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Comment by IndianAstronaut | Hacker News Reader

I have plenty of career conversations with my manager. But it goes nowhere. Lots of talk and no action. "I want to learn more about forecasting models", "definitely". No forecasting work given and even side projects are squashed.

My current manager recently gave me a front end project. I started learning a lot of Angular and started working on it. She recently came to me and said don't learn too much about it.

I have learned that career progression is your own battle and managers are in general a hindrance to that.

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I've been on the other side of this...a manager who's definitely interested in helping both his direct reports and even others who didn't report to me develop their careers. I always did my level best to be honest with people and follow up on things I thought would help, but the reality was that I reported up as well and I didn't have full discretion over projects and usually couldn't come through with whatever "plans" came out of career advice talks. Worse yet, I often had to choose between my direct reports in terms of who to help. That was really hard and I tried to help those that had helped themselves most because I felt that those people wouldn't stall their careers once I was no longer their manager.

There are definitely managers out there who lie to their directs and don't care, but there's a lot of us that do care and simply don't have the weight to throw behind giving you what you need. All I can ask is that you try to be understanding of our situation and give us the benefit of the doubt before condemning us.

You're right, career progression is entirely every person for themselves. The trick is to get management to agree to be your ally.

Or to find a place where your goals and a mangers goals are aligned. I've worked at places where I knew I'd never get a promotion from my manager due to bad blood.

A manager's manager will never fully agree, especially if one is a good and valuable worker: by enabling one to progress in one's career, it opens up the possibility to lose that worker. How will the manager be able to get things done and report success to their boss, if all the good people are gone?

The entire system is ill, seriously ill. The entire hierarchichal model is failing, as is evident by the state of the world and the state in most large, publically traded corporations.

You're assuming your manager is static and doesn't want to progress. Make your boss look good and you both might get ahead together.

I'm not assuming anything, merely stating my observations (studying them is one of my hobbies).

Well, theoretically you could be in a junior role that requires lots of manual functions. You could work with your manager and perhaps one other coworker, start from the bottom, and automate or seriously increase the efficiency of doing the task. The skills and business knowledge, as well as internal political connections, that you gained from doing that can then be leveraged during the increased amount of time you have to take on bigger and better projects while still maintaining your daily functions. By the time talks about promotions or new roles come up, you could argue that it's impossible to fuck up the daily tasks you'll be handing off because you made them so easy to maintain and/or repair. Your bosses boss will see the work is being done better than before and they have to bring on less headcount than they would before, plus in theory you would still to help keep an eye on the role you'll be handing off. So now things are being done more efficiently, your experience doing that has led you to propose bigger and better projects that accomplish the same thing.

> How will the manager be able to get things done and report success to their boss, if all the good people are gone?

Eventually all people are gone. Would be good to know when, so you can plan ahead.

> by enabling one to progress in one's career, it opens up the possibility to lose that worker.

The manager will have to choose between losing you within the company, or have you work for a competitor. In some companies, he/she may also have to deal with your reasons for leaving.

My current place of employment does a good job around career develop. Managers can't progress in their careers unless their direct reports verify they are helping with development, so incentives are aligned.

That said, it's still up to the employee to drive a lot of it. Nobody cares as much about your career as you.

So, expect to have to do the leg work. If your manager won't help find you projects you need for development, then you should go find them. Learn about cool projects being done in other groups, find out if they need help, then go to your manager to say "As a part of my development, I'd like to do X. Jim's department is doing X and would like me to help. I can make it fit with my current responsibilities. Is that OK?"

Sounds like your manager doesn't need an Angular expert. Try asking your manager what they would want you to learn for the job. It doesn't mean you should go force yourself to learn that thing if you're not interested in it, but at least now you know what your manager values and you can use that information.

Long story short, she designed a project with an Angular UI and staked some internal political capital on it. She hired a pretty awful Angular dev who took several months to build up a UI and then abruptly left the company. She wanted me to get up to speed on it, so I did.

I noticed there were a lot of issues in the code and said much of it had to be rewritten since it would not scale. She didn't like what I said and then told me not to focus too much on Angular and just learn enough to maintain the existing application and she would hire another contractor to do the work.

I should add that she threatened me when she said to stop working on Angular. Whereas 2 months earlier she threatened my job if I didn't learn it.

Yet managers are incentivized to make their employees successful and are generally considered to be doing well when their employees' careers advance.

I don't know why you think they're a hindrance. If you find no managers ever work out for you maybe managers aren't the problem.

wow, cynical much?

sometimes you manager is actually trying to help you, sure it's not purely altruistic but is anything? you own the burden of responsibility for achieving your dreams, your manager is merely a facilitator that can sometimes help you achieve that. when you delegate your future, it's your fault.

"I want to learn more about forecasting models". Understand that your manager has many contradicting tensions and they are trying to balance them all. Is this delivering business value or aligned with company goals? It's ok if not, but expect other things to keep being prioritised over it. How many growth opportunities did you find that were denied, or did you not find any?

Take responsibility for yourself.

>Take responsibility for yourself.

My last statement basically said just that. I am taking responsibility for my own growth rather than rely on management. My manager even asking me these questions is really a silly exercise so when reviews come around we can say that managers are interested in our career growth. The reality is that there are tasks and projects to get done and those with business value, rather than personal growth value, get prioritized. Discussing where I want to go is a fruitless exercise.

> Discussing where I want to go is a fruitless exercise.

In my experience, it's neither silly nor fruitless, but you can't expect solid results either, your interests are not the only factor at play.

As a manager, I'm genuinely interested in my team's personal growth, but that needs to be balanced with business needs. I'll always try to match business needs with each team member's personal interests and not just skills, because that'll render a much more motivated (thus productive) work environment, but sometimes it's just not possible, and uninteresting work will just have to be dealt with to keep the paychecks coming until something more interesting shows up.

Maybe you are an exception but from my experience most people in management don't have the depth to really help their people. They are too busy surviving themselves. In addition most companies have no interest in developing their workers' careers. They want them to perform better within their little box but that's it.

It's not cynical to learn from repeated experience and to correctly understand your work environment. As you yourself point out.

Where that work environment is misrepresented by a manager, that isn't balance. It's a manager costing the company money.

They need to take responsibility for that. Doing so will probably require a difficult conversation with their manager.

the real problem with your manager is that they are not holding you accountable to your commitments. it's not their job to "do your growth", that's your job. it IS their job to know what your growth strategy is and to keep you accountable to it.

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