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> Has anyone worked somewhere that they felt they could just do their job without worrying about the career advancement aspect? That's every place I've ever worked, to be honest, including tech megacorps. Lots of places will put a lot of emphasis on career advancement, but I've never seen anyone punished for not doing it. I'm not counting "won't get promoted" as a punishment, for obvious reasons.
FB (10 years ago atleast) had a timelimit to go from L4 to L5
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My non-tech company seems to also have this up or out mentality. They don't have a specific timeline, but if you're a midlevel for too long like me, they definitely try to manage you out. I've had a few friends who are managers confirm this.
Yeah, you can run into it anywhere. When I was in the pizza delivery business in my early 20s, once you got into management, there was very much an up-or-out mentality. You couldn't just be a really good assistant manager; you were pushed to move up to manager and then to a bigger store and so on. It just seems to bother the climbers to see someone content to stay in the position he knows he's best suited for.
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I'd say that they are more uncertain than industry jobs at this point, unless you're talking about companies that have recently been taken over by private equity where the new owners intend to gut the place and sell off the parts.
> unless you're talking about companies that have recently been taken over by private equity where the new owners intend to gut the place and sell off the parts. Off topic, but this is starting to feel like the rule rather than the exception. This practice should not be legal.
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OTOH, if you're barely able to afford food, if they're the same cost, high protein might be a good thing.
Rice and beans are cheap and combining them, your body can use the protein.
But I totally agree!
If you want to stay in swe, government jobs are the best, of you can get in as a permanent employee, not as a contractor.
do staff engineers really have increased responsibility & workload at your company? The distinction between staff and sr is kind of fake at most places I think. If anything, its just staff have more leeway to choose what to work on.
- Has very specific domain expertise in an area critical to the company
- Can work across the stack and get a project done from 0 to 1 without throwing their hands up in defeat when they can't plow through it with SO/Copilot
- Gets a bunch of stuff out the door that management cares about
- Acts as technical lead on large cross-team initiatives
There's basically no consistency from company to company as to which of these truly qualifies somebody as Staff-level. As I'm so fond of pointing out there are places that call every non-Junior person a "Principal Engineer" and places that hire 24-year-olds as "Senior". Titles simply aren't fungible across companies. Show an Amazon employee this comment and they'll say that those first 3 are expected of a Senior engineer. I similarly was doing a lot of 2, 3, and 4 at a company that flat-out refused to promote me to Senior because I didn't meet some arbitrary HR criteria that they cooked up decades prior.
At this point I don't care what somebody calls me as long as I get paid market value to do things in a smart way with people that are well-intentioned.
One option is to find a job that has legacy work. A good place to look is a non-tech company. IE: a company that might use tech to run the business (which you will support), but tech isn't their main product. These companies tend be using older software because they aren't really required to have the latest and greatest.
Bloomberg. The terminal level on their IC ladder is "Senior". They have no formal concept of Staff or Principal engineer. People spend decades there.
Lots of large tech firms have defined career ladders with a concept of terminal levels - typically senior level beyond which there is no up-or-out expectation of growth. I think small and midsize companies that focus on fast growth will often carry this expectation, so I'd avoid those. Alternatively: small non-startups or large companies beyond their prime (again, lack of company-wide focus on rapid growth is key her…
Even there giving the impression of not wanting to advance is often a good way to mark yourself as a "low performer". A savvy understanding of politics is required in these circumstances.