The company I work for is losing all of its humanity, I don't know where to go(superlemon.bearblog.dev) |
The company I work for is losing all of its humanity, I don't know where to go(superlemon.bearblog.dev) |
You are still a human. You are intelligent. Yes - you are, this is demonstrated by the ability to think critically and independence of your views. So - You are capable to adapt into new environment and into new tech. Search for anything and switch job. Don't wait for a toxic environment to destroy your confidence.
You should document everything the bosses are doing, because in many countries firing people for not magically becoming more productive is highly illegal. And workplace harassment is highly illegal.
Build up your power with your colleagues, stay strong and solidarity will prevail!
The world is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
There are precious few of us left who even still know how to write in our own voice, who have a will to grow ourselves and faith left in human ability. I urge you beyond all urging not underestimate yourself, for you have never been more rare and valuable!!!
You don't have to quit to start looking for another job, just start looking. You have 10 years experience, how can you say that you have no marketable skills? You could network, go to events, get involved in your local dev communities, show someone else your enthusiasm.
You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
As a man I need you to expand on this because I'm trying to imagine what concrete actions you think "a man" would do in this circumstance, and of the things I've come up with the only one I think I'm allowed to say on this forum is "quit and find a new job."
What exactly does this mean?
It's a weird way to phrase it, in my opinion, especially in this era where we are generally avoiding ambiguously gendered collective nouns... but I'm pretty sure that's the gist. Or, at least, it's how I read it.
Younger generations might bristle at this use of the word, and that's fine, but try to give the benefit of the doubt (in fact, it's a rule on HN).
I've done it twice. First when an $evil company aquired the place I worked, and the second time when an $evil company aquired the place I worked (the second one being Oracle and Sun, as described in the anthropomorphizing Ellison speech better than I can).
The only thing that I can realistically think through is the fact that because such owners were able to get the personal income and expenses sorted out for a few years and maybe got a bigger house.
But if things change, which realistically speaking, it would. they might get so accustomed to the way of doing things and the shock would be too much in too short period of time.
It doesn't atleast in the moment, seem worth it to me to try to create or chase trends for investors or anything.
I also sympathize with the workers working in said companies like OP. Not sure what realistic solution is out there, the job-market is terrible at the moment for many people and IMO business-making is a hard thing to do and some of us might like to over-estimate ourselves in it too (& side note on under-estimating yourself too)
Accurate estimations of if you should do business or not seems to me to always contain some inaccuracies and you might have to decide your own decision in that and in that sense, job seems better.
You also can't go live without money if one has to exist within society.
I don't know if there is a catharsis to such problem. To me, it seems like an authenticity/trust issue on if you can trust the founders or not but trust by definition is a bit weird and immeasurable and it can always have blind-spots. Maybe the investors investing into such a company trusted the wrong guy but what if the company somehow sells to more people (Ahem SpaceX) and ends up making incredible amounts of money. You would never know and thus you have to just trust the system but the system doesn't work sometimes in a good fashion.
[0]: (We need a better term for such companies which are just trend-chasing and mostly are just built to impress investors rather than try to generate actual profits)
In either case, this job is clearly not healthy for you in several different ways
I went from jQuery to a brief dalliance with Angular to HTMX+_HyperScript. Everyone wants full stack Devs to use react and struggle eternally with insane dependency trees and challenging client side state management.
I like to build things that can be maintained in perpetuity by small teams.
So I'm not very marketable.
That doesn't mean you don't have good skills, it just means that too many people have them. It happens from time to time in every industrial, for all skills.
Obviously, I don't have any good advice about how to deal with it.
Don’t live in the hype. Not everyone is drinking the ai cool-aid bottoms up.
What do you mean by fastapi being a mistake ?
Thinking that you can do this without skills has been here before, and it'll come around again after the executives take the money and run.
Hot take: moving is more about interview skills than coding skills. Whether you leave or not, start interviewing now. You might end up finding a better place sooner than you hoped.
As for FastAPI bring a mistake - that's an overgeneralisation to be sure. It has it's uses.
My first issue is that it falls into the same kind of small footprint as Flask. Every Flask project I work on slowly reinvents Django via a combination of plugins of varied quality and custom code/plugins. Get some Auth plugins, build step for manifest static files, add in Jinja2, grab an ORM like SQLAlchemy (or hopefully PeeWee), a migration system, test runners with fixtures/dB integration and rollback and on and on and on.
FastAPI is operating more at that level but also adds the often unnecessary complexity of async. In Python this is a cooperative setup meaning you have to yield to the event loop yourself (otherwise despite being "async" it blocks). Plus with a webapp all async often does is let you hammer your services (i.e. dispatch more queries to your poor DB) harder. The actual performance improvements don't manifest so much at scale as people often think. Plus you end up with a whole second set of ways to call functions and... makes me pine for gevent.
There are absolutely cases for this kind of async, even in webapps, but it's often not actually that helpful in places that it's used (and doesn't actually need to be everywhere). Good development imo means picking the right tool for the job rather than jumping on hype trains.
MongoDB is webscale!!
And bonus points for bashing MongoDB, of course. Every single project that I worked on where MongoDB was used, also had MongoDB as the single largest constraint and operations time sink.
The best analogy I can come up with is the smurf village: Every smurf has an identity, describing a bunch of mannerism. Baker smurf, strong smurf, joke smurf ... The smurfette is both the only adult female and a separate identity. Her existence in a children's story serves to demonstrate to young humans how the female identity is supposed to work.
I think the smurf village echos a deep human archetype. A man is someone who can choose his identity. He is unbound. A woman is a man with an already fixed identity. She can't choose to be e.g. a baker as primary identity, her choice is made already.
While simplified, there is some truth in this worldview, and people, especially woman, are correct to protest teaching this archetype to new generations.
In the same way, the poster above uses 'Be a man' to probably mean something like: 'Be brave enough to choose a new identity'. Which is a valid message, but needs an implied ([*] woman are also men here) when this archetype is considered.
Extremely online people find the sweet contention in everything and act accordingly.
As for the [*] I did assume that the target was male because of the content of the writing. But if they were female they are presumably going to be no more or less able to discern the value.
This forum is ran by my fellow man, dang, who expects a certain level of decorum and discretion, and it would be ungentlemanly to act otherwise. A Real Man knows to keep his cards close to his chest. It's a violation of the Bro Code to say some stuff out loud, my dude.
> What responsibility for you are you asking me to take?
I'm asking you to explain what actions you think OP, as a Man, should take in this situation. Quit (quietly or loudly)? Refuse and get fired? Something else?
That's the key.
I've been an AppSec engineer for about 12 years, but it wasn't until about 5 years ago I started working somewhere that actually paid a market rate. I wasn't living paycheck to paycheck for the first 7 years, but certainly wasn't putting much away.
Now, I've got nearly a full year of after-tax paychecks in savings. I could easily go ~18 months without pay without a change in lifestyle. I could stretch it out to 3 years with some belt tightening.
In about 6 more years, the house will be paid off and any savings I have could last even longer.
Hope you find another job soon!
I don't think I could go more than 2-3 months. Maybe I should start saving some money.
And as the others said, we've been saving money. We thought it was for retirement, but we're having to use some of it early for this situation.
If in 19 years as a SWE, you haven't saved up a lot of money, you are one or more of:
1. Incredibly unfortunate in the jobs you've been taking.
2. Have made some incredibly bad investments.
3. Are spending like a sailor, burning every dollar as it comes in.
4. Have gone through one or more absolute life catastrophes.
... Then yes, you are also likely to have financial problems if you're out of work for two years.
I don't mean to say that these are incredibly uncommon. They aren't, especially in people chasing the startup carrot and ending up with nothing but the brown, sticky bit.
But I think it's fair to say that a large number of people in the profession should have managed to avoid all four. (With #3 being the main 'avoidable' culprit, and with #4 being largely unavoidable.)
Consider that somehow, people making less than a quarter of our prevailing wages manage to live... Fairly comfortably.
The parent comment mentioned North America. This is huge. Tech salaries in Europe are half what they are in NA. In India, they're like 1/4 to 1/3.
Saving is absolutely important, especially in such a layoff-ridden industry. You should really strive to get at least 6 months of living expenses into savings.
My company pays 10k a year for an Indian contractor, full time. I don't know what their agency pays them, but it can't be even 1/4 of a typical NA SWE salary. More like 1/12th.
Not that it means you'll be raking in a lot of surplus money, but that's also not directly tied to the size of your salary.
But I keep reading about people getting fired because of AI and every time I do I get progressively more anxious and closer to getting start on that.