fizzyfizz

An article hit the front page this morning about when to leave an organization, particularly the author's experience with AWS.

But I'm not sure if anyone at AWS needs a bulletin that things have changed. It's obvious because their growth was so high in the early years, and there was more focus on shipping. Like all organizations they will inevitably shift into managing their success.

I'm struggling with my current job, and the problem for me is that we never have had that explosive growth. We have had slow but consistent growth over five years. That growth has very little to do with our founders or executives' competence, who have mostly flailed around or been AWOL. But we attract a highly dedicated community and quite a few excellent engineers, amidst a lot of insane mismanagement. I often compare it to early Twitter, which grew mostly despite its management.

When should I leave?

Negatives: Options are probably meaningless now; not learning very much except how to deal with our own mounting tech debt; perennially incompetent management.

Positives: I like my co-workers; job does no harm to the world; pays okay; 100% remote; very few meetings; low standards for productivity mean I have great work/life balance. Also I'm significantly older than most working programmers and at least here, I don't suffer ageism.

Wildcards: starting in 2024, some of the incompetent management has finally been removed and we've hired some people with experience at tech giants. Will that be good or bad? Totally unclear.

I'm in the middle of a casual job search, and evaluating companies is difficult.

Values are important to me, so people recommend that I try `keyvalues.com`. But that site is basically matching what you think is important to what the company is willing to say about itself.

Values are expressed through choices. It's nice to say "we value representation", but if you had conflict between a superstar jerk and an underrepresented minority junior, who would be dismissed or reassigned? If you make a choice for one or the other, there's evidence for what you actually value.

I drew up a list of things that might be determined empirically, if you were somehow omniscient about what the company did.

- demographics of who works there

- how decisions are made, maybe with evidence and standard codes for how it works out.

- what software processes are you currently using and how effective are they?

- how often do you release?

- retention period

- salary

- general worker happiness

- company growing

- customer happiness

- customer promotion

- impacts and externalities on the world, generally

Would this be feasible? Would companies be willing to go under the microscope like this, even allow anonymous polling of their employees?

I've had two recent experiences that seem like a new frontier, at least to me. I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this, or if they know who might be selling fake LinkedIn accounts backed by AI to apparently legit businesses.

A person working at a well-known devops vendor reached out to me repeatedly because my company is in the news. Then called me on my personal phone. I texted him back to stop and he was still quite perky and persistent. Eventually I realized I was dealing with an AI - saying something like "Hey, 'Scheduling a meeting with you today at 2pm' is a thing I would never agree to", would result in the schedule being generated. I ghosted on that meeting and then the AI pinged me again saying he was sorry he couldn't make that meeting since his grandmother was ill.

Just this morning the same thing happened. I'm feeling a bit ill and against my better judgment agreed to a call with a recruiter who cold-emailed me. The job seemed relatively specific and tailored to my needs, and even included a salary range which would be a decent bump for me. The recruiter had a long history on LinkedIn, although they seemed to have switched industries from writing for travel websites to recruiting. Plausible. When I got on the call, the person was not "Jason" (who had reached out) but "Jay" who proceeded to say that Jason was too new, so he didn't let Jason handle the actual calls. I asked why Jason wasn't on the call; wouldn't this be a great training exercise for him to shadow us? "Jay" started speaking slowly as if he was figuring it out in real time, and said "...yeah, sure, Jason could join us, if you want... if he's not on another call right now...?" I terminated that call right away.

What the actual f?? What is happening out there?

I'm not great at finishing projects at work.

I'm not great at finishing my own projects.

How can I get better at this? I've frustrated managers and even friends.

I've tried a lot of personal time management techniques.

I think I'm even good at identifying the critical steps forward for success. In group meetings, I'm lethal at cutting unnecessary work.

But somehow, when I go off by myself to actually do it, little gets done. Something in my brain seems to generate lots of complications to the tasks I am doing, and I lose enthusiasm and self-confidence.

I would pay for a coach, if they were familiar with this specific problem and not just general emotional support.

My company is considering acquiring another company.

One of the people tasked with deciding this seems to have no concept of integration costs. He thinks that we just grow our team by 2x and then we're 2x more productive. Even though their technology stack is on JVM languages, and ours is Python-based.

My experience is that this is totally underestimating the costs of integration, but are there studies to back this up?

(Let's set aside the coordination costs of a larger team -- we can refer to the Mythical Man-Month for that).