One of the things I surprisingly (?) learned at a small startup as the first employee.
It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter how close you are to the decision makers, influencing them is still hard. Since then, I just don't care. Sure, I'll do my best, but I do it for me and to get another offer in two years.
Now, I work at a big company, I'm like 5-8 levels removed from the decision makers, and I just don't care. I still try to do my best, if I have any concerns, I might mention it once, but if decision makers are not interested in my feedback, I don't mind. I work my hours, do my best, I don't take anything personally, but I also don't care if there is an outage at Friday (that could have been prevented if only we addressed the issues I brought up a couple of times) or if the feature we are developing never gets to production or if the feature fails (predictably, but a CxO has the amazing idea to pursue some obviously bad product decision).
It's difficult to not show the rest of the team how much I don't care. It's very different to show everyone openly you don't gaf (that's not accepted) and just simply not giving a f while pretending you care (that's okay), so I learned to "mask" my true emotions.
I don't think so. They didn't throw in the towel yet, it doesn't look rosy (at least to me). One of them is still a friend of mine. I learned a lot, so I'm glad it happened, but I'm also glad that I left.
It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter how close you are to the decision makers, influencing them is still hard. Since then, I just don't care. Sure, I'll do my best, but I do it for me and to get another offer in two years.
Now, I work at a big company, I'm like 5-8 levels removed from the decision makers, and I just don't care. I still try to do my best, if I have any concerns, I might mention it once, but if decision makers are not interested in my feedback, I don't mind. I work my hours, do my best, I don't take anything personally, but I also don't care if there is an outage at Friday (that could have been prevented if only we addressed the issues I brought up a couple of times) or if the feature we are developing never gets to production or if the feature fails (predictably, but a CxO has the amazing idea to pursue some obviously bad product decision).
It's difficult to not show the rest of the team how much I don't care. It's very different to show everyone openly you don't gaf (that's not accepted) and just simply not giving a f while pretending you care (that's okay), so I learned to "mask" my true emotions.