#scorchedtulips

[wunkolo]

Hey, this might be a weird thing to ask, but...What sort of job do you have?

It sounds like you’re somewhere in tech, which is what I was originally studying a while back before having to drop for financial reasons.

I had decided to rule out programming-related jobs due to general scumminess from the industry exposure I got (crunch, low pay, poor employee communication, companies feeling super unethical/profit focused), but it’s extremely possible I just had bad experiences and need to look around deeper or in different specialties

I’m in a weird position in life right now where I’m trying to determine a main job industry to work in, and since I’m now in a big city, I was wondering if you might have ideas/advice of more safe and comfortable areas of the tech industry to work

What sort of job do you have?

I’m not sure what the word would be for what I do right now but more generally I am working on a game engine! It mixes a lot of tech though, so lots of high performance computation and GPGPU work and graphics/rendering stuff and all that. It’s great and stimulating and is exactly in my field of interest. Has a good mix of low-level performance code and high-level concepts and mass-parallelism and lots of bleeding-edge tech. Lots of C++ and Vulkan and x86 assembly(and ARM for fun on the weekends).

I had decided to rule out programming-related jobs due to general scumminess from the industry exposure I got (crunch, low pay, poor employee communication, companies feeling super unethical/profit focused), but it’s extremely possible I just had bad experiences and need to look around deeper or in different specialties

My first job out of college was with a startup that was incredibly reactive to every industry buzzword and trend and would totally re-paradigm itself and lie to investors to get more money coming in. It was very volatile and very terrible. Every new potential investor meant the CEO was over-promising features as if we already had them and then forcing me to implement it in less than a week. He deferred peoples income, changed the paycycle the day before payday, lots of nastiness and dubiously legal things. I was fresh out of school and didn’t know my worth so they got me “on sale” too. Lots of scummy startups/companies will prey on new-grads to get cheap work out of a fresh unjaded mind. It was just an overall pretty bad experience fresh out of school but I had to take the job to be able to make enough steady income to move out of my parent’s place asap and it was the most immediately available stable income. A lot of people unfortunately and understandably have to bide through this kind of employment abuse sometimes due to situational financial needs and cannot afford to say No to a clearly toxic environment. If you’re in a position in your life where you can pick your work then absolutely spend the extra time to make sure you aren’t parking yourself into something toxic. Especially now, a lot of people will take what they can get and there is a whole new class of remote-work horror stories where employers will demand that everyone leave their camera on during work hours or must respond to messages within 45 seconds or less or face employment reconsiderations.

My second job ever is my current one and is much more better managed and I would use it as a good example of the total opposite on that spectrum.

I was wondering if you might have ideas/advice of more safe and comfortable areas of the tech industry to work

This is kinda difficult to answer as it’s hard to meter the entire temperament of an entire company or industry just from a job listing(Once you filter pass all the obvious 5-year-experience in 2-year-old tech sort of stuff). Some industries can be more stressful than others like game development may be a lot more “crunchy” and susceptible to mismanagement than maybe a company making inventory software or web-development. I don’t know enough about other industries to really speak for them but I suppose the more reactive industries are under more stress and mismanagement than others. Startups tend to “follow the money” and react much more to every little movement in the industry.

Regardless of industry, the interview process will usually expose you to some insight as to how the culture and temperament is at a company. When I applied to this new job, and I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into, I had two in-person interviews and a phone interview that allowed me to scope out the “culture” of the company while they were also scoping me out for a culture-fit. I spoke to the employees themselves, checked them out on glassdoor if available, researched them on reddit/twitter/etc, asked the right questions(ask about their project methodology like scrum/agile/kanban, some kind of task organization that tries to avoid crunch), reading the details of the job offer(like sneaking in little things that remove your right as a worker), knowing the labor laws of your state, and knowing when your company is trying to bend those laws. There are lots of methods to keep you safe and comfortable while employed by any industry.

I’d love if anyone else can comment on this post and provide insight on the temperament of their industry and red flags they saw during the interviewing process that just bleeds mismanagement for others to read 🙏