Ask HN: Career Advice | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Career Advice

3 pointsillwrks4 comments

Hi all,

I am looking for some career advice…

I currently work in an internal Creative Services department in a reasonably large company, which is a subsidiary of a larger company, which in turn is a subsidiary of a much larger company...

The products are visual in nature so there are always good materials to work from and with. Therefore I have a good variety of past projects and a good portfolio ( although not fully assembled )

My role is ‘digital designer’, a role I have grown into via my previous agency-side employers over the past 10 years. ( I graduated with a Print Design background, all other skills I have acquired on my own time )

My current role revolves around creating digital marketing materials, which these days revolve around recutting/creating video assets for social media, designing and building online advertising and bespoke internal tools and systems.

My skill set is wide and covers the gamut of concepting, design and development.

The below are top-line things but

Advanced in: 3/4’s of Adobes tools, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Greensock

Pretty Good with: PHP, Php frameworks ( Laravel ), MySQL

I am curious in nature and love a challenge.

I am on any OS from Linux, OSX and Windows. Although my preference is for OSX.

I am comfortable working on the command line.

I am considered the ‘go-to’ guy for anything technical, perhaps that says more than what I can put into words.

Anyway to my point... I really enjoy the development side of things and I would like to move my career path in that direction. BUT as I have no formal training in this I am unsure of how I stack up, where gaps are in my knowledge,’ known unknowns' are my perceived achilles heel.

Things to note: I have a wife and young daughter. I live in London, UK. I have good benefits in my current role. I have a good salary for my role, but not necessarily for my skill set.

Advice please!

Best, IW

I've been hiring designers & developers in London for years and designers with dev skills are in huge demand, and that demand is continuing to grow. Developers with design skills are nowhere near as popular.

Stick with the design side, don't worry about formal training, focus heavily on HTML, CSS & JS and highlight this alongside your design portfolio on your personal site.

Feel free to give me a shout via email (my address is in my profile) if you want to chat about what your options are.

Have you discussed your career desires with your manager? That'd be the first thing I'd do, since I don't sense any desire to move companies.

There may be a way for you to transition to more development. If that is possible, I'd definitely bring up comp change, but first determine if a transition is possible.

Thank you for your input!

You are right in that I have no deep desire to move ( beyond a desire for more development projects and higher compensation ). I enjoy my job, and the industry it is in, I enjoy my colleagues and the company. I couldn't ask for a better group of people to be surrounded by.

>> I'd definitely bring up comp change, but first determine if a transition is possible

That is a very good point which I hadn't given much thought to!

Although I'm not sure there is much chance of doing more development orientated work with they way things are structured. The team I am a part of, it's sole purpose is to support the marketing teams and their objectives.

The development projects have been initiated and lead by me, a team of one. To make small tools to speed up internal processes, and to replace and migrate 10+ year old partner facing service ( it was shambles, functionally and legally ).

Management have acknowledged the advantage and benefit of what I have done, and they have allowed some flexibility when doing it, but as these types of things are outside of the core purpose of my role they likely wont support them too much. Certainly not higher up the chain I would think.

I will arrange a meeting with my direct manager in the coming weeks, nothing bad can come of it. I have little faith in negotiating larger compensation, as it stands I believe I earn the same as my manager ( HR let it slip 2 years ago ). Budgets, raises and bonus' are all tightly controlled...

Thank you again!

Yes. I would discuss larger career transistion first (where am I in this company in 2 years? What projects can I work on that are great for the company and interesting to me?). Get that down, preferably in writing. Make sure you mention that you'd like to do more and more development work, even if that means transitioning away from your current role (while training a replacement of course!).

Then, if you have that discussion and it does turn out they are ok with you moving into more development, then tall about comp changes.

If they aren't (if the message is "we need you to stay in this role" either explicitly or implicitly) then you should start looking at what else is available.

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