Comment by beforeolives | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beforeolives | Hacker News Reader

The obvious differences are

- more autonomy on how to solve problems

- less accountability

- no opportunities to work at large scale

- your work is treated like it's magic

- you'll sometimes need to communicate technical concepts in a simplified way to peers and management

- no opportunities to learn from peers and more senior engineers

- no way to get specific feedback for your technical work

It's basically for people who want to get into a technical role but can't land a very demanding position yet so they take the opportunity to practice and develop their skills in a very forgiving environment. Or it's for people who have skills but for whom technical/career development isn't a priority and they want to be left alone, have more control over their day-to-day activities and collect a regular paycheck.

> practice and develop their skills in a very forgiving environment

Oh man, in my experience non-technical teams have been the polar opposite. It's sometimes difficult to reign in what sounds like "simple features" but are actually large technical lifts. They sometimes expect it to be "just a new button", but have difficulty grasping the work behind that.

In my experience it's just as likely to be more work as less work.

I suppose if the team truly gave you autonomy and didn't over-expect it might not be too bad... but it's stress inducing in my experience.

It's about communicating well about expectations and also a bit about power dynamics and personalities. It's definitely possible to have a lot of autonomy on some of these teams. Otherwise, you're getting the worst of everything in such a job (no autonomy and no growth) and you should look for something else.

>your work is treated like it's magic

This isn't necessarily true. A lot of times all they see is the end result (e.g. a UI) and have zero understanding of the work it took to get there. What they may see is a unique snowflake who demands more time and space to do stuff. People can really start resenting you and feel like you are holding stuff back.

> A lot of times all they see is the end result (e.g. a UI) and have zero understanding of the work it took to get there

Yeah, this is the lack of understanding that I was referring to with the magic analogy. It can sometimes work in your favor and sometimes it doesn't.

That sounds like a dream job.

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