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A career-ending mistake

bitfieldconsulting.com

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Re: A career-ending mistake

#81

Post by yodsanklai »

ptero wrote: post #68
fallinditch wrote: post #16

> Most managers are terrible. A sweeping statement indeed, but it does reflect my experience too. Perhaps it's my ingrained deference to authority - when I start a new position I tend to believe that my manager has my best interests at heart. This is a mistake and I now believe it's better to maintain a kind of defensive attitude and to always be assertive in establishing, and if necessary negotiating, the responsibi…

Just as a personal data point, most managers I had in my now 25-year career in tech were good. They set clear goals and expectations, provided honest feedback, both positive and negative, and quickly jumped to help re-plan when things did not work out. They were also asking what I am optimizing for (for me at different times it was more money; promotion; interesting problems to work on; time to explore other long-ter…

> Some specific advice from that manager was (in his words) "never promise something in 2 weeks unless you could demonstrate it today" and "do not sit quietly when you are given unrealistic timelines; counter with specific subtasks you see and how long you expect each will take".

Thanks these are good advice.

> most managers I had in my now 25-year career in tech were good.

I didn't have tons of managers, but my experience as well. Of course, they have their own interest in mind, rather than mine, but in my case at least, our interests were more or less aligned (completing projects, not burning out or leaving the team, working on things that matter to the company, avoid conflicts...).

Re: A career-ending mistake

#82

Post by rakejake »

paxys wrote: post #17

"What do you want to be?" is a question we have all constantly been asked since middle school by parents, teachers, career counsellors, professors, recruiters, mentors, managers, HR and lots of other well meaning souls. My answer is the same at 40 as it was at 14 – I don't know. And you know what? I've been fine. I have worked at some great companies, and some not so great ones. A couple FAANGs as well as a 20-person…

I'm happy to hear this. Cheers.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#83

Post by mgkimsal »

donatj wrote: post #77
equestria wrote: post #20

Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there . Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there. I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60…

Even in small tech. I worked for an agency in the aughts and we would put up websites at roughly the pace of 1 a week. In my time there I'd guess I'd personally built a little over 100 websites and developed our internal framework for us to make doing so easier. Every couple years since, I've gotten a bug in my butt and investigated how many sites still had pieces I'd clearly worked on. On this most recent occasion,…

I left a project in 2003. I can still hit their web login page, and I still see something specific in the URL I put there. I've no doubt they've upgraded some stuff behind the scenes, but they've likely not done huge overhaul, otherwise they'd have simply redone the auth process to whatever an upgraded system uses. They did change some graphics on the login page, and added a google tag thing, and converted some styles to css.

Very odd to look at it and know that I'm probably one of 2 or 3 people who know why that specific code is there, and also to know that the base of this is still running.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#84

Post by mathattack »

donatj wrote: post #77
equestria wrote: post #20

Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there . Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there. I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60…

Even in small tech. I worked for an agency in the aughts and we would put up websites at roughly the pace of 1 a week. In my time there I'd guess I'd personally built a little over 100 websites and developed our internal framework for us to make doing so easier. Every couple years since, I've gotten a bug in my butt and investigated how many sites still had pieces I'd clearly worked on. On this most recent occasion,…

The code may be gone but not the impact.

A gas station sells gas that is gone within weeks. But someone fills their car, and drives to Mountain View and gets a job that changes your life.

Helping a business grow by 10% more each year because they were an early adopter to websites is something you impacted, even if your code isn’t there to remind people why.

“All we are is dust in the wind.” (Kansas and Ecclesiastes)

Re: A career-ending mistake

#85

Post by mjr00 »

paganel wrote: post #56
mjr00 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I refuse to believe that there are people whose purpose in life is to be be a manager/VP, and, if they are, they might as well be walking corpses for all I know. You could say the same thing about ICs though -- "I refuse to believe there are people whose purpose in life is to spend 5 days a week for 3 years building an enterprise line-of-business app to automate an obscure legacy business process that will be used…

The very fact of calling "computer programmers" as "ICs" is part of this syndrome, I'm not sure exactly when it started showing up, I'd say it was popularised by FAANGs, so maybe 2015-2016-ish?

ICs aren't just computer programmers, they're designers, sales, marketing, customer support, etc. It's just an easier term for people who aren't managers than "not a manager".

Re: A career-ending mistake

#87

Post by lifeisstillgood »

noirbot wrote: post #39
mjr00 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A sweeping statement indeed, but it does reflect my experience too. IMO - managers are terrible at the same rate as ICs. But the damage a terrible IC can do is limited in most companies because there's guardrails like automated testing, pull requests, no access to the production database, etc. At worst they end up being a big timesuck for other team members until they get let go. A terrible manager will sink a proj…

There is no code-review process for management decisions. Management is essentially like writing code on the production server all the time. The stakes are maybe a little lower, it's a good bit harder to make disastrous mistakes, but there's no real roll-back or testing for if you're about to ruin your team.

But why isn’t there a code review process for management decisions?

What if code was how decisions were recorded ?

What if companies were programmable ?

Re: A career-ending mistake

#88

Post by loup-vaillant »

> You probably won’t get to choose what to work on, and you may not agree with all the decisions of the powers that be. In fact, it’s practically certain you won’t. After all, you know more about the subject matter than they do.

Wait a minute if the people most suited to make a decision are overridden by people less competent than them (they have to be most of the time, given the different focus of their career), that's kind of a problem, isn't it? Is there any way to avoid such structural failures?

Re: A career-ending mistake

#89

Post by njtransit »

equestria wrote: post #20

Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there . Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there. I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60…

This argument assumes that code is an ends not a mean, which is false. The value you deliver is not your code, it’s the enablement of business functions. Let’s say you launch a new product that gains traction. Sure, in 5 years your code may be refactored out of existence. But the people doing the refactoring only have jobs because of the value you delivered when launching the initial product. That is your lasting contribution, not the lines of code you wrote.

Re: A career-ending mistake

#90

Post by mjr00 »

derefr wrote: post #70
mjr00 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, if anything it's dangerous to assume that your code will get thrown away soon-ish. as an extreme example I'm aware of, the core AWS infrastructure is still heavily dependent on Perl scripts mashed together 15+ years ago.

> core AWS infrastructure is still heavily dependent on Perl scripts mashed together 15+ years ago What part of the infrastructure? The control-plane logic that triggers when the dashboard/CLI/CloudFormation request modifications to resources?

I never worked with it directly so this may not be totally accurate, but IIRC a lot of the fundamental networking code for managing data centers -- DNS, traffic routing, etc -- was legacy Perl scripts. While I was there, at least one major us-east-1 outage was directly linked to a problem with one of these scripts.
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