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Comment by nimblegorilla | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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