Hacker News

On one hand there are places that will look out for job-hoppers so the 3yr rule is good. But for promotions, job-hopping is the best strategy.

The part people don't talk about much is the toll it takes on you when you switch jobs. It's like moving but worse. It's not like switching your wardrobe or something, it's a very drastic and intense change.

There really is no hard-and-fast rule with these things, you just have to figure out your industry, country, region and other details and determine what is best.

An advice I could have used earlier myself is the whole networking and building contacts thing. This is both internally and in your industry. There is literally nothing more important for your career than being likeable and building a reputation. Whether it's a promotion, better pay, or landing a better gig, focus on that as a priority.

In case what I'm saying isn't clear: be the biggest butt-kissing sycophant possible, and never be negative or disagree unless you're very confident that's absolutely what's expected of you by the right people. You don't get paid for how hard you work, you get paid for how valued you are. I think that's a bit obvious, but what many miss is that it isn't how valuable you are for the company that matters, it isn't even how valuable you are to your team, or to delivering some goal that matters. What matters is how valuable you are to individuals. Competency matters, but only as a 2nd or 3rd point of order. It matters how well you're liked, but also how good you are at improving how well-liked others are.

Sometimes there just aren't any opportunities where you are, nothing can be done about that other than jumping ship. However, expecting to be promoted, or paid more because of "the rules", that doesn't work well in real life.

Losing your job sucks. Typically, there is no silver lining. I’ve been laid off 2x and those were both among the worst experiences of my life.

> rawness is an excellent time to reflect on what went right and what I could've done better, before the brain starts coping with the trauma of the event in question.

But that isn’t what he’s done in the essay. I don’t think he’s doing an honest assessment of what he could have done better. Rather there’s a thin patina of “I should have realized . . .” and then a litany of complaints about the company. And the complaints about the company are the same usual ones that everyone makes. I HAVE BEEN THERE. I HAVE MADE THEM TOO.

But I would advise, in six months in a year when you’re in a new job, to take a HARD look at yourself. Try not to cast people as villains and thus can be a learning experience.

I've been told to wait for a pay increase/promotion twice. And I got it both times (luckily). The time periods were only a few months or a year each time.

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.

This is exactly my experience (and I've been doing this fo 20 years now). Saw it on every job I had. The usual bs is "we are developing new performance and grows framework" "promotions will happen on next cycle" "we are reorganizing now" "we want to add more transparency" etc. But somehow they always know who to call when shit hit th fan. Don't fall for it. Look for another job once you see this. Looking for new job nowadays take a while and it's better to be employed during this process.

I like the other employment 3 year problem.

In this the company fills jobs with keen but cheap young people to save money. These people work hard, get experience and take qualifications. Three years later you have a cohort of young people with excellent CVs and qualifications above their peers... that the company can't afford to pay the market rate for! Then it loses a whole cohort of great staff.

Theres some false dichotomies here. Not getting a promotion might not be as intentional as the author seems to believe. Often orgs are slow to change and headcount is one of those hard to challenge issues.

100% agree with the timing point, often the promotion has very little to do with what is within your control.

One of the notable things about FAANG processes that I've observed from my friends there is that roles and processes are mechanized[0]. Individuals are placed like precision robotics in a bigger machine. This kind of structure means that you have a defined process for promotion or pay raises and you know what your role is. In fact, one might even posit that the ability for these large organizations to create a machine to extract surplus from labour in a systematic fashion is the reason for their success.

For most people, this is wonderful. Knowing what you will be valued for is very useful. It says "do the things that are useful to us" and "stop doing the things that are useless to us" and tells you "these are the things that are useful and those are the things that are not useful". At their scale, rare errors in the process will inevitably show up, but smaller companies often have these errors at higher rates. All that to say, success often comes from identifying what is useful to the organization and what is not, and then what is useful and what is not to the person who has control over one's role in the organization.

In mechanized organizations, this should be easier. In unmechanized organizations, one's skill at this will dominate one's technical skill at determining success. But it's just a skill, and if you cannot find a way to train it, the easiest workaround is to ask the person making the decision: "if I wanted it in 3 months, what would I have to do?".

You may get an answer that was untrue 3 months later, but you just shrank your timeline in a way that is much more meaningful, and perhaps more likely is that you'll either get an unrealistic timeline (which is useful signal), or you will hit it and get what you wanted (which is also desirable).

0: A classic example of this is that no one can "get you into Google/Facebook/whatever". This reveals the other non-obvious purpose of their interview process besides quality-control of hires: quality-control and rules compliance on interviewers.

If you ask for a raise and they say “maybe in two to three years” thats simply a polite no.

> “you know the world outside is hostile to job seekers and a steady paycheck beats the unemployment line”

You can search for a new job while employed. Unless you are stuck on an underwater submarine playing hide-and-seek you can always fire off a few inquiries.

If your co-workers are getting promotions and raises and you are not, its a you problem. If someone else is getting credit for your work, its a you problem. Given your claims of impeccable work, we are only left to assume its a personality issue.

Its not to say its fair or right, but life is a popularity contest, whether we like it or not. More likeable people get more things, sometimes undeservingly so.

In the zero-interest rate economy, it was easy for early to mid-career engineers with average skill to switch to a company that paid them 20%+ more money. I did it myself multiple times.

The current economy and AI have turned the tables. Even today, waiting for three years is pushing it for most folks, but understandable. Career growth is being decimated across the industry, and opportunities simply aren't there anymore like they used to be. You can be dedicated and above average, but you are still stuck in the same industry as everyone else.

For anybody that is interested in a clinical psychologist's take, here is mine…

This article triggers an overwhelming feeling that something is missing in the story. Of course, being fired is genuinely painful, and the author's emotional state is understandable. But I think there is a much better way to understand this situation that would be beneficial to the author. Please note that this is just a guess, and in reality, I would explore if this is a good fit for both reality and what the person is capable of talking about, and quickly back off if not both were true. This is just an exercise in hypothesis building that accompanies every meeting i have with a client, and initial theories are often wrong.

First is the defense mechanism of abstract answers. I once asked a girl why she stole from her mother AGAIN, and she responded, "I try to get back up, but I fall down." This is a deflection and a non-answer. This author does the corporate version of that. Instead of saying, "I struggled to read the room," they describe "The Three-Year Myth."

There is the bitterness here that often accompanies the wound to professional identity. The author literally tells us they are smarter than their boss, harder working than their peers, and more ethical than the company. The easiest explanation is to blame failure on the system being rigged against good people. This might be a coping mechanism, but it might also hinder personal growth.

Then there is the claim that the author didn't know why they were fired. However, i think they tell us exactly why in the hardware paragraph. Look at the what the author describes… a senior director presented a vision to a customer. The author (without checking with the director) proposed a totally different architecture because they "read the requirements line by line" (implying the director didn't). The author received a formal warning.

The author’s Interpretation is "My timing was perfect for the market, but poor for the systems of power." (I was too smart/right, and they were threatened). That might hold some truth, but its not implausible that the author undermined senior leadership, embarrassed the company regarding a client commitment, and likely communicated it with arrogance ("no AI summaries here!" as he writes).

And receiving a formal warning is an extremely serious signal. To frame a formal HR warning as simply timing being inconvenient to power that be, shows a near-total lack of accountability. There is zero reflection on how they advocated for their ideas. The author claims, "I'm literally not built for competition so much as cooperation," yet their anecdotes describe them fighting against cost centers and trying to override directors.

The self-reflection that does appear is careful and limited. The author admits to being "naturally helpful and cooperative" and bad at "game theory" but these are virtues reframed as vulnerabilities. "I'm too good and too cooperative for this corrupt world" isn't really self-criticism. The one moment that approaches genuine insight "I need to expand into leadership skills" is immediately followed by blaming stakeholders who "blocked change at all costs." The OCD mention functions similarly and it explains the overanalysis as a feature, not something that might be creating friction with colleagues.

This is someone who likely has high technical intelligence but problems with soft skills. They prioritized being technically right over being effective, and when the social consequences arrived (the warning, the firing), they built a defensive wall of abstraction to avoid seeing their own role in the fall.

A proper question is WHY has this happened repeatedly and in multiple roles, across multiple organizations, with the same pattern? The author even acknowledges this but thinks the answer is "I keep falling for the same trap." I think it would be more helpful to ask, "Why do I keep creating the same dynamic?"

My last acquisition they tried to convince us to give every employee a "slightly lower" salary coming in so they could "get a raise sooner".

I was like WTF are you trying to pull. If you know you'll give them the raise then pay them that now.

Reading this article reminds me of all the advice in university on the importance of soft skills. The OP sounds like a competent technical worker but lacked the soft skills to secure his position.

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.

> On your way out the door, you hear the rumors: someone else did your thing years after you showed yours off. They got the credit, the bonus, the promotion, the recognition. They're a Senior now, or a Lead, or a Director, or a VP.

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?

> I was given a warning because said proposal was (unknowingly) opposed to a Senior Director's vision, one they'd already presented to the customer prior to seeking my input and neglected to mention when I reached out. My timing was perfect for the market, but poor for the systems of power within the organization.

I feel like there's two paths you can take in your career: corporate stooge, or productive worker. The corporate stooge will be more capitalistically rewarded, because businesses aren't optimized for productivity or quality, they're optimized for capitalistic rewards.

There was an article recently about dating apps and their inherently contradictory incentives. They're incentivized to keep you on the app, which means getting you kinda good matches, but not so good that you stop needing the app. The business world seems to be nothing but these contradictions, and it seems our choices are to learn to take this Kafkaesque fully into our internal model of the world, or give up and accept that we'll be disposed of every few years, despite keeping some part of the company's heart beating (a part some exec will one day gleefuly rip out of their own metaphorical chest so as to drive up price immediately before acquisition or something).

> I was given a warning because said proposal was (unknowingly) opposed to a Senior Director's vision

Warning? Wtf. Even if knowingly opposed, you pay this dino to provide expertise not lick your ego. I'd start looking at that moment... bigger red flag than promotion delay.

> Your performance review is solid, of course, your deliverables unimpeachable, but something begins to feel increasingly off. Your colleagues are in more meetings, but your task list only grows longer. Your progress on said project is appreciated by your boss and team, maybe even your boss' boss, but never really recognized.

Managers sabotage talented employees: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/what-drives-ma...

I have to somewhat disagree, but the details matter a lot.

If you insist on seeking the absolute top pay for the work and want to always be on the cutting edge in a fast-paced environment, sure the advice in the blog post is correct.

If you instead take 80% of the pay and pick a place to work that's more slow and steady, the traditional advice starts to make sense again. The key thing is you must have strong and unique skills with the experience to match that the business actually values. You need to bust your ass just as hard as if you were working for 100% of the pay. If they didn't think they were getting a good deal they wouldn't keep you. Simple as that.

I do agree it shouldn't take 3 years though. It should be more like getting promoted every year for the first 3 to 5 years and then you either settle in for the long haul (believe me this really is what a traditional employer wants most!), or decide that you're bored and move on. It's your choice. Definitely, if there's no promotion after the first couple of years I would worry that I'm not what they were looking for after all.

There is no myth. You just have to truly know your worth and not overplay your hand. Knowing your worth is ABSOLUTELY NOT about milking every last drop like a desperate loser. I thought we would have learned this by now after the death of hustle culture. It's a lot like dating. This is just the unspoken compromise everyone assumes you're already aware of.

I'm surprised this kind of article still resonates and gets posted on HN.

> The pink slip comes as a total surprise. It always comes as a surprise. You did everything you were told, even waited patiently like you were asked. You trusted the organization to reward you in turn - and now you've lost your job.

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 r companies that scale 100x in 3 years

If you aren't scaling yourself as much then you're moving too slow