Who Wants to Be Fired? (June 2022)

I just entered a week of what is called PI planning in SAFe.

What the fuck is going on in the world of software delivery.

100 people has to spend 4 days planing 3 months ahead based on headlines from the business.

I have in my 22 years of professional experience never ever tried anything so shocking.

Fire me. Please

I used to do a lot of incident response type stuff and I just got tired of everything being on fire 200mph gogogogo all the time. It was already pretty fast-paced and then new management rolled in and decided to 2x the metrics just to do it, and I wasn't the only one with big changes on their linkedin recently.

I realized that everyone and their mother is hiring and decided to scoot off.

Oh, and before [the ordeal] I was doing a lot of travel consulting. If it weren't for [the ordeal] I probably would have quit a lot earlier because the work-life balance was just abysmal.

I complete a ticket, now I've got to spend a day writing another ticket about how it's supposed to be deployed so any regular jack off can deploy it. Then I've got to find a "champion" (aka. a middle manager) to "champion" the ticket I wrote about the ticket. Then I have to notify several Slack channels about it, wait a bit in case someone makes a stink, then finally press "deploy" in Jenkins.

It's a Modern Stack™ – cookie cutter, untestable locally, horde of Golang services on Kubernetes pulling and pushing to various cloud services. Of course, it's ad-tech and for a company that seems to be the media equivalent of a Jerry Springer show.

I've been, for the last two years, asking my teams business leadership to open up remote hiring and start championing higher salaries for my team mates. My team works on internal infrastructure and we build tools and capabilities that are unlike many/most teams at my company, every one of which are on the critical path. One of the baseline requirements of this team is that engineers pick up four different working languages for our products (which are software development kits, CLIs, and some backends).

I have now lost all of the original engineers I joined the team with (minus one who was promoted), my team of five has shrunk to two (twice), and management has been riding "people only use us for counter offers" (which can't be true because we're several orders of magnitude under our peer groups in competitive offers - ask me how I know). I'm now trying to interview, handle incidents, develop features, and release patches with the help of one other engineer.

Please, for the love of god, take me out back and fire me like Old Yeller.

Freelance clients who think that meetings don’t “count” as work and thus shouldn’t be invoiced.

Obviously it’s up to me to fire these clients, but still…

I am relatively high up in the eng org for a medium-sized company that has a fair amount of natural churn in our userbase. The past 2 years or so, our revenue has been declining and at first it was hand-waved away as COVID-related, but now people are starting to try to figure out why.

The reason is blindingly obvious - our new user input has dropped to multi-year lows and churn has stayed constant. For some reason, people are convinced it is something else, and we've had endless meetings about it. I am constantly being asked to pull up more and more contorted reports to answer people's pet theories about what is going on, none of which make sense, but we spend forever on them.

Eventually if you torture enough data, you'll find something, I guess. But it feels odd to overlook the things that are well-supported by data and make intuitive sense as well. It is like going into the ER and complaining that you feel lightheaded and when they notice your left arm has been severed and blood is spurting out, they rush to treat it, but you instead say "I had a lot of bread this morning, maybe I'm sensitive to gluten.. Can we test that first?"

We do not have basic operational metrics around things like signup conversion and whenever I've tried to draw attention to those, it devolves into trying to create a dashboard with thousands of mostly useless metrics instead. The last time I tried to get everyone to focus on collecting a few operational metrics at first, I got shouted down and told we didn't want to limit anything upfront, and I have sort of checked out of those meetings ever since.

No raises/bonuses this year and everyone was forced back to the office. I'm torn between being more and more worried about losing people and being worried about them being left in a tough spot here as things get worse.

I'm not sure what my boss does. He could be a deep-fake AI Zoom bot, only existing for our weekly 1:1 calls and I don't think anything would be different.

Also the principal engineer on my team insists on well optimized solutions for new features when I just don't think it will matter. And it would take the same amount of time to implement later as it does now, except we'd have more understanding of the problem then.

Haven’t been able to do work all day because policy dictates that we must do all work on a VM that we RDP into. Thing is, remote computers sometimes go down, and today, all of our VMs are down. I’ve tried bringing up the issue but everyone seems to either not care/want me to fix it myself by knocking on the right doors and pushing the issue to leadership. But I don’t want to do all that, I’m a developer, and I just want my work environment to work for me, not against me. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sigh. Should’ve got out early, but I liked the pay and flexibility. It’s not worth it though.

Took > a month off after being burned out by a previous corp. It did wonders for my mental health and gave me time to learn a lot of fun stuff.

I already had a new job lined up, but I highly recommend saving up a bit of cash reserves to do this.

During this time I also moved to a new state, signed up for sailing classes and read several technical books. Way better than sitting in useless meetings and not growing (again, if you can afford it, do it)

Colleague got laid off a month ago, but I'm still here. He has 3 months off over the summer before looking for work again. I haven't had a break more than 10 days since college, I'm super jealous.

I was burned out on start ups and wanted to join a larger company that had more support and a work life balance. I effectively joined a start-up within a larger company and have worked insane hours trying to help push out their V1 product with one other engineer. I pushed back on the hours and subsequently have been screamed at by HR for refusing to regularly start at 6am and work 70 hour weeks - they attempted to make me quit so they wouldn't have to pay me severance (I declined - said if they weren't satisfied with me they can fire me). Now that the V1 is out things /have/ gotten better work-wise, but almost in a completely opposite way where now we have to deal with compliance and I need approval from the technical manager just to sneeze. I know upper-management doesn't like me because I was a squeaky wheel (I even championed the other engineer on the team to threaten to quit to get a raise) and it's just a weird situation. I'm definitely not getting any kind of raise from this company and they for sure don't care about my growth (or any of their employees really). I've been trying to make it at least a year (coming close) before looking elsewhere for my resume's sake but it's been hell at times and I feel like I've been at this company for 2+ years. Even with the recent slow-down in hours, I would love to get fired, take a couple months off, and deal with some personal health issues while studying for the next gig.

Just quit. Life is too short and as you get older, money is supposed to work for you, not the other way around.

I am comfortable with my job situation, but sometimes I day dream about being fired just so I have a good excuse to take 6mo to a year off of work.

I'm working in a dysfunctional team for several months now, every one wants to solve problems his way. Waiting for my contract to finish to hit the door. Bought a farm lately where I spend my free time and money. This brings me back to sanity every week-end. Nature heals, you just need to visit her often.

Just started a new job. Last place had people without technical or domain knowledge trying to lead a project that really needed both of those. New place seems much better.

Also the new place only wants me on site when there's a specific need, not 'just because'. I hear from a former colleague that they interviewed for my replacement, offered the job to someone and he turned them down because he's not interested in being on site just because either.

About four years ago I started pushing for MFA for everyone. Two years ago we finally got approved to enable it for all staff. Last year we got approval for all students.

Now the CEO wants us to remove MFA because students are quitting over this (although everyone else I talk to hasn't heard a single student quit from it). I have to find legislation that requires MFA or he will ask to remove it.

I'm thinking this will be the hill I die on...

I’d quit tomorrow if my company offered a decent severance package. I’m super burned out and with attrition and hiring freezes, I’m stuck with double the workload. I wake up in the middle of the night stressing and full of anxiety about going to work. I despise going to work on Mondays due to the slog of meetings all day long. Writing software used to be fun and I’d do it after hours as a hobby. Now, I can’t stand the thought and just hope I can get 3-5 more years in the industry before I bail out for good.

Another week of releasing features and changing specs 2 hours before they're supposed to be shown to the public in a presentation.

Me. Just want a good severance package. Already been planning for it and going to hopefully get them to convert. I know what buttons to push.

Just start calling management out in larger meetings. ;) Making it clear that people don’t know what they’re doing tends to really send you out on the “not a team player” track.

Churn. I've had 4 managers in 6 months. I'm ready to go consulting because at this rate I never have the same colleagues for more than a few months anyway, and I'll get paid more.

Just waiting for that RSU cliff, or redundancy. Whatever comes first.

I am a technical co-founder and I can't wait to fire and replace myself with someone who is better than me so that I can go and do [another thing over there that's on fire].

I more or less have a no show job. I am a programmer but for a private company whose business is entertainment. About 5 years ago I came up with something that traceably earned the owner millions. The owner/CEO loves me but I report directly to him with no other co-workers so a bit hard to "move up" I get paid 150k a year to work maybe 40 (flexible) hours a month? For the last two years I've pursued side projects (more artistic than business) but haven't reached the brake even point.

I've thought about leaving many times but it always feels like best case scenario I'd maybe get a 10%ish salary bump but one that is way more demanding. I know deep down this is bad for the long term but also hard to give up such a nice lifestyle especially when I've been able to fill it with other pursuits that were fulfilling.