Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Jeff Bezos Taught Me When to Quit (chrisfharvey.com)
158 points by lionhearted on June 26, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 69 comments



> I followed my heart. The universe took care of me.

Survivorship bias. Other people have followed their hearts and the universe didn't take care of them, but their posts aren't likely to be posted on HN and upvoted to the front page.


Usually, I too think survivor bias. However, in this case, his action seemed to be a no-brainer. This was 1999 - not 2008 to 2012. I had just graduated from undergrad with a CS degree and was very naive. Yet, I had companies and groups within companies fighting over me.

So ... he was in a hot job market, had a bad boss, a job where he didn't seem to be learning anything and a low salary. The course of action seems pretty clear to me. I don't think he needed "Jeff Bezos'" call to action to help him on this one. Quitting less than 2 months into a job does seem harsh (not sure if I'd do it) - if he waited a year or so, the tech boom would be over and then things would be different. So, perhaps he did get lucky with the timing.


I think it's much better to quit 6 weeks in than 6 months in. When I'm looking at resumes, a very short stay tells me it just didn't work out. It happens.

I think it's also ok to just leave something like that off the resume. Especially after you've had some other job.

But if you're there for a substantial amount of time (say, 3 months or more) that's harder to explain, and I think you need to keep it on your resume for a lot longer.


Yeah, I was in a similar situation with dickhead managers around 99. It was hilarious how much they thought the engineers had to put up with their bs in that type of job market; I had recruiters tracking down and leaving messages on my work phone there. Serving my notice at that dump was one of the highlights of the 90s for me.


Hindsight is 20/20


There's this great line, though, in the Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (the saga, not the fantasy novel version) where Hvitserk and his brothers want to leave home and their father is worried, and one of them says (in the Byock translation) something to the effect that "if we don't try, we will not know which way our luck will fall."

Who cares about survivorship bias? If we don't try, we will not know which way our luck will fall. I'd rather thy and fail, and try and fail again and again than condemn myself to mediocrity on the basis of fear of failure.


> Who cares about survivorship bias?

The family of the person doing the trying?

I agree that it's better to be struggling to do something that you love than hating doing something you find boring ("I'd rather fight and die on my feet than live on my knees" or some such.) but you're also asking people around you to make a sacrifice.


not to mention the effect it has the person herself. The impact on outlook, happiness and aptitude for risk in the future.


I have heard this but I guess I don't see it. I don't think you can succeed without taking risks, and i don't think you can succeed without failing, sometimes big-time. Indeed I think failure is more often than not, a stage on the road to success.

As for family, it's true that there will always be people who don't have an appetite for risk. However, I also think that if you build risk mitigation strategies into your family unit then the family can become a bit of a safety net, rather than something that drags everyone down. This may not be possible in all environments but I think it is often possible enough with a little creativity, that it can be done.

For example, when I am making money, my wife's income is strictly used to purchase luxuries, or saved. When I am not making money, that's a safety net. Similarly when she's not making money but I am we can live ok. But we can't do this without economizing in a lot of areas and being aware of risk.


I'm one of them. The crummy job I left? The "universe" wasn't "taking care of me" there either. The deficits were vaguer and harder to see than the financial deficits, but they were just as real, maybe more important, and certainly more confusing.

Leaving was recognition that the universe was indifferent to the whole matter and I had best figure out how to take myself. I'm a lot closer to that then I ever would have been there. And I've wasted a lot less time on anxiety and resentment over things I couldn't control or understand.


I agree with the narrative that quitting a job, starting a job/business may seem harder than we initially think (because of some irrational fears) but, survivorship bias is exactly right. The universe only takes care of you if the right parameters are in place – and chances are, those parameters took a bit of work.

I cringed at the "universe took care of me" bit because I find that those who are most vulnerable to hardship or uncertainty tend to have this take on life. The author made an educated decision. The universe didn't even know the decision was being made.


The universe tends to favor people born fortunate enough to be in a position to earn an MBA. Indeed, just being able to live and work in the US is evidence that life could easily have been worse.


Adding "your mileage may vary" (YMMV) to the end of that sentence might not have been quite as poetic. I'm ok with that.


I don't see how this is survivorship bias.

Other people quit jobs they hated, got worse jobs. Quit those, perhaps worse or perhaps better. But eventually they found a job they liked. And they stayed there.

Good for him. It's a good story.


Except that plenty of people never find a job they like. They're stuck working at Burger King or some menial office admin job, and they hate it. They are, in general, not hanging out on HN or blogging about their amazing experiences wheeling and dealing their MBA cred. Hence the bias.

And, in anticipation of the standard reply on this, we cannot assume such people don't also have MBAs or PhDs in Social sciences. The cards just don't fall right every time. To paraphrase another HN discussionf from a few days back, a series of fortunate accidents allow certain people to become wildly (or at least comfortably) successful. The same chain of accidents, playing out differently for others, draw them in the other direction.

If there is a second, standard reply to this idea, it usually has to do with inherited ability (or innate talent) versus disease. So we should also explicitly not assume the people I'm describing have any such disabilities. Those would be additional forces, but plently of able, coherent people never nail a full-on life-hack, in the long-term.


So he reads The Secret? If so, I guess I don't need to read the post.


> "Another new MBA was hired in my group. I found out her salary was higher than mine, although I had been told that my salary was “standard for new MBAs.”"

Heh, replace "MBA" with "engineer" and this was my Amazon experience circa 2011. I was 2 years into the company, getting rave reviews and kudos from management, with pitifiul 1% "raises" a year... and then I found out they're paying a fresh undergrad more than I was making.

Oh, and verbal promises of an upcoming promotion... and then nothing come review-time.

[cue sad trombone]

I did the same thing as author, except I found a 30% raise at another company before leaving ;) Damn it felt good when I gave notice.

For those not in the know: Amazon's attrition rate is sky-high, and while management acknowledges this and has some token measures to try and mitigate it, nothing major is being done (i.e., none of the big, big reasons people quit are ever addressed - pay, advancement, on-call stress, etc).

Now that I've got some distance between myself and Amazon, I consider the whole thing a learning experience. 'Twas my first job out of college, and I suppose learning to read poor advancement, bad pay, and bad management at that stage of my career was better than doing it later.


Amazon is a giant company, so this statement is kind of broad, even in the context of engineering groups. I know plenty of engineering groups with people who have worked there 5-10 years, while others are a sausage factory of oncall hell, it really depends on your team--just like with any other giant company (insert Yahoo, Oracle, etc. here).

Also, in their defense, they do in fact try to address this: for example, a couple years back they had a focus on operational excellence to reduce oncall pages company-wide.

(Yes, I work at Amazon)


I apologize for sounding brusque, but yours is a defense of Amazon that I've heard many times - multiple times from people who ended up quitting in frustration/anger. It's a view I held myself until things got bad enough to make me leave. Things are always fine, until they aren't, and then they have a tendency to compound very quickly.

> "Amazon is a giant company, so this statement is kind of broad"

It really isn't. Amazon's attrition problems are company-wide, and not limited to a few bad orgs. Amazon's on-call problems are also company-wide, with only a minority of teams spared from it (actually, I was on one of those teams, thank God). Amazon's policy of not readjusting employee compensation to fit a rising market is also company-wide. So yes, they are a huge company, but that is not a defense.

I was a returning intern, so I knew a lot of fellow ex-interns returning full-time. My opinion of Amazon is formed by both my own experience and also a whole lot of commiseration with others from across the company stretching over every org.

In fact, of all the interns I returned with, only 3 remain, 3 years in. In fact, several quit without even fulfilling their first year. They willingly handed back their signing bonus clawbacks (+tax!) just to GTFO.

My impression is that senior-level engineers see a whole different world. SDE1/2 employees are just cogs, but SDE3 and up are treated like Faberge eggs. Unfortunately, I was only a lowly SDE1.

> "just like with any other giant company (insert Yahoo, Oracle, etc. here)."

Amazon is trying to hire at the level of Facebook and Google. Comparing oneself to Yahoo and Oracle (both known for being particularly poorly managed, and the latter having a reputation for being a bit of a code sweatshop) is not praise.

Hell, Amazon's hiring process may be harder than Google's. A full-day of 5-6 interviews, including lunch interviews, with a single member of the group having full veto rights over all other interviewers. It's a wonder they have anyone passing said gauntlet. With that high of a hiring bar, new hires trickle in, and the attrition rate pretty much negates any hiring anybody does.

> "a couple years back they had a focus on operational excellence to reduce oncall pages company-wide."

Platitudes. I was there. Nothing actually changed. I know a few sub-orgs had actual drives to decrease technical debt and drive down operational pain, but for everyone else it didn't do squat.

Amazon's on-call misery stems from the high attrition rate. It's a vicious cycle. Most teams accumulate technical debt since they are constantly under-resourced, what with people leaving all the damned time. Most teams I've seen have perpetual open headcount, and never enough hands to really root-cause and fix the chronic problems that are waking up their on-calls at 5am on a Saturday.

Combined with upper management that keeps trying to drive features and this is a recipe for disaster. The pace at Amazon is relentless (which is often good), but it affords almost no opportunities to refactor, redesign, rearchitect for better operational performance. Hell, if you want a prime example of this, look at how the Catalog systems are set up. It's like a brick wall extended by wooden beams extended by rebar extended by I-beams.


Since they are trying to hire at the level of a Facebook or Google, are their initial compensation offers in the ballpark of those companies? Or are they running the classic champagne dream/Natural ice budget/sweatshop labor operation?


I also barely completed a year there (2011-2012), and I personally know people who left before completing their first year.


What's SDE ?


Software Development Engineer - the standard title for coders at Amazon (and Microsoft). You have SDE1, 2, and 3's, increasing in seniority. Beyond SDE3 you have various titles where you're no longer considered strictly an engineer (Architect, Principal, etc).


I think the advice is actually good, all around. I also think it takes a certain degree of courage for a CEO to advise workers to quit on this sort of basis. Bezos's stature just grew a bit in my eyes.

Additionally it's a bit of an inspiring story.

There's another time and place to quit too which seems to me to be touched on in the article. If you are in a position that is well below your skills, very often times HR won't give you a chance to work to your capacity. It's usually better to quit and later re-apply than to try to work your way up within a company. I saw this at Microsoft and have reason to believe it happens everwhere else.


> I saw this at Microsoft

As a bit of MSFT-specific advice, if you're in the dev/test/pm org and an IC and feel this way, you should make sure that you're having a regular (e.g. every six months) 1:1 with your manager's manager. During that, you should try to get a deeper understanding of what the next level means. There are certain levels (63, 65, 68) whose promotions are significantly different than the other levels and can be intimidating, particularly to first-time leads. For example, at 63, your lead might have to justify the promo to your PUM, and at 65, your lead has to convince your discipline manager to justify it not only to your PUM but has to provide enough info about your comparable work to have it justified with all the discipline managers across your division at the calibration meeting.

Unless you are in an extraordinarily technically deep area (e.g. compiler frontend, database internals), you should not expect your lead to be an amazing manager. If they were, they'd have left you behind and be a manager of managers within ~3 years because there aren't nearly enough of those to go around.


Granted the departments I worked at were sent off to India but I was basically triaging and routing tech support calls. What impressed me about the people I worked with was how underemployed they were. We had folks with masters degrees in math who were solid programmers, solid sysadmins, etc. in the team as FTE's, and people who worked there with similar credentials as temps tended to get good jobs at Microsoft elsewhere, but if you took an FTE position in that department you had a really hard time getting into something better.

In fact there was only one way to do it: get a job somewhere else, and then apply back. Things were so bad at one point that HR was actually recommending this as a career path.


I would certainly agree that the path from product support to any of the product development arms is not an easy one internally, particularly for an FTE role where it is generally expected that you would have a CS degree. Especially after the move to eliminate the software test engineer position in favor of software design engineer in test, which basically eliminated the career path for people who were solid developers or sysadmins but didn't also have a good theoretical CS background.

The temp positions are much more lax in almost all groups. The individual with budgetary authority has nearly complete control over the vendor choice and individual hires, so long as they don't do anything unethical. So, if you can sell to that person that you are qualified, smart, and motivated, they will probably give you a chance. It's typically only a 6-11 month commitment, anyway, and so many of the contractors are checked out that anybody with a spark of enthusiasm really shines in the interview process.


Maybe this explains why so many of the great open source software engineers I have worked with used to also work at Microsoft's Product Support Services ;-)


@larsberg's comment tells me (as an outsider) why Microsoft will die. It has the corporate equivalent of arteriosclerosis. Whether theirs products are good or not is beside the point.

All companies are both predator and prey. With inscrutable insider rules like this Microsoft cannot move fast enough to survive as either.


I was recently reading what I had written about Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle in 2004 as part of a business plan. My outlook for Microsoft was simple: Painful days are ahead but Microsoft has what it takes to succeed. Sun, not so much. Oracle could go either way.

Seems I was right about Sun, not sure yet about Microsoft. I now think Oracle is in a better position than they used to be.

One of the major things I noted was that Microsoft, despite a major institutional aversion, has been slowly developing and expanding services businesses. They have continued to do this, for example now offering to host Linux VPS's via Azure. Their services offerings in 2003 were more anemic than they are today. They are on the right track to deal both with open source competition and long-extended upgrade cycles.

I don't think Microsoft is about to die. They may be cut down to size but I think their offerings are large and diverse enough that they are more likely to be pressured to evolve than disappear. Many businesses in fact do this, see IBM's transformation into one of the world's largest IT services firms in the world.


Just as a note on the factors I looked at:

1) Cash positive operations and cash reserves

2) Healthy services business (customer satisfaction, etc) These are important because they are a hedge against open source software and upgrade cycles that extend as hardware matures.

3) Lack of vertical integration/insularity

4) Organizational awareness of issues.

Sun scored relatively low on these, Oracle depended on how heavily you rated customer satisfaction and customer perceptions, and Microsoft scored high on everything but healthy services businesses, but there they were growing and trying lots of things.


Realize that my info is ~10 years old. At the time I was leaving Microsoft, they were working on adding more transparency to the process since, as you'd guess, people wanted to know more. Part of that was explicit titles tied to levels; part was just informing people of the process.

And at least there _are_ guidelines. Have you ever worked at a small company? There are certainly exceptions (I'd gamble that Fog Creek is one), but most of the ones I've worked at or for have had salary and promotion schemes that basically came down to some mix of hiring manager's whim, highest priority for the company today, your public visibility before joining, and whether you have some family connection to the owners.


To be fair (and like others have said re: Amazon), this sounds pretty particular to a specific team. In other teams, it's pretty clear what you have to do in order to get promoted. I overheard from some employees that at the last meeting they had on the subject, management was very straightforward, saying that they had X spots available and Y people to consider. If you did the right things, they would consider you, and promote the best X people. I think this approach is about as good as it can be in a large org.


I haven't heard of any organization with ~100k+ people without rules like these.


Remember when Microsoft was a scrappy company who made fun of IBM for being so bureaucratic?


>If you are in a position that is well below your skills, very often times HR won't give you a chance to work to your capacity.

Exactly, the lesson i learnt. Most of the times, once you are within an organization, switching roles/jobs/responsibilities is pretty impossible. I am not sure exactly how and why this works out to be so, but would probably blame it on social group-think and the fear of the unknown being amplified, when every individual states and restates the uncertainty. It's as if when it's time to make a decision, the number of people agreeing something is uncertain multiplies the actual uncertainty/risk. I don't understand how groups of people make decisions in that manner, but then i never was good with people.


I witnesssed that too. An other thing I saw were managers treating emplyees like, well "property" would be to harsh but not far from it. At my future ex-employers place internal changes (supposed to be conluded within three months to months end of the agreement between you and the new department) aren't done anything faster than 4 to 5 months due to "negotiations" between the current and the future boss. Most people swallow that, but once you actually quit, everybody is shocked since THIS was considered impossible. At least the three months are adhered to. :-)


I think it's a fear on the part of HR and others that you are working at your ability. They don't see evidence of your ability even if it's there.


I think it could also be fear of sticking your neck out and failing. Now, a lot of places simply don't recognize execellence. I had to quit my job at Software GlobalCorp because my manager didn't know anything about technology or the project we were working on.

I did however, continue to stick my neck out.


I have developed a theory about this:

Suppose you were hired to do X, and after doing X for a few years, you have developed the skill to do Y instead. But that skill does not guarantee that your current employer will have an opening for a job doing Y. Even if they do have the opening, from their point of view, if they let you transfer, they will definitely need to hire a replacement X, and you might turn out to suck at Y. So a rational manager will feel a strong pressure to leave well enough alone and let you keep doing X.

There are a variety of ways for an employee to escape this situation, but the simplest one is just to find another company with an opening for Y.


Really? This post made it a little bit more unlikely for me that I'll take a job under Bezos.

"Yeah, my managers suck. I should fix that. But you know, they're extracting enough value out of you for me so that I'm OK with them sucking. I don't really care about lowly workers"

It's a valid stance, but I'd rather work under a CEO who actually cares that the managers perform well, too.


Dude, I left Microsoft and almost doubled my salary in less than 2 years. Just quit. (Or find a job then quit, it's good advice)


Nice organizational insight: Yes, in theory the higher up managers should do something about the bad boss, but they don't know there is a problem, and a conflict is hard to solve, since you don't know who is to blame (and tend to side with the boss, because he is more like yourself, and you probably know him better)

High turnover, on the other hand, is a good signal of failed management, and if you can find another job, then you'll probably do better that way.


When the higher-up managers are the problem, there's generally little hope except to leave. I worked someplace that had about 50% of the dept leave in a 9 month period (I was part of the 50%) - towards the end of that period it was harder for people to not get the signal that there was a leadership/management problem, and the owner eventually stepped in, but not until a lot of damage was done.


> High turnover, on the other hand, is a good signal of failed management, and if you can find another job, then you'll probably do better that way.

There your right. But a non existant turn-over tends to be a sign for an unflexible and counter-innovative bureacratic culture. Or a good working climate. Hard to tell from the outside. And once you're in and can tell, well it could already be too late!


I think the point of the article is connecting to the emotional (and sometimes spiritual) experience of quitting.

I think everyone should quit or get fired from a job at least once in their life. People talk about starting this or wishing things were better, but until you've gone through the utter terror of quitting/being fired, you never know how resilient you can be moving on to the next challenge.

It's kind of like starting a business. You can talk all you want, but until you do it (or it happens to you), you don't get it.

The universe might have taken care of him, but that is because he realized it's not about how you fall down (even if you jump down), it's how you get up. If you keep getting up, the universe WILL help you out.


Yeah, quiting can be enlightening! Since I wasn't fired, I can tell about that. I know peole who wanted to quit for some time but never got to it. Now, they still want to but are no longer able to. I never want to reach that point, I value my own freedom and independance to much for that.


I agree that you should quit when your 'boss is bad', but in a way I also think that what you did was also stupid.

Amazon is a great company and with effort you would have climbed the ladders there if you were good enough. Jeff Bezos -is- a smart guy and he is taking the company in the right direction as opposed to Yahoo!, which is a giant of yesterday.

You had been there for six weeks and had a problem with someone else being hired who got paid more? Why did she get paid more? I've been in the industry long enough to know that salaries are never equal. They are part of the negotiations and are often affected by the situation the new employee is in. A lot of companies pay more for certain employees because of their background situation. If an employee is qualified and shows promise, then companies often offer a supporting hand, because otherwise the employee simply could not afford to work there. A lot of companies pay more to an employee if the employee asks for it when it is about 'their value' and not about value of someone else.

It was incredibly stupid to complain that someone else is getting paid more, when you had been there for six weeks. You didn't sound much smarter than your boss there.

I would never allow a new employee march in after six weeks and ask for a raise, unless they invented the next iPhone or iPad. You did spreadsheets. You would have gotten a 'no' from any and every executive I know of.


Don't count on the universe. First find a new job, and then quit.


I was feeling sympathetic with the author regarding the raise until I realised he was asking for it a few weeks after joining. I think his boss was right, he accepted the salary when he joined; if he didn't like it he should have negotiated at the time. I'm sure a raise would have be considered after a suitable period.


I disagree strongly. The boss was taking advantage of an information asymmetry and/or a naive negotiator.

When I set pay, I'm strongly committed to rewarding people based on the work they do and how well they do it, not how resistant they are to me screwing around with them in negotiations.

It was reasonable to ask for the raise; it could be that the boss (or some other part of Amazon) had made a mistake. By asking, the guy discovered that the boss had no interest in being fair to his employees. That's certainly something worth quitting over.


Right, so he made a bad decision by taking the job. It's still much better to realise you made a bad decision and cut your losses (by quitting), than blindly sticking with it.

Given he was about to quit anyway if he wasn't offered a raise, there was no harm to asking.


But then it looks like Jeff Bezos didn't teach him when to quit.

There's a difference between a bad boss and making a bad salary negotiation when you take a new job.

Nice post anyway, but it's a little bit like "I've seen it in the tea leaves".

Edit: typo


It's a little more complicated than that. First, the job was more painful than expected. Second, they lied to him about starting salaries, telling him that all new employees in that position started at the rate he got. Then they hired another employee into that position for higher, just weeks later.

And finally, you have to ask for things to get them. If he just quit without asking, he'd never know if he could have gotten that raise instead. Now, he knows. At a different company, he might actually have gotten it.

I think he made exactly the right decision at each step, given the knowledge he had at that point.

Personally, I probably would have chosen to stick it out at that company until I found that second job, instead of quitting on the spot, but that's me. But the end result wouldn't be that different.


Sounds like he wants union work, then, with the benefits (such as complete wage transparency and information clarify) but also the detriments (lobsters in a pot pulling each other down, impossible to exceed the boundaries of a position).

I don't want union work. When I hear people whine and bitch because they think they're worth as much as other employees...I don't know but it really makes me dislike them. I despise that mentality. Someone else negotiated better than you -- suck it up, crybaby.


He learned new market information, negotiated the cost of his services (not re-negging because it's at-will employment), and when he couldn't strike a deal, he did so with another party. This is the free-market at work, while you are going on a non-sequitur political rant that doesn't make any sense since what he did is pretty much the opposite of unionizing.


Political rant?

The piece is at its core a whiny complaint, complaining of grievous injustice. That you try to explain it away as simple market forces is truly laughable. Yes, the attitude expressed in the piece is the foundation of unionization.


If the problem was that he wasn't as good as the other employee, the boss could say that. (The boss could say it even if it wasn't true.) The boss pretends on one hand to be locked in by bureaucracy when he doesn't want to do something, but they aren't really stopping him.

Anyway, it seems he is negotiating a better salary. The boss refused to deal so he walked. Good.


He didn't "whine and bitch". He quit.


Quitting a job and following your heart during the largest tech boom in human history, when jobs were jumping out of windows onto unsuspecting passer-bys, might make for a great story, but I'm not sure it's great advice for young kids today, with under-25 unemployment in the 20's in the U.S. and much higher elsewhere.

Unless you've got something lined up, or a lot of cash set aside, I'd advise being very conservative in this environment.


This is really hard advice for a lot of people to stomach. That free-falling feeling you get the morning after you quit, and the bittersweet terror of being unemployed are brutal realities, but you're usually better off quitting in the long run.


having a cushion in the bank helps immensely. i realize everyone has different risk tolerance levels, but... having a year of expenses in the bank gives you a much different perspective on things than living check to check, or even having 1-2 months of savings.


Very true, but it takes a long time to get there when you've got a family to support.


or have been deep in debt. :)

No doubt it often takes a lot of hard work and discipline. Sometimes just thinking about that being a possibility is too much for some people.


It would be interesting if the author ever went back and figured out whatever happened to Bill, the horrible boss. People like Bill often don't last long in a swim or sink environment like Amazon.

If you're not a superstar, and I'm as un-superstar (sic?) as you can get, and you've been around long enough, chances are you've held a job with shitty pay and shittier boss.

Whether you depart for greener pastures or try to stay put make the best out of your situation and work on improving yourself and the company, says a lot about you also.


If there is anything I'd tell a new college grad it would be build a financial cushion as fast as humanly possible. I don't care if you are in debt from your loans... build one - immediately. And yes it is hard when you start out.

Why? You will hate your job one day and probably sooner than later. It just happens, its part of the learning curve. I don't mean that you are always going to hate your job but you inevitably will end up in a situation with a crappy boss doing something you didn't realize you signed up for.

Your cushion will give you perspective. Instead of looking at your crappy job as your life raft and clinging on for dear life, you will be better equipped to realize you have options. If you really don't want to go to that job anymore, you can reasonably wake up and stop the next morning.

Another thing that nobody talks about is that having a cushion can inadvertently gain you more respect in your workplace. I used to work for a group where one of my work buddies was pretty financially independent (this doesn't mean fabulously rich) and unlike everyone else who was desperate to keep their job my work buddy would speak his mind to management. When projects were unreasonable he would tell them to take a hike. Well guess who got all the interesting work and respect.

Seriously build a cushion if you are new to the work world - it only makes your life better.


Who would say that they have a bad boss at an "all hands" meeting? Wouldn't have to quit after doing that...


I bet it was a "planted" question to reinforce the hierarchical culture and approach to management they seem to have. Otherwise, that would be a very silly thing to ask the CEO, indeed. I think his answer was completely logical in that setting.


More people need to do this. It seems that among adults, the most effective message you can send is "goodbye". Sad, but, in my experience, true. Even then, some people will never learn.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: