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Comment on Ask HN: How do you escape CRUD jobs?parent

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I suspect some of it has to do with your personality and how much your over-performance engenders envy.

Looking at my work history, it cost me 3-4 jobs at companies that subsequently failed. The best example is one where the new and essential product needed to avoid an m*n database transaction explosion, where m is the number of clients. My warnings about this---and it was very easy to explain and the math is rather simple after all---kept me off that project and sidelined to a dead end. The project ... went even worse than expected, was never reliable after the 2nd client logged in (the project manager had never even done a multiple client system before), until a new crew was hired to rewrite it, but it was a little late by then....

When Mr. Church say "You get fired if you fail politically." he's spot on. That was obviously a factor these jobs and cost me another one or two. All of these were small companies, except for Lucent during it's year of free fall from 106,000 employees to a targeted 35,000 or so; they ended up getting bought by Alcetal.

Here's a constructive comment (I hope): one thing you have to watch out for is managers who are failed programmers. Even worse is if they had no input into your hiring.

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