How I survived being a $220k/year intern (opens in new tab)

I don't understand people who write things like this. If you're unhappy leave, if you think the corporate culture is wrong, either participate in fixing it, or get out. I honestly can't stand people who self righteously sound the alarm about how they can see all of the things wrong with everybody else. It sounds especially childish when you are making so much money.

Something smelled fishy, so I did a bit of follow-up. This dude is leaving out a huge detail to make his employment troubles be a pivotal problem when...it's not.

Let's footnote a coupleo f his "Story of Pivotal The Employment"

> Hired

To contribute to Redis

> All My Work Is Owned by Another Employee? What?

The primary redis maintainer, not a pivotal employee?

> Let’s Organize Instead of Being A Hobby Project

Let's misrepresent the philosophical position of the OS project maintainer on the best way to move the project forward.

> Two Days of Work to Clear 4 Years of Issues Ignored By The Creator Because Laziness

A bunc hof those issues have fundamental problems that the creator explicitly drilled into and explained (https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906#issuecomment-5145...)

I work for the "Labs" (Services) portion of Pivotal and I've seen this guy's stuff on HN before...

Can't comment on what non-services teams are like at Pivotal but the services organization is pretty spectacular.

Pivotal's got problems just like every other organization does, but this guy seems to be mad as hell and blowing things a _bit_ out of proportion.

Some people would be happy if their first job was to be at a customer service desk or even stacking files for experience with a decent salary in order to get their foot in the door to a internship at a FAANG company. Where as here we see a very arrogant developer paid top dollar for a less demanding role and yet still complains about their employer and chose to work there for over three years.

Every company has problems and you don't have to stay there even if you hate everything under the sun about them. Perhaps he was too focused on hate-watching his company's culture to even think about quitting.

I get the sense that the author is somewhat toxic in the workplace and his managers didn't have the power to fire him, so they gave him as meaningless a job as possible to get him to quit.

I'm also surprised he isn't more concerned with anonymity. I know if he applied for an open role at my current company, based on this post he would not be hired.

> I worked from home for three years with a $220,000 salary, traveled a total of six times, two SF, one Seattle, three to Europe, and contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects, all the while never being granted responsibility greater than what you’d give a middle school intern.

But... that all sounds like a lot of responsibility doesn't it?

The only interesting thought I've had while reading this pretty mundane post is "man am I happy to not be working with that dude".

I think "Matt" thinks he's a bit cleverer than he is. It's not clear what he's talking about.

He also uses the word "fraud" ad nauseam. One place I worked actually used Pivotal Tracker, and I found it worked pretty well from the end-user perspective. Wasn't ground-breaking software or anything, but it at least worked. I could see my tasks at a glance a lot easier than with, say, Basecamp.

Just another person with an axe to grind.

Blog posts like this are usually best interpreted as the bitter ranting of an ex-employee who was let go. The author himself was semi-notorious (possibly still so?) in the Redis community for being a bit of a self-serving demagogue (to put it nicely).

Generally speaking, if an individual was a remote, WFH, IC employee whose manager didn't even talk to them for a year, they probably don't have the working knowledge to do much critiquing of the company at large.

It should also be noted that Pivotal was acquired by VMware for ~$2.7B.

Points like this:

> At the other end, you have employees who create your products being treated like unwanted interns because development and engineering isn’t given recognition for generating revenue. Obviously only sales and executives are money makers. Developers are just an unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable burden reducing your profits because they have non-commission-based salaries. Why not just fire all your developers then sell what they made without fixing or improving anything—wow, infinite profit!

Coupled with him making $220k/yr in salary (no mention that I saw about equity) doesn't seem to gel. The entitlement is strong with this one.

> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects, all the while never being granted responsibility greater than what you’d give a middle school intern

Am I being a bit dim or did they immediately contradict themselves here?

Being paid a lot of money for not having any responsibility sounds good to me. This guy sure seems angry about it though.

It was hard to get at the main bullet points from the rant.

I found that what he did - his job description as he put 'Matt as a service' - to be reasonable.

Support, bug fixes, documentation, and development. It would be nice to see more companies have someone completely own a small piece.

Often when I contact developer support, I talk to someone who clearly does not know anything about the product I'm talking about. It would have been nice to talk to Matt at that time.

Conversely, having the developers directly talk to customers gives them more visibility to how their products are being used. This is both fulfilling and enlightening.

Should be tagged [2017]: while the article itself doesn't have a date, the next in the series ("How Dumb Must You Be To Work For Pivotal in 2018?") notes:

> Previously (December 2017): Pivotal Empolyment 2013-2016

I really feel the need to rebuke hacker news commenters on this. The number of comments shouting "You made 220k! STFU!" is ridiculous. I don't care how much you pay me, you don't get to treat me like shit. Once you reach a certain salary a job is more about fulfilment/ego/interest/motivation than $$, there's a reason we're not all whoring ourselves out on street corners for an extra couple of dollars in the evening.

What the author is talking about is a real issue - there is a very significant portion of enterprise (and b2b) software that basically adds little or no value compared to a competitor. Often the money is made by leveraging relationships with contacts in large corporations who frankly won't notice the money is missing - and for a plethora of reasons are more incentivised to push for buying something than to actually see the company succeed. I've personally seen sales organisations pay hundreds of thousands to external contractors when we had more competent staff literally sitting waiting to be asked to do the work. Even then, there's a hell of a lot of software out there that isn't difficult and isn't interesting, so the defining feature of who provides it is what their sales organisation looks like.

The result of that dynamic though, is the engineering organisation can be crap- because they're not where the company derives its value. Which might not be what an software engineer wants to hear, but it's true. (as an aside, find out what sales folks are paid at your current job - it's probably more than you).

> "I worked from home for three years with a $220,000 salary"

I stopped reading right there. I really don't want to hear someone in this situation complain. Suck it up or find a new job - take a pay cut if you're really that unhappy. I've worked for shitty companies for a fraction of that salary.

Hell, It's taken me over 15 years to get to a salary even within spitting distance of that amount - and I've never been able to work from home.

> I Passed Up a $50,000 Severance To Write This

I wish he had taken the $50K. We would have all been better off!

(As noted in the article, the $50K severance would have been tied to a non-disparagement agreement.)

If anyone is tired of getting $220k/year, i could take it!.

---

I think sometimes developers have drink so hard the kool aid of changing the world and all that, and if is not happening, then get sad. But why?

Maybe because I have a long time in this industry, but this is what I do: If see an opportunity to improve things (without need to convince others) I do. If need to convince others, and succeed, great. If not, but the environment is okey, I keep going.

> That’s okay though, just hand off the company to your bloated, slovenly, zero-posture assistant whose name literally means “I’m going to rip you off.”

This is where I got lost. I worked at Pivotal from 2014 to 2017. There's a lot I can say about Rob Mee but this is just a bizarre and wrong attack given that he 1) Founded Pivotal labs and lead it through the EMC Acquisition, 2) Was responsible for creating a first-tier services company with a name to rival Thoughtworks and a reputation that to this day bumps my resume to the top of many recruiters' lists by virtue of just seeing "Pivotal" on it.

Edit: Quote from one of the prior posts in this "series".

> Future employers judge you on your past employment. Having any extended tenure at Pivotal on your CV is a negative mark against you.

I have absolutely not had this experience. None of my former coworkers have had this experience.

On the other hand, people who write blog posts like these... might have this experience.

No interns make that high of a salary. That means they value his work/skill. It’s clearly a management problem but this is a hard problem. In fact it’s different for everyone. Some people like well structured management and others don’t. On top of that he was remote, which makes it even harder.

His rants are mostly in sales. Engineer ranting about sales is like Sales people saying Engineers are pointless. (Btw both are very common perception). Now that I’ve done both ends I can share that sales people are doing that for a reason. At the end of the day, high end sales are all politics and you need to be good at the game.

This type of rant is what interns do.

I survived a job that amounted to fixing keyboards for $35k/year but kudos to you for surviving your $220k/year internship. I’m sure it was brutal.

Damn I had an offer from them years ago. I should have took it. I don't mind making that much for doing little that's plenty of free time for my side projects....this guy could have used his time wisely and never complain about it ...you can't force companies to be good employers or successful at what they do obviously this company had major red flags you could have left quietly long time and find a more fulfilling role ...otherwise shut up and take the money and use that free time to do great things if you are capable

> At the other end, you have employees who create your products being treated like unwanted interns because development and engineering isn’t given recognition for generating revenue. Obviously only sales and executives are money makers. Developers are just an unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable burden reducing your profits because they have non-commission-based salaries. Why not just fire all your developers then sell what they made without fixing or improving anything—wow, infinite profit!

Funnily enough I've worked in a company that did just that, they developed a TV software that puts ads on the streaming of soccer games and the software was 5 or so years old with no software team. They had a person who did support and was there for a long time and would always have 2-3 developers on the payroll who wouldn't stay more than their probation period. I left within 2 weeks but the company owner was very rich and seemed pretty OK with how things were...

this seems old, but to be honest, the "work got boring" part is not unique to the company described.

i have this nagging feeling that we have tons of issues, and overly complicated systems created today because very talented and smart engineers are being giving the most mundane tasks to do on a daily basis...

Why is this at the top of HN?

Can anyone elaborate on “and proudly brags about his criminal acquaintances in the news”? It’s a bullet point in the section about, presumably, antirez.

> At founding, the company allotted about 13% of company stock for employee ownership.

Is this meant to be disparaging? it’s actually above average (of 10%).

Note that at each finding round, and as needed if you make too much money (don’t spend money fast enough to require another round), you allocate another chunk. The 13% isn’t fixed for eternity.

That’s like the first paragraph. It’s already clear author doesn’t understand how companies work.

Sounds like a person who is really bitter. Good thing he wrote this as a warning sign to all future possible employers or managers.

Imagine giving up 50 racks to complain about getting $220k per year. If you don't want the job, I'll take it.

While lots of organizations are not great, and some are even dishonest, something about the guy's tone suggests the demotivator from despair.com:

https://despair.com/products/dysfunction

I worked at this company overlapping this time frame.

Although the post is emotionally-charged,it's totally on point.

I think everyone is hyper focused on the 220k number, which is not that unusual for a VC-backed Silicon Valley startup.

Admittedly the article is a bit rant-filled, but I have also heard other people say Pivotal is (was?) a bit weird, especially regarding taking pair programming a bit too far (another blog example: http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair-pro...)

I am a bit surprised at all the criticism of the author and saying that "I wouldn't hire the guy because of this post". Consider the asymmetry of power between employer and employee. Companies often put up self-praising blog posts describing their perfect hiring process and how great they are, but often they are a big messy hairball inside. In the US, people very rarely work up the courage to criticize them, because they have mouths to feed, health insurance to pay, and can't afford the expensive lawyers to combat the large companies' legal teams. So we should encourage those who speak out, or at least not punish them more for doing so. In fact, I think the only reason this person is comfortable doing so is that they have probably enough left over from that 220k/year to be comfortable speaking out.

Having grown up in and around both, it's interesting how many people who complain about mental jobs would fare in physical jobs that are far worse.

It's good to work thru your feelings, but for many people feelings are a luxury, having access to opportunity to improve yourself in anyway is a privilege.

The interesting thing to me is that they had an open-source support business getting requests to buy their services, which the salesmen dropped because it wasn't the most lucrative deal they could be doing. But presumably there's a viable business in that particular type of support.

This article takes “tech bro” to a whole new level of entitlement.

We engineers need to organize ourselves. We make piles of money for companies, yet we are too often voiceless.

I wonder how widespread this phenomenon actually is, anyone has similar stories to share?

title really needs the leading ‘How’ from TFA

I'd comment, but if I did, I'd likely exceed the boundaries of my own agreement with a different company.

fuck this was funny

I find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little expected work. It’s not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about problems in the sales culture are likely true. But he could have left any time and instead chose to stay there for 3 years. And I get that leaving a job isn’t always an option for people but those reasons don’t feel relevant for his situation.

Author reads as overly entitled and arrogant imo.

the weirdest thing to me about pivotal is that they require full-time pair programming. how do people survive in that company at all? i can't fathom being yoked to someone (literally) 40-50 hours a week.

> .... shady “customers, but also investors, but also customers.” It’s convenient having combo customer/investors. If quarterly numbers look bad, just ask your customers, who are also investors, to buy more services to prop up their own investment. After all, they wouldn’t want their investment decisions to look bad, right?

That's not shady, to me, it is a common practice and does take advantage of the accounting practices that different stakeholders use. This is what all of tech is doing with VC portfolios. That startup that delivers lunch to your startup, do you think that was random? It is an incestuous movement of money around VC portfolio companies to merely print higher revenue numbers so they can sell them one at a time for 10x those revenue numbers.

Pretty much nothing is organic, so I can't make a distinction for this particular practice. The market can bare it.

Honestly, it should be a more common practice for market participants to be taking pseudo-activist roles in their investments. Just because you are used to passive investments - and probably can't do anything else - doesn't mean it is the best strategy for your portfolio.

Not making any opinion about the other problems with Pivotal, just pointing out how this section isn't validation for the complaints.

There are a lot of interesting and useful takeaways from this article that are being overlooked because of the jealousy of, "boy, I wish someone paid me 220k to not really do anything while working from home!"

“jUsT QuIt yOuR jOb” -hn

With no second thought on any outside life factors.

So much whining in this thread.

It is possible to make $220k/year and also be unhappy. Deal with it.

Beyond a point, money won't increase your happiness. Riding out a terrible job where you're underutilized and overpaid because the job pays well isn't "grit".

It's dishonest. It's opportunism. It's cowardly.

Having worked for a strange startup with plenty of cronyism and nepotism, I honestly think there needs to be some kind of government oversight to make sure that executives aren't squandering investors' money or worse that the investors are in on some kind of shell company.