Ask HN: Your job satisfaction?

[rvpolyak]

With all the recent threads about salaries, I would like to poll the HN Community about their current job:

1) What are some of the best things you value at your job?

2) What are some of the things you wish you could change about your organization?

3) Besides money what is the one thing you wish your organization would offer you?

4) What is one thing the Founder or CEO could do to improve the leadership in your organization?

[byoung2]

I just left my job a few months ago because I wasn't happy. These responses apply to that job.

1. The money was good ($175k as director of engineering in Los Angeles) and the hours were 9-5.

2. I wish I had more autonomy to manage my team. Although I was director, engineering was basically under the control of product and upper management. Unfortunately they knew nothing about how engineering works.

3. A chance to define a new role, possibly R&D or skunk works, so I could contribute but not be bound by the traditional management hierarchy.

4. Ultimately nothing, since he was the problem. He is CEO of a tech company but he can't even plug in a thumb drive. He has said in the past he views engineering as "black magic" because he doesn't understand it.

[highsea]

This sounds really familiar.

In my experience the CEO/Founder can be classified as either of two types:

1) Great sales guy but has no deep concept of the technology his product is based on and other related aspects such as technical debt. Can be really hard to explain why something is more complicated than it looks to him, etc.

2) Great technical guy who can't sell. If you're not doing something conceptually new it can be difficult to acquire customers if your selling is weak.

I wonder if any one has encountered the unicorn CEO/Founder who's great at both of these things?

[byoung2]

Either of those would be preferable to what our company had, which was 3) Poor sales guy with no concept of technology. Even the engineers were were begging for basic marketing concepts like focus groups, A/B testing, user personas, etc. We actually got in trouble for wasting time thinking about marketing instead of doing our jobs.

[meric]

>> Although I was director, engineering was basically under the control of product and upper management.

IMO if you're the lead of the engineering organisation then you have the responsibility to convince your CEO when you feel you're right. As director it comes with a responsibility to do some politicking.

[byoung2]

This company was past the point of no return as far as convincing goes. The founding CTO quit for the same reasons. We built an amazing product that nobody wanted. The tech was impressive, but customers don't see the tech, they see (or don't see) how it helps them solve a problem. When the sales didn't come in, the investors wanted answers, and the CEO blamed tech for building a bad product when really it was lack of product market fit. The founding CTO tried to convince the CEO that it was bad marketing and a flawed product vision that was to blame, to no avail. When he quit, I was promoted to director of engineering, but I didn't have any more success convincing them. Engineering was buried under a boatload of feature requests that sales anecdotally heard customers wanted.

[meric]

Sounds like a difficult job. I'm happy for you to be out of it now.

[blabla_blublu]

1. Work Flexibility and challenging problems to solve. I love the work/life balance in my workplace as it stands. Work doesn't interfere with my life on weekends and in evenings.

2. There should be a clearer channel to communicate with the different stakeholders. I might have good product ideas, regardless of what my designation is (engineer, in my case). There should be an easier way to get feedback on ideas - good or bad.

3. Lopsided workloads should be regulated. It will be nice if all teams were equally loaded. In my case, I have a very reasonable schedule, but in some of my friends' case they work really hard!

4. Give people more responsibilities! Nothing teaches leadership like taking up ownership.

[kdamken]

I'm just gonna answer the questions I feel comfortable with.

1) What are some of the best things you value at your job?

The clients I work for are huge, well known companies. The work is interesting, and I'm learning a lot from the other developers. They like to encourage professional growth.

3) Besides money what is the one thing you wish your organization would offer you?

Getting to work remotely as often as I'd like, which would be like 3-4 days a week. Higher matching for the retirement plan comes in second.

[maindrive]

1) Rapport with Boss,Challenges, new technologies, value of participation, projects in pipeline, company's financial health

2) Putting less skilled people in middle mgmt on top of engineers (thats a big putoff bcoz we do check their profiles), measuring work more, valuing people that actually work more

3) Sports area, occasional hangouts, spare time for personal projects

4) News updates, taking reviews, giving feedback, more involved, valuing tech stuff, following future market trends

[JoeyWendell]

1)Flexibility 2)My organization is perfectly right.I don't like to change any thing. 3)i would like to have entertaining programs monthly in my organization.