I had to learn the difference between hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash when typesetting scientific papers and theses in LaTeX, and after that it just doesn’t feel right to not use them "properly".
and I'm not an LLM (that I can tell so far).
@dang these complaints about AI are more tedious than any other complaints about the website. Might be time to add something to the "guidelines".
> Here’s what surprised me: the practices that made my exit smooth weren’t “exit strategies.” They were professional habits I should have built years earlier—habits that made work better even when I was staying.
“It’s not x—it’s y.”, the dashes, the q&a style text from the parent comment, and overall cadence were too hard to look past.
So for a counterpoint about the complaints being tedious, I’d say they are nice to preempt the realization that I’m wasting time reading ai output.
A tech doc writer once mentioned how she'd been reading Hunter S. Thompson, and that it was immediately bleeding into her technical writing.
So I tried reading some HST myself, and... some open source code documentation immediately got a little punchy.
> So for a counterpoint about the complaints being tedious, I’d say they are nice to preempt the realization that I’m wasting time reading ai output.
Good point. And if it's actually genuine original text from someone whose style was merely tainted by reading lots of "AI" slop, I guess that might be a reason to prefer reading someone who has a healthier intellectual diet.
It also leads to slop spam content. Writing it yourself is a form of anti-spam. I think tools like grammarly help strike a balance between 'AI slop machine' and 'help with my writing'.
And because they are so low effort, it feels like putting links to a google search essentially. Higher noise, lower signal.
I found Grammerly to be often incorrect, but it's been years since I tried it. I use LanguageTool instead, simply to catch typos.
The best time to document isn’t two weeks before leaving. It’s right now.
But even more, why a small employee in his right mind would make himself replaceable for the good of the company...
I was expecting something more practical, like doing an interview every six months or something along those lines.
Supervisors and HR just smile and nod.
Maybe if he had a better relationship with his manager, he would’ve realised sooner that he was just wasting his time.
Documentation is like an untested disaster recovery plan.
When a major issue happens, you’ll be the one called.
You should delegate or automate the task and remove it from your workload, especially if it carries high risk.
I’d actually love to read the dark arts equivalent of this article.
Incidentally, I hear advice like that (especially a variation, of "practice" interviews) on HN, but I really wish people wouldn't do that.
Actually, please don't do this resource burning with startups or other SMBs, unless it's clear they want to burn resources.
But feel free to burn the resources of FAANGs, who mostly created the idea that interviews should be a series of performance rituals that you have to practice and refresh on.
(Though the related phenomenon, of techbro frequent job-hopping, wasn't the fault of FAANGs. It seemed to start during the dotcom boom, pre-Google, especially in the Bay Area, AFAICT, where a lot of people were chasing the most promising rapid IPO. At the time, the rumors/grumbling I was hearing from the Bay Area made me want to do a startup in Cambridge/Boston instead, just to avoid that culture. After the dotcom IPO gold rush ended, it seemed that job-hopping for big pay boosts and promotions became a thing, and that job-hopping culture never went away. But I don't think we'll find much team loyalty anywhere anymore, not from companies nor from colleagues, so that's no longer a reason I'd avoid the Bay Area specifically.)
They are job hopping because they want high level compensation and maybe a position on an high-impact team, instead of being sidelined and powerless against the disrespect of their manager.
Your company can make those work together.
I’m not saying every job hopper is the right hire. I am offering a reason they get hired anyway (availability!) and leave anyway (respect and $$).
The talent view is that this candidate is in demand by peers, and it's the candidate's choice to put in a full 2y and leave early before vesting.
Startups are fine scheduling candidates for 5-6 rounds of interviews, they should be fine with the occasional tire-kicker
Not all startups are like that, and you might not know in advance.
Though, incidentally, I did find one about a month ago, and I will take this moment of inspiration to complain about it, constructively.
I bowed out of an imminent offer, because I thought that the CTO's gauntlet of evaluation steps was a sign of the day-to-day I should expect: that I would only be valued like an untrusted junior commodity worker.
(I have a lot of experience, my detailed resume shows that, and I'd been patient and met more than halfway with the process.)
Meanwhile, the initial pitch about why I might want to work there had worn off, after 5+ calls and a takehome. I wasn't going to invest any more time+energy+soul, submitting to the final grilling/hazing step, of a job I no longer wanted.
ProTip: Unless you are a FAANG, or are paying FAANG-like money, don't act like one towards prospective hires/colleagues. Otherwise, you should expect to hire only people who are moderately good at interviewing (good enough to pass your nonsense, but not the nonsense of the people who pay more). And you should expect them to hop without loyalty, because you do FAANG arrogance and nonsense, without paying for the privilege.
Not sure when the job-hopping culture--especially on the west coast--really came in. I do associate it with post-dot com but I'd really have to look at the data. Certainly wasn't really true pre dot-com at large tech employers.
And this was exclusively at SMBs and startups. At least, the FAANG companies have structure and you know what to expect.
I can't help but think the real take away is that you should trust your gut and quit a lot sooner and the poster basically wasted a year being jerked around.
If you are telling your employer you are unhappy for a whole year and they don't fix the conditions leading to your unhappiness, they are telling you they don't value you enough to make those changes (for the sake of simplicity, I'll just assume the employee's specific points of dissatisfaction were reasonable fixes and not ridiculous asks).
You don't owe them a year of soft landing when you quit, in the vast majority of cases they wouldn't have given you anywhere near that if they let you go.
If the decision makers are welcoming honest feedback, chances are pretty good it's to put you on a potential troublemaker list so they'll know just who to hand pink slips to at the next round of needed layoffs (if not before).
Unless you're prepared to lose your job TODAY, treat your employer like the Roman Empire, and the CEO like Caesar.
The other piece of advice about documentation is important beyond leaving for a new job. Many people lose promotions because “who could possibly backfill them?” Creating a high talent well documented organization is a great signal for promotion readiness, and takes a roadblock away from it too.
There's the founders podcast about Elon Musk. Apparently he stayed in good contact with the Paypal people, even though they fired him and later on that relationship saved Spacex.
- Before being ready to leave, make sure you either have, or will have, another opportunity or no need for an employer. VERY often (especially in tech!) employers/managers will have employees, not for their labor, but for vanity, to build a pyramid to themselves, or for image reasons. Such people will immediately send you packing for complaining about non-productivity. Your perception of your superior's alignment can easily be wrong.
Given that precondition... I agree with the premise.
Big yes
"For a year before leaving, I talked openly with my supervisor and HR about my dissatisfaction"
Big, big, big no. Might have worked for OP this time but in general this will backfire drastically. In many European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.
Huh, where?
Which countries specifically?
To be able to have (again, mostly) honest conversations with a boss or HR is a privilege. In 99% of the cases, HR is there to protect the company, there were only a handful of HR employees that went above and beyond. And even then, you had to make sure not to use some triggering words. I mean this in the literal sense, there are a few things that, if you say, that triggers an automatic HR response, regardless of who you are talking to. Hinting of leaving, even with an unspecified timeframe, is one of them.
In general, don't do this.
Yes, you will need to pay for the coverage that the employer was paying for, but that's not "eliminate your healthcare coverage at the drop of a hat with no remorse".
BinaryIgor•8h ago
"I’ll work like I might stay forever, and like I might leave tomorrow"
Besides practical benefits of this approach mentioned in the article, it's the attitude that brings you closer to stoicism that just makes your whole life, not only professional one, better.
OutOfHere•2h ago
ta9000•1h ago