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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

> you’ll be pigeonholed into that slot as long as you remain in that team

That's a good thing: it gives you great leverage to ensure good retention-pay.

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During your 1:1s/"connects"/perf-evals, don't frame it as "I hate being the only one here who knows SQL, I'm quitting/gimmie-a-raise", instead frame it as "I'm proud of the great accomplishments that my unique and deep understanding of both database-theory and SQL in-practice have brought to the company; given my significant responsibilities I now have in the team/company I'm sure you'll "recognize" my now quite-significant leading-role...."

(for best effect make the "money-gesture" with your fingers during the last part).

...I wish I had the gall to do that when I was younger.

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It also creates problems that normally wouldn't exist. I was "the regex guy" at my last company. Every couple of days someone would be trying to solve a problem that would much more reasonably be handled by a few string.split() or indexOf() calls and some logic in their application's language. Instead they would message me "I need to do blahblahblah, can you give me a regex for that?" Or even worse "I've written this regex but it doesn't work on a few cases, can you help me fix it?" and then share some 600 character long regex monstrosity.

90% of the time my answer was simply "Yeah... That's a bad use-case for a regex. You can use this java snippet to accomplish the same thing."

At the start I would actually solve their request with some hairy regex, but it generally did not perform well and when requirements change they'd be unable to edit it and would find me again to change it.

Did the company ever use the "internal market" paradigm? If so, keep track of your time spent on other-peoples-problems and record it in a spreadsheet, and invoice other peoples' managers accordingly :)

That sounds like a quick way to shut down collaboration across the team...

...and get shit done. I mean come on, who asks a person in another team to help with a regular expression. There has to be a line somewhere. You can be a go-to person for an obscure technology, some complex framework, but being a go-to person for regular expressions? What's next? Go-to person for iteration?

How are you supposed to get work done on a team, if any question asked to another team member is immediately seen as "unproductive"? It's not just about regexes. I'm having trouble debugging a system, who do I ask? Nobody, apparently, because if I do then I might incur a "bill" from my own coworkers!

You wouldn't be logging time spent on stuff that's part of your actual responsibilities and/or for your same team (under the same manager) is fine - the whole "internal market" stuff applies to inter-team work, especially work/asks/tasks that don't go through the chain-of-command (i.e. from IC1 in team A to IC2 in team B without going through either Team A's manager nor Team B's manager).

When I joined it was about 15 employees. When I left it was about 150 (but still under 30 devs) so this wouldn't really be reasonable.

But part of the problem was they did know simple enough regex for what they wanted to accomplish. Having a few simple regex and some application logic around them would have done it. But they'd often think "that sounds messy, squeaky-clean can probably solve this in a single regex." And while I probably could, it would not be good code nor would it be more performant.

I think in the some cases like people mentioned above, it's no longer collaboration but more of a consultation. The benefit is only going in one direction: to the consultantee. In that case, you need some way to make the nature of that relationship explicit and valued. Otherwise these consultants begin to feel they're being put in a position of working for someone else without management recognizing that and compensating it as such.

When I joined it was still a pretty early stage startup so that wouldn't have been reasonable. When I left it was pretty solidly in the mid-sized company category, so maybe something like that would have been doable (invoices are pretty rude though). I did enjoy helping cross-team though, it's fun working with people you don't work with on a daily basis, and they were/are my friends.

I wouldn't even have minded being seen as the "string pattern/parsing guy". But I was specifically regex-guy in their minds.

Also story for another day and another thread, I was also the MongoDB-guy. Similar to the regex stuff though, in 90% of the questions they'd send to me MongoDB was not the correct choice.

Overall it's more nuanced then could ever fit into an HN comment (yes I brought it up with management, and other issues), but there are a number of reasons I quit. I quit a couple months before a company buyout we knew was going to happen and I had equity. I felt like it was probably the right choice then. I recently got some beers with some of my friends who stayed through the buyout and had equal amounts of equity and learned I did make the correct choice.

The XY Problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

Yep! When I first heard of this it was phrased as "the chainsaw problem".

"Hey can I borrow your chainsaw?"

"Sure, you need the gas powered one or the electric one?"

"Oh I'm not sure, which one would be best for cutting my hair?"

I know enough people who have gotten pigeonholed as "the database person" to believe that's not an enviable place to be. You end up getting a lot of tedious, fiddly work dumped on you by people who have no idea what they're doing and need you to clean up their messes.

No amount of retention pay would raise my spirits in that situation.

> people who have no idea what they're doing and need you to clean up their messes

Not even this. It's worse when you end up with a whole bunch of tedious, yet very basic work dumped on your by people who have no desire to know what they're doing because "the database guy" can just do it instead.

Note that it's not only "databases" where this happens.

Worse than that, you can get set with OKRs set by people with no context and then judged because you didn’t meet them. Then your expertise is discounted.

I became one of the 'version control' guys at a company once. It was nice to be a go-to person for certain crises, but it had its down-sides for sure.

But if you truly find it boring it’s still going to be difficult to frame it that way. Picking up too much work you don’t want to do can make you resent a job very quickly.

Most of the world works at jobs that are repetitive, demeaning, dangerous, and insecure. And all that for the payoff of barely continuing to survive. It's truly a point of privilege to turn up your nose to a top 10% first world salary because shuffling things around in a database is distateful to your sensibilities .

And much of the world has food insecurity, but I still don't eat bananas...

idiotsecant, other people having worse jobs doesn't mean you should be happy with the same (or even better). Should we limit ourselves to be content with doing better than 90%? Where would the Torvalds, Stroustups, and Dijkstras come from then?

Being pigeon holed into boring work just because you're "the guy" is crap, no matter how good the salary is. I quit my last job because of this, and would encourage anyone feeling the same to do so.

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