[quote=svelte]Well you learn something even from bad decisions…if you take the time to analyze why it was bad.
The trick is to learn to avoid the bad decisions as much as possible, but there are going to be some. just no way around it.
In the rear-view mirror, most of my bad decision were worth the pain. Though if I could start my life over again with the knowledge I have now, I certainly would side-step each of them!
There are two decisions that really need to be right in life: who you marry and what you do for a living. I think I got both of those right.[/quote]
The funny part is every single time I had to leave a company was when the company got acquired or merged. I mean, from an equity and money perspective it was great. But from a job continuity perspective it sucked. Broadcom was a case that if it wasn’t for Hock Tan swooping the company down and treating it as a MBA “parts worth more than the sum” project, I could have easily stayed there 10+ years…Leaving with a RSU pot was just a consolation prize , I wish I could have stayed there…happens so many times….
Happened again this time too… M&A’s suck for tech employees. And the worst is when the parent company that bought you is run by imbeciles that think they know better than you do…This time around I get doubly screwed because my stock options were negotiated 100% all or nothing at the 3 year mark, with only a 25% immediate vesting upon “change of control” (IE acquired) …. I didn’t think it was a big deal because I thought I’d be able to make it to the third year at least, while most stock/option grants are over 4 years…But man, the imbecility I deal with now on a daily basis is just off the chart. I’ll take that 25% and run early.
Really simple example. My engineers have been asking for a development IOS and android phone. At most costs $1000 per person. Chump change for the company… And man, the parent company is like, well we don’t have a mobile phone policy for normal engineers, but you can submit like this large stack of paperwork justifying a stipend for each of the employees that need a phone, they will have a $50/credit per month for a phone plan and $200 credit for a phone, and they will have to pay for the rest of the phone. I’m like WTF, they don’t need a data plan, they just need an actual IOS phone and an Android Pixel to do their work. So it ran up and down the finance and my uselss VP, and dragged on for 2months..with me finally saying something like: “I don’t understand why this is so difficult for everyone to understand why a mobile engineer needs a work phone hardware to get his job done and shouldn’t be expected to use his personal phone.. I don’t see many server engineers bringing in their own servers… Do you?” and then pissed, I ended up just buying each of my engineers a dev phone out of my own pocket so we could actually get work done…
What does my company do? “Well, FLU, shouldn’t have done that. Because what you did makes the company look cheap…”
