A love letter to my future employer (2020)

by luu • 12 months ago

58 21 12 months ago

Sad that the blog posts stopped after getting employed. I was hoping for some interesting insights after five years of doing it professionally.

zwnow3• 12 months ago

Doing it professionally destroyed all the magic for me. Everything is slop, customer appointments are exhausting af, nobody is able to precisely communicate their needs and im supposed to be the people pleaser saying "sure can do" to every lunatic idea some person with enough money has. If you want to take responsibility and actually build a valuable product your only option is open source software as companies, no matter the size, do not care about the nuances a feature might have as long as its shippable. Big tech has embarked into enshittification for over two decades now. Imagine being paid for making a product worse. Fuck this industry, money is the only driver for me. Once that's gone, which surely will happen with companies trying to replace devs with AI, I'll hopefully find a way to keep my income stable in a different profession that is actually enjoyable.

jama2114• 12 months ago

I sense just a touch of catastrophising going on here…

bcrl• 12 months ago

It really depends on the culture of the organization, personal and team goals. Very few places have everything in place to support engineers by making work low friction, productive and with the right support from the rest of the team combined with interesting tasks and goals. Once in a while a job like that comes along, but usually it ends up changing over time as priorities for the organization and individuals shift.

But yeah, I'm pretty down on tech these days (and even telecom). Bullshit happens everywhere and drains virtually all the fun out of everything. There are loads of incumbents, pole owners and municipalities that don't even do the bare minimum required by responding to permits in a timely manner. It's depressing that it is refreshing to me when people do the bare minimum -- replying to emails on the next business day (making it possible to get to the real work of installing cables for a customer). Most days for me now are hounding people to do what they should have done weeks / months / years ago, or writing legal documents to try to address harm they're causing. <sigh>

trollbridge• 12 months ago

She still posts to her Mastodon and LinkedIn, but I guess blogging is completely dead. For what it's worth, she quit her job at Edera 2 weeks ago.

catzkorn• 12 months ago

Hi!

I've been trying to write 'the next post' for the last 5 years - it's often something I think about that I've just left these posts in the ether with no conclusion. It wasn't a conscious decision not to continue, but I started interviewing then got hired at an early stage start up (Tailscale), and everything turned into a blur. When I went back to the draft I had going, it felt overwhelming to try condense the pace at which my skills and career was evolving and I'd close it pretty quickly. Surprisingly to me, it's been more than just how I write code thats evolved - I've discovered a lot about how I operate within a tech company and that I'm also extremely user focused.

I'm not sure how my blog was found and posted here (but thank you for reading!), but last night I did open that draft and started working on it again. A complete coincidence, but it was the first time it felt like I'm in the right space to continue working on it and distilling the past 4.5 years of employment, the initial job search, etc. As someone mentioned, I left my previous role recently, but I'm starting the next adventure on Monday. Now seems like a good time to finish that post!

Charlotte

globular-toast3• 12 months ago

Looking forward to it!

ethan_smith• 12 months ago

Charlotte (the author) now shares technical content through Tailscale's blog and her GitHub contributions instead.

Quizzical4230• 12 months ago

I am currently at the stage from where I admire the software world from outside, trying to be competent one day at a time. The author is a badass for landing tailscale!

dblohm7• 12 months ago

Can confirm that catzkorn is a badass.

HughG• 12 months ago

I'm sure you've changed lots in the last 5 years, but laughed (kindly) at the bit about feeling silly for leading your pairing partner down a garden path for a morning: I've been a professional (or, at least, paid) developer since 1996 and I still take a wrong turn at least once a month, if not more often, and will happily bring a pairing partner along for the ride!

A love letter to my future employer (2020)

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