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Comment by bendouglas | Hacker News Reader

Kim Scott talks about this in her book "Radical Candor" [1], and I agree with her perspective. A well rounded team needs people who looking to take on big new projects, but also people who become deep domain experts. Sometimes called a "guru". People who don't want to progress are this latter group.

The key is to (1) make this arrangement explicit and regularly check in, and (2) find non-promotion ways of rewarding and recognizing good work. This will be dependent on the person, and isn't as clear cut as the promotions track.

I think it's great to just be happy with what you're doing, and focus on other things in life.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29939161-radical-candor

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My greybeard anecdata:

I did exactly this in my early career and it worked great in small organizations. Mid to late career, I worked for a tech megacorp and was essentially forced to ladder climb because it was up or out. Eventually, hit a grade level that was oversaturated and got offered a package to leave on the 13th round of layoffs in my time there. My seagull manager at the time had no idea of how much organizational tribal knowledge they lost, but everyone my grade or lower who worked with me did.

I postulate that the size of the larger organization is inverse to the applicability of the "guru" strategy.

> My seagull manager

i'm sure this is a typo, but IDK what was intended.

senior manager?

A seagull manager, like a seagull, flies in, shits all over things then flies out.

Poetic

Thank you Ill remember this explanation as it hits the base so hard.

... steals the best sandwiches from children's hands, while declaring "mine, mine, mine, mine"...

Animals exhibiting this behaviour are known as kleptoparasites.

Sometimes they eat the plastic lunch bag and die.

Don't forget the incessant screeching.

I also like "mushroom managing" - cover them in shit, keep them in the dark...

And sometimes they steal your french fry. Or your red Swingline stapler.

Probably a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_management

"[...] a management style wherein a manager only interacts with employees when they deem a problem has arisen. The perception is that such a management style involves hasty decisions about things of which they have little understanding, resulting in a messy situation with which others must deal."

I think the "up or out" dogma is garbage, and ends up hurting some of an organizations best people. Sorry to hear this happened to you.

I truly don't think it's that challenging to allow for an alternative path. But as a low level manager at a big corp there's only so much you can do, I get it.

I'm not sure what the idea is exactly but it seems people get promoted until they are just outside their comfort zone. There they quietly do their job without complaining hoping no one notices until a scapegoat is needed.

Peter principle

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Or until they silently hate their job and leave.

"Up or out" is the best way to enable the Peter Principle and all the institutional mediocrity it brings. When you keep pushing your best performers to a level where they can't perform, what you're really doing is pushing the entire organization down instead. I wish more managers would recognize that.

Fortunately, I'm right now in a place where that doesn't happen, but at the same time there's not that much room for growth either. Fortunately, there's all sorts of personal and OSS projects for that.

Software Engineer with 30 years of experience here. I am the new guy in a team working on a critical app in a large company which also aspires to be tech company. The application that I am working on has been touched by many people. Mostly competent people, but you can see how there is a lack of coherence. Cleary a lot of the engineers only new pieces and no one knew the app deeply. Because every body left to new projects I became the domain expert in just a few months. I would like to stay and become the domain expert and work through the application with a continuous improvement mindset. It would be a big challenge and very valuable for the company, but I don't see the incentives aligned for me to do that.

This is the case where you may be empowered to layout the values of being the knowledge expert for this to your management and give them buy in to have you be the owner of the product from a tech perspective.

Do a stealth rewrite.

What could possibly go wrong.

I think this continuous pressure of career progression is a managerial bullshit , that unwise managers (most are) apply to everyone without any thinking. This ends up unnecessarily hurting people who are otherwise perfectly good employees but just not interested in progressing in their career and ends up demoralizing them. People gotta understand that a job is just a job and the contract between employee and employer mandates certain compensation for certain hours of work or certain goals but not necessarily compensated for working towards a promotion.

I've probably worked on the same team as 100-150 people over my career so far. Maybe 200. I can count on one hand the number of people who:

1. Are happy in their current title, company, responsibilities, etc.

2. Don't want to get a big raise

3. Just want to "do their job and go home"

I'm thinking of exactly two. There may be one or two I'm forgetting. Coincidentally they were also two of the least skilled developers I've worked with, I think in part because they had very little interest in growing professionally.

There are plenty of important, fulfilling, well-compensated careers in which you don't need to grow, learn, and expand. Software development is not one of them.

I think there are shades of gray.

Two of the five IC's I manage are prolific open source contributors on a project mentioned here often. By any measure these two IC's are outstanding engineers and mentors, but also have zero interest in "growing" or having more responsibility.

Well the only reason someone would not want a big raise is because they would be worried that it would put them higher up on the chopping block if/when layoffs come around. So that criteria kinda self selects for under performers.

But you can absolutely have folks who meet criteria 1 and 3 who are very skilled. Programming self selects for introverts, so it shouldn't be a surprise that not everyone wants to be a manager. And at some point in your career, you realize that taking on more responsibilities without the subsequent promotion results in more work and more stress for little benefit.

> There are plenty of important, fulfilling, well-compensated careers in which you don't need to grow, learn, and expand. Software development is not one of them.

This may have been true 5-10 years ago. But I think most devs now realize that constantly churning your tools in search of the newest shiny thing is a great way to add unnecessary work and stress to a project. It is entirely possible to get experience with 1-2 tech stacks and make a career out of it.

Your assumptions are incorrect specially after you spend couple of decades doing software development.

That at least puts a positive term on it that the manager's manager might buy off on - "John is pursuing guru status on Domain X".

I love HR bs like this. Having to make up vacuous accolades to hand out to people doing a fantastic job for literally no reason. Presumably also making these highly productive employees jump through arbitrary hoops to validate their own existence.

You may already know this, but you can google "performance review phrases."

As a manager, I've found it invaluable over the years :-)

Oooh - I like this, and agree with the other commenter that this is some nice HR spin

I think the important thing to put on the table when having career & performance conversations with team members is to acknowledge that career progression via deep specialization is a perfectly valid path -- or that it isn't. This is often a business decision, and frequently the business is ok with just mediocre or competent SMEs, which will frustrate folks who want more, but at least you'll have created the "radical candor" you need to talk about it.

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