[naterator]

Yea, the lesson is: If you find yourself in a situation like that, bail out as fast as you can. When we're young we are often not taught—or more importantly we do not have the opportunity—to simply GTFO of the crappy situation we're in (Family, Bullies, etc.). It has tragic consequences both early in life and later on. It's (one of the reasons) why we get school shooters, why people stay at crappy companies when they don't have to, why people stay in destructive relationships.

Modern society often allows us the freedom to avoid people and situations we can't control but don't want to be in. For the love of god, please take advantage of that.

[bingofuel]

We are also not taught how to make the decision to GTFO. I've recently had to make such a decision and really had no prior experience to based anything on. It was a completely new experience.

Yes I eventually made the decision to GTFO but it's still lingering in the back of my head if I made the right one.

[atom-morgan]

I've done it multiple times now since I've graduated from college. It makes you uneasy each time and shortly afterwards I definitely questioned myself. But today, I don't regret it one bit.

[michaelochurch]

If you bail on every company that's dysfunctional and political (that's about 90%, including of startups) you'll probably get stuck with the job-hopper stigma before you find a good company.

Employers get away with horrible conditions and general dysfunction because of the job hopper stigma, but unfortunately, one person leaving bad situations immediately (instead of wasting months to years trying to make lemonade out of piss-lemons) is not going to break that stigma. In fact, it's going to lower your value and make you more likely to end up in dysfunctional companies.

A better strategy is to play the game, well, by learning how to do enough in typical, semi-dysfunctional environments to get career credit, while keeping an eye out for better opportunities. This all-or-nothing attitude that many young people have toward corporations ("if they think that way, then I don't want to work for those losers anyway") doesn't pan out in the real world. Even the good companies have plenty of stupid, political people in them.

[vinceguidry]

The answer to "job-hopper stigma" and any and all other competence-trigger hurdles is simple. Sell the benefit, not the feature.

In other words, change the conversation from "who you are" to "what you can do for them". A track record of accomplishments does a lot more to convince a stake-holder that you know what you're doing than a list of previously-held positions. If all you have is a list of previously-held positions, then sure, if there's more entries on it than years, you'll have a rough go at it. But you don't have to operate this way.

Nobody is unemployable. There are only people who have figured out how to convey competence and people who haven't.

[GNUgler]

I disagree. I work at Google, and I can't imagine getting in trouble for making an unambiguous improvement to someone's code.

There is, of course, some politics. It's just not at the level where people could openly be pissed off just because someone made them look bad by doing better. Politics happens over much more ambiguous things, like what length people from one team should go to to fix bugs affecting another team. These are areas where there are legitimate differences of opinion, so it's only natural that people's biases affect their work.

[rdl]

Virtually all startups are dysfunctional in a variety of new and surprising ways, but I think you can clearly identify the main dysfunctions (or at least, things which won't be addressed) in 50-500 person companies, and figure out how much you care about those factors.

[tuxguy]

this ! awesome articulation bud !