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Tech company career ladders

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Re: Tech company career ladders

#131

Post by gregorymichael »

kbar13 wrote: post #15
wheresmyusern wrote: post #12

i hesitate to pursue a career of any kind, especially tech, because of all this. you have to have a pretty good personality and charisma in order to work well with your manager, or else you will make no progress which means you get fired. people are born with all kinds of quirks, peculiarities and qualities. while im a better programmer than most of the people who i went to college with, i have a special problem with…

social skills can be learned

Agreed. "how to win friends and influence people" changed my life here.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#132

Post by commandlinefan »

> If you're a citizen or have the appropriate paperwork, this is no big deal.

To a certain extent. However, too many job changes, over too short of a period, looks really bad on a resume. It is possible to job hop yourself into unemployable territory, citizen or not.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#133

Post by busterarm »

taneq wrote: post #66
busterarm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah except your promotion isn't usually a level, it's lead, manager, director, or chief. You leverage that and walk to a slightly larger company in that new role after a couple of years. Then rinse & repeat once or twice and you just shaved off years of slogging through the FAANGs. After all of the above though, I would put 2-3 years in at a FAANG and then do whatever the heck I want.

True, but that relies on the company itself raising the level of work that it's doing to justify the title change. Coming from a small company with an inflated title just makes you look pretentious and silly.

I didn't think that needed to be said, and actually I think it's on you to make that happen at the company rather than the other way around.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#134

Post by commandlinefan »

mlazos wrote: post #2

I think this article unfairly paints small companies as some nirvana which is obviously not the case. I have plenty of friends at small companies who feel like their c-suite is filled with sociopaths and because the company is under the radar nobody cares how the employees of said company are treated.

> paints small companies as some nirvana which is obviously not the case

Seconded. At least at big companies, they have defined procedures for promotions and departures (if for no other reason than to cover themselves legally). In small companies things can end up as unpredictable as middle-school politics (and about as mature).

Re: Tech company career ladders

#135

Post by falcolas »

hugs wrote: post #35

I wish I had this information before I took a job at Google 11 years ago. I probably would have still taken the job, but I would have realized I was really signing up for two jobs: 1) The job I was hired for; ... but *more importantly*... 2) The job of navigating the leveling and review systems, including managing your manager.

To be fair, this second job exists at every company. Whatever the levels/review systems are called, managing your future is your job, and only your job. Your manager is your employee when it comes to setting up your future.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#136

Post by ralphc »

taneq wrote: post #55
mlazos wrote: post #2

I think this article unfairly paints small companies as some nirvana which is obviously not the case. I have plenty of friends at small companies who feel like their c-suite is filled with sociopaths and because the company is under the radar nobody cares how the employees of said company are treated.

Even if the people are great, small (5-20 employee) companies often simply don't have scope for much career progression. You might have one layer of management between yourself and the company owner, so unless they start hiring or you plan on taking over the company, you can only be promoted once.

Yeah, at the small companies I worked at, did ok but not crazy growth, the managers & above had been there for years and weren't going anywhere, so there was no place to get promoted into.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#137

Post by jerf »

Aeolun wrote: post #68
Afforess wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> conversations with me are always like chewing sandpaper, unless they focus on some very narrow interests of mine. Basically, that's the problem. In order to establish a repertoire, you need to have more than dense interests. It's cool to be passionate about one or two hobbies. Lots of people have none, and this makes conversation dull. However, it is vital you can maintain ordinary conversation on lay topics too --…

I think the problem is that most casual conversation just isn't relevant. If we're having a conversation to have a conversation, what's the point? I happen across a lot of conversations where people are just blabbing at each other, but don't actually listen to what the other is saying (or are clearly not interested in what each is saying), but still continue to have a conversation. I don't get that...

"If we're having a conversation to have a conversation, what's the point?"

You're actually halfway there with the question. Indeed, the point is not conversation, or at least not the literal contents of the conversation.

When I was younger, I had a hard time understanding this stuff too. I'm not 100% sure why (I'm not convinced I'm even slightly on the spectrum, but it's not out of the question entirely; it's also just possible that I was simply too different as a kid from the other kids), but one of the steps to resolving it is just to realize that yes, there is logic to almost all of what is going on, and it isn't actually that complicated of a logic either. The biggest impediment to not being able to understand these interactions is the belief that you can't understand them, or that there's some sort of virtue in not understanding them. The second-biggest impediment is the belief that these things are essentially irrational, in the older sense of "essential" as meaning something like "inseparable from the whole"; there is actually a level on which this is all shockingly rational behavior. Once you get over those ideas, and accept that the surface levels and what's actually going on in the relationship between two people is not the same thing, it doesn't really take long to figure out what's going on.

(There's... a few other ideas you'll find you may want to discard. For instance, while politically incorrect today, there are reasons to be initially distrustful of people not in "your group". If you can't believe that's true today, it was certainly true in evolutionary terms. So there are instinctual protocols for determining whether someone is "in" or "out", and there are reasons for them, and there are reasons why they involve difficult-to-forge signals like simply knowing some in-knowledge from a culture, or burning time on seemingly-inconsequential conversations. And these things operate at instinct level; it doesn't matter if you think they are wrong, out of date, or politically incorrect; they do what they do anyhow. Start putting a few of these things together and it all starts making much more sense. There's reasons why these things exist and persist.)

Re: Tech company career ladders

#139

Post by superhuzza »

taneq wrote: post #66
busterarm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah except your promotion isn't usually a level, it's lead, manager, director, or chief. You leverage that and walk to a slightly larger company in that new role after a couple of years. Then rinse & repeat once or twice and you just shaved off years of slogging through the FAANGs. After all of the above though, I would put 2-3 years in at a FAANG and then do whatever the heck I want.

True, but that relies on the company itself raising the level of work that it's doing to justify the title change. Coming from a small company with an inflated title just makes you look pretentious and silly.

Not really - If you managed a small team at a company, you've still got management experience. Bigger companies will recognize that regardless of title.

Re: Tech company career ladders

#140

Post by commandlinefan »

jaggederest wrote: post #82
tejasmanohar wrote: post #24

Within a job ladder, you then have levels. They tend to map onto years of experience, *whether you have a degree or not*, what kind of degree it is, how well you do in your interviews, how much money you ask for or hint about, and possibly how well you did as an intern. I don't work at a big corp. Has anyone seen career growth stall directly because they lack a (bachelor's) degree (in CS)? This article doesn't direct…

No, but I have seen people's career stall because they worked on the wrong project. As my manager put it at the time "Nobody gets promoted for reducing the size of a tire fire by 50%". You have to be really strategic about what you work on, and for who. It's not about the technical contributions, it's about finding and retaining a sponsor higher in the organization. You help them torpedo competing initiatives and inc…

> I have seen people's career stall because they worked on the wrong project.

... and then they wonder why there's so much turnover in our industry. "Due to circumstances completely outside your control, you have no future at this company." "Hm - well, maybe I have a future at this other company then." "What ever happened to loyalty?!"

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