Unfortunately, this is something you have to learn through experience and cannot be taught by someone else.
Yup. I work 35-40 hours a week. I do not put work stuff on my personal devices, I do not open my work laptop at home. This isn't something I negotiated or made explicit, it's just what I do. No one has ever objected to my work or output and I keep getting raises every year.
your hands might be limited that way, but your mind isn't.
This is something that you already realise very, very early in your career. The only hard thing is how to set boundaries and negotiate without infuriating the other side and burning bridges forever.
This assumes that you care about (at least a little bit) what the other side expects from you.
I've interviewed several great senior engineer candidates over the last few years, and then had to watch do this and walk themselves right out the door inside of 6 months. I've developed a marked preference for promoting internally, because you get longer to head this sort of thing off.
Incidentally, this sort of thing is why software engineering desperately needs some sort of formal levelling criteria and/or mentorship programs. It's really hard for senior folks to calibrate themselves against their rapidly shrinking peer group.
It goes both ways, and I would argue the spiral happens because the other side expects something above an beyond the possible.
Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.
I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.
The work was essentially web scraping complex systems, which is not a case of "you don't need someone with my experience to do this" and more like I just didn't want to do it because it did not improve my current skills at all.
It is not like in the interview they told me: you will be doing web scraping for months on end. Or that I even thought to ask.
You've had a somewhat traditional career there by HN standards. Most of Silicon Valley was promo-hopping ever 1-2 years for the whole middle period of your career (somewhat curtailed now by the job market). It was really popular to FAANG -> startup for 6 months -> FAANG-1-level-up for a good chunk of the 2010s
I do think that startups are pretty rough when it comes hiring. We don't pay BigTech salaries, we expect engineers to wear a lot of hats, and we don't offer the kind of management chain isolation a big company does. It takes a particular kind of engineer to enjoy/thrive in that environment, and a lot of engineers transitioning from big companies don't realise the extent of that until they've struggled with their first startup role.
And that is just when you can talk to the engineers directly, it gets worse when you need to escalate on the management chain.
Startups are easier because most of the time you usually only need one rubberstamp (and sometimes none!) to do something.
It gets much worse though once the startup scales up and becomes massive. Then it tends to be worse than big corps because there at least they have processes.
A lot of your work at the senior level is harder to track. If a junior engineer stops pulling tickets off the queue, somebody is going to notice. If a senior spends a couple of weeks taking cross-functional meetings and writing docs at the start of a new project, nobody really blinks an eye. Sometimes the manager doesn't catch in time that they aren't coming back out of that phase...
The best advice I can give on moving your career forward is to not try and get a promotion at your current job. Apply for better positions at other companies while you still have your current role. You'll have maximum leverage and unlimited time to choose the best possible option. Trying to claw your way up the ladder in a single company is the least efficient (and more often than not hopeless) strategy.
- work climate and coworkers - work life balance - legal rewards for staying (This might not apply to the US but in most of Europe you get progressively harder to fire the longer you stay at one company)
Bouncing from place to place could have earned me more money over time, but I valued the stability of sticking around for longer stints.
Interviewing sucks. I know, if you currently have a job then you don't lose anything. Other than precious time and I already feel like I don't have enough free time, I don't want to invest the remaining interviewing.
I have been in a few companies and yes, sometimes getting a promotion is literally impossible. I remember one company that didn't give me a promotion until I threatened to leave.
But if you find the right company, then you shouldn't even need to ask for a promotion.
And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement
> And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement
This I absolutely agree with. I quit my last job for ethical reasons and indeed, the same problem I faced is so pervasive in our industry that it limits the pool of places I'd work. That being said, I think the advice holds. Jumping around is a much easier way to move your career forward than staying at a single place.
By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.
If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.
I haven’t followed that advice, because I quite like my jobs, and getting deep into a problem space is one of life’s pleasures. But, I do think it’s sound advice all the same.
I’ve yet to decide if that’s what I actually want or if there is another solution out there. Is leaving the only real solution?
were you able to reclaim the space in your head that your software salary took away? like, are things clearer? do you feel like you "own" your thoughts and brainpower again? do you have more mental energy at the end of the day to pursue your own interests?
if i take a 75% pay cut, i really hope i can have my brain back again.
So I quit and became a bartender for about a year. Fun, but the hours are horrible. Then while doing that I got my massage licence, mostly just on a lark. Then I worked at a candle factory for some years, and found I enjoy that kind of work. Apartment maintenance was mostly a compromise I made, because apartments are a much more stable career than manufacturing in Seattle.
So now I’ve got my toolkit and I debug and maintain all day just like I used to, but in meatspace instead of virtually. I like being a part of my local community and work with a great team. Some days I touch poop, but I never feel like my brain is being taken over by useless facts about software that just makes people’s lives worse.
I don't think this is actually happening. Maybe a few high profile businesses trying to burn through and exploit inexperienced workers are doing that, but there's a whole lot of businesses out there that aren't run by sociopaths. You just don't hear about 'em on the news.
i cant help but think there will be a mini exodus from big software companies, and im curious what thatll do to the industry.
The ladder has collapsed. No more juniors to mentor and grow (in some cases no more US hiring period), and all of the carrots have been replaced with sticks. If you're lucky, the reward for doing good work and being nice is 'not being laid off', but the promo budget is gone and it's not like your boss gets a say in who's laid off so may the odds be ever in your favor.
Jokes in general are, if not explicitly against site norms, discouraged: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." [1]
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What a ridiculous presumption.
So either you made a joke that isn't funny or one that is offensive. Either way, there's your answer to why people didn't react positively.
He's a fine guy, and a fine coworker, but he's not the hot shit his resume progression would suggest.
I guess that's worth being taunted in graded school.
Sure, promotions are harder to get, but the "ladder hasn't collapsed" and many companies I know (at least in tech) will reward above-average dedication (that average being quite low...).
Nice little soundbite but for this to work your personal interpretation of "good work" and "be nice" needs to align with the people around you and the broader organisation.
If you have at least enough for now, you can start by just doing a good job and see what happens and if you're rewarded, not have to specifically chase. Hopefully you'll get to enough for the future without having to focus on promos etc. It's certainly nicer that way.
Then you can take on big projects when they make sense, instead of forcing them. Big projects that benefit your team/company where you're the right person to do it are more likely to work out than ones where you're a bad fit (or the project is a bad fit for the org!) but you think it will get you promoted.
Perhaps I am lacking context on the “seniority” of this individual. Unless they are a Principal engineer, or operating as an architect/staff engineer, or as a “tech lead”, I would absolutely expect them to be solid engineers delivering code.
They would have clear deliverables in sprints that would typically be heavier and more complex than their junior peers.
Take this from someone who has worked in all of the above roles and subsequently in management.
Instead, just communicate with your stakeholders asap. Chances are they already know the project is at risk, and they'll be amendable to either descoping or pushing back the deadline.
It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.
He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of lines of code written, commits landed, and tickets closed can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.