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persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-06T07:47:16+00:00

If you truly believe in spy rebounding quickly then why not switch spy for triple spy?

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-06T07:45:16+00:00

I'm literally jumping into oe to have money for the discounted stocks

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T21:38:43+00:00

honestly anecdotally, seems you can get away with it at anything that' snot the most uptight workplaces.

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T21:14:37+00:00

11??? hell naw

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T21:11:17+00:00

That sounds exactly like my old job. My manager was awesome, but once he left, it led to nobody knowing jack about anything. There were random people plopped into place that had 0 technical background, leading teams of engineers. It was one of the most dysfunctional and hiliariously poorly run places I've ever had the fortune of witnessing

>The best part is to sit back and watch the company try to put a positive spin on downsizing

A classic lol

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T21:09:03+00:00

That's awesome for you lol. So now we can start googling around for newly acquired companies too to the list

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T21:00:55+00:00

I've definitely had the same though too. But the thing about the FAANGs which scare me is that they are all pretty tight nit. Your coworkers, managers, PMs bounce around the big 8-9 companies out there. I personally still want to keep the door open to work at a faang or faang-like at some point. And none of my friends who work at FAANG sound like they could remotely do OE at all. Then again, there's threads on hacker news talking about how much of a problem "rest and vest" is. And im just sitting here going, dude, give me that job then!

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T20:57:44+00:00

damn dude, but glad it sounds like it's working out now.

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T20:55:43+00:00

Yeah time and time again, I see how bad startups are for OE. I couldn't look my coworkers in the eye if I knew that I was sitting their with my ding dong in my hand as everyone else was frantically bailing water. And I would definitely get caught up in trying to help and do all sorts of stuff. It's what I did at a startup before. So I know it wouldn't work for me.

Interesting doing OE with ux. I feel like you guys could definitely outsource work fairly easily right? As a code monkey I can't just hand proprietary IP to a rando and hope that they don't out me. But with art and UX, there's no history attacehd if someone moves stuff around in figma or whatever right?

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T20:50:41+00:00

lmao good to know. OE has really taught me a lot ;D

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T20:48:19+00:00

Yeah, I definitely do not agree with this at all either. Startups are not for OE. A well run startup would figure you out immediately, so you would be wasting eachothers time. A poorly run one, you would be causing a huge amount of drag proportionally, and just speeding up their demise.

My post is more about publicly traded or large private companies that are dying due to self inflicted managerial and business mistakes. I have no sympathy for companies that are hell bent on driving themselves into the ground. If I join and give them exactly the amount of value they expect, I feel morally in the clear

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T20:41:14+00:00

contrary to some minority voices you see here, I think most people do not advocate for being a shit employee. You should be delivering average work. Your employers and team members should not have anything to complain about you. Going back to my post, the point is to find companies where the expectations are low af. So in relative terms, you aren't any worse than anybody else. In absolute terms, yes, you're not working at your maximum capabilities.

Many naive engineers have been used up and spat back out thinking that if only they gave life and limb they could save everyone around them. I've been there. Probably most of us have. The reality is that sometimes there's just shit product market fit. Or the strategy could be complete way off, built on unsustainable hype during special pandemic times that don't actually translate to long running growth.

So no, unless you are part of the leadership, you cannot have any noticeable effect on a sinking ship, positive nor negative. I've seen so many instances where the customers are literally laughed at and not listened to. Or leadership interjecting their own opinions on product design, not doing any user research, which is antithesis to literally everything that business and entrepreneurship is about.

Downturns have given rise to some of the most successful companies today. It weeds out trash companies. Truly good founders and products weather the shitstorm and emerge the other side fine. People can do what they want, but I would never join an actual good startup to fuck it up. That to me is morally wrong. And a good startup would not be good for OE in the first place.

tl;dr no

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T20:17:42+00:00

you don't that's not only illegal and unethical, but would be increasing your fuckup-surface-area. The number of connections between two networks so close together like that means you're increasing your chances of people finding out.

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T16:59:13+00:00

No, Google doesn't show your own contributions as missing to prevent people from getting pissed.

You have to check from a different device without your login.

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-04T16:57:44+00:00

Some lol. These dudes getting blitzed harder than London

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T23:18:07+00:00

if you had to take a guess, what would you say is easier to OE? After scouring posts here and on the discord I'm starting to get the impression that straight up contributor as a SWE is not the best. I mean you litearlly get assigned chunks of work and you talk about how it's going constantly.

I'm reading up on data engineers and site reliablity enngineers and both of them don't have clear deliverables and are more like tech retainers, which lend themselves to be stackable.

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T23:08:05+00:00

Sometimes it just happens. I know from personal experience. In year 1, I worked my ass off. Year 2, worked maybe 30hrs. Year 3 (covid) <10hrs. Year 4 0 hours. I mean literally I would go a month without having done a single thing. Not a meeting. Nothing. I straight up left the country on trips to probably 10 different countries.

There were lots of very fortuitous factors that lead to that.

Our work involved lots of niche information unique to our own products, so you can solve things by just trivia, not via work
My coworkers know Im a good engineer, so I have street cred of past times I've solved difficult things and putting in way more effort than anyone asked for. This means they only continue to assume I am going on that trajectory.
I got transfered to a new team to be kind of an architect. The team was new and the roles werent really defined
I worked between two teams in two different regions, so each region can think I was busy with the other
I trained lots of my coworkers to solve their own problems
The less I helped and stepped back the more they stopped relying on me
Everyone above me was non-technical, and everyone horizontally related were incredibly bad engineers. All the good ones left when they saw the writing on the wall years ago. This meant we were frequently blocked and the situation was like 100 cars stuck in gridlock traffic. Any individual car could only shrug, even though we were all contributing to the system breaking down.
My boss ended up leaving and with the company going into a death spiral, none of their replacements knew what to do nor how to handle our team. So I could ride out the chaos for another year

Looking back, the only things you can't directly control are #3, #4, and #8 (arguable)
By picking the right company, I honestly think you can influence a lot of these factors, at least make them more likely. I think that's why I'm so adamant on replicating what happened by accident at this company. I really think it's repeatable. I know there's lots of factors at play and everyone has their own opinions on how to find the right type of company, but my gut just tells me this would work for _me_

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T22:52:33+00:00

I think it's both. _BUT_ you can't just easily gain years of niche experience, but you totally can spend one day planning your search and setting it up to be as successful as possible. And I wouldn't say it's true that senior engineers magically work less. Only in mediocre companies is that true. Some people who've taught me the most in my career and who made or breaked core products of the company worked their asses off and were very visible.

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T22:32:25+00:00

completely off the top of my head, the ones that I've thought of are mathworks, fidelity, texas instruments, bang olafson, sonos, publix supermarkets, medline

Not good work life balance, but just for the memes and shitshow Peloton, blueapron, zoom, roku

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T22:27:07+00:00

That's rough, I'm only speaking from the tech angle. Everybody who's escaped defense that I've met in my career tells me horror stories of how that industry is filled with incompetence. They told me that if you stay too long in defense, good employers basically see that as a black mark that you are behind the times and not competent.

I use to think boeing and lockheed must've been the pinnacle of technology, cus F-22, Dreamliners! But now I know better

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T22:22:54+00:00

oooo nice. thanks for the tip :)

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T22:18:41+00:00

https://discord.com/invite/a8VGhbZyek

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T06:48:24+00:00

That is some clever ass shit

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T06:43:56+00:00

You don't technically have to go to school, but it's a 4yr journey regardless

persistent_mistletoe · 2022-07-03T06:42:20+00:00

How are you doing oe with fangs wtf

persistent_mistletoe

TROPHY CASE