Ask HN: Disheartening Corporate Life

[whattimeisit]

Does anyone have any tips for coping with the demands of the corporate world? The politics, the vague requirements, the changing deadlines, the isolation.

I am a part of a "team" that only works on solo projects. Only a few of which are my level technically, or in experience, and I am by no means a senior developer. I have to argue with managers that are clearly making bad decisions, some of which I suspect are being paid off by vendors. I get vague requirements handed down from 4+ levels up the corporate ladder. I don't get any recognition when I do something worthwhile. I don't even get punished when I don't deliver. I don't want to grab the brass ring, but even if I did I wouldn't know where it was.

I have responsibilities, and I don't think I could come anywhere near my current compensation anywhere else. So I stay, but every day I care less.

[actualdragon]

I just left a corporate job in London at a Fortune 25 company that paid 78,800 GBP a year and moved to a different country with a smaller / lesser pay. I did it because I wasn't happy with the corporate life.

Don't measure your life by the size of your paycheck. Think about what you want to do and just take a leap of faith. If you choose to stay on, then invest some time and learn a few more programming languages and get some domain specific knowledge. If you don't have a specialization then that could be your start.

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

Curious what country you went to, I'm considering leaving London too.

[vivaamerica1]

I'm on the exact same boat, except I couldn't care less and therefore I do not "argue with managers", or get worked up for any reason whatsoever. I say yes to whatever people want, even if it's stupid, because at the end of the day I'm just a cog in a corporate machine and still get paid and everyone's happy. Of course on the inside I laugh about them, but on the outside they think I'm their best buddy.

You may say I'm fake, well you're not wrong, but being forthright and get isolated don't help with paying the bills. It's a tough life I know. I'm not doing anything wrong, I just choose to ignore the bullshit for the sake of my own sanity.

>I don't even get punished when I don't deliver

Use the free time to do better yourself. You're given the gift of time from god. I become a better programmer not by doing whatever bullshit project they give me, but from self-learning with all the free time.

[hkmurakami]

To the sibling commenters saying OP can move -- OP seems to hint that he/she is located in a non tech hub with a family to support (perhaps his/her own, perhaps parents). In such a case where you are geographically constrained with few if any other high paying employers in the area, what would you do?

[matt_s]

Move. That's what I did. I was stuck in a corporate fortune 500 world of meetings, unrealistic deadlines, frequent random layoffs, technical jobs being a cost center, etc. The metropolitan area was a bad job market too and I was interviewing for a couple years.

The further you move up in an organization like that, the less marketable skills and experience you will end up with. And higher pay locks those golden handcuffs.

I found a job in a different state that is growing economically, sold the house and moved. Sure it is tough on everyone in the family to leave behind friends, family and the kids go through periods of time where they are bummed.

The alternative is just waiting it out while your skills vanish and you become less marketable. My thought process was I wanted to be in control and not wait to be laid off which would be worst case scenario and would require moving.

[mattbgates]

I know it's not much to go on and I can't give specific examples, but I created a website to help people cope with their daily lives at work, to hear stories from others, to rant and complain about their jobs, their bosses, and do whatever they need... the website has evolved into full blown articles beyond the ranting... like success at work or dealing with stress at work and etc., but all types of articles are accepted.

Confessions of the Professions http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/

[aecs99]

I spent almost one year in a company where my situation was very much like yours right now. I was constantly frustrated and wanted to quit, but I couldn't because of several reasons. I noticed that such frustration was negatively impacting my work (although no one noticed/cared) * AND * my life outside of work. Once I had that realization, I decided to put an end to it and here's how I did it:

I started using a time tracker. I noticed that if I truly focused, I was able to get all my work done in 3-4 hours instead of 8 hours in a workday. This was amazing because every day, I was done with what was expected from me by the lunch hour. As you would expect, I kept this a secret. Once again, no one noticed anything abnormal as I was delivering with the same pace.

Every lunch hour, I'd quickly eat my lunch and practiced Spanish for 30 minutes. This bumped up my spirits me because I was having fun while learning something new. The next 3-4 hours, I whole-heartedly dedicated the time to sharpen my skills. I was basically reviewing fundamentals, practicing for interviews, and was keeping up with new research in my community. Once I realized I could move, interviewing and leaving the company was very easy.

In hindsight, I think the shift in my mindset occurred after I stopped caring about my then situation and started focusing on where I wanted to be.

I'm in a great place now, but just so you know - the politics, vague requirements, and deadlines still exist :)

[actualdragon]

The only way you can be rid of those vague requirements and ever changing deadlines is if you work for yourself :) ;)

[chatmasta]

Just quit and work for yourself. You’re a slave right now. If you’re okay with that, or you’re into the whole politics thing, fine. But there’s no need to put up with that bullshit if you are as capable as you say you are.

There’s never been a better time to be a software engineer (well, except maybe the winter of 2000). There are thousands of smart, respected, non-technical people looking to start businesses in their field of domain expertise. Find them. Work with them, as a consultant or co-founder. Charge as much as you can.

If you’re not happy at your job, leave. Life is too short. You have a very marketable skillset. Currently you’re extracting value from that in the lowest friction way possible: working for a corporation. There are other options. It’s your choice whether or not to pursue them. But if you hate your job, and do nothing about it, I have no sympathy for you.

Take some control of your life, say peace out to these idiots, and put your skills to use to make money for yourself.

[twoquestions]

Maybe you read it differently than I did, but the OP didn't cast themselves as some rockstar ninja with FU money who's tired of working with people they feel are beneath them, what I read was they discovered political skill > technical skill, which is certainly true for larger companies, and this fact is not obvious if you lack political skill.

> There are thousands of smart, respected, non-technical people looking to start businesses in their field of domain expertise. Find them. Work with them, as a consultant or co-founder. Charge as much as you can.

Do you have any actionable advice or resources on how to do this? This kind of personal networking is it's own skill that's non-trivial to acquire and train. Without such resources, this comment sounds as heartless as telling a laid-off factory worker to "Stop thinking poor! Pick yourself up by your bootstraps!". With such advice, it could be quite helpful indeed!

[brailsafe]

Well... having been in a vaguely similar situation about 2 years ago, I recommend picking your golden handcuffs and getting the fuck out before you stop caring all together.

Find a smaller company, identify what you find full filling in a team and work, and search for that. Salary second.

This is a whole lot easier to reason through while you can control it.

I also second others' mention of the importance of learning.

Or, sell your sanity. How much is it worth?

[fsociety]

Are you working at the same company as me? I just jumped ship to somewhere else with high pay and promises of working with a complex low-level codebase - this is my skill set after all - as it turned out I'm writing unit tests in Python and being paid a bunch of money for it.

Inexperienced as far as the industry goes, but as far as the company goes I actually feel quite a bit more experienced (thanks to being mentored by a couple senior engineer with serious projects under their belt). Unfortunately people seem to care more about seniority in the company than actual code quality.

Even worse is that people seem to rarely show up to work except for meetings, or if they do they just leave really early. The ironic part is that the company is supposed to 'move fast', but all of their builds and infrastructure is insanely slow.

I guess the only thing we can do is learn skills outside of work and jump to a better job in a few months or a year. It is a good life lesson, and at least you are getting paid.

[throwaway_atl]

I've been at the same corporation for 13 years now and have encountered this a couple times. I don't know how feasible it is where you work, but what I've done is look for a new position within the company. I really love this company, but there have been times I didn't enjoy the work/team I was on. It could be as simple as changing to a new project, or sometimes even more extreme. I went from being a lead architect on a project to heading over to the DevOps team for a year and giving that a try. I didn't enjoy it so I've since moved over to our Data Science team where I'm an Analytics Architect. Luckily I've been here long enough and gotten to know enough people that they've come and let me know when they have openings on their team and see if I'm interested.

TLDR; See if you can find another team/division within your company to work for.

[sokoloff]

The amount of money sloshing around in our industry is insane right now. You might be surprised at how close you could come on current comp (unless you're in rest-and-vest at a very high-flier, in which case you need to look at how to replace what your comp will be in 2-3 years when the [typically] largest chunk has fully vested).

It doesn't hurt to look.

[nilosedge]

Focus on learning, seminars, conferences, people, training learn everything you can. Learn as much as you can while you can. Once you feel that the job can not offer you any more learning opportunities, leave, for another job that will provide... rinse and repeat and you will become a top level.

[Gibbon1]

You may find yourself happier working for a smaller company.

[codegladiator]

Pick up a problem in your current company which you can solve and automate. Automate that, get out and sell this to them later and hopefully more companies. Problem could be any "manual process" that's going on which you can fasten up or completely automate.

[RHSman2]

Why is compensation (above and beyond what you need) so important?

[jf22]

How senior are you?