different desks in that time.
People were regularly worried about their jobs and whether the company would even be around after family fights. And when they no longer needed me they started playing games with me, writing me up for things I hadn't done etc. Anything to avoid having to pay unemployment.
I knew in the first couple of weeks. But a bit of me died at that job. Eventually they fired me. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't given them the opportunity and fired them instead. But I had mouths to feed besides my own.
Well, i guess it also depends on how much your coworkers are helpful to you as well. Because there are times some people are kinda introvert and they require a bit of more time to settle down. In certain situations you end up looking for work from home jobs as well. But that's just my perspective.
My last job had some giant red flags right up front. “Who would I report to?” “We don’t know.” “Who would I work with?” “We’re not sure yet.” And then there was a high profile legal issue after I accepted but before I started, and it rendered the position I was hired for irrelevant.
I worked there for four years anyway. Every one of those red flags was a sign of a real problem. Three of those years were very good, but eventually the chickens came home to roost.
I've always known within a week if I was going to like a job or not. I was right every time.
I quit a job via a consultancy to a bank at about lunchtime on my first day.
I'm just not at the stage in my life where I'm willing to onboard to a transformation that starts with a half a day call authenticating so you can login to a remote VM to do your development.
Similarly I had a 2 week gig where they send me some shitheap of a windows laptop that takes 20 minutes to login, where they wanted future engagements.
Nope. Nada. No way.
You can see the value of your productivity straight out the gate. It's not valued and you will never be able to change it from your vantage point of IC or middle manager.
It doesn't really matter that they say otherwise, the evidence tells the story.
Got hired for a contract to "integrate this crypto[0] protocol sdk" but it turned out that they actually meant "implement this crypto protocol from scratch in an async manner" and by day four I was out[1].
Shortest perm job was about 5 months. Tiny office, 4 other people on the phone all day, impossible project (writing software for unreliable hardware), not a difficult choice.
[0] actual crypto, not currency.
[1] not just because of the bait-and-switch but because crypto is miles out of my wheelhouse.
For my past several jobs, I've put together a job satisfaction matrix that I fill out once a month. If it scores below a threshold three months in a row, that triggers a job search.
It helps me because I have a habit of fixating on the team’s mission and ignoring my own happiness, so the monthly check-in keeps me from staying somewhere longer than I should.
How many times have you switched jobs already, and what was your average tenure?
Over ~15 years I've switched four times. Three if you don't count being brought over in an acquisition.
- 6 years
- 3 years -> triggered by matrix
- 3 years -> until acquisition
- 5 months -> acquiring company, triggered by matrix
- 2 years, on-going
Would you mind sharing this? Seems really valuable.
Sure - it's fairly personalized based on what I'm looking to get out of my career, but it has questions roughly like this:
I score each item 1-5 (1 = rarely, 5 = always) and track the total. If that total stays below my cutoff for a few months in a row, that would trigger me to start looking. Sometimes I include notes beside any low/high scores for context.
Friends have challenged this, asking if I can't just feel when it's time to move on, which I can, but I've found this leads to me being more thoughtful and proactive about it.
The first few weeks at a new job always feel fresh and exciting. It usually takes a few months before I start to really get a sense of whether the job is a good fit.
Over time, I begin to see how I feel about the work itself, how I get along with coworkers, and how the daily pace and expectations fit me.
Curious if others have their own rule of thumb for figuring this out.
I hated my last job. Love my current job. The difference is good managers and good coworkers.
I've suffered so many fools that I just consider that to be a practical part of standard work.
Question is what is the value of suffering these fools? New skill? New perspective? What's the result of this transaction?
That to me is what defines staying power. If there's just no value, or a bad imbalance of toil to value, it's time to go.
My job criteria has not been as profound.
Will it help me get my n+1 job? Will the technology I’m using look good on my resume? Will I just be a code monkey who pulls well defined stories off the board?
Does it pay me market rates?
Is the bullshit/pay ratio worth it?
Post 2020 the rules have changed for me.
Is it remote and is it a remote first culture?
Does it pay “enough” to take care of my short and long term goals?
And funny enough, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work for any large company or BigTech (again).
These days, I don’t care if the company is a shit show. I do 40 hours a week and money appears in my account - that’s the deal. I don’t work for “passion”, “alignment” or the “mission”. I work for the paycheck.
I do like the company I work for now. It’s the best job I’ve had in 29 years across 10 jobs.
> I work for the paycheck.
Would you be open about this in an interview? The majority work for the paycheck but preferred the job had less BS or shitshow.
Of course not. I’ve been playing the game long enough to know how to bullshit my way through behavioral interviews.
I wonder what society would look like once it becomes common to trust your gut instincts. It used to be that you never judge a book by its cover, but now that is increasingly never the case.
I think we'd find a broken society that becomes even more broken without anyone wanting to fix it. It'd more profitable to destroy and rebuild under a new regime.
Way back in the 80s, I had started a new job, and they held a meeting to discuss the results of a recent employee opinion survey. The results were overwhelmingly negative. It made me realize I had made a serious mistake. I quit before a year had passed.
Does Charity ever miss? Ever?
This is the same advice I now dispense to anyone I'm mentoring in software. I didn't for a long time because I had to learn this lesson the hard way a few times.
>> How long does it take to form an impression of a new job?
>> Zero. You should give it 0 time. You already know, and you’ve known for a long time;
Oh boy, how developers are clinging to the illusion this is still 2021.
How long till they interiorize that they are now immigrants crowding at a day laborer site, hoping some farmer with a truck will pick 10-20 of them for a round of picking strawberries.
So when you're penniless with no perspectives and the countryman picks you out of a crowd of hundreds hungry and desperate, you arrive at the strawberry farm and realize instantly: nah, this is not for me!
You forget there is a distinction between a plumber and an architect. The plumbers might get streamlined and need to compete, but if you design the whole house, do all the work yourself or know how to manage the contractors you will be totally fine.
I don't want to correct you on your stance, your pov may vary, but i haven't noticed any downsizing in orders and i don't want fearmongering happening here for youngsters.
If you design a clean product and maintain it you will be totally fine - some social skills and experience are ofc what you learn along the way.
There is no data backing up the ever repeating horror stories of mass-layoffs or people not getting hired because some magic AI now does all the job and if you learn the matter you can understand how to leverage these tools and why they will not make you "penniless and desperate" anytime soon.
For me as freelancer what actually was replaced was the farmer - i can have bookkeeping now, marketing and even legal assistance from AI, but i cannot have it do anything over a simple morphism or terminal object without it carrying technical debt 10x what you get when you just code down some manager-wanted functionality (and you may not want to work in places that operate on these hierarchies anyway)
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/05/19/can-ai-take-you...
You can keep your fear-first stance here no problem, but it's either misunderstanding of what AI can do or what software engineering is about.
i worry that i've job hopped a bit too much and have a series of 2-3yr gigs on my resume.
part of my problem is that I get unhappy (or bored) with a job but sit in denial for too long. so by the time I start looking for a new position, I'll desperately jump headfirst into a new gig instead of lining up the perfect gig.
Or maybe not. maybe it's impossible to tell if a place is a good fit from the interview.
2-3 yr gigs in 2025 is completely OK, we're not in the 80's and people are not expected to work many years for an employer, especially in the modern workplace where the "normal" way to get a promotion is job hopping.
FWIW I have several shorter gigs in my resume. A combination of me being still young and not evaluating things correctly, and employers not being honest about working conditions. I even once stayed at one job for less than 2 months, but to be honest I have left that one out of my CV.
One more thing: I've been on the hiring side a few times and I have observed that candidates with very long gigs (5+ years in the same job) are often seen negatively (Why did they stay in the same job for 6 years? Do they lack ambition? Don't they like a new challenge? Etc.)
> One more thing: I've been on the hiring side a few times and I have observed that candidates with very long gigs (5+ years in the same job) are often seen negatively (Why did they stay in the same job for 6 years? Do they lack ambition? Don't they like a new challenge? Etc.)
Even so, there's some companies with notorious reputations for culling staff (often only loosely correlating with performance). I'd be wary of hiring someone with long tenure from one of those places, to survive, you have to be a certain type of ruthless.
Same company same title for 5 years is slacker zone. Same company getting promoted is a good sign. 10 jobs in 10 years is a never ever.
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I'm the same as you. A series of 2-3 year gigs. Some I left because I was bored and not getting any new challenges. Some I was laid off from. Some I left because for some reason everything I enjoyed about the job fell apart. My favorite coworkers left, the executives clawed back all the nice perks, etc
I'm in this situation right now. Just passed the three year mark and the new executive team is starting a rodeo
I honestly feel very down on myself, as if I'm incapable of staying at a job more than 3 years. Like I'm making excuses for moving on, not reacting to a change in reality
Don't feel down on yourself in the least. Two to three years is a good run in the tech industry.
If I'm not learning new things that will get me the next better job that's a rung up the ladder, there's no point in staying. I've never had a job where that's the case three years in.
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Is it realistic to find a perfect fit job right now?
It takes me about 3 years. And it turns out that no job has ever been right for me.
Had no idea .wtf was a thing
Sometimes it is experience that comes with finding out a job is right for you. The job itself can be great, the projects fun, but if the companies structure is anti-growth and headed for some idiotic goals (like "we want to start making the software that our most expensive supplier makes" aka want to go up in the food-chain in a already well-established market) instead of working with the chances they got- you will go nowhere. And you will know it.
If all the ambitious people leave- or go into inner exile, while the work stays the same but the company goes nowhere, the job has quit on you and its time to walk.
It takes less than a minute, provided they post salary ranges.
"It depends, Charity. As always."
Word.
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