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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

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Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#191

Post by jbs789 »

aristofun wrote: post #118

The general sentiment of being aware about your career and decisions is true. But this reminds me of what I hate about modern corporate “culture” the most. And what is broken about it the most. Im speaking about the rat race. Tge fact, that you have to waste a noticeable part of your work time, effort and energy to sell your work instead of doing it. To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bo…

These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done.

If the company truly promotes incompetent salespeople then I’d steer clear of that company with the confidence that others are out there.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#192

Post by aristofun »

jbs789 wrote: post #191
aristofun wrote: post #118

The general sentiment of being aware about your career and decisions is true. But this reminds me of what I hate about modern corporate “culture” the most. And what is broken about it the most. Im speaking about the rat race. Tge fact, that you have to waste a noticeable part of your work time, effort and energy to sell your work instead of doing it. To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bo…

These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done. If the company truly promotes incompetent salespeople then I’d steer clear of that company with the confidence that others are out there.

> These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done.

Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be aware of what's going on.

As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation of an engineer that puts pressure and becomes a toil.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#193

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

BeetleB wrote: post #186
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building. You can either choose to accept gravity exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump and die. My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager wa…

> My manager’s job is not to manage my career. But it is to promote and demote. In many (most?) companies, to get a promotion he needs to actively advocate for you in front of others. That is part of his job. Many of them simply optimize to "I'm not going to do that part of the job well, so you, as my report, need to give me the material I can sell to others." And not "you need to do well so I can sell to others".

Yes, that’s true. But that only happens if you give them something to work with. I volunteered for the thorny complicated initiatives at the startup I worked for prior to AWS.

While there was no place to be “promoted to” besides being a team lead as an IC, it did give me the chance to have the skillset to get my next job. I specifically told my CTO - we had a good working relationship - that a team lead would be a demotion. I was already influencing the direction of the entire company. He couldn’t “promoted me”. But he gave me a nice raise and kept letting me choose the hairy work that crossed team boundaries.

At BigTech, your manager can help you go through the promotion process. But it is still mostly out of their hands whether you get promoted. You have to prove you are deserving to a wider audience.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#194

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

aristofun wrote: post #188
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building. You can either choose to accept gravity exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump and die. My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager wa…

> hop to another job if you want more money I wonder on what planet are you working? Virtually everyone I know in IT bumped their salary only after switching the companies, never I've seen anyone who raised their salary with comparable magnitude and/or pace by working hard at one place.

Isn’t that what I just said?

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#195

Post by BeetleB »

the_af wrote: post #79
integralid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either misunderstood or we disagree fundamentally. Everyone can and should design their life. Of course richer people have a lot more choices, and poorer people a lot more constraints, but everyone can make informed choices. Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.

I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all. Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their available time and…

> I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.

If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.

This is not a binary issue. All of us have choices and make decisions (feeding family, paying rent, not robbing a bank - all of these are choices). Yes, people in privileged positions have a much larger "choice space". And yes, plenty of underprivileged folks simply refuse to pursue the choices they have. Both these things can be true.

But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist who, either due to their own design or otherwise (e.g. health issues), may be stuck and their agency is significantly diminished.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#196

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

aristofun wrote: post #187
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building. You can either choose to accept gravity exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump and die. My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager wa…

> Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought. There will always be value and importance to networking, human relationships and commun…

Can you change the corporate culture of the companies that pay top of market any more than you can change gravity?

Sure I could change the culture by accepting a bullshit CTO position that is a glorified developer at a YC like startup that pays less than the intern I mentored when they got their return offer at BigTech and I could get meaningless “equity”.

But if I were in a position where I wanted to maximize my comp, I would play the game and convince a company with a lot of money to give me some of that money.

I just happen to care more about work life balance and making “enough” money now.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#197

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

aristofun wrote: post #189
BeetleB wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them? They certainly seem to know when I'm not doing well, without me having to tell them. Do you not see the asymmetry?

yes, there are much more bad managers than good ones, also human brain is naturally wired to notice problems and warnings, rather than good news

So you can either bemoan “bad management” that you can’t change or accept it and play the game.

I love the autonomy I get now in the latter part of my career over the last 10 years where I don’t have a manager hovering.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#198

Post by alphazard »

hnthrowaway121 wrote: post #178
alphazard wrote: post #173

It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do. Why would you reveal any information…

I’m careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust with managers. Most decent cultures don’t favor hoarding good employees how you’ve described. > It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do. This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager to you, you are much mor…

> but you can establish trust with managers.

This is technically true, but metaphorically false. Most readers, especially the younger crowd, are likely to be too trusting and not correctly recognize fundamentally adversarial relationships, like with their boss, with HR, with lawyers whom they don't pay personally, etc. Especially when those people present the relationship with a faux version of the same naivety that they intend to prey upon.

The only people you can trust at a company, are people who have demonstrated that they value your relationship more than the company's relationship. That's not impossible, but if they really need the salary, then the odds are stacked against you.

It's certainly nice to pretend that everyone is nice and trustworthy. In fact, most people will hold it against you if you don't sufficiently pretend to be trusting. Universal insincerity is part of the human condition.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#199

Post by zkmon »

Nope. It is not that black & white. It is always a mix of contextual changes and your decisions that are going define your path. Too much action on your own is also not going to help. In some cases, people who just didn't do a thing in decades, have achieved better that people who did all acrobatics.

Re: If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)

#200

Post by alphazard »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #174
alphazard wrote: post #173

It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do. Why would you reveal any information…

Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?

> when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum

This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people, or how they feel about each other.

If the situation is zero-sum, and one party doesn't realize, or is too trusting of other parties, then they just lose. And they might not even realize that they lost, or that the situation was zero-sum to begin with.

> basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?

Obviously not true, unless you can truly ignore your manager and still be successful at the company, then they have power over you. If they control more resources than you, or have more face time with people who do control resources, then they probably have more influence than you as well.

This whole comment reads like a sucker who doesn't know they are being scammed.

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