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Comment by htrp | Hacker News Reader

Also add where you want to be career-wise so that they can support you in this.

What people want their career to be is often immature. It takes wisdom and experience to figure out what you should want. So coming into the conversation with that is limiting.

I'd rather get the manager to be a partner in helping me figure out what I should want.

IMO it's ok if the initial answer to "where do you want to be in X years" is a shrug of the shoulders. Defining that can be important but that doesn't mean it has to be solely on the employee to define. Good leaders will help their people answer that question and help them grow. This is why a regular check-in/1:1 is important.

On a number of occasions that I was asked this question, I replied with a question of my own: "where _can_ I be in X years in this company?" Unfortunately, I never received a reply even remotely close to a satisfactory. Satisfactory answers would include opportunities and directions, with big bonus points for an attempt to find overlaps with my general desires, motivation, and strengths.

That's a great question to ask! And now you've got me thinking of my answer to that question for my direct reports.

I will say that there does have to be some "meet in the middle" with this entire exchange. If my directs aren't interested in 1:1s, the meeting won't be effective.

Then you should talk about how you you need help coming up with a plan!

If I was your manager, I’d tell you that while your problem about setting career goals is real, your framing of the problem as something I the manager should tell you what your goal is is backwards. I’m not living your life, you are. The path of least resistance for me is to let you stagnate right where you are and then tell you you’re perfectly happy if I wanted to gaslight you, but then I’d be a shitty manager.

What I should do is tease out shat motivates you and how that aligns to what we need as an org, not just my team. I may not be able to give you want you want, but I can help put you on that path.

Seriously, if you need mentorship, reach out. I’m easy to find.

No, what young developers (possibly other employees too) really want is not to be asked what they want to do, they want to be told what they would be good at.

They don’t know! I didn’t when I was a young dev; still don’t if I’m honest. And for years all I ever really wanted a manager to say was ‘here’s a pathway I could see you going down’.

If there is one thing mentors and managers can usefully do it is to stop asking stuff like ‘what motivates you?’ and start saying ‘you might be good at X’

I don’t see how any of this is different from what I said.

What do you want to become? Tell me your goals. Let's help you make a plan.

All very empowering manager buddy stuff.

To a junior developer, sitting across the table, it all sounds like

I can't do anything for you. If you don't know what you want to do, you're a failure. I don't even know what you do here.

What I want to hear from a manager who understands me:

Here are the pathways open to you. Here's where I see you fitting in. Here's what you could be doing in a few years. Here's what I'd like to see you achieve.

> What people want their career to be is often immature. It takes wisdom and experience to figure out what you should want. So coming into the conversation with that is limiting.

Maturity comes through experience, including talking to others about their experience. Some candid or honest appraisals, insights, and anecdotes from bosses are useful for that.

Watching a previous boss lose their mind taking care of boardroom struggles and powerplays convinced me to stay out of management -- for the better. I'd have never built that career path without discussing it with him, extensively.

Very generic answer IMO. In practice, it gets pretty tiring and boring to talk about it after couple of meetings with manager and bringing it up in every weekly 1:1 will have your manager avoid/cancel meetings with you. I tried following this generic advice and noticed it hurts more than it does good.

Talk about where you want to get to career wise. Develop a plan with them to get you there. Say you want to move from eng 3 to senior eng in the next 2 years. Great! What skills do you need to develop to operate independently at a senior level by then? How can you work with your manager to ensure you're getting right-sized projects to develop then demonstrate those skills?

What's coming down the pipeline next quarter that you can try to claim instead of having it go by default to a more senior member on the team? Can you pair with them on that work if you aren't yet ready to do it on your own? Seniors are often looking for mentorship and teaching opportunities as those are skills they need to develop to make it to Manager or Staff if they're interested in continuing to advance their own careers.

If your manager is blowing off your 1:1s, your manager sucks.

One of my worst managers blew off 1:1s with all of his reports for months. Being naïve, I didn’t even raise this with his manager. I should have.

I’ll say this about him. His skill at managing up was inversely proportional to his skill at managing down.

If you're finding that your 1:1's are increasingly useless, consider spacing them out more. Ask to meet every other week or monthly. Set an agenda with things to talk about that are important to the role. Additionally, setting hard time limits will condense it to what matters. Start with 30m every other week, move to 15 or monthly if it still isn't useful.

Lol so talking about (1) what you actually care about (2) deep blockers to performance (3) what your manager most cares about and (4) human connection is "boring". What do you talk about that's more interesting? Compiler warnings?

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