throwarayes

Just a note of warning from personal experience.

Companies don’t really need non-competes anymore. Some companies take an extremely broad interpretation of IP confidentiality, where they consider doing any work in the industry during your lifetime an inevitable confidentiality violation. They argue it would be impossible for you to work elsewhere in this industry during your entire career without violating confidentiality with the technical and business instincts you bring to that domain. It doesn’t require conscious violation on your part (they argue).

So beware and read your employment agreement carefully.

More here https://www.promarket.org/2024/02/08/confidentiality-agreeme...

And this is the insane legal doctrine behind this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_disclosure

Is anyone working in AI or adjacent feeling burnout?

Some things I’ve experience or heard about from colleagues lately at big companies

* The Tech Bro CEO pressure to AI everything

* completely discarding roadmaps or actual user features to build a dubious AI thing

* death march projects

* a complete disregard for team health - despite lip service. Even in orgs that once demonstrated care for these things in the past

* Disinterest in existing organizational context. Ignore lessons learned how to ship products

* Some Tech Bro Czar of AI appointed that ignore all team norms and completely derails roadmaps for their pet idea

* Lack of interest in retention. If people with organizational context leave, it’s almost seen as a good thing

* Proliferation of AI yes- men that agree with brilliant founder of head of AI

It’s as if suddenly leaders have permission to ignore everything we know about organizational psychology and building longer term cultures to ship an AI toy.

As someone that generally likes their day to day work, and dislikes arbitrarily Mandatory Corporate Fundays, I really just wish companies would stop this hack days nonsense. It just means I'm going to be more behind on tasks I'm already behind on.

To do a hackdays successfully, I find good projects have already had a lot of personal upfront investment before the hackdays project. The hackdays project then assembles a team of potential labor that might (or often not) accelerate the idea to a demo. And then, even if there's a snazzy demo, you have to engage in a tremendous push after the hackdays to turn them into successful projects.

I can just as easily spend my time doing this in normal planning channels. And instead of hackdays, maybe we should encourage prototyping and demos to be part of the normal planning process, not some out of band activity likely to screw up schedules and deliver nothing.

Please, companies, stop these mandatory corporate fundays. And just fix your normal planning processes.

Like I get it, Reddit has historically been more open. But I just find the drama boring. Most people don't use 3rd party apps. Most people browse Reddit through an official UI. Instagram, Snap, a bazillion other private social networks don't have 3rd party apps. And with OpenAI, etc, you can't just give away the community's content to train LLMs. I didn't sign up for that when I posted on Reddit.

I'm going to continue to use Reddit.

I can imagine the most impacted folks are Mods, thus Mods are in a position to make a big splash with their complaints. But do 99% of users really care? Or even know what Apollo is?

The histrionics have gotten a bit out of control...

I wonder if I'm the only one that feels this way. I suspect its a broadly felt phenomenon, based on the research on layoffs[1], of hurt trust, and demotivation among employees at large tech companies. Though nobody would publicly admit it (hence my throwaway account!). It's not exactly something you announce on slack when layoffs are afoot!

Before and early pandemic, I could at least suspend disbelief that I worked for a special place at my big tech company, who had a mission, or at least my group had a mission that someone cared about.

Now, I don't see any difference between a tech company, Exxon mobil, Coca Cola, or any other mega corp. It's all just capitalism. Yes, yes, I should have known all along.

It's hard to find motivation in such heartless times. When companies like Shopify layoff, even when performance is good[2]. Trust has been utterly destroyed. Even if probability is still pretty low I'll be impacted, I will know people impacted, it's simply hard to care about this company and what I'm building.

1 - https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about-layoffs

2 - https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/04/shopify-cuts-20percent-of-its-workforce-shares-surge-on-earnings-beat.html

How do you deal with that person at work that:

1. Takes feedback as a personal attack. Gives feedback as a personal attack. Up to and including getting colleagues fired who have had disagreements with them.

2. Process is for thee, not for me. They complain when others don't follow the rules. But they act completely independently of process and complains it holds them back.

3. They never take responsibility / never contrite or apologize. This. means when they cross the line, it's just the new unspoken standard of behavior. Not something they take time to repair and apologize for.

4. They see software development as a zero-sum game. If you are succeeding, it means its taking away success from me.

And no, I'm not talking about someone who's incompetent. Or someone who's a bit gruff.

Now the obvious answer is 'leave' BUT its been my observation that most jobs have had at least one person that fits this profile. And you may not know when you interview.

How have you dealt this person in the past?