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Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

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Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#181

Post by rapidaneurism »

nradov wrote: post #159
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another aspect of being promoted: many of us see what the next level has to do/is doing and isn’t interested in doing that. I’ve seen people get promoted and then immediately implode because N+1 started involving lots of politics that they couldn’t or didn’t want to handle. Even senior IC roles get more and more exposed to non-technical and organizational issues.

The usual solution to "The Peter Principle" is to give the promotable employee the additional responsibilities first without the job title (or salary) and see if they rise to the occasion. If not then it's easy to dial back assignments without going through a demotion or termination.

And if they do rise to the occasion you keep paying them the lower salary.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#182

Post by rapidaneurism »

zipy124 wrote: post #162
jandrewrogers wrote: post #64

Stalling out on promotion has always happened. It can be explained almost entirely by two factors: As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying…

There is also the fact that hiring outside can be preferred to promoting internally for some reason I have yet to figure out.

Internal people are people paid more than their market value (otherwise they would have left).

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#183

Post by zipy124 »

rapidaneurism wrote: post #182
zipy124 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the fact that hiring outside can be preferred to promoting internally for some reason I have yet to figure out.

Internal people are people paid more than their market value (otherwise they would have left).

Is that actually true? I was under the impression it was the opposite.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#184

Post by DanielHB »

compiler-guy wrote: post #156
DanielHB wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really a financial liability part really pushing companies for these policies? I never heard this argument before and compared to salaries PTO is minuscule liability... Seems much more likely companies just trying to squeeze employees into taking less PTO.

Pretty much every article on a naive Google search lists "reduced financial liability" as one of the corporate benefits. Even the ones that talk about more complicated financial scenarios deal with "unexpectedly short-staffed" rather than, "We have a big financial liability on our books." A somewhat random example: https://www.higginbotham.com/blog/unlimited-pto-pros-cons/ "Cost efficiency. Traditional PTO policies c…

I mean I can understand why an accountant would be happy his one metric is down when the company implements unlimited PTO, or maybe the stock market responds to the (slightly) reduced liability levels.

But surely it can't be a significant amount of make sense to implement this kind of police only for this unless the company has insane turnover (so "unpaid" PTO is not paid out as cash). The reduced amount of PTO staff takes must be the main reason.

Unpaid PTO is (assuming that the employee _doesn't_ leave the company) essentially debt in the company books with 0% interest rate.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#185

Post by rapidaneurism »

zipy124 wrote: post #183
rapidaneurism wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internal people are people paid more than their market value (otherwise they would have left).

Is that actually true? I was under the impression it was the opposite.

I'm a bit cynical :) there are other reasons to stay in a job, but the definition of market value is how much you can successfully interview for. So yes staying in a job signals that nobody wants to give you more money.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#186

Post by tasuki »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #64

Stalling out on promotion has always happened. It can be explained almost entirely by two factors: As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying…

> Stalling out on promotion has always happened.

I don't get this framing. No one is owed a promotion. (Unless that was explicitly promised of course!)

Me, I'm worse than stalled out: I'm earning one tenth of what I used to. And I'm happy with my job! Imagine!

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#187

Post by bryanrasmussen »

contagiousflow wrote: post #168
9rx wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that is significant is that shift brought us to reaching peak human productivity. Prior to that, humans were not able to be as productive. Consider agriculture: You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. This is why wages were able to grow alongside productivity as we started moving away from a pure agrarian world…

> You might be able to be maximally productive some times of the year, but usually you were waiting on Mother Nature to do her thing. I don't know what that means. When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow? The only thing that changed for the production side was requiring less humans as machines could do the work of many laborers.

Although I agree with 9rx's points mainly, here

> When did we have to stop waiting for crops to grow?

part of modern agricultural automation includes year round seasons, which means essentially you are no longer waiting for crops to grow in the way that was first discussed.

This of course is what allows us to have fresh tomatoes year round, and many other fruits and vegetables. Obviously these are not perfect, tomatoes as the example already given, quality of the automated output is significantly less in comparison to the natural - nonetheless we do not wait for many crops to grow in the same way that people did before the 1990s (when computerized climate management, hydroponics and advanced greenhouse tech took off, as some later advances on the already mentioned PLC, and enabled automation in that field of human endeavor)

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#188

Post by thayne »

I've sort of reached this point, because I've reached the highest point for an "individual contributor". I do not want to be a manager, and don't think I would be good at it. But at most companies, once you reach a certain point, that's the only way to move up. And I've seen people who are good engineers get promoted to managers where their skills are less beneficial.

Thankfully, my company is pretty good about still giving me raises.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#189

Post by aksss »

mekael wrote: post #146
dmbche wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't give two weeks!

Depending on the size of the market in your area, or the market in general, not giving two weeks is effectively blackballing yourself. The city I work in is small enough I might have trouble in the future after leaving a manager in a lurch or burning a bridge. Is that how things should be handled? Nopers. Is it how things are due to employers having more power than employees? Yeahpers.

Just being real here though, hiring flaky employees is enormously expensive. Every hiring manager / business owner would just as soon not waste their time on it. So there are these heuristics that have organically developed for how to spot good employees vs bad. Not having the stability, foresight, or courtesy to (be able to) give notice is merely an indicator of whether you have your shit together. Similar example: an HR director once told me early in my career that drug tests (back when those were a thing) are basically just IQ tests - the company doesn’t give a shit if you smoke pot, but if you can’t control yourself enough knowing you have a test coming up or you can’t figure out how to engineer a workaround, you’re probably dumber than the candidates we want.

The system is reasonable in the sense that it’s explainable and predictable on both sides. Social convention seems preferable to me in this context to binding contracts.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#190

Post by aksss »

stringfood wrote: post #58
MangoCoffee wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

two weeks notice when you leave but where's the two weeks notice when they fired you.

this could be because the business have all the power in the relationship, especially in bad job markets like today. When they hold all the cards they can make us dance for them and they never dance for us

If you have desirable skills, why does the business have all the power? If you don’t have desirable skills and yet remain employed, how could you expect otherwise?
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