I think this is the reason I was hired at my current company and it put me in an awkward position.
I was hired as employee #2 for a critical team at my company. For the first 3 months, my colleague and I worked closely together on everything I was doing. From production problems to day to day PR reviews, I had no one else to ask besides my colleague. We didn't even have a manager we reported to. Then suddenly I was told they didn't work at the company anymore. I was told they were still available for 2 weeks on Slack for any knowledge transfer I needed, but they would have no other access to our network, our Github, or anything else.
My advice is that option 1 in the SE question (hire a replacement, then terminate) should be avoided. How is that going to look to the replacement? It really shook me up. I was only a few months in, I didn't have time to build trust in the company yet. If I could have, I probably would have went back to my old job right away. Then what happens to that knowledge you were hoping to retain? A year later I still wonder if someday the same will happen to me.
Instead, I would recommend approaching the employee and working out a deal for them to amicably train a replacement. The replacement should know going in that they are a replacement and they should be told to focus on training themselves and others on this knowledge. If they don't agree to the deal then you fire them immediately. Yes, that'll suck, and maybe you even have a production problem because of it, but you can make it work.
> If they don't agree to the deal then you fire them immediately
this does nothing but hurt the business. it hurts the person being hired the most, which in this story is you, because that new hire will still happen and they won’t have as good of training.
Indeed it should be a standard practice to maintain some kind of paid retention/consulting relationship for a few months post exit. It’s a win-win for just a few months extra cost.
Or, you can do what I did when an evil manager tried to do this to me: tell the new hire what’s going on, work as a team to do a great job for your customers while turning them against management, then use managements opposition to all your great work together to get said management fired.
> Or, you can do what I did when a manager tried to do this to me, tell the new hire what’s going on, work as a team to do a great job for your customers while turning them against management,
Okay, I'm with you so far.
> then get said management fired.
Then draw the rest of the fucking owl? How did you do this?
I'm guessing you were somewhere relatively large. I knew someone who got replaced like this and it was a small enough company that I don't think this could have been done because there was no layer of management between them and the top dog doing this to them.
Oh, and no one above that guy either. He was the owner of the business.
Yeah, this only works if you can play some higher than your boss against your boss. You’re screwed if it’s a smaller place or the CEO or someone like that is directly doing this to you.
When I graduated I really struggled to find a job. It took 18 months and the first job I got was a small place. I was hired directly by the owner and I had one colleague. On the last day of the first week, the owner took me to lunch and said, "we are going to fire [the other employee] and you will do his job". I was gobsmacked. I quit when we got back to the office. Fire the other person if you want, but don't make me complicit.
I think it was unethical to do it like that, yeah. And you're right I don't know the history between the two of them, so I can't say which was the asshole. But I do think I'd have been an asshole had I stayed after learning that.
I've written/read the word asshole so many times, I'm reminded of Spaceballs!
But you're right, I didn't know them enough to judge who was in the wrong. I think that was the problem. If he'd just fired the guy without telling me, I'd have been surprised but there wouldn't be anything I could do. Instead, he effectively gave me a choice: stay and someone you barely know loses their job, or leave.
Unlikely (because he's dead), but... small place, hired directly by the owner, exactly one colleague, told (over a meal) you're going to take over his job.
I specifically asked this question to Sales and they told me no. There probably isn't an official policy and it's up to the discretion of the people involved. In my case I had 100 MB of data on S3 that I was serving to a lot of users (250 TB - 500 TB of egress per month). This is free for me on R2 because you aren't billed for requests served from cache and we have a 100% cache hit rate. I was very up front about this to sales and they said they didn't care as long as we paid for some kind of support package. We were paying for the $20/mo plan but later elected to upgrade to the $200/mo plan. Not a bad deal since the data transfer from AWS alone was more than $20,000.
I don't want to take advantage of them and get on their abuse list since this is production. I'm happy to pay more! I just don't want to deal with negotiating an Enterprise plan. They ask you so many questions like "how many Page Rules do you want? How many Worker requests?" I just want R2. And this response confuses them too because they say "well R2 is pay-what-you-use..." I would honestly be happier with a $5000/mo "excessive R2 bandwidth" fee. But they don't seem to want to implement that.
It keeps forgetting for me too. That is to say, in my mobile browser and desktop browser I opt out of the redesign in favor of the old.reddit.com design, but about once per month it'll just revert back to the redesign. I don't think my cookies are being cleared because I'll stay logged in and I've never found any other setting that flips in the same way, it is only the Redesign opt-out that does this.
I don't know how to explain why many people say "this never happens to me" and other people say "this happens frequently."
While I'm on the subject, another grey pattern the article missed is the button to opt out of the redesign on mobile. When clicking the hamburger menu there used to be a button at the bottom called (iirc) "Opt out of Redesign." The same option exists today except they've moved it into a Settings submenu and renamed it "Request desktop site" which implies it's a temporary change.
Lastly, if you search you'll find threads where people say the web pages are sometimes rendered without any opt out button. I just opened an incognito window to test this and I simply cannot find a button to revert to the old design, even when using my mobile browser's Desktop Mode. So unless a visitor knows about old.reddit.com they are forced to use the new design.
There is also a bug with the AMP pages such that the submission dates for the threads are often wrong. For example you're searching for threads that have been posted in the last month, some of the results will say something like "7 days ago" until you click and see it is actually 5 years old.
Reddit has a MASSIVE security vulnerability with their AMP pages and I really hope they get in trouble for it because of how much they shove it down people's throats.
It's possible to visible quarantined or even banned subreddits through their AMP pages. From there you can still view deleted videos and other content through the autoplay "previews".
> Suggestion: Create a new Wikipedia article with the same Name, upload your own profile photo onto it and put a Disambiguation (Programmer/Hacker) in it so that Google will associate it correctly.
That Wikipedia article would probably meet the criteria for Speedy Deletion and just causes unnecessary effort for the Wikipedia editors.
Amazon is in an interesting situation. They create the delivery routes, dispatch the drivers, and set the KPIs the drivers need to meet, but if anything bad happens they can say "The driver isn't an Amazon employee so we're not responsible." If a crash occurs you often can't figure out what the contracting company was as the trucks are often unmarked and Amazon won't help as they have plausible deniability that the truck was even performing an Amazon delivery. If a contracting company is identified with a crash it often goes out of business the next day and those records are lost.
This is a good opportunity for me to ask something I've been wondering for a while about what is appropriate to put on a blog tied to your real identity.
The majority of this article could be seen as negative toward the author's former employer. The website is also listed on the author's CV, and knowing the author's name it is easy to find the website. Is there the possibility that this is seen as unprofessional, or that someone who was involved might read it and be upset? Maybe it is okay because the company is defunct (I assume), or because it was so long ago?
I ask because I am early in my career and I just finished a job where the majority of the things I learned were non-technical in nature. I would like to write about the lessons learned but, like this article, it would have some component of criticism about the company. Like the author, my website is on my resume and the website can be found by searching online for my name. Someone reading my resume could figure out what company I'm talking about, and some people who work there might find it. I don't live in a large tech hub in the US so it's very likely a future potential employer knows some people personally that I might have criticized vaguely (but due to process of elimination from the jobs listed on my resume wouldn't be hard to identify).
The advice I've been given from people I know is to either not have a website tied to your identity at all, or be as professional as possible if it is tied to your identity.
What do you think? If you knew this author, or it you stumbled across this article because you are thinking of hiring the author, how would you feel?
I personally wouldn't, but everybody has to decide for themselves.
I at least know a few companies that would avoid hiring people who criticize old employers, afraid they will be next. I mean, most companies have at least some "skeletons in the closet" of bad practices or what not.
Having said that I'm usually brutally honest in job interviews, I see it as my way of screening companies, if they don't want the honest me, then I would probably not fit the company culture anyway. So there might be nothing wrong with having an honest blog in the end, maybe you receive less offers, but the offers match you more.
I would imagine that the how makes a big difference. Publicly on a blog vs privately in an interview is one aspect of that. And your tone: matter of factly stating problems vs agitated ranting.
I think this is a good question; as the author of this, my general attitude to these kind of things is that I'd rather just be myself rather than try to tactically modify my behaviour to get better outcomes.
I've seen people advise that you should "avoid controversial topics" on first dates, as that "might be a turn-off". Well, maybe it can be (certainly had a few dates like that), but that would also be boring conversation, and not very meaningful as such if you're actually looking for a serious relationship (which doesn't apply to just romantic relationships by the way, also other kind of social relationships). Related comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788380
It's partly cultural as well; I've seen this in certain countries (cough England cough), where everyone avoids talking about anything meaningful so all they talk about is the weather or some such pointless conversation because they're afraid someone could possible disagree with something they say. It's not like I'm against small-talk, but if that's all you do... Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's certainly very different from my own Dutch culture where people tend to be a lot more forthright.
It's not like I will just say whatever without any filter or consideration for other people's feelings, or what might be inappropriate, or without being receptive to feedback. Actually, I try to be quite conscious in how I communicate, especially online where the lack of body language and diversity of culture/social norms can make things pretty darn hard. But at the end of the day this is mostly about how you say something rather than what you say. e.g. "this is stupid" vs. "I'm not sure if this is a good idea".
There are always trade-offs of course. I was known as "Carpetsmoker" online for years and I changed it across the board over a period of a few years to "arp242" mostly because I felt "Carpetsmoker" didn't sound too professional (a lot of people seem to associate it with drug use – I don't even like to smoke cannabis! It was just a funny joke I made when I was 14 that turned in to a nickname). I still think it's kinda funny, but what's an appropriate nickname when you were 14 isn't necessarily appropriate when you're 36 and actually use your GitHub as a way to earn your living, and it doesn't really matter all that much what your name is; so I just changed it.
I publish it on my personal name because I see it as my personal space. Being anonymous would make it "arp242's personal space" rather than "Martin's personal space". I know some people like to keep their "online identity" more separate from their "real life identity", but personally I don't really separate things out all that much.
This is a bit rambly maybe; I'm having a hard time to articulate my feelings on this ... but I hope it makes sense.
And, of course, everyone can make their own choices in this.
Not every other program. I have seen apple bug bounty reports of others completed in a month or so. But I don't know what took so long for them in my case.
I was hired as employee #2 for a critical team at my company. For the first 3 months, my colleague and I worked closely together on everything I was doing. From production problems to day to day PR reviews, I had no one else to ask besides my colleague. We didn't even have a manager we reported to. Then suddenly I was told they didn't work at the company anymore. I was told they were still available for 2 weeks on Slack for any knowledge transfer I needed, but they would have no other access to our network, our Github, or anything else.
My advice is that option 1 in the SE question (hire a replacement, then terminate) should be avoided. How is that going to look to the replacement? It really shook me up. I was only a few months in, I didn't have time to build trust in the company yet. If I could have, I probably would have went back to my old job right away. Then what happens to that knowledge you were hoping to retain? A year later I still wonder if someday the same will happen to me.
Instead, I would recommend approaching the employee and working out a deal for them to amicably train a replacement. The replacement should know going in that they are a replacement and they should be told to focus on training themselves and others on this knowledge. If they don't agree to the deal then you fire them immediately. Yes, that'll suck, and maybe you even have a production problem because of it, but you can make it work.