The worst career advice I ever received

> of course, the obvious follow-up question is how do you identify which teams and businesses will grow fast?

I think his point was: when you're certain that the current team isn't, find a new one. You can't reliably identify what will grow fast, but you can identify what won't

My takeaway from the article was a bit different: it's about being passive vs. being active in your career.

The author argues that you should not stay where you are hoping to passively benefit from a power vacuum, but instead actively seek out opportunities to advance your career. If your current position is not helping you move toward your goals you should find one that does.

It's like the old stock-picking joke: buy the ones that will go up, and if it doesn't, don't have bought it.

The "risk" he was taking was slight. Given that his goal was to be promoted, the status quo — remaining a line manager on a struggling team — was a failure, rather than being neutral.

Importantly, with the benefit of experience he's now in a position to identify that moving teams was less risky than he'd even assumed. This is not just survivor bias either — in management you aren't rewarded for keeping a floundering team afloat. You need to attach yourself to a team that is making your manager and their managers look good.

I took the point of the article to be that you are taking a risk by leaving and you are taking a risk by staying. Either of them might work out or they might not. In either case you can't read the future, but at least one of those cases is more in your control and so win or lose it's a better bet to make because it's more predictable in some ironic sense than the sure-fire power-vacuum that's going to come along and Hoover you up to the upper echelons.

I think it's basically right.

In this case, the risk was the product would fail and more than likely he would be moved to another team or he could have easily gotten another job.

It seems like his current position was not going to work out if he stayed -- the team was losing good people, the situation was chaotic, etc.

When people leave a sinking ship, a person who gets promoted to fill the gap in management has an even tougher job than the manager who left. The team is smaller and a lot of the best people have moved on, morale is low, and the project is probably already behind on deadlines. The factors that caused the project to go wrong in the first place will still exist and may be entirely out of the manager's control.

If the author's new position turned out to be bad, he could have moved on from that as well. By leaving he had a chance to get out of a bad situation. By staying he would have guaranteed that his situation would remain bad. He didn't have much to lose.

> There's no indication that this guy would've radically changed his career by moving to the new position

Job interviews can offer plenty of indication regarding how different the new position is.

Article seems to have the same basic idea as https://xkcd.com/1768 - When in doubt it's better to leave.

I think the Toronto-Waterloo corridor is more commonly referred to as "Silicon Valley North" than Ottowa now. Hopefully it doesn't become too similar to actually silicon valley though it's pretty nice as it is.

To move up in your career you should get out of your comfort zone and take risks. I think this is what the author meant. It is fine if you are content with your position.

It’s not bad to not want to move up in your career, but it’s a horrible mistake to get complacent in tech. The chances are that either you will either get forced out or you’re going to want to leave. When that day comes, if you spent nine years stuck in a bubble doing the same thing - especially if that thing isn’t management of a successful product - you’re going to find it harder to find a job.

if taken at face value, this is sad. In fact, the entire field is moving in many directions at once. Some parts of some kinds of programming already did move to India from the US, but its not at all the whole story.

Wow that is bad advice.

My current career started with clients burned by outsourcing their projects.

For a lot of engineers this seems completely wrong but to many others in enterprise software this has become more true than false. Most of the old guard tech companies of decades past have moved the majority of their development opportunities offshore (Israel, Eastern Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, and many more), abuse H1Bs (both as persons and in terms of policy), or to lower cost living areas of the US. Heck, even NASA’s largest personnel presence is in Alabama and Florida last I checked rather than NYC, SF, or even DC. While there are exceptions the rationale is that unless you have a business reason to have top engineers paid top wages and specifically in a large US metro, you likely are going to shift your tech labor force elsewhere. I think the message from the market is pretty clear - average / below average programmers have little competitive advantage over overseas labor of comparable overall technical output even if their communication skills are pretty decent, and the sky’s the limit practically for the talented - this is the reality of opportunity gaps in the US and has been for a long, long time.

The reality is quite the opposite.

There are plenty of opportunities here and most of the candidates are grossly incompetent. Many passably competent candidates confuse their status for greatness (Dunning-Kruger). As a result many companies persue visa sponsorship for immigrants at greater expense to supplement their hiring targets.

This level of incompetence should not be a surprise to anybody since software and software hiring are completely unregulated. There are no licensing, certification, or objective standard qualifications to define competence.

If in fact a candidate is objectively better than average they can go where ever they want. For these people the most challenging part of their career is finding a team/product that thinks like they do.

I'd offer a softer version of this. If you are capable of becoming a programmer, you're probably capable of entering a field with better prospects.

This is a slightly ambiguous claim, because a "programmer" can be such a wide range of things. You can read a book on PHP and MySql, or not read the book and say you did, and call yourself a programmer.

But if you're the sort of person who can enter a decent college (no, not elite, just a proper college), read and write well enough to get good grades in your humanities general coursework, do calculus through differential equations, and major in computer science or engineering, then I think you're probably capable of entering a field with better prospects than programming.

I don't feel quite as negative about programming as you do, in that I don't think it's necessarily a bad job or a dead end (though I do think these risks are very present in programming careers), and there are still great careers to be had in it. But yes, I do agree that people capable of doing this are probably capable of doing a lot of things, and many of those things may be better paths.

Not really, I had a friend at Nokia maintaining old code in a team. He was the go-to person for many years without getting promoted to even team leader position.

I told him to learn some new language that's used in the company that can be used as a leverage to switch companies as well if he isn't getting promoted, and try to switch. 1 year later he's working on writing new application load balancers in go, and he's loving it, and getting more money for it, and he can easily switch to other company if he wants to.

Of course the old team really misses him, but they didn't value him high enough, so they lost the best person on their team.

I don't agree. If anything, this seems to be a sampling bias- people who don't move on from situations they can't actively change will be sampled as relatively unsuccessful compared to those who will.

In other words: If author had moved to an unsuccessful team, he likely would have moved again until he found a team he could be successful with. Looking back and comparing with his friend who didn't move on will often result in a favorable comparison.

Not agreeing or disagreeing, but one note: he didn't go to a different company, he went to a different division within Microsoft.

If we look at this from a buddhist's point of view, then there is no luck: the author did something in past that allowed him to use this opportunity and what he did could be completely unrelated to his work, e.g. he wrote a blogpost long time ago that he didn't consider important, but it really helped a few people.

Sometimes, but it can be a bit more complicated.

Perhaps it is accurate to say the most mobile, unattached people tend to go first.

Perhaps the more loyal people stick around longer -- this puts a positive spin on it.

But you could also say that the most opportunistic people go first -- putting a negative spin on it.

Also, I think it depends heavily on what you mean by "bad". As a company culture deteriorates, sometimes it is the people who have been there the longest that don't notice the decline (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)

Technical people who are intrinsically motivated (typically the best and most productive people) often are the sort of people who find working with other high caliber people to be an important and highly valuable part of their work experience. When good people leave because the company isn't treating them well the result is a cascade effect, because every good person leaving makes the working environment worse. So more good people leave. Then for everyone left behind there's extra work and a struggle to reacquire lost institutional knowledge, and everybody finds that executing on projects is more difficult and results in less success.

Because of the nature of software development (no development cycle is ever really identical to the previous one) it can be difficult to conclusively or objectively say that the capabilities of the organization have been reduced, or that the working environment is poorer, because these things require subjective judgments. But many people have enough experience to make those judgments for themselves, to feel the organization getting worse and less capable, and this can create a kind of pressure for people to find other options elsewhere even if not everyone understands why on a conscious level.