Managers are very hands-off here, not many meetings either, outside of a weekly stand-up. I get just enough done each week to seem mildly productive to management which seems to be working.
Thing is, I spend a good 40% of my time working on growing a couple Android apps and a SaaS business I've built which make up ~40% of my income so that I can finally quit working for The Man and focus on my dream full time.
Posting this to get some thoughts from people who may have been or currently are where I'm at. I get that it's wrong, but that hasn't stopped me from doing it.
Am I the only one that does this?
Some contracts will have a section regarding intellectual property, you either have to list everything you want to keep and make updates as needed or your employer can claim your IP especially if it is within the same realm of the work you do for your employer.
I have had employees like you, and I try to scan like the plague during interviews to avoid hiring folks like you.
The thing is, that I hate to be micro-managed and by extension, I hate to micro-manage people. Since to have a good work environment, you need to have trust that works both ways.
When one person does what you do (20% barely getting by to appear like you are actually getting something done), you create resentment to the other folks in your team: "Why is throwaway184827 getting a pass when we are all working to do our best? This sucks, I end up having to do his work".
It is because of people like you that we had to create a structure to make sure that progress is being done, and so, overhead is being added and the party is over.
Do your employer and your teammates a favor and quit right now. Work in whatever is that you truly love - otherwise you are being toxic to people around you - and more importantly, yourself.
Trust does go both ways.
I've seen it first hand what happens at an office where management does jack. Employees slack off as well.
I think a good weekly stand-up is sufficient.
- Managers are very hands-off here, not many meetings either
I was in a similar spot. You can get away with a ton of stuff in an environment like this, but as you've probably guessed, it will quickly bore you or the code base will invoke tears. Bonus if they let you work from home, and they probably would if you come up with a decent reason.
Check your IP agreement, because someone doing due diligence on your Android/SaaS business will find that out if you ever plan to exit with your new companies.
I'd be interested if you could 're-launch' your products with a clean version control history to sneak out from underneath an IP agreement since your current employer likely doesn't have any interest or any code from you regarding those unless you've told them. That would be a lawyer question though.
Ethically, you should still keep enough working knowledge so that you don't fall into incompetence, and realize you may need to do occasional crunch-time which should get 100% of your attention.
In my not-so-humble opinion, it's up to the business to assess your skills and make use of them, so by only handing you work which you can easily accomplish, you are fulfilling your responsibilities to your employer. This ultimately hurts you more than them because it ends up being low-quality stuff for your resume and you have to do more stretching of the truth. The business is already stretching the truth likely by promoting the shitty code base as a good product.
Naturally, they won't be happy to find out you've been taking advantage of them, so I wouldn't ever bring up your Android/SaaS stuff or your free time around anyone.
Do you realize that this is your fault too? Your job is to manage, maintain and improve the code-base but, instead, you choose to take advantage of the fact that you still get paid because people aren't micromanaging you and forcing you to do your job.
You should realize that lousy codebases and micromanagers exist because of the people who act like you are acting -- without a sense of personal responsibility and accountability.
Your lack of responsibility and commitment is a central reason why things are lousy for the rest of us.
People will outsource a lot of things. The people outsourcing are not generally knowledgeable people but managers. They buy crappy software against the advice of their own engineers and then ask the engineers to maintain it.
What's worse is that a lot of young engineers will learn code from that crap. I have seen contractors in 2014 laughing at the enterprise for using something as silly as SVN or git. They sent a Whitepaper saying that file locking is the only right way of version control. Do you know how hard it is to correct a bad managers perception? I did, but I also lost my job.
They also had if statements that were 2000 columns wide. Only reason I knew what because I installed a trial version of resharper and ran their code through it.
You might think it's uncommon, but I've seen it in all sorts of places. The current place where it took me 2 years to convince senior management to buy resharper. They do the things I advise them to do, but it takes a shitload of convincing. An EE in the company just died of a heart attack. There's a massive load of cognitive dissonance in there, he tried to fix all sorts of stuff(which is good), but he never got around learning to objectively not care about it(i.e. if they screw up in the end it's their responsibility not yours, you advise them and they actively chose not to listen).
But putting the blame on those people, is at the very least extremely disingenuous.
The only fair question you can ask in this case is, why not just leave. For me it has strategic value, I generally advise people against doing so though.
If we had reasonable social safety nets, I would say quickly that he is irresponsible staying after finding out about the code base. But the problem is that employers upsell the stuff you're going to be working on. They don't tell you upfront that it's shit and you're the one to rewrite it. If you ask them about the quality of their code, they'd likely respond with "it has some painful points here and there" or some other non-answer.
If they hired OP to rewrite it, then yes, they're not fulfilling their responsibilities. But it sounds like a place that just shovels JIRA issues at you and tells you to go fix them.
An employer-employee relationship does not necessarily imply "I must do everything in my power to make sure this product is the best that it can be within my 40hrs/week". If you are leadership or a product owner, you have that burden, but not necessarily a LOB developer position. If they gave him that responsibility, they should immediately ask for a significant raise, because they've changed virtually the entire job which they were hired for.
Bad software is often a cultural problem, and I know first hand that you can't just go in and change the culture of a place with the snap of your fingers, especially when you're not in management.
Sometimes you can't get authorization to work on things that would be a "waste of time", even if it means you sit there visibly doing nothing. That's just the way enterprises are sometimes.
I think the real question is: are you being honest with yourself?
The last time you asked this it was more along the lines of "I hate my job and want out, btw I have wife and 1 child" and now it's more cooled down to "I've accepted that I hate my job and I'm sort of just punishing them with my lack of direction in life" and then looking for someone to make the decision(s) for you, here, /again/ evidently.
So are you being honest with yourself? Apart from income, what do you actually WANT to be doing? When you "work full time for yourself" are you going to have the motivation to do that? What direction do you have already, and what do you want your direction to change into or continue to be?
> I have been working on a startup on the side (and on the clock, because fuck it, idgaf anymore)
A somewhat stupid analogy is like saying "I'm killing people in my spare time. I get that it's wrong, but that hasn't stopped me from doing it. Am I the only one that does this?" If you find other people doing it won't make it more legal ;-)
If I hire a freelancer to work on project A and charges me X$/h, but instead work on project B and still charge me for that time, it's illegal. Of course, illegal is a fuzzy term, it really depends of how the contract is crafted and, more importantly, how much one would be willing to take legal action against the freelancer (which will most likely turns out more expensive than just letting it go).
I'm no lawyer, but pretty sure it's not written in standard contracts "Employees can work on whatever he/she wants, get to keep all the IP of it, pending that employee doesn't get caught."
Excuse me if I'm sounding rude but you sound very young, and unaware that what you are doing is illegal and seem to have misplaced resentment
As far as I can tell, this could be a breach of employment contract at most, and that's a civil matter.
That doesn't make sense. If someone is underpaid, they make less than most other people who do the same job. If "almost everybody" is making a certain amount, then they aren't underpaid -- they make the market rate.
Whenever you feel the temptation to just slack off, come up with something that you could do to help the company out that would also be enjoyable.
For instance:
Most of my job is in Javascript/web and Golang. A few months ago I needed to get back into the swing of C# (and learn WinForms) to help out with a new project. (Other than my normal responsibilities, we're mostly a Microsoft shop)
At the same time, there was a PowerPoint file being sent around that we were supposed to fill out and screenshot to create an image based email signature.
I got approval from my direct supervisor to whip up a WinForms app that made an HTML signature (with RTF/txt fallbacks) that contained phone, email, and address links and automatically installed the signature to Outlook. Had a couple other convenience features as well.
So rather than screwing around, I learned a new library, provided value to the company, and had my name thrown around by the higher ups in a positive light for several weeks. All for the cost of maybe 16 hours of work here and there where I already had some spare time.
It's done well to keep me from getting antsy. It also enabled me to move without getting let go, because of my unique value add (I think)
But quit as soon as possible and do something you really want! You only have limited lifetime, don't throw it away ... (even if you get money for it)
I think ^^ this is the most important consideration. Whether you're being fair to a non-real corporate entity is immaterial to the larger question of whether you're self-satisfied.
Be part of a team, if that works for you. But if the folks responsible for your team aren't smart enough or aware enough to notice that you're on your own team... well, that's an indication that they shouldn't be in charge in the first case.
1. All employees should do the very minimum amount of work possible to sustain the relationship with their employer and meet their own personal goals. Check all the boxes, but don't go above and beyond unless there is a direct benefit to you (promotion, bonus, etc). If you can check all those boxes in just a fraction of the time, great!
2. If you're bootstrapping, keep the paycheck job as long as you can. Keep it, even if you hate it, until you HAVE to make a decision about working as a Founder or as an Employee. The longer that paycheck is coming in, the longer you'll be able to survive on ramen profitability. The more money you save (you're going into this with savings, right?) the better you'll fare in thin times.
Working for the man sucks, but running a struggling business while barely surviving can be worse. Running a struggling business with financial cushion can mean the difference between succeeding and failing.
You'd be changing comfort for urgency and meaning, imo, and as long as it's financially sustainable, I'd say that's a good tradeoff.
Employers have so much more negotiating power than employees that I find it extremely hard to feel sorry for them / blame employees in this kind of a situation. Obviously, if you're looking to make a difference in the company, or get promoted, or build experience you can use elsewhere, it's the wrong way to go. It may not be the best route to personal happiness either (making customers happy is probably key there, if you are in contact with customers). But it's your life, and once you leave the company everything you built there belongs to someone else. I don't see why anyone needs to pour their soul into building someone else's capital, in a moral sense.
They eventually got caught and fired but that didn't stop them from raising a couple of hundred K seed round.
You are definitely not the only one.
The answers to those questions will vary over time as your employer's business itself changes. Your worst case scenario is "Yes/Yes," ofc, and best-case is "No/Irrelevant." Reality is probably somewhere in the middle. I have seen cases where someone like you got "noticed," because a peer who didn't care about a side business out-competed them at work performance. No one was malicious in this equation; once "Mary" got going with her natural enthusiasm, it just became obvious that "Joe" was being paid too much. "Joe" got a bit of talking-to; he decided to quit.
If your W-2 income is critical to you, for whatever reason, you want to keep an eye on this whole situation. If the energy spent in keeping an eye on that drains you from pursuing your business goals, then it's not worth it to you to get away with it, even if you do.
If you are weighing moral qualms, don't fall into the trap of over simplifying it in either direction. No, you probably don't work for a "soulless" corporation that doesn't care about your creativity and thinks you are dispensable yada yada; but no, you didnt sign some sort of pledge of absolute allegiance either when you joined (but yeah, you did sign something that would give your employer property rights to your business, under certain circs, and it's again not a given whether they'll exercise this right if they can.)
Short version: it depends :)
Now as far as quitting your job, that depends on how much savings you have, your historical ability to deal with extreme chaos, stress and uncertainty, and how much you realistically believe you can grow the business. Some business are great part time but difficult to scale.
Don't overthink it and just do what feels right. Remember that doing the wrong thing can end up being the right thing 10 years down the line.
I used to spend at least half my day wandering around our campus because I could get everything done in 2 hours and would typically do another 2 hours because that would double my output. I couldn't get a 400% raise and I was satisfied with the amount of work I did, management wouldn't fire me because I was providing them with an awesome deal, etc.
I didn't tell them I did not work half the day. There's a lot of unspoken bullshit in the corporate would, normally it works against employees and I think it's okay for it to work for you sometimes, too.
Thinking more positively about the idea that a job can be fun will also work in your favour if your side businesses take off and you need to start hiring. You want to know how to spot and get-along with developers who actually care lest you end up with a team of people who will do to you what you are doing to your current employer.
I lean towards, if you're in a situation where you have to do something ethically dubious to survive, then go ahead, as long as you're spending some effort on getting out of the situation. If you're making a legitimate effort to get out of the situation rather than wallowing in it, then you're clean enough in my book.
Do double-check your IP though. Depending on your country/state and any contracts you may have signed, your employer may have a legal right to things you have worked on. If the situation is at all unclear, it's worth a consultation with an appropriate lawyer to review your situation and be aware of what could happen if you ever try to take investment or get acquired.
if it is a bad company, you might get away with that, but you will miss on a lot of learnigs, earnings and networking if you stay there.
in both cases, i believe you should make a change.
personally, i would be too compassionate to the company’s success, and too paranoid on improving my own job security and salary to ever think about doing what you do. i am not judging though.
Still expect to be fired suddenly.
Way to keep a paycheck :)
