Reflections on changing jobs

Posted by mkhairul - October 16, 2009 at 03:10:10 am - No Comments

 Categories: blog



Here I am, thinking, reflecting on the past while waiting for my download to finish. Some stupid stuffs that I did a few months back.

Changing jobs. Never ever, change a job in 24 hours. Especially for an unknown company whose office you have never seen. You could think that they’re being lenient and all for meeting at a restaurant for a chat (which actually is an interview), but there’s always “udang disebalik mee”.

Think for a while (in my case I didn’t), if you had an office that you’re proud of, why the hell wouldn’t you invite a potential employee to come over for an interview? This should raise a flag (+5 suspicion).

One of my other mistake is asking a developer who is a good friend of the technical manager for an opinion on the working environment. Obviously it will be biased. Should have waited for a whole month before jumping the ship to investigate further.

There’s also other bunch of mistakes that I made:

  • I did not ask about the environment in detail
  • I did not ask about developer level documentation
  • I did not ask about version control in detail (they used it, but there’s no comments in the commits, you’d have to diff the file to see what have been done)
  • I did not ask if there’s any code review being done
  • I agreed on the odd working hours (there’s no amount of money that could substitute for this, ok maybe RM10,000. You’d miss a lot in socializing with friends, cats and other stuffs). Burning out by spending too much time on work is certainly not worth it
  • I got sucked into a promise of a ‘family environment’ when in reality every company is govern by a market norm (no exceptions, unless you’re one of the founders of the company, then yes it is like a family)
  • I was promised that the transition will be fully paid by the company from the old one when in reality their policy only allows them to pay half.

Well that certainly was depressing to think about. Always take your time to dig deeper for more understanding on the environment and work being done at the company that you’re going to.

No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Security Code:

GimpStyle Theme design by Horacio Bella.