adventure

You've been working as a software engineer at a start-up for some time. You get paid reasonably well, but you aren't really happy. Work-life balance isn't great. You never seem to be able to make time for things. There's lots of unproductive meetings. You end up working late or getting up early to find uninterrupted time. The CEO keeps overriding your product manager. The product backlog gets longer. Bugs go unfixed. Rumor has it the current fundraising round isn't going well. Some early employees have left. Morale is low. You're looking for a new challenge and you want to contribute to something that feels meaningful. You attend some meet-ups and scroll through LinkedIn. A friend suggests you apply to work at The New York Times. You take their advice and, a month later, you receive a job offer. The offer is lower than you expected. About 20% lower. You aren't sure if this is because you were mis-leveled or you were expecting too much. [[You believe in the mission. Leave your higher paying job.|Accept offer]] [["Promotions happen often," your manager says. Accept a lower title, for now.|Accept offer]] [[Maybe things will improve. Stay at your current job.|Stay at job]] [[Quit your job. Quit tech. Quit it all.|Quit start-up]]

You follow the invitation link and join your union's Slack workspace. You knew that your coworkers had formed a union a couple of years ago, but you didn't really know what that meant. You've never been in a union before. You hardly know //anyone// in your field whose been in a union. There was one coworker at your last job who had worked in the public sector for a while and was briefly in a union, but you never really asked him about it. [[Join #salary-sharing.|Salary sharing]]

The on-call documentation lists a lot of systems for which your team is responsible. You haven't heard of most of them. You ask your coworkers in Slack for help. I seems like a lot of systems were inherited in the last re-org, but no one on your team is really familiar with them. Your manager tells you not to worry about on-call yet. You'll get some training soon and will be expected to join the rotation then. You knew that was part of the job, but you were assured that teams work to keep the rotations manageable. You didn't know what that meant, and were afraid to ask. You DM one of your teammates to ask about on-call privately. She tells you that half of the team is on one rotation and the other half is on another because the shifts haven't been realigned since the last re-org and some of your team has important context for systems that your team doesn't own. They're supposed to be able to hand those off and join the main rotation for your team soon. You expected to be on-call a lot at your start-up. The company wasn't very big, but you had a real feeling of ownership over the product. You expected things to be a bit calmer at a larger company, though. "What's soon?" Your teammate explains that they've been waiting for the other team to hire someone for a while, but their manager is out on parental leave. You're afraid to know the answer, but you ask, anyway. "So, how often are you on-call?" "Every third week. 24/7 for a week." "Does our manager ever give us comp time or anything?" "Uh. Sometimes! When there's an incident. It's not an official policy or anything, so be sure to ask." "Doesn't that mean some people get it and others don't?" Your phone buzzes. There's a link to a Slack workspace invitation in your texts. [[Open the link.|Join Guild Slack]]

You arrive for work on your first day. Walking into the elevator, you encounter a woman who gives you a kind look and says, "Hello." You return the greeting. "Hi! I just started this week. What do you do here?" "I'm the CEO," she answers, and a feeling of embarassment comes rushing up. How could you be so stupid? You should have familiarized yourself with the executives before your first day. Maybe sensing your embarassment, she reassures you. "We're glad to have you on board. What do you do?" "I'm a software engineer. I'll be working on games." "Fantastic! We'll be hiring a lot of you all this year." The words don't hit you the way you think she hoped they would. You're not sure why exactly, but you feel a little more like a resource and less like a human. You imagine yourself as a line item in a budget for a moment. You take a deep breath as she steps off the elevator and try to shake the dread off. [[Here we go.|Morning standup]]

You open the #salary-sharing channel and start reading through the chat history. You find out that you are making less than some coworkers who have the same title. For a moment, you feel angry at them. You encounter stories about coworkers negotiating their salaries. Your hiring manager told you that salaries were non-negotiable, and you believed him! Maybe he actually didn't know, but it still feels bad. You're already rehearsing how you're going to ask for a raise next year. A year feels far away. Your back muscles tighten. You read about someone who was put on a performance improvement plan after they were on medical leave! You try to relax your shoulders. You really don't want your tendonitis to flare up again. Reading the replies to these stories, you are comforted by the consistent solidarity. You remind yourself that your manager is the reason you have the salary that you do, not your coworkers. You feel fired up. You check the #general chat and discover that there was a recent vote to authorize a stike. Some first day this is turning out to be! You're feeling heartbroken and energized all at once. The promise and possibility of a new workplace is in front of you, but it's not in the form you were expecting. You've never seen so many reactions and replies of support on every message. This is the sense of community you always wanted at work. You go back to your on-boarding tasks, but you're distracted by thoughts of the potential strike all week. By the time Monday rolls around, you're ready to hit the street. [[Join the strike.|Call to action]]

It's time to get down to work. Let's do this! [[Open Jira.|Jira]] [[Open Slack.|Slack]] [[Open GitHub.|GitHub]]

Your team has helpfully set aside some to help you with on-boarding. Your buddy tells you that the tickets might not have enough context, so ask questions as needed. They were going to spend some more time refining these, he says, but stuff has been a little chaotic lately. There's been an project underway that a high-level editor has been asking about and it was never on the team's roadmap for this half of the year. "No problem," you say. Back at your start-up, this was normal. The CEO was always disrupting roadmaps. Your team talked a lot about refining tickets. The company even hired an agile coach to come in for a day and give a workshop. Nevertheless, Jira always felt like a place for managers, and not for engineers. It always seemed like important context was lacking. "I'll just jump into the code and figure it out. No worries." [[Open GitHub.|GitHub]]

Slack is really overwhelming. You've been thrown into so many channels, and some of them seem wholly redundant. People cross-post because they don't know where to share things. A dozen channels are full of automated alerts that seem to fire all day, but no one has time to address the causes. The unread messages pile up. You've been reading through your team's on-boarding documentation. At least that seems thorough! But lots of information is out of date. Some of the documentation links don't resolve anymore. There are links to a subverslion repository, but the whole domain seems decomissioned and you know that your team uses GitHub now. There are links to a wiki that doesn't seem to be updated anymore. You ask in Slack about some of the acronyms you encounter. Your teammates are immensely helpful. They clarify most of the acronyms for you, but admit to not knowing the origins of some of them. Half of them refer to teams that don't exist anymore. How many re-orgs have there been recently? Whole departments seem to have been renamed, even multiple times! The landscape is feeling a little inscrutable. There's on-call documentation. That might give you a better sense of the systems that are still in use. Or maybe jumping into the code will help demystify things. [[Read on-call documentation.|On-call onboarding]] [[Open GitHub.|GitHub]]

You're not required to give notice because you're at at-will employee. You could have been fired at any time without notice or severance. You've worked hard at your job, though, and you don't want to leave your colleagues in the lurch. You've been working on an important refactor and you don't want that context to be lost. You put a lot of effort into your work and you don't want it to be wasted. If you give notice, you'll have some time to tell people. You can hand off your work to someone else on your team. You won't have any time off between jobs, but starting a new job might be energizing. On the other hand, you've given enough to this place. You could quit tomorrow and take a couple of weeks off. That'll mean starting a couple weeks into the month. Will you have insurance during those weeks? Do you have to file the COBRA paperwork? Maybe you should jump right in and set your start date for next week. You can keep paying down your student loans that way, too. [[Give notice.|Give notice]] [[Jump right in.|First day]]

You tell your manager that you're leaving, but that you're here to help for the next few weeks. She tells you not to bother and encourages you to take time off, and wishes you luck. You appreciate the supportive sentiment, but you're not sure you can really afford to take the time off. Now you feel awkward staying. [[Leave this week. Start next week.|First day]]

You've had it. You're done with opaque funding terms that line the pockets of venture capitalists and empty promises of growth. You've had it with on-call without overtime, health care plans that don't cover the care you need, and long working hours. You can't sit through another all-hands meeting full of spin. You're sick of seeing your coworkers leave, your products rot after mergers and acquisitions, your enthusiasm dwindle. You're done. You're... just... done... Congratulations! You don't know what's next, but you feel lighter. The excitement of possibility starts to creep in. You wake each morning feeling refreshed. You've got a little bit of savings, and a lot of hope. You make a cup of tea. You sit down to take in some quality Internet content. [[You read about striking tech workers at The New York Times.|Call to action]].

The workers who develop and maintain all of the systems that power The New York Times have walked off the job. They are fighting discrimination in compensation, promotions, and firings. They are demanding accountability from the company and insisting on protections against unreasonable terminations. They want to be compensated fairly when the company does well. <hr/> Thanks for playing! In September, 2024, members of the Tech Guild at The New York Times voted to authorize a strike, with over 95% of members in favor. After putting over two years into bargaining and filing multiple unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, members have had enough. Management was given months of warning, and the bargaining committee showed up for a marathon of last-minute bargaining, but the strike deadline came and went without a deal. They need your support. Follow and share: @NYTGuildTech on <a href="https://x.com/NYTGuildTech">X</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/nytguildtech/">Instagram</a>. Contribute to the <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/nyt-tech-strike-fund">strike fund</a>. <a href="https://www.labornotes.org/secrets/handouts">Organize your workplace.</a> A better workplace is possible.

Maybe things will improve! Your coworkers are really smart. Some of the best ones have left, but new people have joined who are also great! Your coworkers respect you and you have important institutional knowledge. Why should you leave? Your wages aren't keeping up with inflation, but you are reasonably well-paid, for now. That fundraising round might go better than people think! Your stock options might be worth something someday! Plus, if you leave, you don't have enough savings to buy those options right now. Paying all that tax sounds unpleasant. Yeah. Better to stay. Still, you're a little sad you didn't take a risk and make a move. You open your social media feeds to procrastinate a bit and you read about striking tech workers at The New York Times. [[That could have been you.|Call to action]]

It's time for your team's morning stand-up meeting. Your manager opens the Jira board and starts going through the tickets. One by one your coworkers talk about their work. No one is working on what they're supposed to be working on. Between dealing with production issues, reviewing unexpected contributions from other teams, and attending meetings, everyone seems to be juggling high priority work that isn't reflected on the board. You feel a little defeated, but you're used to this feeling after a stand-up. [[Get to work.|Start work]]

There are a lot of repositories. Getting access to all of them just deepens your confusion. The outdated team names appear again and again. You're invited to some teams that seem strange. You're told that the names are kind of irrelevant and also out of date, but they grant access to deployment tools and secrets. Your teammate explains how it all works, but it's going to take a while to get your head around it. You ask your teammate why these systems seem a little disorganized. You're careful to add that you know how hard it can be to maintain these things, and that you've never really seen management give anyone space for work that like. Slack informs you that your teammate is typing. Then they stop. Your phone buzzes with a new text message. "Has anyone invited you to the union Slack yet?" "No, what's that? How do I join?" Your coworker responds with a link to a Slack invitation. [[Open the link.|Join Guild Slack]]