I will say that for me, personally, the people I work with have a much larger impact on my job satisfaction than any of the technical aspects. I don’t currently work with the most advanced and interesting technologies but I do really like the people on my team and we all get along and work really well together.
An anecdote: I previously left a job to pursue what I thought would be a great opportunity to work with a “modern” and fun technology stack. However, my new manager turned out to be a totally manipulative jerk and my coworkers were rude and uncaring. I lasted about 9 months there (enduring stress and panic attacks like I’d never dealt with) before I reached out to my old boss and asked for my old job back, which is where I’ve been for the last 4 years and I’m very happy I made that decision.
So even if the stack is terrible, think about how other aspects of the job impact your mental health and stress levels. Can you live with a terrible stack (or maybe even think about ways to improve it) while working with good people? Does your compensation cover any downsides to working with that stack?
If you feel you’re underpaid, can’t stand the technology, and the relationships with your coworkers don’t balance either of those aspects out, then I think it’s time to pursue something else. But be warned that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
I lucked into some great coworkers for my first two jobs out of college. I assumed the whole industry was this way.
Then eventually a company came along and offered me compensation that I couldn't refuse. I joined assuming I'd be surrounded by good coworkers as before, but I was wrong. It was toxic from the top down, but they used the high compensation (including back-loaded vesting schedules and signing bonuses with long retention periods) as a hook to keep employees in the toxic environment.
I made a lot of money, but it took a major toll on my health. I ended up taking time off after leaving that job, to the point that the extra compensation was largely a wash relative to what I could have made somewhere else.
YMMV. There are great companies with great compensation, great tech stacks, and great people. But it's rare to get the entire combination in one. FAANG type jobs with an easy manager might be the most repeatable option, but even there you can end up with a bad department or bad manager that defines your experience. Nothing is guaranteed.
But what happens when your great manager and team leave?
I've made the mistake before of staying longer at a job than I should have because my manager and team were awesome. Then my manager decides to resign for greener pastures. Thankfully his replacement was also a great guy...until he too resigns two years later.
Coincidentally, having been traumatized by the departure of the first manager, I too had been preparing to leave and had offers in hand (not because I was strictly unhappy, but along the lines of "a leetcode a day keeps unemployment away"). My (second) manager's departure was the nail in the coffin and sealed the deal.
Furthermore, shortly after both I and my (second) manager had left, the higher-ups decided to completely reorganize the entire department so all the existing teams were broken apart and everyone shuffled around into new teams. From what I heard, people were not happy.
I think the days when you could depend on your manager and team to be a constant factor are long gone unless you're working for a very small shop where your manager might be the owner/CEO. Meanwhile, the tech stack is much more likely to be a constant factor during your entire tenure.
Your manager's and teammates' first responsibility is their own career. If they see greener pastures, they will jump ship regardless of your situation. You should likewise, lest you end up holding bags.
The comradery + expertise of good coworkers is 100% the biggest thing for me. It's one of those polarizing things, but Gallup has stuck to their guns on making the "best friend" question part of Q12:
And I agree. I've been at my current job over a decade, and there have absolutely been rough patches for which the main thing carrying me through was getting to work with good people.
In my case they didn’t. My former boss and I basically met up for lunch, talked about it, and then a few days later I got a new offer letter. I did have to do another round of background checks just to make sure nothing had come up in the months I was gone. They also hadn’t fully backfilled my role (they had hired a couple of contractors during my absence) so it was still technically an available position.
Another thing to note is that when I left previously I did so on very good terms and gave plenty of notice. I’m sure that played a part in how willing they were to have me come back.
> they keep showing up asking if I need anything, refilling my glass unprompted
Generally in the US these kinds of things are “mandated” by management or corporate offices, especially in retail stores and chain restaurants.
When I worked in retail I HATED bothering people who seemed like they were fine browsing without any help. But of course one time someone complained because they weren’t greeted within 3 seconds and didn’t receive white glove service, so at the door greetings and constant check ins became the standard practice even when most people don’t care.
Regardless of the tool you pick for actually managing the data, first you’ll need to go through some data classification to determine what your dimensions are and how to reconcile them.
For example, if you have multiple data sets for Contacts, what dimensions should be used to say that a record from system A is the same as a record from system B? Is it email address, full name, some other identifier? From there you have to then decide which source system is more “correct” and how to determine that.
You’ll also need to figure out if reconciliation should be automatic, manual, or both. Does a “master” record get flagged when it’s out of sync for user review, does someone have to intervene to say which values are correct and merge those records, or are you relying on some keys and algorithms to make a best attempt? In some cases it’s helpful to have a set of “staging” tables for dealing with the source data and a “pre-merge” table for resolving conflicts before overwriting the master record.
This is why many MDM platforms can charge as much as they do. They’ve already figured out decent ways to manage this for some known platforms (Salesforce, ERP systems, etc).
Written communication, with a special focus on “writing for an audience” (and by that I mean understanding what your audience needs and not trying to impress them). My company is now almost entirely remote and my team works with a lot of internal stakeholders. Being able to write clearly in a way that makes sense to your target audience is seriously underrated. Some people may think it’s “just” IM and Email but it makes a huge difference, at least for me.
Yes, in the past week I've had two unclear emails from lower level staff. The second one I picked up on the error quickly, the first had me chasing my tail for a while. Words have meanings, and learning to use industry jargon correctly is important.
A million times this, like fuck me I'm from the IM/SMS generation but I swear the ability to write a decent email is god tier. One solid email can save tens of man hours of meeting time.
I don't think I've seen this mentioned here so far, but a big reason why I use (and pay for) native apps is because the subscription management process, at least in the Apple ecosystem, is quite a bit simpler and less user hostile than having to go through an individual site/company for each service.
If I subscribe through the App Store, I can easily cancel my subscription at any time by going to one place and just clicking "Cancel Subscription". Contrast this with some well-known news sites who make you place a phone call and then give you the run around just to cancel a basic subscription.
It would be a nightmare to subscribe to multiple different websites and then have to go through a user-unfriendly process to cancel through each one.
At least for EU people this will be better starting from 2022: Where you can make an online contract, online cancellation must be at least as easy as buying the things, with just a simple click on a button.
I enjoy working on and solving technical problems, but the “core” thing that I’ve found I really love is working with other people to figure things out together (even though I’m fairly introverted). Once I realized that it shaped my perspective on a lot of work tasks and hobbies.
For example - a good friend and I regularly play battle royale and co-op games together after work in the evenings. The joy of those games, for me, is that we are communicating and working together to achieve something or win. I don’t get the same kind of enjoyment from single player games or games where I’m just grinding alone.
I think looking at “core values” and trying to extrapolate from there might be a good approach (or at least it has been for me). If you don’t have a sense of what those are, maybe take some time to reflect and see if you can find or create them.
This is exactly me. I get super bor d of playing single player games and I don't even play multiplayer games alone. I always need to play with a friend over discord. It's my way of socializing and getting that feeling of playing a team sport. Overwatch has been really fun over the years.
It’s similar in my area, but not just limited to truck drivers. It’s amazing to me how angry people appear to be when I drive exactly at the speed limit and refuse to tailgate the car in front of me.
They seem to think that I’m the one in the wrong for treating speeding hunks of metal that weigh thousands of pounds as dangerous things that can and do kill people.
Respectfully, I don't think this is the right mentality. These laws give the idiots cause to be jerks. The guys speeding 80+ bullying people over to the right lane do not make our roads a better place.
the person hogging the left lane does not make our roads better, instead they make them slower and less enjoyable. If you're in the left lane and somebody's behind you, just be decent and go to the right once it's clear to do so. Then you can go back into the left lane
I am not much for speeding but I try to keep in the appropriate lane. I understand Someone going at speed limit in the left lane if there are just two and the right is full of trucks. I see people doing it on sparsely used 4 lane highways too and I think that is just stupid. Why would you make traffic more dangerous for yourself?
if you're in the left lane and people are behind you, that means you need to go faster, period. It doesn't make traffic any less safe if you go faster. Going slow pisses people off and makes them do risky moves.
Usually I am in the right lane. My area has laws where “slow moving” traffic should stay to the right, so I use the left lane for passing and move back over whenever possible.
Typically I am in the right-most lane. I was taught during drivers education that the left lane is for passing and that you should move back over to the right-most lane whenever possible, especially if you’re a “slow moving” vehicle.
But there are drivers who weave through traffic whenever they see an opening and those are the ones who appear to be angriest when they’re behind me in the right-most lane because they were impatient in the other lanes.
I am an impatient driver, but I think you're in the right and the other driver is in the wrong. Right lane is slow traffic/merge. Middle lane is travel. Left lane is fast/passing lane.
One thing I’m curious about and on which I haven’t been able to find any good data/information is whether the drop in vaccine efficacy is a function of time since last dose (i.e. due to waning over time) or whether the third dose drives up total antibody or T-cell activity and/or broadens the immune response which leads to it being more effective against Omicron.
My spouse and I have both had boosters but my child has only had two doses because they only recently authorized use for children ages 5-11. I think my spouse and I are fairly well protected but it’s uncertain if my child is well protected or not given the timing of everything.
We have a 1 year old. We try to avoid intentional exposure, but the knowledge I have indicates COVID is no more of a threat for children than many other viruses. Flu, RSV, etc all have similar risk profiles in young kids. As such, we approach COVID the same way we approach many other things.
Wash hands, avoid known sick people, monitor conditions, avoid known bad situations.
We are avoid daycare facilities for now since that would introduce a many-to-many situation where an outbreak is inevitable.
Fair question. My general understanding is that the risk is very low for children, especially when it comes to severe disease and/or death (though there are still some questions about long-term effects), and even more so now that they have been fully vaccinated with two doses.
I’m mostly just curious if we’ll see booster recommendations for children as we have for adults and if the efficacy impact of Omicron is due to time or something inherent to the two-dose vs three-dose mechanisms at play.
And generally as a parent I’d prefer to see my child not get sick at all, though I know that’s basically unavoidable. That being said, I like to understand what the risks involved are if possible.
3 boys at home, all with a COVID-19 infection last December. The one already after the puberty got long COVID, the one "in the start of puberty" had only mild long COVID and the youngest one (7) was asymptomatic.
Some friends noticed also this puberty "cut". But statistically, I cannot tell if this is significant or not, because you never have the information "12 good in puberty" or "11 no signs of puberty yet".
No scientific data unfortunately, but this BBC article explains that even though it's the same substance each time, the effect develops further over multiple doses, and goes on to describe what that means using metaphors.
I don’t have any good advice for you but I do sympathize. My wife runs a small coffee shop and about a month ago Instagram flagged her business username as spam without any warning which prevents anyone from tagging and sharing her business. She’s had the username for over a year, and does NOT spam other pages with it. The closest she ever gets is people taking pictures of their drinks in their stories and posting with the business tagged in them.
We’ve tried and tried to get in touch with someone at Instagram but it’s impossible to do so. The only reason we could figure out it was a spam issue is because I opened the Chrome developer tools at one point to review the network request made by the “Report a Problem” button and there was a property in the POST body labeled “spam=true” (the message on the screen was a generic “sorry we couldn’t do that please try again” error). Eventually we gave up and changed the username to get around it, but all of her branding material has the old username.
It’s incredibly depressing and frustrating that there are no avenues to get these kinds of things resolved, especially for small businesses that depend on word of mouth and social media to grow and succeed.
An anecdote: I previously left a job to pursue what I thought would be a great opportunity to work with a “modern” and fun technology stack. However, my new manager turned out to be a totally manipulative jerk and my coworkers were rude and uncaring. I lasted about 9 months there (enduring stress and panic attacks like I’d never dealt with) before I reached out to my old boss and asked for my old job back, which is where I’ve been for the last 4 years and I’m very happy I made that decision.
So even if the stack is terrible, think about how other aspects of the job impact your mental health and stress levels. Can you live with a terrible stack (or maybe even think about ways to improve it) while working with good people? Does your compensation cover any downsides to working with that stack?
If you feel you’re underpaid, can’t stand the technology, and the relationships with your coworkers don’t balance either of those aspects out, then I think it’s time to pursue something else. But be warned that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.