> don't think I'll ever find the position where I feel I belong [...] now that I know how broken the system really is

Some people are chalking this up to depression, which is possibly part of it, but honestly I think this is simply the reality of a former idealist coming to grips with the big picture. You can't help but recognize that passion will come & go and it's all castles made of sand in the end. Whatever is most interesting for us to work on, someone else is almost certainly doing it better than you or I could without our help, and everything short of this feels like garbage when you only look at the work for its own sake.

All I can say is that what really makes anything worthwhile comes down to your relationships with people. Working a job which involves putting up with a lot of broken shit isn't so bad when you truly appreciate your team-- and on the flipside, working with the coolest bleeding edge stuff in the world will still suck when you don't. Localizing your focus and reinforcing bonds with the folks you enjoy being around can help a lot in getting through it. My two cents.

Well, the difference between someone who is mentally healthy and someone who is depressed is this (and friends, I've been both):

Someone who is mentally healthy realizes the world is imperfect and what they're doing is isn't working, but then takes that knowledge and builds upon it. Maybe they change careers, or maybe they lower their expectations for their job and focus on other meaningful things.

Someone who is depressed never gets out of the "this is awful" rut.

Again, nothing but sympathy for the depressed, but if you're unhappy you should try to find a way to redirect that energy if you have the strength to do so.

I agree. For me the solution was to stop thinking about my career as much more than a means to an end ($$$). The system is broken, sure, but fixing it isn't my job.

I'll work on problems I find interesting, and for all I care, the system can crash and burn. All the while, I'll clock out when I want and go home with a smile on my face.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,"

That's great. Fortunately for my sanity, I've decided not to take on the burden of caring about being "good" in all things.

I'm sorry to hear that. I've had many positions where I felt like I belonged including my current. The ones where I didn't were very depressing and stressful.

I hope you will find more fulfillment in the future!

By the way I never planned anything. I don't think more than a week ahead. Somehow I have fallen into the right places anyhow.

I tend to get really bored once I've totally mastered a job so I change a lot. I need a challenge. Because I do this within the same company (lucky to get the opportunity!) it didn't really make me look like a jobhopper, that helped alleviate worries about having a CV that's all over the place.. Also, some things I've done (like desktop office telephony) are totally extinct now so it is pretty easy to explain. I'm definitely in the "Senior IC" category in the article.

But I can recommend to look around if you're not happy. You never know...

It felt great at first. Once you realize that the company - respected/known as a place that does the right thing - doesn't follow its own policies and screws people over, you realize that every company/job sucks. It won't be better anywhere else. And you wasted your youth on obscure and obsolete tech because the company needed it and you wrongly believed their promises that they would take care of you (retraining, career growth, not laying off, not outsourcing, etc).

My experience is totally different. The company I've worked for for the last 20 years has always done the right thing by me. They allowed me to work from my home country for half a year when I needed to be with my family, they paid to move me to yet another country when my team was made redundant so I could do the job I really wanted.

And I really love learning obscure tech :) always have.

Some companies really are better than others. But tbh it's more the people you work for directly that matter. They're the ones with the capability to shield you from the worst crap. That fight for you with HR when your job is on the line. When I look for other teams to move to I always take the management into account too. They may not stick around forever but if you have a good relationship they might bring you with them anyway.

When I do an interview I always ask to see the workplace. Just to get a feel for the place I'll be spending my days. It's usually viewed as a very peculiar request when applying externally but usually granted. I've rejected a job once because the team really looked burned out and literally stuffed in a corner.

Another place I was shown looked amazing and fun. I still work for that company today.

I would like obscure tech if it had a future - like when I thought the company would do the right thing.

I do think some companies are better than others, but I don't think any company is really good. They all lie. My company has a reputation for being great and caring. On paper it's true. For over 90% of people, that might be true. But they don't follow their own policies, screwing over a small percentage. So I think if you don't fall into that small percentage, then you just don't see it.

For example, my company says they don't compare people except for the highest rating. So you have to meet the "standards" (which are poorly defined btw). I know departments in the company where if you gave someone the highest rating, then you have to "pick" someone for a low rating.

I feel like your perspective is very narrow. You’ve had a bad experience at one company that you admit has done well for almost all their employees, therefore all companies are evil and your chance of happiness is zero? That doesn’t seem reasonable or even likely. May I recommend “Feeling Good” by David Burns? It has helped many people in situations like yours.

"therefore all companies are evil"

Not evil, but that they lie and screw over employees. Are there any companies on Glassdoor with 100% positive ratings (with n>100)?

Would you ever expect that for anything? There are always going to be disgruntled employees/customers. if I see 100% positive, I'm usually looking for the scam.

Glassdoor is a terrible metric for measuring companies.

Like any rating system it is biased towards people with grievances, as they are motivated to look for an outlet to express that grievance.

And it's likely thar at least some of those grievances where born out of misconduct by the company. Bringing us back to my position that all companies lie and screw over workers, that the ones that look good just mean you aren't witnessing it.

Find me any situation anywhere in the world where there are no bad actors.

Companies are made up of people, this happens everywhere. You're just describing life. This is not a problem specific to "companies".

Or, on the other hand, I've seen companies offering to enter you into gift card drawings to relate your positive experience with them on glassdoor, etc. :eyeroll: To me, glassdoor and the like are similar to Amazon reviews, you can't trust them, but it sometimes feels like the only way to _possibly_ get the information you're seeking.

Obscure tech is also an opportunity to be one of those rare specialists in a field. A Linux expert still gets rewarded more than a Windows one in a desktop management role, though it's certainly harder to find a job in the first place.

But this is also a personality thing. I prefer being a specialist on something unique over one of many on a big team.

I agree with you that when the obscure tech is simply the wrong one for the scenario, it's bad. If you don't believe in it yourself it's really hard to commit to it. In that case it's probably better to find another position or even another company..

I recall thinking that my friend who had decided to gamble on Objective-C as his specialization in '95 was being foolish, because NeXT wasn't doing that well, and the hazard pay for being one of the last N experts was probably fraught.

Less than 2 years later NeXT merges with Apple, and Steve Jobs has begun the biggest comeback in tech history, including switching Apple to Objective-C. Well then...

This sort of thing is a lottery ticket. You likely will not win, but if you do it could just make a couple extra car payments, or you could be set for life.

True, but I don't see Filenet and Neoxam ever getting big.

No, and any framework that your architectural astronaut coworkers created is most definitely not going to ever be used anywhere else you ever work. And in fact the decisions it made may well be counter to industry accepted practices outside of that company.

I have specialized on Pascal, XPath, and causal (Bayesian) networks

I do not know how to make a career out of that :/

"Companies" are made up of individuals. If a company has a culture where they make an attempt to care and put on a public face of caring then that is an awesome start, but actually making that work comes down to you and your managers.

> you wrongly believed their promises that they would take care of you (retraining, career growth, not laying off, not outsourcing, etc).

None of these things _ever_ just happen, even when promised. People who want them have to actively make them happen. The promise is just a "the company won't get in the way" thing, which is the best you can hope for.

Your comments make it sound a bit like your career is something that has happened to you. Careers atrophy unless you take steps to force the direction.

For example, if retraining was mentioned, then find an online course at Udacity or something, get the annual review or whatever where retraining was mentioned, and send en email to your manager saying "hey my review said I need to do retraining. I need $450 for this course and then go from there".

Even in the best companies it's pretty rare someone will actually organise something like this for you.

I understand what you're saying, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

It is solely the company who decides to outsource or lay off after saying they don't do that kind of thing. You have no recourse when the company gives you a bad rating. They don't even allow you to be present for the secret trial they put you on (calibration). God help you if you're in one of the departments that requires a manager to pick someone for a bad rating to balance out a top rating. Without a union, there's no way to contest bad ratings and keep the people in power from screwing over workers.

I have gotten certs like for AWS and one specific to my area's business acumen. So I'm not sitting here doing nothing. But it doesn't help that much and there aren't many options in my area.

I think integrity is a rare resource, and an expensive one. I'm trying to only work for people with a lot of it. Even then, the ownership structure of the company matters a lot. A manager with high integrity and investors to please who misses targets will either compromise or be forced out eventually.

Ownership structures other than VC funded startups might prove better fits.

For what it's worth, there are companies who walk the walk, I've been lucky enough to work for a couple. However, I think they are almost always smaller companies.

Do they walk the walk for everyone though? I find that the stuff that's out of view and only affects a small percentage seem to exist almost everywhere.

In my experience, some of them do. However I think that in general the larger the company, the less that is true. In a smaller company everyone is on the same team. In larger companies you always find there is someone who gets shat on because someone three levels up doesn't think of them as actual people.

I see it as like the corporate version of judging people by how they treat waiters or shop staff. You don't judge a company culture by how it treats its rare as unicorns tech staff, you judge it on how it treats the easily replaceable staff with low market pay rates. If it treats the latter like shit then the only reason it's treating you well is because they have to.

> you realize that every company/job sucks. It won't be better anywhere else.

The world is a huge place, and the variation out there vast enough to be hard to get your head around. It will always be a mistake to assume you have a good handle on "everything" based only on personal path.

I don't know what sort of alternate reality bubble I exist in but I've found that I often get more opportunity to learn new technology when working as a contractor or consultant than as a FTE.

You would think that they would want to hire people who already knew the domain, but apparently that is often not the case.

I have a friend who was laid off and said the contractor company he's with provides way more learning opportunities and courses.

What kind of company do you work for? Tech company, FAANG, etc.

I hope people don't see this as spam (especially since in the past I've talked a lot about this), but I've started Mobile Jazz (my first company) specifically because I wanted to created a place where I and others feel happy. A place where increasing revenue and profit to the extreme is not the focus, but employee happiness is. We call it "Optimizing for Happiness".

We've written a lot about it in our company handbook https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/ (free to download, no email required) and you can find more stories and details on our blog if interested.

COVID has made things more difficult, especially since pre-COVID we did a lot of events together (skiing, surfing, hiking, co-living, workations, etc.) and not meeting up has definitely harmed our sense of belonging and purpose. So we're very much looking forward to having events again this year.

Basically what I wanted to say: People are currently jumping around a lot in their jobs, looking for the highest salaries and finding a purpose and a place they belong. We somehow have managed, despite not being able to match Silicon Valley salaries, to have a really good team of loyal, friendly and kind humans that gives me joy to get up every single day and to work with them. And with most of them it's similar, since many of those people have been staying with us since they've joined us. Despite getting better offers (financially speaking) every day.

I'm fine with being civil and approachable but I really don't want to make the effort of being friendly with people I work with just because higher ups think this will compensate for below market salary. If I click somewhere that's great but I don't really see a correlation with a good work environment.

Sure. If you live in the US and want to work for us and want a Silicon Valley market salary at the same time, then we're not the right company for you. Not because we don't want to pay you a Silicon Valley salary, but simply because we cannot afford it.

If you are in another country/market, then we are very able to pay market salary and in most cases even above market salary, while providing a great work environment at the same time. We have and had people from Ireland, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Croatia, Serbia, Mauritius, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Austria, Thailand, Argentina and probably a couple more that I forgot now.

So basically what I wanted to say: just because we cannot afford a Silicon Valley market salary, doesn't mean we are underpaying people elsewhere or treating them unfair (financially speaking).

I hope my answer helped to clarify things.

I'm glad people with your mindset exist and trying to make a difference. May your company prosper and provide a happy workplace for a lot more people!

    pre-COVID we did a lot of events together (skiing, surfing, hiking, 
    co-living, workations, etc.)

A bit off-topic, but how well does this work for employees that have a family? Do they take their kids/spouse to the events?

Yes, we're completely open to having partners and kids around at our events. We actually encourage it. I myself have a child now and am looking forward to taking her to our next event. We're also looking into options of having a nanny. Depending on where we go and what we do.

What about employees with physical disabilities? I've got ten screws in my spine and never thought when deciding to work in computing that I'd be expected to be able to ski and surf.

I’ve not personally thought about that specific case but it’s similar to a lot of other issues with well meaning benefits (e.g. company outing focusing on activities like Laser Tag).

The best solution I’ve come up with so far is simply paying well & giving a lot of time off (and making sure people actually feel comfortable using their vacation days, which is an issue with “unlimited vacation” sometimes). Then each person can just afford to take the activities they want to.

Yep. Outside of the occasional off-site and/or team dinner (which aren't really the same thing), I pretty much want to keep company recreational activities--especially outside of work hours--to a bare minimum. They're never really optional.

We’ve not done anything that physically demanding, but we’ve definitely had events with short hikes, a chair lift ride up the (summertime) mountain to the lunch spot, or other short diversions from large group discussions. I’ve never gotten any sense that if someone were either physically unable to perform it or just not interested that it would be held against them and in any group of 30+ people you’re likely to have someone who doesn’t want to/can’t do exactly the activity and so you make accommodations.

It’s not like you’re going to be coding while waiting for the next set.

This is a problem we have had at my company too, how can we be inclusive to everyone with "fun" type events? Some people don't want alcohol, some don't want physical events, etc.

I think the best we can do as companies is know the team, have a variety of activities (inside normal working hours!), and not require 100% attendance since there is never going to be one activity that works for everyone.

It seems there may be a typo on the linked page:

  How we manage a fully reemote company

Thanks! I'll get that fixed :-)

You have to be careful here because you're trying to make sure that people are happy, not fat and happy. Complacency eventually threatens the livelihood of your employees, and that is stressful at any company, but the magnitude of that change is greater when everyone has been bopping along without a care in the world.

Being happy is not a capitalistic goal and the capitalists will eat your lunch. Being happy and kicking ass is close enough to be harder to sabotage.

Thanks for your input! I think we have been at those points ("fat and happy") a couple of times and I noticed it, because I especially got bored myself. Luckily I have to say, we quickly got to a point again where another problem or challenge presented itself.

Also our business doesn't have huge profit margins like some of the big tech companies. So financially we're always somewhere between "it is not critical, yet", but also never reach the "100% comfortable".

So change careers. I spent the first 6 years of my working life as a medical microbiologist, and was miserable for almost all of it. Then I gradually got into programming, and things looked up. I was still miserable for some bits of it though - such is the nature of things.

There aren't any good career changes that I've found so far. I'm looking though. I think it's easier to get into tech than most other decent paying jobs. So if we reversed the direction of your change, I assume it would be much more difficult to go from programming to medical microbiologist.

> I assume it would be much more difficult to go from programming to medical microbiologist.

You are right - it takes you several years of training, whereas you can probably pick up the bits and bobs of programming in a few weeks, if you have any aptitude.

But the basic idea remains - if you are doing something you hate, stop doing it, no matter what the price. It isn't going to get any better.

I pretty much agree. Except if I stop doing it, it could get worse. I need to support my family.

There are also many adjacent jobs to development (or whatever) at a medium to large tech company. However, if it's that all the jobs or companies are bad (for you), you're probably going to need something really fundamentally different like some sort of trade. And that has its own set of downsides and is probably going to be a step down in compensation.

I've been looking at other jobs. I saw one for a business analyst. That seemed like a perfect fit until I was told it's really 75% project and stakeholder management. No thanks. Plus, it turns out most people in that group are Ivy League MBA holder (corporate strategy is apparently the path to the C suite).

This is what I've noticed in (as far as I can remember) all of the comments here that outline their career change. The career change... it's always _to_ programming, but never _away from_ programming. I sometimes feel burned out and like I'm solving the same problems over and over for different people, teams, etc. I mostly enjoy my work and usually the people I work with. I do end up reading comment threads like this one with some frequency and realizing not many people switch from software engineering to altogether different careers. I don't count switching to engineering adjacent roles among the things I'd be willing to switch to because my reasons for leaving are definitely not my lack of passion for technology and learning, but almost always trying to find/build a team I enjoy working with and not having to do the same non-programming things over and over again to improve my environment (people, workflow, pressures, etc).

I really wish there was a way to hop paths that didn't involve making ridiculously less money for many years, while likely having to deal with many of the same problems.

I frequently lament not choosing to go into marine biology, even though I know now that it would have been a far more challenging field and would still have (likely) resulted in far less income. Had I just started on that path, I believe I would not have cared much about the possibility of making more money in another field that I would have been skilled at. The last bit is clearly an assumption as you can't actually go back and do it all over to realize the possible outcome(s), but I can't imagine a life journey were I didn't enjoy programming, even if it wasn't my career focus.

And so here I am, in a place that I mostly still enjoy, dreaming of what could have been, assuring myself that I'm doing the right thing for myself and my family. It would be one thing to completely upend my own life (I still have the belief that I could do it if I were the only person affected), but to completely change the trajectory for my family and possibly the financial stability we enjoy... I guess that leaves me in the category of "overall happy enough" because my family more than makes up for my perceived benefits of getting out of the tech industry, which if not already clear, I love more than hate.

Wow... that's a lot of text and felt more therapeutic than anything to unload that. :) So frequently I'm reading these threads and keeping my thoughts to myself. If nothing else, I hope that maybe some others who believe they're in the same boat take note that they're not alone in this and I have at least 2 close friends who feel very similar to this (though I rarely admit, even to them, that I feel this way about my career).

whew

> I don't think I'll ever find the position where I feel I belong

I had this same feeling (including the despairing tone), until I changed where I work. Perhaps you can find a job in a meaningful industry (public transport, charity, a utility, etc) so that you can be certain you have a material positive impact on other people's lives. This impression helps a lot with work enjoyment.

I interviewed for a place called Nava. Seemed like interesting work and a company that cared. When using dig deeper, there seem to be some issues. There are definitely some in the Glassdoor reviews. Others are evident in the policies or the answers in interview.

For example, medical has great coverage for the employee, but only 50% coverage for dependents. It seems they're selecting for single people, and indirectly young people as they're less likely to have a family (the people I remember in their videos and media are mostly very young). Then there the whole "billable hours" switcheroo - making you think extra hours are rare, but really you're expected to work extra on non-billable projects (internal company work).

Healthcare... No, just kidding. Don't do that.

The more I read this thread I’m not sure healthcare is such a bad deal…

Healthcare software..

Actually, there are some interesting at-home testing startups out there. I even came up with an idea for one when I couldn't find anything on the market for it, but it was already patented.

How about making your own company or career? Would that help? (It definitely helped me in a lot of ways.)

I’m curious what you mean by ‘how broke the system really is’. Which system are you referring to, how is it broken, how could it be fixed, and what kind of expectations did you have going in that?

Companies lie and don't even follow their own policies, screwing over the workers (you could also apply this to the "justice" system, and many others). A good start would be a union to enforce the policies consistently and right the imbalance of power.

I have an LLC for largely non-tech work. Tech work is terrible in my market, so I don't think I'd do well enough to support myself. Not to mention, the tech I spent time building expertise in for the company was obscure, so I do think even have any real expertise now.

I think it may be about expectations. It is a game and, no matter what people or company say, they are NOT your family. Face your job with that in mind, avoiding the cynical views/attitudes. You go there to make money and if you learn and improve yourself, don't do it for the company to congratulate you, but in order to have more options and/or because you want to learn that new thing.

Companies are there to make money, and policies are set not as laws in stone, but to have some control over the work environment. That means the company would use those policies as needed. You are replaceable in general, and that's a fact. The same way companies should be replaceable for you. In this case, in tech, we are lucky enough to have plenty of opportunities to get new jobs, so use it. Not to find the perfect fantasy company, but to get the money you need to live a life you want.

A union could ensure equal enforcement and that contract terms aren't broken.

"we are lucky enough to have plenty of opportunities to get new jobs"

That's highly individual. I don't have many options or opportunities.

How about a tech LLC?

I didn’t get a picture of what the policies and imbalance of power is, or what it should be. I’ve seen some companies lie in varying amounts that don’t always add up to broken. What’s actually broken from your perspective? Does broken mean they’re not paying you? Or does it mean you aren’t getting promoted? Does it mean the software they produce doesn’t work, or the company doesn’t make any money?

For example, my company says they don't compare people except for the highest rating. So you have to meet the "standards" (which are poorly defined btw). I know departments in the company where if you gave someone the highest rating, then you have to "pick" someone for a low rating even if they don't deserve it. There are many other examples of them breaking their own official policies with backroom policies that screw people over.

A tech LLC won't help. The area is terrible for tech work and my expertise was in stuff that's irrelevant.

I am Jack’s high-functioning depression. Get out, man. There are a thousand other paths.

This sounds more like a classic case of depression, and might be solvable from that angle.

I don't think it is. I enjoy a lot of things in life. Work just sucks. I believe there was post here about a questionnaire used in medicine (longer than the typical one during a physical) for screening for depression. I scored low, so I shouldn't have it. Same as when the doctor asks during a physical.

OK. That seems like all the due diligence I'd recommend.

Amen.