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Ask HN: I may have made a mistake taking this job. What's next?
1 point by kadabra9 on Jan 22, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
About four months ago, I started a new position at a company that did a great job selling me on the mountains of data they have to hack on and a great salary.

While it's true that there is mountains of data and the pay is good, it turns out there was a lot of intangibles that I didn't really consider... an absurdly slow and incompetent IT department that refuses to install the tools I need to do my job, less than subpar workstation/setup, constant distractions, constantly putting out fires due to a patchwork and extremely poorly designed codebase,etc.

While I completely acknowledge that I should have taken things like this into greater consideration when I was interviewing, I'm beginning to have some real second thoughts. I've talked to my manager about some of these things, but I'm not really sure how much he can do, or if any of these things will be changing in the near future.

Has anyone experienced a similar situation somewhat early into a new position, and if so how did you handle it? I've been contacted by other companies and recruiters but was concerned about leaving so soon and how that would reflect on me, but am unsure how to proceed.



I was in a similar position to yourself and ended up leaving after 5 weeks. The problem was that my immediate manager didn't have the clout to change things and going up the chain of command got me nowhere. And this was with a big name multinational IT company.

There are two things for you to do:

1. Refresh your CV and focus on the positives. Don't rubbish your previous workplace. Explain it away as a difference in priorities and goals.

2. If your immediate manager can't / won't fix the problems go over his head. It might not work (hence step 1). But you could luck out.


This is the same situation a close family member is in. He realized after he got there that the reason the pay was so good is to compensate for the inherent stress in the job. It's just part of the package deal. So he focuses on trying to figure out which fires are worth fighting, and taking it one day at a time.




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