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Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

I think one important factor to consider, that is not mentioned explicity in the post, is: Manager.

Your immediate manager can have a lot of impact on job satisfaction. A good manager would follow a bottom-up approach where he asks the team members what they need (time, equipment, etc.) and would try to get those things so that the team can succeed. This creates an overall higher job satisfaction.

An ineffective manager may enforce ridiculous deadlines coming from upper management on his team or hog all the credit of the good work done by the team or not be supportive which would lead to stressed, overworked, and unhappy work life.

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> A good manager would follow a bottom-up approach where he asks the team members what they need

> An ineffective manager may enforce ridiculous deadlines coming from upper management

This is not how it works in modern workplace. In large companies the pressure mechanism is delegated to a whole group of employees in the same place in the hierarchy - POs, PMs, Scrum masters, various process lunatics. In case of problems they feed the line manager with negative feedback thus creating an image of bad team player, the line manager itself is a divine being rising concerns at most during friendly one-to-one conversations. Once it's clear you are not a good team player, it's better for everyone if you'll be let go. Ideally this process should be catalyzed during the trial period.

Do you mean managers are not effective in a modern workplace, or do you mean managers are effective in a modern workplace?

What is the "This" you are referring to when you say "This is not how it works".

Also what kind of modern workplace are you talking about? I am working in a place that is developing software in the year 2018. I guess that is fairly modern. I see both effective and ineffective managers in this same workplace. What exactly is your point?

> In large companies...

You could have stopped right there. In large companies the politics have firmly taken their place at the top of everything. And if you don't enjoy politics, they are terrible places to work and you should avoid them like the plague.

There are too many places in Europe (e.g. Dublin, Prague, Warsaw, smaller cities with job market dominated by one company/industry) where local branches of global companies are the only viable places to work in.

My local home town (20,000) had several small software vendors 15 years ago, so not buying you on that one. I also then lived 30-45 minutes from a large town (might be called city in the US, 200,000+) which had tons of them. I now live in a city smaller than the ones you list, Nottingham, and work with 3 different local companies as clients, 2 of them are 5 minutes walk from me. And I haven't tried to get a new client for like 2 years. Our job market is "dominated" by global companies like Capital One and Equifax, but I personally know of a bunch of local software companies crying out for devs, who ask me every time I meet them at a meetup if I know anyone.

There are also tons of digital agencies these days in every locality, which employ lots of programmers.

On top of that, a lot of businesses now need software internally, whether these are shitty positions is entirely dependant on how good the company is.

A quick SO jobs search shows that Dublin has plenty of non global company jobs going. https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&l=Dublin&d=20&u=Miles

Within 10 seconds I find 2 Dublin founded companies looking for software devs in the last 2 weeks:

Datahug - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/144383/start-building-a-socia...

EmydexLtd - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/emydex-technology-l...

2 Dublin companies are on this month's who is hiring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16282819

Have you considered that it could be that you're not great at job hunting and networking?

> Have you considered that it could be that you're not great at job hunting

Among the few places I haven't yet applied to are Russian intelligence agency and South Pole Station.

> and networking?

Beat me to it. The best I'm able to do in this domain is arguing with strangers on the internet.

Honestly, it's just turning up to dev meetups for a year. A lot of local CEOs or CTOs will go to the meetups to try and meet new devs, as well as you meet a bunch of other devs and they'll never be resentful if you ask if there are any jobs going. Lots of companies do internal referral bonuses of a few hundred £/$/€ if an existing employee refers someone, so they're often keen to refer you!

I actually got my first client at the first meetup I ever attended with virtually the first words I said to anyone. I sat down next to someone and the conversation went, "Hi, I'm Matt, I'm a C# dev looking to start freelancing", "Oh, hi, I'm Jon, we need a C# freelancer".

Like I could list 5 local companies right now I know of off the top of my head that are always looking for devs and I personally haven't even been to a networking event for like 2 years.

I've had some great nights too, some long interesting chats. One that always sticks in my mind is someone who'd just setup his own ML cluster on AWS and him telling me all about Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, which had just come out (wow, 4 years already). Or sometimes just having fun and a few drinks.

I've worked in places with 50 employees and places with 15k employees. The amount of politics was no different, and if anything where probably worse in the smaller companies.

People romanticize small workplaces. Cliques (e.g. most of the team transferred from a different company), little dictatorships, blurry private-professional life border, etc. - so many ways the things can go wrong and they oftentimes indeed do.

I've had a lot of managers over the years but they usually fall into two buckets:

1. Very technical with no political skills. They are great to work for as mentors but they have no power in the organization to get their teams resources, raises, or promotions. They weren't career motivated because they made enough to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle and don't understand why you care so much about money.

2. The overly political. They will throw you under the bus in a heart beat to make themselves look good. They are very good with managing up. If you make them look good though and no how to play the game, you can get ahead. I was never good before recently at playing the game.

It's a rare manager that's good at both - they are like a unicorn. But they are great to work with. They can manage up well enough to communicate both the technical needs of their teams and get resources and compensation for their teams and they can help you on the technical level. I would have never been able to transistion from developer to dev lead without them.

I'd expand that and say management in general.

It's not just your direct manager that can make your job shitty, it can be anyone on the management chain from your direct supervisor up to the CEO.

A good manager can mitigate the effects of poor management at the higher echelons, but it will still persist, hovering under the surface.

this so much. I have had terrible micromanagers these are anxiety inducing. Also fake bro-managers, fakely imposing a friendship where there is none and trying to get more over time just by being friendly.

I prefer my manager to be professionally friendly, not a neck breather and treat me as an adult. Currently very happy with my manager :)

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