Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A career ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 332 posts

Re: A career ending mistake

#171

Post by allisdust »

znq wrote: post #119
moonchrome wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with being civil and approachable but I really don't want to make the effort of being friendly with people I work with just because higher ups think this will compensate for below market salary. If I click somewhere that's great but I don't really see a correlation with a good work environment.

Sure. If you live in the US and want to work for us and want a Silicon Valley market salary at the same time, then we're not the right company for you. Not because we don't want to pay you a Silicon Valley salary, but simply because we cannot afford it. If you are in another country/market, then we are very able to pay market salary and in most cases even above market salary, while providing a great work environment…

I'm glad people with your mindset exist and trying to make a difference. May your company prosper and provide a happy workplace for a lot more people!

Re: A career ending mistake

#172

Post by vinceguidry »

reaperducer wrote: post #164
vinceguidry wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at. There's not much business value in just having one person be really good at something. It doesn't scale. The state of coding and information technology means you can't maintain exponential or even logarithmic scaling of your own abilities to produce business value. At some point, the only real thing left to do is…

10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you. That only seems to make sense if those 10 less-productive people make one-tenth the salary of the single productive person. I've seen this in action. I know of a company that hired a whole room full of know-it-all high school drop-outs to write code, rather than one or two trained college graduates. That company went out of business in a matter of months.

The economics of software development completely abstract out the costs of developer salaries. Software is not a capital-intensive industry, it's labor-intensive. They don't need to wring costs out of the production pipeline, they need to wring more production out of it. Any added cost is worth it.

Companies all want to have software biz economics, but few of them actually know how to run a software business. A room full of high school dropouts is each going to have 1% of the productive capacity of one top-level resource. College grads will have roughly 5%. With decent leadership and mentoring that can go up to 10%. Within a few years they'll hit 10-15%, becoming 'senior engineers'. Title inflation happens because titles, and their requisite salaries, don't matter for the industry. It's the same in finance, so you see a zillion vice presidents.

It makes no sense for a company with hundreds of devs to take a top-level resource and waste their talents on writing code. Top level resources write code to stay sane and relevant, not because the company needs their code.

Re: A career ending mistake

#173

Post by erwincoumans »

My 5 cents: optimize for working with great colleagues on things you are passionate about, with leadership caring about those things and giving you freedom to do that. Keeping up with general tech trends helps too, and stay curious.

In my experience, if you follow this, the appreciation with follow, either inside or outside your company (or both).

Re: A career ending mistake

#174

Post by nefitty »

asdfman123 wrote: post #144
ebiester wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it seems to lump tech lead, staff-level individual contributor not leading a team, and architect-level positions that have no direct reports. When I speak about career options to people I lead, I say there is a senior level plateau. At that point, you have to be more intentional about growth. If you want to stay in the field, and you want to progress past senior developer (staying a core contributor is an option!…

Staying a productive IC your whole career is fairly straightforward: I really think it comes down to never "coasting" and always being open to learning new things. The problem is a lot of older people seem to believe that once they get to a certain point, they're entitled a position and respect. Is it a wonder why younger people, who might be more up-to-date than them, don't want to work with them? The trick is to ne…

It seems like some people fall into this trap if they manage to get into FAANG. I would be scared of that happening to me. It's like, your entire view of the industry was built around hitting the winner's podium, and once you've achieved that, where do you go? There's only so many gold medals to go around on the podium itself, anyways.

Re: A career ending mistake

#175

Post by rurban »

"You can't stop the waves, as the saying goes, but you can learn to surf. Chance favours the prepared mind."

Never underestimate such innocent looking sentences. I've learned surfing with 40. Surfing is by far the hardest craft to learn. You only have a few seconds on a wave, and hardly get anyone, esp. in crowded surfs. You need at least 5 years to get decent at it. But it's really worth it. I'm missing it a lot.

Re: A career ending mistake

#177

Post by rektide »

Noteable to me is that the only people with any power are consultants (sometimes) or managers. There are very few paths where the very good, wise, experienced techies get much self-determininacy, much power. You have to become a manager & fight your stake via politics to gain control.

Probably one of the key reasons SRE & devops roles are semi-popular. Your target is techies, and you have much more leeway about where you want to go. There used to be architect roles, but they feel- to me- fairly outmoded?

Re: A career ending mistake

#178

Post by allisdust »

Jaruzel wrote: post #118

I hate my job. I don't know how I got here. Like many I started out in small scale IT just as desktop computers were becoming a thing. I transitioned from mainframe support to desktop support, from there I worked through several desktop support roles, wishing I was server support but never managing to get there... over time I became a desktop architect, and then infrastructure architect, and now well.... I just don't…

Aah meetings. The bane of happiness all around the world. They can even be graded on how bad they suck.

Best are the ones with > 10 people. You know beforehand nothing gets done in it and no one cares. So you just nod along and drop a word here and there and work on something you anyway have to do in parallel.

Worst are the ones where your boss is present and may be 3-4 of your peers. You are supposed to look enthusiastic, offering opinions, ideas and all kinds of projections, d*ck measuring and mud slinging all in a non combative politically sly manner. And probably even nod approvingly at the silly ideas of the one above you.

Re: A career ending mistake

#179

Post by allisdust »

noisy_boy wrote: post #125

> I think there are three main kinds of career destination, at least in the tech industry: > Independent > Senior individual contributor (IC) > Management I guess I'll stick my neck out and just admit that I don't want to give any more fucks about any of the above and just wake up, sip my tea, read the news and take a bloody nap whenever I want to. Also volunteering/open source but mostly, not doing things I don't wa…

Sadly unless there is some kind of universal ABI or born to rich parents, doing what we want especially in the way we want is not an option. Its wage slavery all across the world and no end in sight for any number of future generations.

Re: A career ending mistake

#180

Post by deweywsu »

giantg2 wrote: post #5

"It's not surprising, then, that many of us find ourselves in less than fully satisfying jobs, with doubtful or non-existent prospects for advancement." Very true. I can't wait for my career to be over. I don't think I'll ever find the position where I feel I belong, so I'll just be miserable anywhere now that I know how broken the system really is.

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN