Y’all Ain’t Killing Me: The Rise of “Super Jobs.”

Ever been 'promoted' into a new role with only a small salary bump, and an inability to hand off your old role to someone else?

Or perhaps you are a driven/smart person. Which management rewards by increasingly spending your attention on various areas of the business that need to be rescued, organized, straightened out. Yet management drags their feet on any permanent changes which would prevent the fires from starting in the first place. What begins as a rescue operation gradually becomes normal practice. Over time agglomerating your responsibilities across various critical areas.

Job postings like these are what happens after you leave.

These kinds of jobs often point to an unhealthy co-dependency between non-technical management and (usually) younger engineers.

Everyone wants to play the hero. The manager reporting to his boss about how hard his team is working and how they will all pull together to solve the problems, and the engineer feeding off the praise that he has saved the day and that without his efforts all would have been lost.

It's just papering over a lack of planning on everyone's part, and it never ends well.

The big salary bump is always just a quarter or two away. The engineer eventually burns out and is replaced by a more naive individual, and the vicious cycle begins again.

Sorry if I seem a bit pessimistic, yesterday I had lunch with a friend of mine who is a programmer in exactly this situation. I was telling him to get out and find another job, but he was convinced that once he proves himself and solves all these problems, he'll get a big raise and a large option grant. His boss won't put that in writing of course, but he just really believes that he'll be rewarded.

It breaks my heart.

The cherry on the top about these job descriptions is usually at the end when they're basically throwing a few peanuts in your general direction and suggesting 'here, feed yourself and your family you bitch'. The only way they're filling these positions is using desperate people, there is no other way. If they actually paid 500,000 - 1 million some people might actually do this for a set period of time, say 4-5 years and then at least be able to quit with a house or something, but to do with for years on end living paycheck to paycheck, that's almost hell.

I worked a place like this. These kinds of job descriptions betray unrealistic expectations from management. In all likelihood what you'll find there is an undocumented clusterfuck of a codebase with some serious design flaws. Limited or non-existent access to your predecessor for questions about where key elements like passwords, etc. are located. And by the time the 2 months it takes to get your mind around it (if you're really good) expires, they'll be ready to fire you for not meeting productivity expectations.

I think the most important point to take from these super jobs is that if they don’t value the individual responsibilities enough to hire a dedicated employee to handle them, then they won’t value you, even if you manage to do the job of two or three people almost perfectly.

bravo. this describes a very real trend in the job market. the term "super job" is a useful handle.

i guess the post-2008 "super recession" emboldened all these companies to demand "self-starting, high energy, ninja rock stars who thrive on chaos and multitasking with no supervision" to fill all their "super jobs"

but now these same companies need to adjust to the tighter labor market.

The worst part about those jobs is there's no time to find another one.

"Have you finished developing the new feature yet ? Oh and here's my laptop, it needs reinstalling. Do you know why my WebMail is showing my folders in a different order than my Outlook ? You need to fix it."

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

  WLAN

That they've included this in their bullet points for a role intended to cover enterprisey Microsoft-ish business application server admin and reporting is a red flag.

That, and no indication that so many tasks shall be delegated to a team of loyal underlings and minions. (hint: the minion is you)

Also, "Excel spreadsheet" expertise.

  ( ._.)

All a consequence of a regulatory system that allows fewer jobs than people that want them.

Do that and competition drives a race to the bottom with all the benefits flowing upwards to owners.

Can't be fixed until politics gets strong enough and brave enough to take on corporatism.

Just take the job and renegotiate salary once you are indispensable, no ?

It can start small: project A is predicted to not be full time, so you are also assigned to project B. But at the first obstacle (or the first wishful-thinking based estimate or plan) you don't get enough done on either project, overtime is needed, and it's your fault. Then project C takes the sales team by surprise, and who's going to deliver it?

This is a hilarious job I saw today.

https://denver.craigslist.org/sad/d/linux-network-admin-jr/6...