Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

454 pointsthrowarayes285 comments

I'm in a situation where my boss really doesn't get me or understand what I specifically bring to the table. She simply needs something different. I've tried to fit myself into what she needs like a square peg in a round hole. I have a very different vision for my role, and a specific understanding of how my strengths contribute to our team.

After a year of trying, coaching, assuming I’m the problem, talking to my skip level, hard convos with my boss, and much more etc I'm finally realizing trying to force myself into something that's simply not going to fit. With all humility I admit it may be me that failed. But life is short, it’s time to move on.

Cool story bro, why are you telling me?

Well I just want to say, the industry has an obsession with "growth" in performance reviews. But the reality is that growth only works when you build on someone's strengths. Trying to ask someone to grow by changing who they fundamentally are, leads to withdrawal, stagnation, and anti-growth. I'm actually getting worse at my job, not better, because I'm being forced to be something I'm not. It's depressing, draining, and frustrating. I can't be who I fundamentally am in my role.

It's important to know when your strengths are fundamentally misaligned with your job, boss, etc and leave ASAP. Don't try to force yourself to fit into it for the sake of "growth". You'll only drain yourself and there are better places for you. You may end up going through a traumatic experience that actually causes you to LOSE skills and abilities.

That is all, thanks.

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I had a situation once where we had a minor re-org and I ended up with a new manager. Literally day one, he made an attempt to change everyone's role. We were a team of developers and business analysts. He decided that everyone would become both and spend 50% of their time on each activity. Not sure why he thought this was a good idea, but he did.

After he announced it, I had a 1x1 with him and clearly let him know that he was the boss and I'd do my best to accomplish anything he assigned me. I also let him know that the business analyst duties didn't fit well with my skillset and that I would very likely struggle to produce output. We had a good, honest conversation about the situation and I ended up staying 100% as a developer. In the end he was happy and I was happy.

Why am I telling you? It's that I've learned it better to communicate and hopefully work things out then just pack up and head to another place.

This right here. I realized long ago I should do whatever I can to the best of my ability. If my superiors want to do something stupid or use my skillet in a suboptimal way my responsibility is to do my best to council with them, share what I see and then do the best job I can at whatever I am assigned to, assuming over course it doesn't cross legal or moral boundaries. My job is not my Identity we have an economic arrangement I do what I am asked to do, I do the best I can, not because my employer is fantastic but because I am mature enough to recognize that my work ethic is about me and not my employer, and then collect my pay check.

If my boss wants to pay me a SWE salary and then insists I clean out the break room fridge on Friday that is his perogrative not mine.

If my boss wants to pay me a SWE salary and then insists I clean out the break room fridge on Friday that is his perogrative not mine.

I mean... I can buy this to a point. But for me personally, there are lines. And there are things I'm just not going to do. Period.

I know it's un-trendy to talk about anything being "beneath you", and I'm not sure that's the wording I would use, but there are simply things that I don't consider being in my wheelhouse and that if you ask me to do, I'm going to say "no". Then you can decide if you want to fire me or not.

Case in point: I used to be a parts counter clerk at Advance Auto Parts. We got a new manager and one day he comes in and asks me to go outside and sweep the parking lot. I said "no" and he tells me to do it or I'm fired. So I rip off my Advance Auto Parts shirt, throw it in his face, say "fuck you" and walk out. 30+ years later I feel absolutely no regret about that. I didn't apologize then and I won't now.

There's more to my life than a job and I can find another way to pay the bills. I don't have to take their bullshit.

I think each person has their limits of what they are or are not willing to do, but I have to say, I find it strange where you decided to draw the line. Personally, I wouldn't do anything that grossed me out or that I found demeaning or humiliating. For example, I probably would have refused to sweep that parking lot if I thought the person telling me to do it was doing it just to show that they could; but if it was something that needed doing and there was no one else, I see no issue.

I totally get it.

Think office kitchen. They are always gross. There are always people that just throw their stuff in the sink instead of putting it in the dish washer etc. I've been at places where they wanted to make everyone do kitchen duty meaning cleaning out the sink and stuff on the counter and all that in a round robin fashion because "everyone uses it and we can't figure out who is the culprit".

I don't put stuff into the sink or use the dish washer and I don't use the fridge for my food. I have my cup, which I keep at my desk and wash up from time to time and take back to my desk. In between it doesn't need cleaning and just stays on my desk.

Hire a cleaner if you can't get these gross people to clean up after themselves but do not make me clean up after other people in a "communal space" I don't even use.

Needless to say I refused. A lot of people caved. "not worth the fight" was something I heard a lot.

Sorry but I am very principled that way. Yes worth the fight every day. You want to fire one of your best developers over a kitchen sink because you can't do your job properly? Be my guest.

That said I was civil about it but very firm.

Needless to say nobody was fired and they solved the problem a different way.

If it's about cleaning what you use and you don't use those facilities, then I would have to agree that you shouldn't be made to do it. Myself, I do on occasion use the dishes at the office, and in such a situation I would have found a way to eat without using them, rather than cleaning after some slob who can't be civil without being forced to do so.

That said, if I was your employer and everyone had taken your stance, even the ones who do use the kitchen, I would have simply taken the dishes and utensils away. At that point it's just people being unreasonable.

I can absolutely agree with that. Wouldn't mind at all. Bring your own cup.

Which actually I learned not to ever do because not only do people slob with communal areas, they also don't respect personal cups.

You have a valuable SWE skillset which is the result of major investments on your side. If you can maintain this skillset and credibly convince your next boss that you did so by cleaning fridges - go ahead.

You sure showed them! I bet that advance auto manager thought real hard about asking anybody else to....sweep.

I'm glad you realized your hands were too important to be callused by a broom

I'm glad you realized your hands were too important to be callused by a broom

You misunderstand. I have no problem sweeping. If he'd asked me to sweep in the store, that would have been fine. I did that pretty much every day anyway. It was more that the *fucking parking lot* doesn't need to be swept in the first place. It's a parking lot! This guy was just being a jackoff, which is why my response was as seemingly hyperbolic as it was.

Sorry, that's my fault for eliding some details in the story, because I was in a hurry earlier.

I bet that advance auto manager thought real hard about asking anybody else to....sweep.

The thing is, I didn't then, nor do I now, care about what he thought hard about or not. That wasn't the point. I just wasn't going to be the one doing it. What happened beyond that is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned.

seriously, while I understand and agree with the sentiment in general, you're a clerk at a small store, sweeping the parking lot doesn't seem outside of your duties.

But it doesn't matter what you think my duties are. And it didn't matter what my manager thought my duties were. It mattered what I thought they were. And on that day, considering the circumstances (some shit job I'm working for barely more than minimum wage as I work my way through college) I chose to decide that sweeping the parking lot was not an acceptable duty. Maybe I would have chosen differently if I'd desperately needed that job to feed a family, but that just goes to show that our lines are somewhat situation dependent.

I'm getting the impression many are not entering into good faith discussion on understanding your perspective and attempting to not only invalidate your experience, but to also cast judgement.

This is HN, it's expected. :-)

Yeah these people have not worked these jobs and the type of thing workers already have to do on the regular like cleaning pee on the shop floor. I agree cleaning that parking lot was a power control move and things just would have gotten worse as they were probably going to use you to make an example of.

wrong. I've been homeless and have worked many many factory jobs in my life, including chicken factories and I promise you that shit is worse than sweeping up pee from a floor.

There's a word for people who throw tantrum's and walk off of a clerk job because they were asked to sweep a parking lot: privileged.

I'm sure you're a hoot to work with, but personally I'd rather be around people who have the humbleness to avoid thinking sweeping a parking lot was beneath them.

If you can't take pride in a job well done as a store clerk, why the hell does anyone think you'll take pride in a job well done as a developer? That motivation is internal.

Seriously you must be so fun to work with.It's a person's choice and there is no pride in being a low paid worker, get over yourself.

> If you can't take pride in a job well done as a store clerk, why the hell does anyone think you'll take pride in a job well done as a developer? That motivation is internal.

This is an absurd argument. They have nothing to do with each other. If you'd rather be a store clerk then why should expect you to have much motivation or competence to be a developer?

Right? What was advanced auto supposed to do? Hire a person specifically for cleaning the parking lot?

There's a reason job postings all say "And other duties as assigned"

Hire a person specifically for cleaning the parking lot?

Or do what everybody else does, and contract with one of those companies that comes through a couple of nights a week with one of those parking lot sweeping trucks?

The thing is, to a first approximation, nobody asks employees to go out and sweep the god-damn parking lot with a broom. This particular manager was just being a dick for the sake of being a dick. And I'm not somebody you can bully like that, because I will happily tell you to go fuck yourself and walk out. shrug

There's a reason job postings all say "And other duties as assigned"

And do you actually think that people take that to literally mean anything? Is there no task whatsoever that you would refuse to do? If so, I'd say you are a very strange person, as most people in my experience do have a line. That line is going to vary a lot from person to person, but I don't think I know a single person who would honestly say "Yes, I will do anything for my boss based on that clause in the job description."

Here is the missing piece of the tale: why did the manager want the parking lot swept?

I've been in a shitload of positions where I was assigned menial tasks for a variety of reasons. In some of those. positions I could say no without drama, in some I could quit, in some I could say "Yes sir/ma'am", in some I could delegate, in some I could outsource. In every case, I could respectfully and tactfully ask why.

"Is there any specific area that needs extra attention?"

"Will somebody else be covering my standard duties while I do this?"

"Is this going to be part of my regular duties or is this just to keep me busy?"

... and so on. Tone matters depending on the relationship you have with the manager. But a violent reactive act and profanity doesn't seem like the best way regardless of how righteous you feel years down the road.

I wouldn't hire you if this was your "tell me about a time you dealt with adversity in the workplace" interview answer, that's for sure.

rawr, you showed him! how dare he ... uhhhhh ... ask you to sweep with a broom.... yeah, that dickhead.

What next, will he ask you to go grab shopping carts?!?!

Despite your rationalization, it's not uncommon to have the parking lot cleaned up and swept on a regular basis. I've done it for restaurants I worked at as a teenager, for example.

Your problem is being too sensitive.

At a restaurant we had to sweep the parking lot once in a while. Not the whole thing mind you. We had a short broom and a container on a stick with a swivel to sweep trash into. (name?). It was really spot cleaning.

Was a decent change of pace, didn’t mind it. Would have done it as long as mgr wasn’t a jerk about it.

>What was advanced auto supposed to do? Hire a person specifically for cleaning the parking lot?

That's for the business owner to figure out, why would OP even want to concern himself with stuff like this?

Quite snarky, heres my story. Worked at a big box home improvement store as a 15 year old kid on checkout. Someone literally shit diarrhea all over the floor, the store manager asked literally everyone in the store to clean it up including me, everyone refused, he ended up cleaning it himself. Some things are not part of the job!!!

The thing is, the mess had to be cleaned up and the manager did it after everyone else refused. There are limits, sure. You need proper equipment to clean up such a mess because it is a health and safety issue. I can also understand why no one would want to step up. When everyone else is a refuses the job, stepping up is a good way to end up being the one called upon to do it in the future. But the reality is that people were probably refusing because they didn't want carry their weight.

But kudos on the manager. He realized that it had to be done, then went ahead and did it without ordering anyone else to do so.

There's a difference between being asked to clean up potential biohazards and being asked to push a broom for a few minutes and up and ripping your shirt off and quitting over it.

You know who is going to be the first one fired and the last one promoted? The SWE who is being asked to do some bogus tasks that aren't even close to what they are capable of. In many cases you are in one way or another obligated to act as you suggest, but it is not always good for you personally and simply pretending that you aren't getting screwed is pretty naive. You often don't really have much of a choice in these matters, aside from closing up shop and leaving. You can try to work it out with your boss and if that works great. Then again bosses who don't know how to use their people kind of suck to begin with as a rule, so it would be wishful thinking to expect that they will simply come around.

The example given is fridge cleaning, but tasks outside your narrow job spec can be very useful.

For instance, if you are hired as a software tester, and snag a task setting up the automated build system, you can turn that into a higher paid dev ops careeer.

Some people thrive in highly structured environments where they can optimize for metrics and get promotions - they do well in big companies. Others collect skills and achievements and use those to push their career forward - they do well in small companies and consulting. The world needs both.

With that said, knowing when to say no is very important as you say.

I have a good friend who runs a smallish (100 person) company with about 30-40 (mechanical) engineers. One of their long-term custodians got ill for a long spell and so engineers were asked to take out their own trash. Some people just refused to do so, to the point it got smelly and affected the org. One of the execs got fed up and took all the smelly trash out herself one night and then started going around and individually directing the engineers in person to take out their trash when she thought it was too full. For the people who didn't take out the trash, it was considered in annual reviews.

Be thoughtful in what you evaluate as a "bogus" task. What is hard or complex isn't always what is important or noticed.

Pitching in on one's own space is different from being demoted to being a custodian that costs the company like an engineer. It's well within the company's rights to ask employees to keep a tidy office.

You can hire a temp cleaner instantly in almost any city. They literally wasted more money arguing with engineers than they would paying for the work to be done.

> Be thoughtful in what you evaluate as a "bogus" task.

Well, no. a business is all about money and if the engineers can bill they shouldn't waste their time on anything else. Management in a firm basically exists to facilitate billable hours so the employee here is right, both personally and professionally, in realizing that this is not only silly but corporate suicide.

> What is hard or complex isn't always what is important or noticed.

This is true. If you have a chance to pick your boss's suit up before a meeting or drive them to the airport it is probably worth doing, little favors go a long way.

Life if too short to work for a bad boss.

If you're cleaning a fridge you're probably not working from home which means you're in the wrong place anyway imo.

The key distinction is between things that anyone could do (and you are asked to do them because you are the least productive) and things that nobody knows how to do (and you are asked to do them because you are the most capable to figure it out).

I sort of agree. Jobs usually have aspects that seem unrewarding. But if you spend most of your time cleaning break rooms then it doesn't let you grow the type of skills needed to land a SWE salary at the next place.

This will often be a small company/large company divide.

If you started at a small company, you'll be used to doing all sorts of things "outside of your job description" (usually below) like restocking toilet paper, etc, simply because there is nobody else to do it.

If you started at a large company, you'll likely be used to "you cannot whatsoever move your computer to the other side of your cubicle without contacting building management" and other such things - stepping outside your job description could get you yelled at or even officially reprimanded.

LOL, once spent a few days on SWE salary (along with a few other guys) physically moving server racks from one facility to another. Yes, small company. As a one-off that sort of stuff is fine.

I was the technical director at a place where I was on one hand responsible for the dev team, and second highest paid person after the managing director. On the other hand I was also the person who'd lug new servers into our racks when needed. Part of the fun is being able to be all over the place and have a hand in every pie. Downside is the times when you don't have a choice because there's nobody else with the right skills.

The "promotion" to MAC (moves additions changes) technician was my first raise.

Please go to this client, take these monitors upstairs, and deploy them. We expect this to be your next few months.

For $4 an hour more than I was making as MSP sysadmin? Sounds awesome!

I was disappointed when that contract ran out.

I can and do practice those things in my own time. I love my craft I love to excel at it. I have a period of time coming up where I will not work for several weeks (still paid though), during this time I am planning on working through The Art of Computer Programming and learning mobile development.

The responsibility for me to keep my skills sharp is upon me not my employer.

As someone who collects and follows and works through AoCP, one does not simply, "work through the Art of Computer Programming," in a few weeks.

That's something that comes through piecemeal. Many of the exercises are great but require work to really understand. It's not a series of books one reads cover to cover.

I think yes and no. After working for 7 years+, you will hit a plateau. To break through, you will need to study on your own free time. That's because most individual work doesn't get harder after a certain level. It is the scale of it that makes the work difficult.

Not disagreeing that self study is valuable, but it's unclear to me how writing a bitonic sorting network in a bespoke assembler is going to get me promoted to staff

It generally won't.

Sort of like how lifting weights won't train you to be a better line backer on an American football team.

You lift weights because it strengthens the body and you need a strong body if you want to have a long career as a reputable line backer.

(Maybe a bad example... head injuries and all)

Knowing how to implement combinatorial algorithms or SAT won't get you a promotion unless your job is implementing libraries of code that use those algorithms... but it's hard to see the forest for the trees if you can't recognize them... so to speak (Knuth loves trees). It can level up your mind so that you can solve more challenging problems or find innovative solutions.

I don't really read through AoCP with a job promotion in mind. I mainly do it because I find the subject matter enjoyable. And I only work on parts I find interesting or when I come across something I've heard about before but don't know well: chances are there's a data structure or algorithm explained in detail in AoCP.

Thanks for the advice. I figured it would be something like that but thought this is probably the best chance I have to take a stab at it.

You can, but at what cost? When do you see friends, or cook, or exercise, not to mention sleep.

I’m not saying some personal time shouldn’t be dedicated to learning, but if the vast majority of your week is spent on a dead end, the time you have left to keep your skills sharp pales in comparison.

I’m an infra guy, and I’ve had two unexcellent jobs in a row now where I’m the only Linux person, and the most critical things run on Linux, so I spend the majority of my time on break/fix situations and trying to remember what the fuck I was doing before someone bothered me with another broken service. To make things worse, management was and is chaotic and disorganized that I can’t take time to complete a single project at once (and in the case of my current role, an actual barrier to progress, I’m currently getting blocked on something because I haven’t tested a particular method of copying a script to target hosts for a process that we do only twice a year, the difference is as trivial as using rsync instead of scp, but not exactly since I don’t want to give exact details, just in case!). I can tell that I’m not learning anything, and in many ways, my skills are regressing (as has become apparent through all the interviews I bombed in the last six weeks).

The problem is that I’m so irritated and demotivated by this job that I don’t want to look at a computer after I’m done. I don’t want to be in my office after I’m done. I only go in there if I forgot a drink or something on my desk. I need to figure out a way to upskill outside of work since it’s so clearly not going to happen at work, but the mental “anguish” (not quite anguish, really) makes me want to just shut down at the end of the day.

It’s much better when you get to spend a significant part of your work week building new skills, or at least improving existing skills.

Why not take that responsibility on company time? What's the worst that happens? The nonsense you were asked to do was somehow tied to company profitability and the stock price tanks?

You may eventually have other commitments (e.g., wife and children) that make that somewhat impractical.

It's important to guard your career.

I can appreciate this, I think to some degree (especially in a physical office) there is a degree of community required, and as long as there is a general acceptance that this kind of "other stuff" is either minimal or accepted in lieu of your "regular" work (as opposed to in addition to), I think it's OK.

My main concern, honestly, is not so much that the work is "beneath me" but more that I get pidgonholed doing that work. I know this isn't realistic, but I don't want come review time for people to say "it's great you do this stuff around the office/for the team/for the org" but it doesn't affect your metrics.

In some cases, I think the fear is being asked to do these things in a non-documented way means you have no evidence that you had these "extra-curricular" things you had to complete.

I'm fortunate I haven't had that happen to me, but it's a fear I always have at the back of my head whenever these sort of requests happen.

I've done a lot of service jobs, and commercial construction jobs, and have a deep appreciation for a clean and well-organized space.

I love to sweep. If I could get paid as a SWE to just speak and "garden" our office, to make it a more pleasent environment, conducive to peaceful thought and pleasent interactions, I'd take that job in a heartbeat.

Christopher Alexander is a bit of a god-father of object-oriented programming, and architecture: https://dorian.substack.com/p/at-any-given-moment-in-a-proce...

He believes that all work on something new starts with "repairing" the environment in which that new thing is being created. (The codebase, the room, the block).

The first step of repair is to tidy and clean.

Sooooo I can weave a compelling story to others about why cleaning and tidying is in fact _very_ reasonable to do, and some could argue it's some of the more important work someone could do.

I'm not above doing any work that's morally ok but salary is only part my compensation for a job. I'm also paid in skill growth and career opportunities. I'm not going to get better by cleaning fridges, so asking me to do chores all the time is short-changing me even if the money is good (for this point in my career).

If I were employed at a place that did not let me work on high-impact high-visibility roles, I'd move to somewhere that did as soon as possible.

(Unless I was already where I wanted to get in my career)

I don't know how this works in the US but here in Germany your work contract roughly specifies what you do for work.. so for a software engineer it would be developing software and similar tasks.

Cleaning break room fridges would not be an acceptable task. You sure could say yes and comply if you like cleaning fridges but usually people would probably just say no thanks.

If you just exaggerated to make a point I agree with you partially. But you always have to consider your personal growth and satisfaction with your work.

Unfortunately, all too often in the US, there is no contract. You apply based on a job description that can be changed at any time by the employer, and has no legal force in any case.

I did have a job at a very small defense contractor, where I was 99% a software engineer, but when we had to move the safe (happened twice) as the largest man in the firm and still reasonably fit in my 20's -- I also had to do that.

I took it as an exaggeration to make a point. They're unlikely to ask you to do that--or to pay you for doing so. But within the broad confines of developer, or product manager, or technical marketer, the is a wide range of roles and responsibilities. If you've been working on a mainframe and your employer decides to retire it but is happy to put you on some front-end web stuff which you've never touched, that's probably going to be a tough adjustment that may not end well.

> If you've been working on a mainframe and your employer decides to retire it but is happy to put you on some front-end web stuff which you've never touched, that's probably going to be a tough adjustment that may not end well.

Sure nice of them to give you that chance rather than just laying you off though. Would be even nicer if they spent a little money to train you on the front-end web stuff. Employers used to do that sort of the thing all the time - retrain known good workers rather than just fire them and hire new (unknown) ones.

And there's certainly a push for more retraining currently although we'll see to what degree it happens.

>My job is not my Identity we have an economic arrangement I do what I am asked to do

…within the predefined framework of “roles”

>If my boss wants to pay me a SWE salary and then insists I clean out the break room fridge on Friday that is his perogrative not mine.

Your wording here is kind of vague. Are you saying that you would acquiesce to anything a boss requests?

What if it’s not the breakroom but a public bathroom? What if instead of cleaning it’s foot rubs? Would you taste test exotic foods for your boss? Babysit their kids?

If the answer to any of these is even remotely close to “yes”, then to you there is no such thing as a software engineer or a software engineer’s salary. There would only be only servants and sovereigns, and servants’ wages.

You omitted an important qualifier.

> assuming over course it doesn't cross legal or moral boundaries.

If someone asks me to clean the bathroom, sure I do it at home, much more rewarding to make $50 an hour, and probably less gross than the bathroom where a toddler is potty training.

As for the rest of those items although they may not explicitly fall under legal violations by US federal law, given the relationship between myself and my boss they probably cross policy lines and could be excluded under illegal. Except for taste testing food I'd do that one for sure.

But your framing this as a ruler and subject relationship is off the mark because every thing you listed has people that get paid to do exactly those things, that doesn't make them all serfs to a lordly managerial class.

It seems you have concocted the most absurd extreme interpretation of my words and then used that to refute my argument.

Ultimately I am willing to do pretty much whatever I am asked to as long as it is legal and moral, included in moral is my dignity as a human being.

Ultimately I feel that trying to frame every interaction with an employer as adversarial and feeling that everything is workers vs managers is immature and reductionist. At the end of the day Initech or Introde or whatever as a company doesn't really exist it is a legal fiction we use in society. What does exist is my boss my coworkers my customers. I want to treat them well and with respect and make life easier for them not because they deserve it, or because I think I will get ahead. I do it because I want to be a good person and good people treat others well even regardless of who they are.

It doesn't mean I need to be a door mat or allow myself to be exploited, but it means as an employee I try to behave like I would want my employees to behave if I were a manager, and if sometimes that means they ask me to do something for them that isn't inside of my regular job description I'll try and do that because I dont bave to come in and see Mr. Introde every day, I come in and see Dan my boss, or Carl the director and those are people.

Most everyone you meet is another person just trying to get by in the world and most people can really use someone cutting them some slack once in a while.

>they probably cross policy lines and could be excluded under illegal.

I’m confused by this part. What if your company does not have a policy against foot rubs or babysitting? For example there are big wellness companies like, for example Goop, that might reasonably have foot rubs, babysitting and software engineering in the same building.

>every thing you listed has people that get paid to do exactly those things

I agree. There are people whose job it is to babysit and provide massages. If you heard your babysitter say that it’s reasonable to demand that they engineer software because you pay them so much, would that make sense to you?

edit: The job you describe yourself as doing seems akin to personal/executive assistant, which is a fine job! I worked as an EA for years. I wouldn’t call myself an SWE if I worked as an EA.

edit 2: After re-reading, this makes even less sense.

If your friendly boss “Dan” insists that you clean the bathroom, you’re happy to do it because it makes you a better person? It makes ole’ “Dan”’s life easier to insist that an engineer being paid engineering wages do minimum wage work? Couldn’t Dan make his life even easier by hiring a cleaner for an hour a week for a fraction of what your time is worth? It seems like Dan would both save money and have talented workers spending more time being productive. That’s a win-win!

Unless of course Dan likes exerting power for the hell of it, then it’s a loss for him. If Dan liked to make sure his employees should be infinitely deferential and constantly reminded that they are lucky to work for him, it would make sense to insist (not ask, it’s insist according to you) that you do menial work that literally anyone could do.

Friendly ole Dan, such a nice guy that he reminds you to polish the Sword of Damocles every Friday. It is such an inconvenience for him when it gets dusty.

> probably less gross than the bathroom where a toddler is potty training.

Nope. The dividing line between gross and just normal IME is public vs private. I've cleaned some bathrooms in my "career" (if you want to include high school part time jobs), and the worst ones were the womens bathrooms in public use; grocery stores etc.

This statement is what the older generation and companies want you to think. It doesn't have to be that way and companies and management need to change or people will leave for companies and management that think differently and want you to feel successful.

Some of my experiences align with that. You want me to spend time doing relatively useless things. I can. I am paid regardless. I am just not sure it is a good management or resources.

I do my best to communicate openly with my immediate superior about the reality on the ground, but if my advice is summarily dismissed, at certain point I just check out.

a superior alternative to checking out is to work on things you deem both interesting and under the auspice of personal development and skills currency

This works if you are at the end of your career, but otherwise one should look at building their career in case something happens to their current job.

Your job should be your identity. You do it 8 hours a day. Your growth is extremely important. Ideally your job aligns with your values. If you haven't found this job yet you should keep searching. Do not complicate this with "economic arrangements" - you're just afraid.

This is such awful advice. Some folks are lucky to have the job/identity thing going on, but for everyone else it's a means to an end, and that's fine.

> Your job should be your identity

if your job is your identity then be sure and put away some savings for therapy. The moment something happens to your job outside your control like getting laid off, company going under, workplace harassment, even nasty office politics then a mental crisis will soon follow.

Typical worst case scenario thinking that prevents you from even trying.

Compromise: Your vocation can be your identity (and you may not have found exactly what it is yet). Though if your particular workplace situation gets bad, you may want to detach from that one job, or find ways in which the imperfect job/situation can further the larger mission.

Communication is a 2-way street. From experience, this approach doesn't work if your manager is dogmatic/egotistical and unwilling to hear you.

You wouldn't know until you talk to them at least once. Don't assume anything.

So many developer stories out there where it doesn't sound like they ever really had a direct talk with their boss.

Every time I raise an issue like this with a manager, the manager makes all the right noises but nothing actually changes. Maybe I’m just not direct enough. But I’ve never had a conversation with a boss about an issue like a role mismatch and had it actually work out. Months will go by with no progress, multiple check ins with the same conversations, until I’m fed up and I leave.

Maybe I haven’t lucked out and found a manager who not only listens but is actually empowered to change things.

If you raise the issues, made it clear how you feel about it ... then you've communicated.

Actions do count after that.

Communication is just the first step, after that it isn't always required if they've demonstrated they won't / can't do a thing(s).

> it doesn't sound like they ever really had a direct talk with their boss.

Sure, but why? Why wouldn't you have a direct, honest conversation with your manager?

I'll tell you why.

Because it can be terrifying.

You don't know how they will react, whether you'll be forced off interesting projects, put at the top of the layoff list, or similar. You can watch how they handle other situations and get an inkling, but you don't know.

Good bosses won't react like that and there are many good bosses out there who want you to grow and will work with you to achieve your goals. But there are plenty of bad bosses too.

From this perspective, it's a lot easier to just pack it in, write off the boss and company, and find a new job. It's less satisfying, to be sure, but less terrifying.

It's taken me a long time to realize how important it is to have a boss you can have a direct conversation with. It's also a factor of my experience and knowledge of my self-worth too.

If I were a new developer in my first job, it'd be a lot harder to have a tough conversation with my boss, because my alternatives would be fewer.

>From this perspective, it's a lot easier to just pack it in, write off the boss and company, and find a new job. It's less satisfying, to be sure, but less terrifying.

This exactly. I've tried having 'difficult' conversations with my boss only to wind up on their bad list.

Thankfully I'm at a company with a strong culture now and I'm much more financially independent than when I was younger.

For way too many (bad) managers, deliberately initiating a 1:1 with them can feel like calling the police in the USA. You have to really consider your options, because you have no idea what the police are going to do. They might be cool, or they might shoot your dog. They might arrest the wrong person, or they might even ignore the call. They might get pissed at you and start harassing you every time they're in your neighborhood. Obviously with your manager, nobody is going to get shot, but I've had bosses that were so unpredictable that you wouldn't voluntarily risk talking to them, because who knows how you might come out of the conversation: Your problem might end up worse, you might end up with more (or less) job responsibilities, you might get on their "bad list" (or even their "good list"), you might get fired. You never know ahead of time.

If you feel like that for your boss, that's reason enough to leave already.

Oh man, I had one whose mood was based on the stock market. When the market was up, have a 1:1 with him, as he'd praise you, give you a little time off, maybe even a little bonus just because. When the market was down, he was on the warpath and nothing you did was good enough. I got fired on the day of a particularly steep NASDAQ drop.

Maybe "communicating with your boss" is a skill folks need to be taught.

Uncomfortable, scary, yup, but necessary.

Yup, and IMO definitely less scary than finding and starting an entirely new job.

Would love to read an article on this! Do you have any reading to recommend?

> You don't know how they will react, whether you'll be forced off interesting projects, put at the top of the layoff list, or similar.

Yep, this has happened to me. So if I'm unhappy, I usually just start sending my resume out. I never ask for anything (big) from my boss unless I have an offer in-hand.

So many manager stories where it doesn't sound like they even did a basic check in with their subordinates...

Communication is a two way street for sure.

But I haven known plenty of devs who keep their heads down and bemoan their boss and wouldn't say anything to them anyway. Hard to know how a person feels in that case.

Some. But there is also that thing where manager is supposedly paid for superior social skills. And lately I am realizing, that good 80% of communication work in the manager-developer relationship or within team is on developers. I mean, yeah, partly it goes with power differential where person lower on hierarchy has to do that work and management simply dont have to.

But seriously, it would be nice if managers would put a bit more thoughts and effort into ... communicating and people.

Agreed, it is a two way street... but that means both have to participate for it to work too.

Sometimes I think the fact that some devs move into management / senior type roles, not always great for communication. Yeah they can talk about bits, but the rest gets lost at times.

> Sometimes I think the fact that some devs move into management / senior type roles, not always great for communication. Yeah they can talk about bits, but the rest gets lost at times.

Not a single person I had in mind was previous developer. Just to be clear. As much as it is popular to knee jerk assume that developers dont have social skills, this one is much LESS pronounced with developers.

From the sound of it the OP really did go out of their way to try to talk this one through. Of course communication is a two way street, but communication is basically the only job a manager really has at the end of the day. It is their primary responsibility and they should bear the brunt of the responsibility for any communication breakdowns. Sure devs can be hard to talk to. Managing people is fundamentally a hard job. That's why it pays well.

Yeah I can't say for any given person, OP, what they did or didn't do.

> I had a 1x1 with him and clearly let him know that he was the boss and I'd do my best to accomplish anything he assigned me.

Never understood this attitude. I'd have told him that what he was doing was very inappropriate (without buy-in from the team), and if he doesn't back off I'll quit. He can ask around for other opinions so it's not just coming from me but it's a hard line.

Of course this mostly works cause as a developer you don't need to be afraid of finding another job. But that's good. Workers having leverage over bosses is good.

> I'd have told him that what he was doing was very inappropriate (without buy-in from the team), and if he doesn't back off I'll quit.

The reason not to do this is that you're very likely to provoke a defensive response and have the other person dig in their heels. A gentler approach is more likely to get results, less likely to create tension in the relationship, and sets the tone of future decision making as adversarial.

If that doesn't work you can try firmer approaches, and you can of course always quit or use the threat of quitting, but 99 times out of 100 leading with that will lead to worse outcomes.

You don't give up any leverage by first trying to resolve conflicts without threats.

Well the magnitude of your response should be calibrated to the magnitude of the grievance. A new boss coming in and changing everything in a way nobody signed up for or is on board with is very egregious, and I _will_ quit if they don't back down, so I'm going to tell them that. It's a statement of fact. If they don't stop, and I quit, and I didn't say that ahead of time, then I haven't communicated what I meant to.

> Well the magnitude of your response should be calibrated to the magnitude of the grievance.

This is where I disagree. The magnitude of response should be determined by the likelihood of achieving the desired outcome. Sometimes that requires drawing a really firm line, but usually it does not. And I'd argue that it virtually never involves drawing that line as your first strategy.

Like I said, you should absolutely be willing to make that threat, and to walk away, but I don't think there's any benefit to yourself in leading with it. If your initial attempt fails, then try something more drastic until you either get your desired result or quit.

I don't think you can expect people to be rational all, or even most of the time. Just because something is a fact does not mean it is necessary or beneficial to say it.

I find it much more satisfying to smile and nod and then leave unexpectedly without notice.

mm. I don't believe in doing that. You don't owe anything to the company as an abstract entity, but I believe you can be honest about your plans because it's respectful of the people around you, as people.

People don't always react rationally when you call them out like that. Being too aggressive confrontational is not a path to changing minds or accomplishing your goals.

Well -- if they react poorly, I'll quit sooner, dodging a bullet in the process.

Yea maybe you’re the one reacting poorly by being an ass instead of trying to communicate in a healthy way.

This is literally the point of the OP by the way, most people aren’t out to get you, and can be convinced of things if you communicate respectfully. No one wants to work with someone who goes out of their way to tear them down.

It sounds like you're the one who is reacting poorly in this context. OP is describing exactly what you're talking about without being an asshole about it.

It really comes down to what you think of "...know that he was the boss and I'd do my best to accomplish anything he assigned me." To me that is... 20th century-style salaryman subservience, aka, super problematic and repulsive. The idea that the bosses' whim is your command is disgusting to me.

You're treating it like a career.

The parent is treating it like a job.

No judgement from me on this, but that's the difference.

Glad it worked for you, but in my experience, this doesn't always work. Making everyone a developer and a business analyst is a super stupid idea. This is not something subtle like rotating people to work on different parts of the same codebase. What is even more stupid is that it looks like he decided it unilaterally (based on your comment).

Why should anyone work for a person like this? If a boss decides to make huge changes like this unilaterally without at least talking to the team, why does he deserve a polite conversation from his team?

I don't know, there's lots of room for nuance. Maybe the boss asked around and half the team said they felt silo'd and one dimensional, and they wanted a bit more of a "smart person on the team whose core contribution is development" rather than "developer who just takes tickets and builds" mindset. Maybe the edict was a bit more like a proposal. It seems like the manager was willing to be flexible and change his proposal, so I won't necessarily assume bad intent

> I've learned it better to communicate

Good advice for almost any situation.

I think someone on HN suggested "change your employer" with the dual meaning intended. First try to get the necessary changes through without swapping in a completely different employer. If that's not possible, look for a new job.

> After a year of trying, coaching, assuming I’m the problem, talking to my skip level, hard convos with my boss, and much more etc

Seems like OP did all these things.

How did the rest of the department fare? Were you the only one who avoided going hybrid?

There was a half-hearted effort for everyone to go hybrid. After a few months everyone naturally fell back into the individual roles we had before the edict was issued. There was a lot of struggling before this silent return to original duties happened. No one really ever acknowledged the bad course we were on, just went back to the way things worked.

One developer actually found that he liked the business analyst work better and continued on that path.

> Why am I telling you? It's that I've learned it better to communicate and hopefully work things out then just pack up and head to another place.

How do you know it was better, in this circumstance, if you don't know what the outcome of packing up would have been? It's impossible to know all the consequences of our actions.

I think the implication here is that he otherwise liked the position. Sure, you can always hike and try something new, but if you like what you were doing before, communicating helps. Don't assume that a change is immediately Unwaivering Word Of God.

Because if they were anything like me, and the boss unilaterally decided I'm going down a different career path, they would have eventually quit.

because they didn't want to switch careers part-time into something far outside their original job description. that sounds borderline illegal as constructive dismissal anyway (ie that job you took? we're cutting the hours on that to half, good luck seeing as much career growth opportunity as you had expected when signing the contract)

Personally I think the concept of growth is a scam to get people to work harder for less. You can certainly grow your skill set, but intelligent people can rise to the occasion in most jobs. Including CEO/Director/High level decision making jobs.

Everytime I have received some insultingly low offer from a startup, they start talking about "growth", "what I can own", "wearing many hats". Meanwhile, the founder is sitting on some 40% equity grant.

Yes, my biggest problem with how promotion processes work at big companies is this.

How you're supposed to perform at your currently level is pretty well spelled out by your manager - exactly what your expectations are, etc.

However, you're supposed to perform at the "next level" prior to being promoted. Expectations are less clear here.

This leads to you doing a lot of things you think will get you a promotion (most of which is very valuable to the company). However, it gives the company an easy opportunity to say - oh, all that extra work you did was great and much appreciated it - but that is not "next level" work. No promotion. Try again next time. Also, no, we won't tell you what will get you promoted. Keep guessing. Hopefully you guess better next time. Sorry for your loss and our gain. Goodbye.

It is orders of magnitude easier to just get hired at the next level at a competing company. And, on top of that, you'll likely get paid much more, too.

If a company won't promote me, and I'm clearly exceeding the standard for the next role, I take that experience, and describe myself as that level on my resume for the next job. Seriously.

If you're doing the job, you're doing the job even if they won't officially give you the title.

I find titles not that meaningful since they can have wildly different responsibilities depending on the organization.

Do you put down "staff engineer" if you're not officially a staff engineer?

Titles don’t mean much. I used to be a “Test Associate” and put “QA Engineer” on my resume. Whenever I get a title like Software Engineer IV, I just put Sr. Software Engineer on my resume. If I was leading a team as a developer, I’d have no problem calling myself Lead Developer, regardless of what my title was. As long as your experience maps to what you’re selling yourself as, there shouldn’t be much of a problem.

The only time I’d be mildly concerned would be in reference checks and background checks. I just tell my reference what I’ve been calling myself so it’s not a surprise and put my official title in the background check.

If your grossly misrepresenting yourself, make it through a subpar interview process, and you manage to get the job, you’ll simply be miserable & stressed out because your underperforming & worried about getting fired.

If you're meeting or exceeding the company's criteria for that position, absolutely.

successfully get someone to agree with your performance at current job: 5% raise and more than 5% more responsibility

successfully get another job: 30% raise and no increase in responsibility

anybody married to their current management is contributing to the wage gap

promotion gets progressively harder the further up the org chart you go. There's just fewer and fewer slots and better and better people trying to get them.

I'm at a level now where the next level up just looks miserable. The people I know one level up are the most intelligent productive people I know but almost every single one of them has some bizarre unexplained health issue likely related to stress. The things my boss, her boss, and their peers are able to accomplish is amazing to me but, man, i just don't think that level of suffering is worth the increase in pay.

Let me guess you work at Amazon.

This is mostly true for IC roles. Politics of the company are learned and are increasingly important beyond that point. People generally need to learn how to influence and how to whip votes for certain objectives to become a priority or receive budget dollars. Being smart might help but isn’t always a solution but having a mentor in the process or having been coached through similar activities can be a big help. They also generally need to learn how to lead/grow/manage a team of IC's and eventually team of managers as part of their responsibilities. Even smart people are usually born without that ability. Some people have a head start if they have taken leadership roles elsewhere in their life. YMMV but this is applies to most corporate cultures that I have experienced over my career.

> Personally I think the concept of growth is a scam to get people to work harder for less.

I've certainly seen this employed as a way to argue against wage increases. "If we're going to pay you 15% more, how are you going to add 15% more value?" Sadly this rhetoric often works on people because it sounds so obviously intuitive at first. Thing is, jobs can become more valuable even if they're exactly the same, and the employee provides exactly the same input from day to day. The market decides the value of a job.

>"If we're going to pay you 15% more, how are you going to add 15% more value?"

This quote assumes that the employer refuses to acknowledge the employee adds more value than what their compensation represents.

I'm always of the mind that my value to my employer is 1.5-2x what I'm actually getting paid, at the low end. Asking for more money is simply trying to better negotiate the way I'm compensated for the value I'm already delivering. If my employer fails to recognize that, I've learned no amount of loyalty to the employer or flexibility to try to do more can change that.

This is why it's important for folks to understand exactly what they are contributing to a company's bottom line. This is easier for sales roles where they can point to closed deals, but more difficult for IT roles who's job is to keep the lights on.

"Easy. I've been working at 50% because of the s*t pay anyway."

Jokes aside, if someone tries such manoeuvres it might be time to reevaluate if 15% is enough to stay.

It's definitely in the same vein as "you will be paid in experience."

A startup job offer scam is different from actual growth in a job. Depends on the company of course but many are ok if people are comfortable in their jobs and are delivering as expected. That is an accepted state of mind to be in.

They are not necessarily wrong. The most straightforward way to grow into the role you want (e.g. a manager) is to get direct experience doing the job. For example, if you wanted to get a manager role at a FAANG-type of company, you could:

1. Get a role as a junior developer at a FAANG, get 2+ promotions, hope your team has enough scope and resources to let you try out manager duties

2. Get a role as a junior developer at a growing company, be quickly forced into manager duties, then transfer into FAANG

True, some places will use this to their advantage to underpay you, but you should be aware of it as a tool in your career.

I dont know. I've taken a few jobs for growth. But I made sure they also benefited me in other ways. Want me to take a really hard role where I'm going to learn and grow a lot? Pay me more than if I was taking a less difficult role with less growth.

Agreed, growth is a vague term, such that you can hide your lack of knowledge of the situation or the person, or it is just straight exploitation sprinkled with bs

It's a scam but sometimes it pays off.

There is a leadership book called "First Break all the Rules - What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently". It's data driven by a large meta-survey and research project.

One of the conclusions was that, essentially, the normal instinct with Performance Management to focus on improving weaknesses is wrong and leads to sub-optimal outcomes. The best managers actually doubled down on each individuals strengths, and simply accepted weaknesses as something to be smoothed out to the minimally acceptable level. (e.g. someone may not be "good with people", but they can't be openly hostile with co-workers.) Instead the manager would look for another employee which had that weakness as a strength, and manage responsibilities appropriately.

It speaks exactly to what was wrong in OP's experience.

This is exactly true. The real problem is that sometimes, we have people who are good at things that aren't important to the value we are driving as a team. For example, someone who really good at whipping up proof of concepts is really valuable in an agency and not very valuable on a team that is primarily tasked with increasing the performance of an application, whatever it takes.

I can't change my project to need more proof of concepts in every case. So, I have two things in my toolbag: I can try to coach someone to know my expectations for this project and help with coaching those behaviors and skills, or I can let them go for being a square peg when we need a round hole.

I wish we had better ways for matching people with the best jobs that rewarded what make them excel.

If you think about it MMO strategies involve picking players how fit specific roles:

tank - can soak up damage and keep the big bad focused on them dps - does damage to the target while healer - makes sure everyone stays "alive" through the fight.

Mismatching roles never really works well. You get similar patterns in the "real world". You're people person does well with end users, etc .. It's a more diverse group (sometimes much less defined) but a similar set of ideas to follow.

Or baseball. A good back catcher doesnt need to pitch.

Oh wow, you mean every book in existence got it wrong until this book came along and now we have THE ANSWER?!?!?!

Thank god they solved that problem!

No, this is typical "The only way to be smarter than everyone else is to do it different so I gotta do it different".

good managers are good because they're good managers, not because of this 1 weird trick.

It's an entire book, based on a massive research project, of which that was one small result. The clickbait title of the book is because that is what sells books.

"good managers are good because they're good managers"

LOL thanks. I guess all these books are pointless because you figured it out! Thank god you solved the problem!

This is extra dangerous because it can result in you losing confidence which can lead to you developing patterns that make it seem like you are falling which in turn feeds a downward spiral. This older HBR article on "Set up to fail syndrome" should be read by everyone who is a manager or feels like they are struggling: https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-set-up-to-fail-syndrome

Thank you for this. It puts words to a situation I made worse with a report a few years ago and helped me see it another way

I would approach this with a dose of humility. I used to think I had it all figured out too; now, older me realizes how ignorant I was and surprised how tolerant management was of my flagrant pomposity.

I agree. However life is short and after trying half a dozen things over a year, it’s creating a lot of mental health problems for me.

It is likely I have failed. I have tremendous empathy for this boss. But I also have to think of my strengths and where I can be successful elsewhere.

Don't worry about having failed. Just try to learn some lessons so you can avoid similar problems next time.

If it's truly getting to the point where it's affecting your mental health, the job is no longer what you should prioritize.

Precisely ^

Strive for excellence, not perfection, in everything you do.

Did you fail? If you got paid for the work, you didn't fail. You succeeded. We're all at this for money first. If you can enjoy the time spent making money, that's a bonus.

Time has come to tell yourself not to dwell on it anymore. Find another job, you will be surprised how much of a difference it will be. Company culture, styles of management, relations with colleagues, all need a fresh start.

You didn't fail. You just found half a dozen things that don't work. Work on yourself for a while.

OP did.

>"With all humility I admit it may be me that failed."

The real problem here is that hiring is a giant pain for both sides. In an ideal world, you would quickly quit that job and hop to another. If you didn't do that, they would quickly hire you and both sides would move on without much stress. But changing jobs/employees is a big deal involved insurance, retirement funds, dozens of hours of interviews over many weeks, etc.

My advice for anyone in this spot is to quit quickly. I've left a number of jobs within the first month because it was an obvious bad fit. They likely weren't happy about it, but we'd all be miserable after 6+ months of me not performing how I know I can. Don't be sentimental about the work that went into getting the job, just go find a good fit.

Also if you quit quickly, you can leave it off your resume. This is especially valuable to squeeze in extra chances to join the right startup as an employee, over your career, in between the 2-4+ year stretches engaging deeply in the good growthful roles.

Yep, I never quit a job without a new one lined up. Because sometimes it takes several months to find something decent.

Sometimes you don't have a choice. If you've been laid off, you may have to jump on the first thing that comes along (will usually be a suck job with high turnover - those always seem to hire quickly) and keep looking for something good.

I actually quit jobs without next being lined up. And in retrospect these were the best decisions. Sometimes it's better to cut loses/bad fit and concentrate on the future than dragging it on and draining yourself.

I got a question. I started doing that about a year ago. One thing that worries me is how it looks on the CV, that you quit a job after a month or two.

Even worse, when you have more of those in there.

I don't put them on my CV. I generally explain gaps on my resume as working on side projects or doing some consulting looking for a good long term fit.

Been there. I had very strong technical skills and was well known in the organization for that. Changed jobs on the promise I would work on projects using those skills.

In reality they wanted me to do change management, negotiate budgets, negotiate dates, coordinate projects, make power point decks…

Because of my excellent track record delivering technical stuff they expected great results from me doing this new stuff. I couldn’t deliver it as they wanted. “You must grow and become a leader, that’s the path forward” they kept telling me. In the end it didn’t work and I left.

Now I’m in a new team and they expect me again to become a leader but this time it’s different, it is truly a technical leadership and I hope this time it will be different.

One thing to watch out for (in roles like the old one you left) is the mentality that all butts in chairs are interchangeable.

In particular, they should have hired a seasoned release manager instead of trying to turn you into one.

(Some Dev Ops proponents have some nonsensical argument about continuous release meaning you don’t need a release manager. Those people are incompetent, and don’t know what a release manager does.)

Over the years, I've had many managers who didn't understand what continuous integration was. As a result, I've set up a number of different build machines. Once they saw it in action, the response was typically something close to "how did we live so long without this?"

I think people put way too much focus on growth. Trying to scale the corporate ladder is really starting to seem like getting a PhD and trying to be a professor. There aren’t enough director or C level jobs for everyone, but most of us are compelled to join the rat race to try and get one.

difference being it is easier (especially if you've got some computer skills) to create a new company than a new university/research lab.

My personal "growth" trajectory will eventually entail starting my own shop, I suspect many other people will have similar paths.

fantastic. i’ve been on that path for the last year. it’s odd and very different. it feels like there’s an actual fog of war now. things to discover and be curious about.

One of my problems is that I like to write code. Specifically novel code. But the places I work at really want me to just do regular CRUD work and glue work (use other people's code and avoid novel code). How do I find companies that write their own cool new code? Maybe coding teams get broken down into such small teams that there is only room for CRUD and glue and novel code gets too risky when trying to deliver use value at every sprint.

New code is not cool.

Today's new code is tomorrow's legacy code. It will need updates, security vulnerabilities will be discovered in it, and it will break occasionally or maybe lose data.

Someone will have to maintain it.

People need to have more respect when it comes to new code. It should be treated like unexploded ordnance.

Thank you for your comment. Maybe I need to be reminded of that every once in a while.

I would rephrase it as, new code is cool for who writes it, less cool for who needs to maintain it.

Depends who's writing the new code. My new code generally doesn't need people to maintain it and those that do end up having to modify it are happier that I replaced the garbage that was there before me.

You can write new code with the intent of making it maintainable.

If your new code is clever shit nobody understands you probably shouldn't be writing code.

YMMV.

I use very, very cool language tricks in my unit tests.

Not in the production code.

While maybe my view is a bit myopic here, I think the harsh reality of the world is that it's very difficult to find an opportunity where all you do is write brand new code outside of a small/early stage startup. The numbers just don't make sense to constantly reinvent the wheel, even though many developers love and prefer that. In truth the best developers I've ever worked with and managed have a good intuition about when the re-use vs re-build and I support them in that. Developers who try to push too hard one way or the other often end up taking way longer than they should have to get a task done. As with darn near everything else in life - it's all about balance. That's my 2 cents anyways.

Excellent analysis. Yeah maybe I do struggle with build vs re-use situations.

My experience is that shipping is boring.

If I want to ship my software, as opposed to just write it, I need to use tech that's a couple of clicks back from "bleeding edge," and spend a lot of time, "polishing the fenders."

B O R I N G

But I get a kick out of seeing my software out there, ready to be integrated into other people's software (90% of the time, I'm my own best customer, but I write all of my software as if it were being adopted by a Fortune 50 company).

I recommend the pharma industry or any other science-heavy field.

It's sort of hit and miss, but sometimes you get a research project where it's the experimental results which make or break the whole thing - your role is to support the experiment with the software you write.

Example, since this may sound too vague: I'm currently in a project that started off as a research paper and associated Matlab code.

Problem is, you can't ship this to people who just want to see the results and don't have the proper computing power on their work laptops to perform the necessary calculations, so we built a whole web app which does all that at scale.

Other times you do a boring compliance/business application, but such projects are usually timeboxed and with unchanging scope.

Example: 9-months, 11 devs and the result was an app where the user clicked a button once a month which made the backend talk to 15 different APIs that in concert created the last section of a 2k page PDF file because regulations said so.

Boring as hell but it was over soon enough and even got an internal award for "least(zero) complaints".

Worth looking into any COSS (commercial open source) companies that you find interesting. That’s where you write the code that then others glue together - plus you can inspect the codebase beforehand!

Shameless plug: We are hiring at Jina AI https://jobs.lever.co/jina-ai

Learn a statically-typed FP lang and get a job doing that.

Even if you end up at a "Simple Haskell" place, you'll still have all sorts of opportunities to reinvent the wheel (so that you can run yourself over with it, of course).

Great suggestion. Maybe my programming language is the problem and I need to tackle this issue by learning a different language.

Another upside is that if you use a less-common language, there is _not_ a library or package for everything just yet... so sometimes, that creates the opportunity to work on open source at your day job!

Some people will say that this is a downside, because you can't build new things or ship new features as quickly… But I suppose that it comes down to what you want to get out of your career, and what your goals are.

If you are careful and diligent, you can find a way to get paid to solve problems within the domain of your interests. It might take a few years of study on your own time, but I pulled it off; and if I can pull it off, that means that just about anybody can!

Plus, learning new stuff is fun, and I would not have spent the time that I did learning the things that I have learned, if I didn't feel like it was worth it for its own sake.

Solid advice. Thank you!!!

Most real problems don't need interesting code.

You get paid to write glue and CRUD apps because that's what actually solves the problems most people and businesses have.

It depends on the company's product. At a very large company you might find the odd team that's building some interesting new, internal framework or infrastructure. If you want to stay away from CRUD your best bet though might be a company where the CRUD isn't the core of what provides user value. Examples that come to mind immediately (since that's where I work right now) are data offerings. Lots of interesting new and existing data stores these days and unless you end up on the, likely very small GUI team, it's all hardcore coding. I would expect similar from some ML products.

I also started my career in web development, and also found it became very mechanical after a while.

Personally, I've found game engine and graphics programming to fill this void. It's somewhat tricky to learn, but if you're interested I'd check out Handmade Hero to start.

The job market for engine programmers isn't fantastic, especially if you want to work remotely, but there are definitely jobs out there, and very few people capable of filling the roles.

If you like to write novel code it may be that you really enjoy puzzles. One way to scratch that itch in existing systems is seeing if it can retain it's use cases with less code. See if you can make your net lines of code negative for all your bug and feature commits.

Find a place where you are allowed to own the code, as in code in any language. Ask the coders what language they use. If they all use the same language it's a bad sign. If the work ad mentions a specific code stack it's a bad sign.

Become a "research engineer", take projects that need research.

One option is to work on open source projects.

There are many novel projects that work with novel code, (such as UI / features on top of stable diffusion).

And you can drill into the novel code dependencies (such as SD in above example) if you want to write novel code.

Working with teams shipping novel code publicly is probably the fastest way to find work that pays you to do similar.

>> gets too risky when trying to deliver use value at every sprint.

I disagree. To me, being afraid of new code or refactoring code means you're working with a code base that has a lot of tech debt and also no serious continuous integration infra.

Early employee at a startup?

> It's important to know when your strengths are fundamentally misaligned with your job, boss, etc and leave ASAP. Don't try to force yourself to fit into it for the sake of "growth".

Spot on. Also remember your “boss” is not your owner. Nor are they all knowing. If the “boss” doesnt meet your requirements change the “boss”. It goes both ways.

At my last FTE job I started straight telling my boss that I had no growth goals for myself, that I was one of the most productive members of the team and was quite happy to stay where I was at since I didn't desire any promotions or anything. He worked with me to put some unmeasurable goals like team building or whatever so that the review checkbox could be checked. The one thing people rarely try is brutal honesty.

It sounds like OP is getting on the verge of the brutal honesty and part of that is acknowledging the actual assigned work makes them miserable. That's fine, and if you can't be moved to a better fitting role then it's time to go.

Another alternative approach is to not care about your work reviews, as long as you're not getting fired, and look for your growth outside your 9-5 job. For the 9-5 think of it as just a tool to pay the bills while you do what you want to do. Performing at around the halfway mark compared to the rest of the team is good enough to not get fired. Use your new-found time, mental energy, etc. to focus on whatever personal or professional goals you want. That's how I started my business and it's going great.

I ran into this at a job. The manager who hired me left a few months in, and the new manager was hellbent on painting me into a corner by having me train to do things I wasn't really experienced with or well suited to doing. The goal was to avoid having to spend money on an engineer by training a non-engineer - me - to do engineering work.

After three years, in my last performance review with that manager, they told me to consider whether I really wanted to stay with the company in a nudge to get me to quit. I really did want to stay at the company, though, so I got on the company's internal job board and applied for a transfer to an open role in another department.

After those three years without a raise above cost of living or any consideration for a promotion, within a year in the new role I got promoted and a performance raise. After two years the company gave me an award, performance bonus, and another promotion at an offsite. I'd gone so deep into the self-loathing hole with my previous manager that I didn't even know work _could_ be like that, anywhere, much less at the same company working with many of the same people.

The new role wasn't even all that different - I still spent more than half my time doing the kind of work I'd expected to do when I joined the company, and even spent a significant chunk working across groups with the same people from my previous team. I was just under a different manager who, instead of trying to warp me into a different version of myself, quickly recognized what I was already good at, found what value that could bring to their team, and set me loose on it. I took off like a rocket.

As a nice side effect, I didn't lose vesting on my options and benefits, even if the options ended up being worthless.

Thanks for sharing. It gives me a great deal of hope <3

Generally speaking, making major changes in our character/passions/work etc just to please someone is not sustainable, this is true in both personal and work lives. I am facing something similar, but from a family member.

In my previous job, I was asked to do QA work. I have never done QA work before - I don't mind doing it, but I didn't want to do only front end (color, pixel etc) QA work. Needless to day, it didn't work out for me and for my manager.

The best thing to do in such scenarios is to just leave, if that is an option. Especially in professional situations. I have had a lot of jobs in my life - some good, some bad, some super bad. The only thing that was common in ALL these jobs was this - nobody gave a fuck about anyone else, beyond using them to get stuff done. Yes, most people are polite and nice - that doesn't mean they care about you or anyone else. This is not bitterness speaking, this is just the reality. So the best thing to do, is just leave and find a better job

I think it's possible to 'grow' in something you don't care about or are not necessarily your core strengths.

Like I never had much interest in DevOps, but previous jobs have put me in a situation where I had to learn it and although I sucked at it at first, I got better at it, and since it seems to have become almost an unescapable part of a full-stack web developer's job nowadays.

Also I haven't cared much about the domains of several companies I've been hired for or clients I've been put to work for as a consultant (like I actively tried to avoid the insurance and finance industry, and ended up doing work for both). Hasn't stopped me from learning that anyway, and I can follow along (mostly) with our client when they talk about wealth management concepts now, when I was totally lost in those conversations when I first started.

And at a previous job I knew nothing about developing phone systems, but did a little work here and there, and eventually became the department's 'phone systems expert' as I became the only person left in the department that knew enough about those systems as people transferred or left. I handled the role just fine until I left for another job. I don't do anything with phone systems now, but I do have a better understanding of how networks work because of that job, which has been useful.

It is an opportunity cost, though. I have lost some of my other skills because of time spent in these roles. Like I think I'd have trouble going back into video game development after spending so much time out of it, at least at the level of seniority that I would kind of need in order to get sort of in the ballpark of the salary I'm currently making.

I'm still making games in my spare time, but I don't have a ton of free time anymore, so progress has been slow and the games I've been working on have been tiny in comparison.

If you put yourself in your managers shoes, what are the demands and most important goals that need to be achieved? Sometimes the reality of the situation is less than perfect and you can't personally blame them for it. I've seen backend developers forced to do UI work when they absolutely did not want to and our manager was very blunt about the fact that we didn't have the resources to get a FE developer, or even the need for one full time so "tough luck". After that conversation, the BE dev. did the mature thing and got on with it.

>After that conversation, the BE dev. did the mature thing and got on with it.

Sure. At least for the near-term, get on with it after you've had the discussion. However, if you're being compensated as someone with a lot of experience in an area and you dropped into something quite different, sure you can learn and certainly some skills and experience are transferable--but you may still be performing at a significantly lower level than before for least at a decent period.

That sounds very frustrating and while I see comments suggesting to try harder, leaving probably is the right thing to do.

> I have a very different vision for my role

This is the critical piece, and I’m not asking for detail, but the details here are everything and it would be interesting to hear both sides of this mismatch in expectation.

That said, let’s not forget that a job is where we trade our time to spend doing something the company wants in return for money. This is complicated, but we can’t necessarily expect to have our own vision for our role, we can only seek out roles that fit us and hope that it’s an environment that either allows our vision or matches it. Some managers want people to build their own vision, and some don’t. Even though the best people and the strongest growth comes from people who do have their own vision and take initiative to change things, there’s also a ton of work out there where the company just needs something specific done, and that something might not be what you want.

BTW, from experience, a lot of this still mostly true even if you run your own startup; we just trade time for something the customer wants, and it often isn’t what we’d rather be doing.

> With all humility I admit it may be me that failed.

If it’s not a fit, then it’s not your failure. Go find a better fit! Good luck!

Let me guess, your boss tried to force you into a lead / staff / management role?

Same thing happened to me. As I've gotten older management has been been more insistent on me taking a 'leadership' role. What they don't tell you is this is 2x the work (and the sort of work you hate the most) for ~ 10% more pay.

10% is the carrot. The stick is that they start telling you you're 'top of band' for a sr dev and that they can't give you raises going forward despite meeting and exceeding expectations. That particular shoe hasn't dropped just yet, but when it does, I might have to make some hard choices to keep my career moving forward.

Only 10%? The difference is much bigger in my experience. But yes, it's a different skillset and you need to work on honing it.

Yeah, I don't work at Big N. The pay bump for staff in the south east seems to be pretty damned paltry. Certainly not enough to compensate me for the extra hassle of being team lead.

The tone of this thread is so unrelatable to me. I feel like the total opposite of the sentiment in this thread. I want to work in a place that pushes me to do better and fulfill my potential. I know that's hard, because true learning is almost always uncomfortable and feels like work. But in most jobs throughout my career, my experience is of feeling stifled and asphyxiated. In practice, many times when I've tried to "grow" in my role, the reaction from my colleagues was negative and I got the sense that I didn't belong there, that I was stepping on people's toes, that overworked people felt insulted or threatened rather than relieved by my offer to take on tiny pieces of their responsibilities. Things have gotten better now that I'm in my 30s and better at standing up for myself, but I'm still in an uphill battle just to be included in conversations. As someone who is passionate about technology, I want to answer questions like, "What's the hardest thing I can do?" or "What's the most awesome thing I can make?" or "What's the biggest positive impact that I can have?" And then I feel jealous when I read this thread because I wish I had a tenth as much support as some of these people have. I wish I had a manager who wanted me to grow too much!

Yes, you are learning to discard the HR corp bullshit and face reality. Humans are flawed, humans can’t do everything equally well, humans get sick and hurt. And more than anything, humans are a product of their environment. Great outcomes come from great environments, poor outcomes come from poor environments.

We have a tendency to take all the blame onto ourselves. We have a society that tells you to take personal responsibility for everything from your career success to saving the planet. But fact is that if the ship is sinking you will go down too.

Find a better boat. It is the most powerful thing you can do in life.

At various points, I've thought who my manager is doesn't matter. I'm the same person, and I'll have strong output and progress either way.

But then I got a great manager with a great manager over him. Suddenly, I knew what it was like to be supported properly. For the first time in over 10 years things clicked and made sense.

Turns out, mediocre managers do have a real impact on me.

Yes I’ve learned I thrive when I’m surrounded by hood support and people that truly “see” how I contribute and how I can get better at my super power. I don’t do well when I’m seen as a burden or problem, and “why can’t you just be X”.

Now I'm imagining a SWE who thrives because the hood supports and protects them.

This resonates with me as a programmer who has refused the management path. However, I also think that the more experienced one becomes, and the more influence one wields in the org, the more gaps in one's skillset are amplified. So, grudgingly, I admit that with age and experience comes a certain expedience in learning to not completely suck at things that are outside of my normal areas of strength. As long as my boss understands that I may never be stellar at those things.

Does anyone in the team understand what you bring to the table? Is your contribution key to the team's success? If that's the case then the others could serve as promoters for your case in front of the boss who apparently doesn't see or appreciate this.

But if this is not the case then maybe your current skill set is not a good match to what is currently needed. I don't know, maybe someone else is already covering the things that you say you bring to the table, or the team's activity and goals are just a bad fit for you specifically.

> because I'm being forced to be something I'm not

Many managers see this as trying to help you grow, by getting you outside your comfort zone. In the end it's your choice if you want to play along or find a team/boss that makes better use of your contribution.

Yes, I helped build the team. Many of the colleagues are my friends and best coworkers from past jobs. That’s what makes leaving so hard. I’m being recruited heavily by other internal teams, which helps my mental state right now.

Go. Your manager should be encouraging you to do so - it will open up a spot for them to find the right fit for what they're trying to do as well as keep someone valuable to the company.

Interesting, building a team and operating as part of a now stable team ca be different affairs so that might be part of the issue.

Anyway, the interest from other teams is a good sign that your skills are still valued elsewhere. Moving on might be the best choice especially if you've been struggling with this for some time.

Author Marcus Buckingham has a series of books about this.

https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/books/

It's been a good decade since I read some of these, but I recall that there is often a focus of "eliminating" weaknesses instead of avoiding them and focusing on strengths. But his interviews led him to believe the opposite is best - just work around weaknesses, but put most of your effort into expanding upon strengths.

EDIT: See this was mentioned already - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33248487

I completely understand this sentiment and I've been there. I was at a job that paid me extraordinarily well (particularly with my stock grants). Yet I was constantly on call, having to respond to hundreds of requests in the #ask-foo channel, and constantly servicing inbound chore tasks. My skills are in algorithmic and low level engineering.

Ultimately a move was what made my life better.

Something that took me way to long to figure out: know when it's time to leave a job.

I wish I did! :-)

Hey, Tiger, your golf is great! Really off the charts. But your basketball scores are terrible. We're putting you on a performance improvement plan, and if we don't see major improvement in your basketball then we'll have to let you go.

There is research that supports your experience and conclusions. See Clifton Strengthsfinder, based on Gallup's research. The gist is: build on your superpowers instead of on the qualities you are less strong.

>I've tried to fit myself into what she needs like a square peg in a round hole. I have a very different vision for my role, and a specific understanding of how my strengths contribute to our team.

It happens and it's not necessarily anyone's fault. A new manager comes in with different views of what work needs to be done and what doesn't. For whatever reason maybe transferring internally is hard right now for whatever reason or maybe there just aren't other roles internally that excit you.

(What I have seen though is managers who come in, make changes in roles, and really try to hang onto headcount even if some of that headcount is people they wouldn't have hired. That's on them.)

Depending on a lot of factors maybe it makes sense to hang on for a while. But, at the end of the day, if you're in a job you don't really care for and don't really have the background for--especially if you're supposedly very senior--that's just not a stable or good situation.

It seems to me that your boss was more than understanding. Coaching and long runway. I'm glad you see the realty as it is and not go into passive-aggressive mode.

I disagree that growth can only come from strength. Like many coders, I was bad at communications, particularly in public speaking space. My boss needed an engineer that can present work at company meetings, he basically tasked me (mainly because I knew the system and business very well). It was 6 months of absolute terror as some of you might know. In the end, I succeeded. I learned more than about me than before, while my technical skills didn't improve, my soft skill improved leaps and bounds. My career also has improved significantly.

What I'm trying to say is, change is hard, especially if it impact the core of who you are. But like everything else in life, stepping out of your comfort zone is important for growth if that's something you desire.

Could you be more specific ?

Like if your weakness is poor communication leading towards unintentional hostility to coworkers or inability to prioritize work, that weakness is probably worth be developed.

To me it sounds more like they are trying to force them into a bullshit-job.

Completely agree. I'm basically in the same situation at work now. I got islanded on a side project (systems dashboard) and am completely inessential except for political reasons, and for a while I had the worst kind of supervisor -- someone superficially nice but constantly changes the sw contract on you so you keep getting screwed over (it's awful getting the "hi friend" greeting every morning while having a knife stabbed into your career). Now he stepped down from group leader and got replaced by an management hired from the outside that is injecting chaos and has poor Technical judgement. Meanwhile the codebase that's underneath me is spiralling out of control, has very few tests, etc.

I'm only sticking around in the hopes of transferring to another department where my friend is the group leader.

well why dont you just quit? I would quit after two weeks of such drama, all of my friends would do the same.

A few years ago there was a similar phase at my current employment. Someone with a key position in the product team, who had become the primary conductor of the developers, attached an excessive importance to "delivering results" to her higher-ups. This manifested in a desire to stack up as many Jira tickets as possible in the "deployed" column between the releases that the product team digested into result summaries/breakdowns. I'm not sure how the pressure to show progress made it into the everyday concerns of me and the other developers, but for a period we regularly made up small contrived "problems" - nonsensically technical Jira tickets that nobody in the product team would ever bother to deconstruct - in order to produce enough "results".

My skills have deteriorated too. Mismanagement and poor company policies have created a lot of inefficiency and sapped my morale. I'm just coasting. I figure the disappointment, frustration, etc is present in any alternative job anyways.

Move to another job. Not all organizations / teams are incompetent.

Eh, I'd rather coast at this point. I'm too old and have too many responsibilities (and restrictions) at home to switch companies at fhis point.

I hope you get fired, for your own good, my friend.

It would only hurt me.

I fully agree. Growth can only happen if the context is set right.

I would even argue that is why some bigger firms such as stripe have a rotation model where you can explore new jobs and positions within the company.

Have you told your boss about how you feel?

Sounds like a bad fit - find something new. Learn in a new place and experience. If the pattern follows you around, maybe start to look inwardly at whether your bringing the same problems from place to place.

You can’t escape yourself..,

This almost always comes from a bad manager. I think our industry needs to hold managers more accountable to growing their subordinates in the direction of their careers they want. If they can't, they shouldn't be managers, it's really that simple. Some may argue that personal growth is not important to the business but in reality it is because if the employees don't feel like they're growing then they leave and it costs money in churn. Look at how much Amazon's churn is costing them, it's in the billions of dollars.

A competent manager would recognize you're not a good fit for whatever it is that she needs, and would help you find another role in the same company, and if not available outside of the company.

Wow that sounds like a lot of stress and if you're looking to climb a corporate ladder and that stress is worth continue to work in tech at such places where the environment feels competitive.

If you want to work in tech yet have little stress work in government IT.

Personally I could never work at places like meta, amazon, google and other places where you are under a heat lamp and those around u are too. Of course there's more money but for me the stress (affects health hugely) isn't worth it!

> Well I just want to say, the industry has an obsession with "growth" in performance reviews. But the reality is that growth only works when you build on someone's strengths. Trying to ask someone to grow by changing who they fundamentally are, leads to withdrawal, stagnation, and anti-growth. I'm actually getting worse at my job, not better, because I'm being forced to be something I'm not. It's depressing, draining, and frustrating. I can't be who I fundamentally am in my role.

I totally agree with this. What poor companies do is try to force you into a process no matter what. The process is king and if you don't fit it, get out.

What they should do is go grab a coffee with you and ask you what your desires are on a regular basis. And even to some extent make the company strategy malleable to this (across all staff). That is if employee churn is an issue, which of course it is because hiring is a big hassle!

Obviously the more people in the company, the more standardization of process you need. You may have less need for certain roles that are jacks of all trades and need specialist squads. But there should be always room for asking staff what they ideally want and trying to get them closer to that.

> But the reality is that growth only works when you build on someone's strengths.

Respectfully disagree. Growth comes from going beyond what you're comfortable with.

Also not sure this is "ungrowth" and more a general misallocation of human capital. Good bosses are proactive, yes, but that doesn't mean randomly messing with team dynamics and roles like you're a chemist trying to find the philosopher's stone.

Nice message. After being fired from like 6 jobs or something, I've tried to emphasize this vocally. I have abysmal short term memory, miserable sleep management, and I lose track of calendar stuff and different task tracking systems easily. But I can code, and I can communicate pretty well. So I try to emphasize this if it comes up. I deeply suck at managing communication in support requests with customers, and expecting me to be as good anyone else will just be telling me to start looking for another job, because I'll try and burn myself out only to fail. If it's absolutely crucial I never miss a meeting, as dumb as it is, I'm going to miss some here and then.

I like trying to get better at the things I've discovered some way to get progress at, but I hate trying to push myself to try and be perfect at something I can't.

I am in a similar situation. I have to write and review requirements and other docs in a system with the worst usability and stability I have ever seen. Every little thing you do turns into a massive ordeal because there is always something that doesn’t work right. So I am spending an enormous amount of energy and time just figuring out the quieks of the system. Everybody who has to work with it hates it.

In the last few months I have basically neglected my regular job which is to be a team lead and architect. Other people have picked up the slack to some degree but I feel more and more that my tech skills are going downhill because I am dealing with a software system that shouldn’t ever have been bought.

This is becoming a real career problem. I am learning “skills” that are totally useless in any sane company and neglecting the skills that can get you a good job.

I'm over "growth"-oriented performance reviews generally. At my current job, we have them every 6mo + minor "check-ins" in between.

I'm pretty high up the IC chain (the leveling guide even says my level is a natural place for someone to be at for a long time/indefinitely). And I'm not interested in the next level. More, I'm not interested in growing professionally anymore.

That's not to say I'm not gonna keep solving problems and learning new things. But at this point, I'd just like to be Very Good at What I Do for the next years.

I'm busy growing personally on many axes anyways. But they aren't useful to my employer. But I only have so much "self-improvement" juice to give.

I think this really depends on what they are asking you to do. If part of the job is say writing documentation, moving and documenting your work with Jira tickets, report progress, or helping your team accomplish the sprint then maybe you need to build those skills to at least be ok at it. If it is to manage people or move up in job title then I would agree maybe that isn't something you should try for. You were not very specific on the details.

Also growth isn't always just building on strengths. It is also knowing where you are short on skill and learning more to at least do that skill ok and then maybe delicate or trade tasks with someone that is better at it. It is about understanding yourself.

It's the job of a manager to understand how to "grow" an employee. It's the job of the employee to convey that in a sensible way to the manager. That's what one on ones are for.

One of two things will emerge. The employee has strengths which can be used to benefit both parties (employer and employee) and can be grown which creates a career path. Or the employees strengths are of no use to the company and they part ways amicably.

This is the sensible way to product growth and trying to shoehorn someone into an unsuitable position is damaging to the company and the employee.

Sorry to hear you're going through this. I can definitely understand some of where you are coming from too. Earlier in the year I wrote a bunch of stuff as work was making me fed up and very low. It's doing the same again now so I'm rereading what I wrote. Sometimes writing things down can release a bit of mental pressure.

https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2022/my-thoughts-on-what...

It's important to look out for yourself and your career

I'm a founder at a small company, and the current environment has us stagnating a bit

My biggest fear is that our best contributors go elsewhere because we aren't able to fully enable their growth here right now

I've lucked out in terms of how loyal my team is, but loyalty only goes so far, and the business has an obligation to enable the careers of it's contributors

Basically just saying, there are two sides to every deal and if you're not thriving due to environment, you have a responsibility to yourself to find an environment where you will thrive

This is an interesting topic. I suspect you are being vague for privacy. But is it possible to get some more context?

What do you think your strengths are? Which strengths does the manager want you to grow?

I think too many people lean on 'strengths' instead of realizing that you could be putting effort to improve your 'opportunities'. Growth is about making yourself better at things you aren't naturally good at, not staying in your safe zone doing the same exact things just because it's easier for you that way.

This is how I hire, I look for people willing to adapt and learn, because our field changes constantly you have to be able and willing to adapt to it. That may not be comfortable.

I was a pretty mid to lower performer in my last role. Now I'm a top performer. A lot of times its just how your work is valued and the support you may/may not have.

Reminds me of a company I had the most fun working for.

One of the basic principle was you can only be world-class in your natural strengths.

Some of others were: - Try to ask why as less as possible as it's getting your rationalisations and emotional most of the time - Ask what might I do differently instead - Risk, trust, honesty triangle - These need to be equal at all times for teams to be effective - Never judge and never say bad/good. Works/doesn't work are alternatives

You and I are in a similar train if not actually the same train. My last day at my current position is end of the month - next month I will take up the same position at a competitor who created the job position because they have a need, not because upper mgmt said they had to (as with my current). I'm happy for you that you too found your final destination on the train towards nowhere. I wish you the best, oh familiar stranger. :)

Yours truely, A dude on your train.

> With all humility I admit it may be me that failed

Always remember failure has no inherent meaning, it only has the meaning we attach to it. This can be a liberating realization.

Very relatable to what happened in my previous job. Thing is... you try and try to do your best to grow so that you fit in. Every evening thinking, man it was hard, what can i change, how can i be more efficient, how can i pick up that skill faster, learn faster such that they will be content. Until you finally realize, this job/boss is not for me. Search/find another one. MUCH happier.

It's hard to realize this until you try something and suck at it.

It's especially hard if you've basically been good at the things you have done in life, not realizing you either got lucky choosing things you were good at, just tended to be drawn to things you were good at without realizing why, or got jobs at things because others realized the good match...

The finality with which you describe your experience leaves little room for understanding a wider range of perspectives, doesn’t consider room for misunderstanding or the chance that you’re simply wrong in your view of underlying events. For me, that’s the growth that’s missing from this anecdote. It seems unlikely you will be happy in your next role given this perspective.

Well I didn’t spell out the full drama but:

1. It’s been more than a year and I’ve beat myself up, had coaching, and assumed I was the problem

2. This boss / situation is the outlier from almost every other role and I’ve decided to stop beating myself up about it (for context I’m mid career, worked at half a dozen places)

3. I have complete empathy for the boss. This situation is just different from past roles. They just need someone else in the role.

I admit, perhaps I failed, but life is short and I can keep beating my head against a wall trying to “grow” or move on.

I doubt it was your fault. I’ve seen this story over and over again (including with world class / top-knotch engineers).

The root cause was poor management in every single case I’ve personally witnessed.

Wow you just summed up my current situation except i didn't do any of the coaching and went quiet and stopped interacting much. It sucks that management has such an impact on their devs and there is no one to check this. Imo senior engineers should push for change but they wont as its easy to fool/manage an ignorant manager.

The beginning stages of change can feel very frustrating and you may even see things getting worse before they get any better. The key to growth is sticking with it and going through the difficult times specially when things get tough.

Now if she's being a jerk and forcing you into a corner by learning things you don't want to then leave immediately.

I've left 3 teams over this, and as a manager would encourage my people to try other teams if they feel ours isn't a growth direction.

Sometimes jobs change on you too. One position used to be for you, and now they need someone different. You should almost never strive to become that someone different.

You reminded me about a big company I used to work where they had these personal development plans. They were insisting on people to do them, but the allocated time was mostly "on paper". The consequence of that was that people started to pick small/trivial goals just to show something in reviews.

1. The person who signs your paycheck (or the digital equivalent) is the one who gets to decide what your job is and what they need you to do.

2. If it's not a fit, it's not a personal indictment. Move on. Not everything you do in life works out. However, if this happens over and over, it might be you.

I’m sorry you’ve been going through something traumatic. My email is in my profile - reach out if you need.

But just in case you need to hear this, I don’t know you but I believe in you. It takes a lot of skill to write something tactically useful when you’re in the deep end of shit pool. You’ve got this.

I don't know if you know the concept of degrowth

https://www.amazon.com/Case-Degrowth-Giorgos-Kallis/dp/15095...

Thanks man. I needed to hear that.

For sure. I needed to say it :)

This is great advice. Thanks for saying this out loud. Performance improvement is just as much about finding the right position to grow in as much as it is growing in that position.

The world needs a happy version of you. Everybody benefits then.

"assuming I’m the problem", I think I'm doing the same. Unfortunately, I'm not the one who willing to speak up, I'm suffering because I have no choice at the moment. I'll quit soon.

Thank you for posting this. This actually speaks to me on a number of levels and is somewhat...cathartic. This has happened to me. I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone.

So, again, thank you for posting this.

This simple equation will change your life:

      n=((y-1920)-a)/(0.25*a)

where y is the current year (e.g., 2022), a is your age in years, and n is the number of careers you have ahead of you.

Quit!

So in the year 3000, a 20-year old has over 200 careers ahead of them?

Yes.

The math checks out!

Sounds exhausting

Not really. By then either we’ll live to 300 (or potentially forever, depending on how you define living), and/or have essentially auto-executing micro-factories and perfect markets so ideas become products with little effort, or we’ll all be batteries for our AI overlords, in which case this discussion is moot.

I'm kind of wondering if we work together and talked about this on Tuesday with each other. If so, as I said when we talked, this is the right mindset.

I’ve been there, it’s miserable, but I hadn’t framed it exactly in these terms.

This is well articulated and certain something many of us can relate to. Thanks for writing this.

Thanks for posting. I happen to be putting in my notice today at my current role, and this helps validate my reasons for leaving.

Thanks for sharing.

Agree 100% btw.

Always be earning or learning, ideally both.

1. Make BS metrics/goals

2. Achieve them

3. ??

4. Profit

This is how it works in large corporations with a mandated 360-review process. Hell, my old boss told me to put in a bunch of "goals" I have already achieved/delivered in the current year to make it even easier.

if you're going for VC funding, it's more

1. Make (semi-)BS metrics/goals

2. Achieve them

3. ???

4. More funding!

I'm not sure that it's possible to lose skills in this way unless they completely fall out of practice. Seems like a situation where you learn that you won't grow in a particular way can only lead to a better understanding of the narrow path to fulfilling growth and development.

Just my viewpoint though.

Quit your job!

Softskills.audio

+1 from me.

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