Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired ?, Hacker News

I wrote about my experience at my current job a few weeks ago [1]. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for all your support. I recently got an offer for the field I’ve always wanted to be in, with around a $ 25 k pay raise too. It’s such a huge weight off my shoulders to finally see a way out and I feel so much better, basic things like my appetite are back and I don’t dread waking up. I already have so much more free time now that I’m not searching for jobs 2 hours a day after work. I gave my two-weeks notice this week and I’ll have around 3 weeks off to decompress before starting – I’m planning on visiting Seattle, anyone have any recs?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951953

Hey man, I’m so glad to hear the good update . I was really worried about that other post and just wanted to tell you that it’s not normal to be bullied at work. I’ve been on 4 very different companies, and never went to something even close to what you did.

Congrats on the new job! Be sure to enjoy your vacation, you deserve it!

My boss (effectively) prohibits us from displaying negative emotions towards each other, as he pulls us aside to chide us when we do. I think the intention is to encourage more constructive conversations, but his bar for what he considers inappropriate is so low that it ends up stifling disagreements. We have a tough time making decisions because of it. It’s also difficult to tell him about other problems I have, because if I show any annoyance, he’ll criticize my tone. He, of course, gets visibly angry with people on our team on a weekly basis. It’s driving me nuts to have to walk on eggshells all day.

Yeah that’s seriously unhealthy. I’ve been in that situation. Get out, you’ll immediately be happier for it.

I took a role which relates to a strategic goal aligned with correctness of data held. Its public-trust information. From time to time, pragmatism around “can’t we just change this record …” makes my blood boil: Its explicitlynotwhat I took the role to do: fixing pragmatic bad choices time after time, makes me want to go do something else, when the intent was to defend a line of historical accuracy and completeness.

The agency is a community benefit NFP, consensus led policy. The decisions we take off-policy worry me intensely. But realistically not all things can be done by consensus. I do think there are some pressures in this space which are similar to the above: if your own moral compass and how the enterprise is driving don’t align well, you really need to talk to yourself about why you are doing things.(I am not so far mis-aligned i have this problem, but I have in the past)

Friends left eg the IETF, precisely because of this. If you can’t adhere to the norms, you need to ask why you’re going.

Working on 20 years of bandaids on an MFC C ERP Application with no documentation and some crazy ass shit going on. The goal make it a ‘web app’ … The corporate office is constantly waging political fights between management. We can’t get anything done. Stymied.

My team runs a mission critical application nearly all of us were duped into supporting. Ops engineering turned into “process champion” and now I yell at people about ticket structure (bane of my existence) instead of diagnosing db performance issues (things I gleefully lose sleep over.) Now I question my passion for IT daily, fall asleep at lunch and wait for the day I do bad enough to be fired.

I do! I work at a failing startup. I find the direction and strategy of the company lacking. My advice is often ignored or they wait years and then claim it as their own. Sluggish sales. Sluggish revenue. Haven’t been profitable in the 5 years I’ve been there.

I’m looking for a job but I rather just be laid off and collect unemployment for a while. I’ve been working for 17 years with no employment gaps. I’m ***

I can relate, I haven’t gone more than a week without a job in that same amount of time. I fantasize about just straight up taking a week or a month or a year off and doing absolutely nothing.

I’m not good a getting fired. I am personable and don’t slack off. Those positive qualities are having a negative impact on my dream. I’ve wanted to collect unemployment for years.

This fucking year …

So, for starters I’m already really depressed and low energy due to a death of a really close family member. I have particularly low tolerance and high fatigue due to this.

So, we shipped a product, successfully on time in a company that has had many years of difficulty of shipping products in our target market. Which was the goal. So the new management decides to disband the team, most of the team is already laid off.

I get moved into an adjacent org, onto a ~ 15 person team building a complicated piece of technology that I have great expertise in, and have built 3 versions at othe r companies to commercial viability, sounds great.

Well, the team has nobody else anymore who has the experience building the tech we are trying to build. Has existed for nearly one year, and (almost?) The entire team has changed through attrition already (maybe more than once). We have the sunk cost of almost 150 k lines of code, that is immensely over-architected, and still doesn’t provide any customer visible features for what’s expected of this type of software. The team is stuck thinking way to big, and the few people who will focus are kept chasing around the rest of the team like cats. At this rate we will build something that can solve any conceivable problem in about 20 Years.

There are already a lot of hands in “architecture”. Politics, and honestly my previously mentioned fatigue are preventing me from fighting the engineering fight I need to try to get a handle on it myself.

I honestly like the new manager enough. He listens to my complaints and recognizes my experience, but solving the problems are more difficult, and honestly I think we really should just scrap everything. This is already a rewrite and we have an old version of the code base that would be a better start, or I have enough experience to properly build a new one. But the sunk cost fallacy is ohh so stronger when you have this much of a sunk cost, and a lot of expectations from execs and external teams.

Ohh, and build times are like 40 fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine.

A nyways, thanks for an opportunity to rant.

>Ohh, and build times are like 40 fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine.

Reminds me one of my past colleagues who worked at some_proprietary_compiler with so many tests for corner cases that it took 6 hours for each build on a top ent husiast grade PC each person in a project was provided. Also the presence in office for 8 hours a day was mandatory, imagine the whole team spread around the place for the most part of the day doing nothing with an excuse “I’m compiling!”

I’ve had to work in some gnarly monorepos where pulling the dependencies down itself took an hour and a hundred gigs. Local builds were not fast. I usually ended up hacking the build system to build individual projects manually and copying things where they needed to go.sighmuch much happier now that I ‘m living in a smaller repo.

I don’t want to be fired. I absolutely love my job and the people I work with. But I can just smell that we are about to hit a sticking point with how I don’t do on call (it was never mentioned in the interviews or part of my contract) and I don’t respond to work after 5pm.

If it does come to that sticking point I’m trying to figure out how to be the most assertive and diplomatic. I.e. How do I convey that I badly want to keep this job but those new terms are a non start?

In professional settings, when it comes to these kinds of awkward topics , I have found a method that has served me very well:

A. Meet with the person who is applying the unwanted pressure (it works best one-on-one, so if more than one person is pressuring, you may need to figure out who is best to speak to).

B. Frame your concern as asking for advice. For example, “I’m struggling with how to handle this on-call thing. Work-life balance is EXTREMELY important to me, but I love my job, and I don’t know how to set that boundary without upsetting management. would you do? “

In my experience, this approach makes the listener very sympathetic and pragmatic, and they advise you to do what you already want to do (and subsequently stop pressuring you to change). I think this is because people like being asked for this sort of help, and when they enter “advice mode” they take a step back and look at the situation from an impartial distance.

YMMV, IANAL, etc., but it’s served this awkward introvert quite well.

>How do I convey that I badly want to keep this job but those new terms are a non start?

You don’t convey that you badly want to keep the job. You keep that under wraps. The terms are a non start. End of story.

As the other poster said, I think an honest framing of just what you said is fine (“I really enjoy working here, but those other things are non starters”). If it truly was not outlined beforehand, then just point out that you feel strongly enough about the extra requirements that you would not have taken the job in the first place had it been mentioned.

Maybe they accept it, maybe it becomes a learning moment for them in the future. Either way, its unfortunate but non-starters are non-starters.

I think the best way to convey something you don’t know how to say is to put it this way

“I don’t know the right words to use – so I’ll say it directly. I BADLY want to keep this job but I even more so can’t be ‘on call’ “.. you can explain to them that for you personally you need separation between work and personal life.”

>I’m trying to figure out how to be the most Assertive and diplomatic.

Having a job offer in hand does wonders for one’s communication skills.

I perpetually have a few competitive alternatives. But I don’t want to have a conversation that way. I shouldn’t have to.

Then don’t.

First: Have a very direct conversation where you state that after-hours work, and being on-call, are not the job you took. Also state that you really like the job you have, and that you’d like to continue to work where you’re working.

Next: Make sure your value to the company is clearly established. What important things have you done that were vital to the company? (If the decision makers think they can replace you, then you’re better off switching jobs now.)

Finally: Figure out how to telegraph that you’re considering other offers without actually telling anyone that you’re considering other offers. In the late 1990 s – early 2000 s, showing up very late one day in a suit did it. In my case, I just started leaving at random times to meet people for coffee, or taking phone calls behind the office. Later, I didn’t pick up the phone for an “important” call with my boss, and his boss, because I was at an interview. They figured it out and the problem was solved very quickly.

You could perhaps try framing it as a negotiation, i.e. “there was nothing in my original contract that indicated this would be one of my regular responsibilities, I’m happy to open negotiations with you in order to add that stipulation.” Think of a salary at which you might actually consider being on-call (don’t be charitable; make it double or triple or quadruple your current salary if you want). Then, increase that number by 50% and call it your starting offer. If they balk and try to talk you down, offer to go lower, but don’t go below that number from the first step. Negotiations will almost certainly stall and your supervisor (who I presume is the one putting pressure on you) will then have political cover to tell their own supervisor (who I presume is putting pressure on them) “hey, I tried”, and hopefully this will continue far enough up the chain until it reaches a person that is so detached that they don’t really give a damn and drop it. If they do eventually end up firing you over this, then this indicates they would likely have fired you anyway and therefore you’ve not lost from this exchange. And on the slim chance that they accept your terms of quadrupling your salary, I guess you can retire substantially earlier. : P

I am an acquired founder working in the bay area. The acquisition made me rich, I’m liquid, and I love my product and my team. Everyone did really well in the acquisition.

The acquirer means well, but as a public company there is little intellectual honesty and projects are going off the cliff while my fellow executives not sharing the truth of how bad things are going and asking for help from one another for the good of the company. I’m increasingly demotivated having to deal with lying and intellectual dishonesty at every turn.

I can quit, but then I lose out on almost a million bucks that’s unvested, not much compared to what I’ve made so far but I’d really like to just be fired (without cause) and get to walk away and start a non-profit.

Then coast. Just do the minimum to keep your job until your vesting date.

The way to signal that you’re unhappy is to give your notice the day of your vesting date. (Or give your notice so that you leave on your vesting date.)

I’ve seen worse. One CTO that I know of, after acquisition into a public company, got stuck with an idea guy who just monopolized his time pushing for dumb ideas that had nothing to do with what the company wanted. From reading between the lines, it sounds like there was a lot of verbal abuse going on.

If you’re fired, do you vest fully? We got acquired recently and it seems like my vesting doesn’t jump ahead if I got fired (without cause) … not totally sure though.

If you’re in a situation where your vesting schedule incentivizes your acquirers to fire you without cause your lawyers may have ripped you off.

it’s technically not vesting (my founder shares were fully vested on acquisition ) – more of a hold back. we made sure to negotiate this term in.

doesn’t work that way for employees unfortunately.

wear sweat pants and no underwear and put your foot up on stuff while you talk to people in the office.

If you don’t have a penis, put a strap under the sweat pants.

No one is going to fire you with cause for not being aware of your obviously swinging dick . ******************

Why would you want to get fired at the limits? Why not talk to your managers or you know resign .. I mean if you get fired you don’t get unemployment benefits .. I think you mean you’d rather as to be laid off. Getting fired in the best case means taking a moral position against the company that is righteous … Does being laid off mean you were lazy?

A pissing match between two unrelated branches of an enormous org chart has caused monumental waste and discord where I work as a software engineer.

My employer is also allergic to open source, even though we are a huge publicly traded software company , so we’re reinventing wheels for things that are already solved problems.

Toxic hell, I should be gone in weeks.

I do, but I need some filler on my resume so I ‘m toughing it out as long as I can.

Just finished four months of overtime to meet an arbitrary executive-decision deadline. Now I’m on a new project, and I’m finding out just how horrible theotherteams had it: legacy systems from the dark ages of tech that are being shoved into the cloud, critical account access is shared with everyone, everything was built by hand two years ago by people who are no longer here, nothing is documented, and 4am maintenance windows are a weekly thing. There’s aloof parent companies imposing draconian pointless restrictions, finance has a strangle hold over everything (hiring, new hardware, new software, etc) and kills any funding no matter how much we need it, but somehow execs will buy a giant pointless thing that we never use, all the bosses refuse to take responsibility to push back or even fix problems we can control, and we have to go through three different teams to get changes made outside a single cloud account. Developers don’t want to have any responsibility whatsoever for how their code actually runs or is supported, scrum masters impose ridiculous process requirements that have nothing to do with productivity, we never actually see a single customer / client until we launch a product, we have almost no tests, and almost no plans for what to do if we can’t just build more cloud stuff to fix any problem. There are 10 architects whose sole job is to tell you to use arbitrary technology with absolutely no context or consultation, security is one guy who doesn’t know what metasploit is, and the people building shared services for internal use don’t want to actually support the users using t hem. I’m the only one trying to improve anything because I’m new. Everyone else is either job hunting or is super green and in love with the constant free food and beer.

(Throwaway, for obvious reasons.) I work for a boring start up remotely half of the week (2 days in the office) and I run my own SaaS business on the side (making a few $ k MRR after 5 years). I do sometimes day dream about being fired, selling my company and quitting tech entirely for a damn good while. I have well exceeded my threshold. Perhaps I will continue to watch Twitch instead of work, sabotaging my job, or perhaps I will get my shit together. I am not really sure.

Please sign me up!

I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed state, then canceled.

I’m on a very small team, I am the only expert in infrastructure, but all infrastructure code is reviewed by the lead engineer who is a complete novice at AWS / GCP. I’ve written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.

In my other areas of responsibility I am prompt, spot-on, and thorough. I bring experience and perspective, challenge half-baked ideas gently and constructively, and have shipped tons of solutions. I keep proving myself, and I do my best to celebrate my other team member’s wins.

I’m frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default. Plain wrong solutions get approval, and prudent, cost-effective ones are ignored or even ridiculed.

I would understand a bit of politics and orthodoxy on a large team, but for such a small team I’m stymied as to why that needs to exist. I keep losing bits of myself as my genuine efforts are met with forceful rejection, day in and day out. I’ve sought direct feedback and gotten vague responses if any, followed by closed door meetings about me as I do.

The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.

Well honestly I have had a lot of sleep problems in the last 2 years. It seems I have CPPS [1], where I am up all night with an overactive bladder. The result is 5 or 6 out of 7 nights I get very little sleep.

I am in a role where I’m in leadership of a startup. I got there by being ambitious and pushing my capabilities. Now that we’ve experienced some success because of that, the company needs me to maintain a high level of performance. Further, I have a lot of equity tied up in the company. I feel stuck from the perspective of wanting to support the team, because of my equity, and honestly because when I’m normal, this is what I WANT to be doing.

I would love to be “fired” and just spend time with my kids until I figure this out.

1-https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_prostatitis/chronic_pe …

I have the same issue and it was completely resolved with Amytriptalene. Until I found the right doctor it felt like my life was over, and they kept giving me useless treatments. Contact Dr Hanno at Stanford; he’s the only competent one I have found.

I assume your doctors have considered it, but have either of you had a vasectomy or undescended testical?

I had a undescended testical when I was younger, and had a surgery when I was 5 or so. Curious to know the link, as I share the same symptoms as OP now that I’m 30 .

I have had a vasectomy (which my urologist knows, cause his office did it). I’d be curious why you say that. Is there a link?

Thanks so much. I’m actually not in the Bay Area. But yesterday I met a second urologist. They diagnosed me as CPPS after a 1-2 years of misdiagnosis from sleep doctors, primary, and another urologist. So I’m happy to finally have this diagnosis.

My new urologist is having me try OTC drugs (Zyrtec, ibuprofen, benadryl) as he said that it can be linked to inflammation / allergies where NSAIDs and anti-histamines can help. I’m trying those out to see what happens. Did your doctor send you through that course of treatment to try out?

I always get downvoted for saying this, but many diseases with ” unknown “causes are psychological in origin. I get the feeling this is one of them. Read The Mindbody Prescription – hope it gives you your life back like it did with me.

I wouldn’t hate it. They’d be doing me a favor if there were more mouths than mine to feed.

A company merger resulted in lots of engineering talent leaving with multiple unfinished projects and very little documentation. We’re at a point now where only 2% of the original team remains.

I was hired to complete these projects and clean up the technical debt left behind. That priority shifted to work on new products. That priority changed again. It changed a third time. Now I’m being tasked back with coming back to cleaning up the technical debt and security mitigation’s I was originally hired for after a weekend outage that affected the wrong client. Suddenly the critical infrastructure weaknesses I pointed to needed our full attention and system reliability became the first class citizen I long argued it should be.

Except every time I make progress on patching up and stabilizing one system, a new hole springs in the dam.

I’m the Dutch Boy of DevOps at this place.

Despite recent increase in funding, management refuses to backfill any of our open vacancies, project management refuses to budge on timetables, and as a result we’re putting out fires daily with water guns and spray bottles.

Meanwhile we’re on our third VP of product in two years, and our second Director of Infrastructure.

Two years more later and I’m well beyond the threshold. Hoping there’s an offer letter coming soon after interviewing the last few weeks.

Fuck my job. I make more money than ever but a bunch of chodes want to meet all day. I do NOT like meetings. Pairing is a NIGHTMARE. I’m a hardcore sysadmin, let’s debug some drivers. Instead we run php web apps where I can’t grep.

I won’t tell tales about my current employer, but I ‘ll tell the one about my previous one (without naming them).

I left because the code base for their main product was incredibly bad. Brittle, opaque, undocumented, buggy, and virtually unmaintainable.

That alone wouldn’t have been a dealbreaker as long as the company saw the problem and we were working to fix the situation. That wasn’t what was happening, though, because the Big Boss didn’t agree that there was a problem at all, even though literally every dev was telling him so. He saw any effort to improve the code quality as a waste of time and money.

So, I had to leave in part because it was a terrible working condition, and in part because I didn’t want my personal professional reputation to be damaged by being associated with that project.

Yeah, that was my intention when I saw what I had to work with. But it was also specifically prohibited.

How do you prohibit making code better?>for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change

And all that jazz …

Was your boss a super dev reading the code and calling out if it looked better?

The company I work for is active in an industry I have zero relation to. I can’t relate to the business at all and I’m working with ancient tech. It pays well though and was brought on board by a friend and I don’t want to disappoint him by leaving after just 1 year.

Have you talked to your friend about the company since joining?

If you’re miserable it isn’t worth wasting your time. You only have so many years to live …

1 year is pretty much the modern standard for the minimum appropriate time before moving on in my experience, so I think it’s fine.

In my country we have a two main employment contracts. One with full benefits and one with partial benefits. Second is usually used for your first contract or for hiring students on half time job.

In my IT department, everybody gets two monitors, unless of course, your contract is a “partial” one. Then you get work with one monitor, regardless of doing the same job everybody else does. They buy you second one, after they sign you with the full contract …

Getting fired from a bad job is like having the best sex of your life but with the worst human being ever.

Feels amazing for a brief moment but you need a very long shower and a doctor’s appointment after.

Then confusion and anxiety sets in because you’re afraid you’ll never have that high again and some part of you wants you to go right back for that perverse rush even though your smart brain says “HELL NO”.

You see all your friends working for their dream companies and wonder not if you’ll ever have that, but if ~ anyone ~ will welcome you again and you long for that filthy job.

You’re spiraling into darkness and come to HN for the Who’s Hiring posts and see all the other depraved lunatics and that’s when you realize – you are not alone and you are not special and that you’re gonna be downvoted just like everyone else – and it feels like home and it’s ok that you’re a miserable aspiring founder like everyone else who isn’t happily employed.

(I say it with love from past personal experience)

Getting told by my director that the product manager thought it was rude when I answered a question by sending them a link to the answer in the relevant documentation.

I guess this is why nothing else at this company is documented, because why write things down when you can waste multiple people’s time repeating things.

Not the rudest but it is basically saying RTFM. I deal with it like, here’s the info you’re looking for, but in the future you can read here instead of having to wait on me:)

The idea being to present it as a benefit for them and not an unburdening for you.

That would be considered passive aggressive messaging. People easily see through the intent. Just copy paste the content from the manual and link to source.

I’m very sorry to hear that. Some people will go to any length to avoid work, even by putting it on us.

I’ve been working as a developer at a shitty company with no mentorship or room to grow for 2 years. My co-workers are obnoxious, loud sales people which drives me insane. I’ve tried my best to get out but due to visa constraints / random shit I’ve not been able to find anything.

Not with the job in particular, just want to take a break from tech especially from being a programmer.

Tired of staring at a screen for 80% of my awake time and constant puzzle solving. Sick of people in this industry making you feel you’re not smart enough, that you’re not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work.

>Sick of people in this industry making you feel you’re not smart enough, that you’re not enough no matter how many times you prove yourself in past work.

Dealing with this in the heavy right now.

I’ve built a lot in my 10 years as a programmer. Infinitely, and automatically scaled application server based on load. Hasn’t crashed or had a single downtime ever since release.

(I’ve built mobile applications 100 % myself being used by thousands still today.

I’ve learned 7 different programming languages. I’ve done web, mobile, server, and even bare metal firmware. The only ‘domain’ I haven’t touched yet is ML.

Yet …. I truly feel DUMB. I feel like I’m nothing in this industry when one phone screen call puts you into an ‘online assessment’ where I can’t solve the problem in better than O (N ^ 2) time.

These fucking algorithms are killing me, and making me have a hard realization that maybe I’m just not cut out for this. Yea, I’ve built shit … but you know what … anyone could. I’ve plugged together a bunch of work other people did, and wallah, working server. Working app. Working whatever. But I can’t write the libraries. I can’t code a hyper scalable function that could handle petabytes of data.

The only reason my fucking amazing server hasn’t crashed is because it doesn’t handle anything close to the scale that many companies need. Hence why these algorithms are so important. But I can’t fucking get better at them.

i’m going to be honest with you – if you wrote an app that has never crashed or had a single downtime yet is infinitely / auto scalable based on load, it is either extremely simple, you are a legitimate genius, or you exaggerated. there is just so much that can go wrong there that i’m skeptical, ergo i’m skeptical of other things you wrote.

however, if what you said is generally true, then it’s obvious you have some skills gluing stuff together. news flash: this is what a large fraction of people in this industry do on the day to day, it’s just that nobody wants to admit it. 90% of my previous software engineering jobs was just figuring out how to get things to talk to each other.

key for you i think will be spinning your skills in a way that makes you attractive.

you’d seem like a good fit as a consult ant. clients generally don’t care about how you’d write a string matching algorithm from scratch and what the theoretical runtime is in theta notation – they typically appreciate contributions, on deadlines, and clear communication. they pay you to figure out how to make stuff work on a schedule you mutually agree to, and you either give them that and get paid, or don’t and don’t. put up or shut up, so to speak.

so i ‘d start there. you have a large pool of knowledge, so just pick whatever interests you the most. then what you think you should get paid per hour, and triple it.

expect 80% to not follow up on leads and 80% to reject your schedule / hourly rate / etc. sort of like interviewing, but at least you’re not stooping down to a level of desperation. keep your head up: your skills are worth a large amount of $, so don’t take it personally, and don’t reduce it just to get scrub-tier work / wages – unless you’re legitimately broke, but hopefully after so much working you’ve got some sort of cushion.

A follow up, if ES6 JS doesn’t come easy to you – pick a language you like best and look for its equivalents to Set, Map, .filter (or select) and .map (or collect). Bonus tip, look for .find or .first, to short circuit looping and stop at the first thing that matches. Yes, you can memorize for loops or why one thing is more efficient than another, but if you start with Set and Map where each makes sense, you’ll solve 80 – 90% of algorithm questions pretty easily and usually in a way that’s straightforward to read and understand later, especially if you start naming some of your functions to make them a bit easier to read. (Like naming selectors in Redux …)

If writing SQL as part of a quiz, learn the different joins because usually the question is worded in a way where picking the correct join will deliver huge performance benefits by reducing how much data you’re going through or making things more efficient than looping through multiple subqueries. Left vs Inner vs Right vs Outer vs Cross … remember that the less data the server has to go through (the fewer records in the earliest sub query), the faster everything will run, in these quiz scenarios. Yes, in real life how you store data matters, what you index, but it’s rare you’ve any control over the index or schema in these tests.

>These fucking algorithms are killing me, and making me have a hard realization that maybe I’m just not cut out for this. Yea, I’ve built shit … but you know what … anyone could.

I wouldn’t get too discouraged about this: they couldn ‘t – not necessarily anything of value anyway.

I’ ve worked enough places now where the product the business is built on was written by somebody who wasn’t necessarily a great programmer, yet this “bad” [1] code is the foundation of the company’s success and may be the sole reason they ‘ re able to pay me.

You can build a really successful business on really “shitty” tech.

[1] Inefficient, non-scalable, hard to follow, poorly architected, spaghetti code – call it what you will.

I have news for you:

You can study for technical interviews and get good at doing them. “Cracking the coding interview” is a good start, then there is interviewing.io and other resources.

You can learn to be good at that shit with a bit of practice. You’re probably not dumb.

Outsource things you aren’t good at. You think Tim Cook knows how to write the code required for iPhone hardware to communicate? No.

Maybe it’s time to build something for yourself then. You have the necessary skills, basically a full stack dev devOps. That’s the route I’m taking – also have never studied algorithms or data structures and am mostly self taught.