this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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I write software and I work for a pretty technophobic, brick-and-mortor kind of company that's still struggling to catch up in tech. (The unstated stance of the top brass was definitely that the internet was a fad until like 2015. And even now they're clueless, but improving.)
Wonderful place to work. I have surprising autonomy to work on interesting projects. It's easy to get away with long lunches or showing up late. (The boss kindof doesn't care.) Full-time remote (even though I live in the city where their headquarters is.)
The more Silicon-Valley-ish (yet "large") company where I used to work was really... culty? They expected everything out of me every second to the point I didn't get a chance to take a breath and think. And all my coworkers constantly expected and pressured me to work late at night and such. (Like, they genuinely seemed to want to be awakened at 3:00am to sit on a Zoom call where they couldn't actually do anything to help with the massive outage going down.) It's the sort of place that turns down applicants who aren't smart enough (unlike where I work now), but you'd have to be crazy to want to work there.
If/when I have to change jobs, I'm looking for a remote software engineering job at a company with manifestly the worst technology setup I can find. Lowes might be a good choice. Or maybe a regional grocery store chain. Or some hash-been company that's now a shadow of their former self like ToysRUs or Sears.
Are you me?
Went from a FTSE200 to a significantly smaller, private owned business.
Vastly better pay, more autonomy
I can attest to working for smaller companies.
I also write software, but not for a technophobic company. We are consultants, I guess. We write applications for clients then move on to the next one. Often clients will pay again for extra work on existing projects so we get lots of variety and clients are loyal to us.
We too have a great level of autonomy, they trust us to do the job and we work hard because we like coding and the environment is nice and they have made my concessions for me when I’ve had issues outside of work.
This is counter to almost anywhere else I’ve worked. This is my first software developer role, but any customer service roles I did before, like 40 jobs, all wanted me to work as hard as humanly possible whilst paying me as little as legally possible. Like call centres would try and tell me I can have 9 minutes of personal breaks (toilet, drink, etc) a day. Naturally I would do what I wanted and tell them like it or fire me cause I ain’t bowing to you.
I also want to shout out Apple UK as an awesome place to work, I worked shop floor as a Christmas temp for three months and as a natural introvert who has had a colourful past I am very good at being an extrovert for periods and so excelled at customer service, like it would make me happy just being nice to customers, giving demos to the kids and talking to the kids as though they were adults, as if the product is for them then I’m talking like they’re the main person rather than most would talk to the parent.
Anyway got promoted to the Genius Bar and worked there for three years and loved it, sure it’s hard work at times and some people are fucking assholes, but on the whole it was amazing. Surrounded by very talented people from all backgrounds with all kinds of hobbies. The support from the management was extremely good, the benefits were awesome, the healthcare got me my ADHD diagnosis and literally turned my life around and it’s thanks to that and the support there that I’m not doing my dream job, admittedly for less money than I was on at Apple at the moment.
Finally, I am not absent of the fact that Apple employees or sub-contracted employees in the east are treated a whole lot worse and I actually had these conversations with managers at my store. As I did about green shirts for Earth day being counter to the message, since they had to manage shipping these around the world. And they’re not having pride flags in places where they really should be trying to change things like Saudi and Russia stores.