All organizations have a consensus that guides it's decision. While heavily skewed towards leadership, even the consensus of the lowest hierarchy worker is important.
From what I saw in TFA, OP correctly identified that there was a need for FinOps but did not do the work to get buy in from the organisation. Even though I find it absolutely tedious and sickening. Some amount of politicking is inevitable for survival.
If you aren't scaling yourself as much then you're moving too slow
Your reward is your paycheck. On Friday night, the balance anyone owes anyone is zero.
You didn’t “trust” them at all. They had no further obligations to you, nor you to them. You seem to have invented obligations that don’t exist.
There is nothing more destructive than talking to people daily, having a good working relationship with them, and then randomly getting laid off with no warning or explanation. Years of positive interactions go up in smoke overnight, because the company couldn’t bother to treat you like a human with needs, and instead act as if you’re just a mercenary.
And to be clear, I’m not talking about budgetary or performance issues that lead to layoffs. I mean when you’ve done good work for a company for years, then out of the blue, get a meeting request for a Friday afternoon.
It makes for a cold, mercenary world that I want no part of.
I definitely think you need to avoid companies with 1) large turnover, 2) investor-driven growth metrics, and 3) a hostile or passive approach to company self-criticism.
Like the guy in the article, I have found that companies which hand-wave away legitimately good ideas or criticism in favor of some vague “strategy” reason tend to be untrustworthy. Well-run companies want to improve themselves, even if they don’t have the resources to make that improvement quickly.
I disagree. It’s not depressing, it’s business. Treating people as if they are business professionals is showing them respect. This is why we negotiate salary.
(Separately: your coworkers treating you as a business professional is in no way a lack of respect for your future or your career.)
It’s passive aggressive and unprofessional to think that you are somehow owed something additional and undefined after your paycheck is paid and options assigned.
I enjoy business relationships specifically BECAUSE the obligations of each party are formally documented. Nobody can legitimately be mad when everyone does what the contract says, because everyone read it before signing and everyone voluntarily signed it. There’s even a clause in there that explicitly states that the contract is the full and complete agreement between the parties and supersedes all other agreements, written or verbal.
They’re not joking when they put that in. The cake is a lie.
Nobody has to guess at what is expected of them. It’s written down. Contrast Aunt Judy giving you socks for Christmas: does this mean you owe her a birthday present? At what age does it change? It’s all so fuzzy and context-specific and people are so cagey about giving firm answers about what the rules (and there ARE rules) actually are.
Business has none of that. It’s great.
Having that opinion 50 years ago would get you fired from any company immediately. Because social mores were less eroded then.
When Aunt Judy gives me a gift, I try to get her one too. It’s not a transaction I need to keep in my head, worrying if I owe her something. That sounds like an extremely depressing way to interact with other people.
It’s not depressing at all, it’s how our society works. Most people have no problem intuiting most of these unwritten rules, or are quietly taught by their parents or relatives.
The point wasn’t about transactions, but about whether or not the rules of the system are written down and accessible or not. Both social circumstances have rules.
If you come at it from the idea that businesspeople are cold and unfeeling sharks, and that everything is a transaction, then naturally you would think it’s sad and depressing that someone must apply rules in the workplace and rules in other social settings too. But that’s a vast oversimplification that misses the point: that business professionals carrying out a task directly and efficiently is neither cold nor unfeeling, nor is it some portent of a decaying social fabric. It’s simply professionalism.
Most working people aren’t professionals and have no desire to be, so it comes across as hostile and insensitive, but it’s not.
That's exactly what GP said.
If that's your jam, great! It certainly isn't mine either. Indeed, my theory is that the world is going to shit because of doing business like that. Where's the humanity in that? We're not automatons.
We sell our work, they give us a paycheck, done, lets not make it more than it is.
I think it's a judgement call but making such a long-out promise like 3 years in the tech industry is a huge red flag. Even at one year you should be skeptical and asking how/why as the author suggests.
But you should only be waiting at most a year. If you get told “wait 2+ years” then that’s usually a sign that they’ve already decided you’re not eligible (for whatever reasons they decide) but don’t want to be candid with you.
If you get told to wait for any duration beyond the next pay review cycle, then take that as a sign that you’re not going to progress under the current regime.
I'm earning now few times more per hour than I did when I started.
The only thing I did was being open to work somewhere else for more money. I don't think I ever worked anywhere for more than roughly two years.
I became a senior dev because I didn't fit in a "regular" bracket in the company that wanted to hire me. I never got a promotion. I became a team lead because a project for my client required more work than I could provide it myself so I transferred it to a friendly company that gave me a team to work on it.
If it actually went down like this, that's pretty horrible, and that someone else is a grifter. Very harmful for any organization in the long run, because that behavior will be applied to anyone who's "ripe to be taken advantage of" (from his point of view), burning them out of the way.
That is, if they were aware that you made the thing that they picked up later. Though I wonder why the original didn't go through. The other person pushed harder for it to go through, or showed it off with a different sort of demo? Or was it a different sort of technical implementation / design?
yfw•2h ago
100% agree with the timing point, often the promotion has very little to do with what is within your control.
decimalenough•1h ago
Not getting promoted, on the other hand, is the default state of affairs. Are they doing work above their level? Will they keep doing it even if they don't get the promotion? Great, then there's no need to promote, move onto the next thing or person.
hnlmorg•11m ago
Headcount doesn’t take 2+ years to resolve. Even in heavily bureaucratic organisations, it’s a few months at worst.
Organisation wide restructures can take years and changes to departmental structure can be suspended while the org restructure happens, barring any unusual and typically director approved circumstances (like scoring major new project with a key client).But any employee would be well aware of such restructures and client projects.
Changes to pay will typically be postponed until the next pay review cycle. So could be up to a year. But if it’s longer then that’s typically a sign that your manager (or above) has already vetoed any such pay increase and they’re not being truthful with you about it.
Ultimately, if you get told to wait 2 years and the reasons are not “company wide restructuring” then there’s some shadow politics going on and you should definitely be reviewing your job prospects. And if there is a company wide restructure happening, then you should also be updating your CV just in case too.
If you get told to wait 3 years the just assume it’s never going to happen. Because you can guarantee even if your management has the best of intentions, priorities will shift multiple times within those 3 years.