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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

After I was laid off from JavaScript work for 6 months a recruiter contacted me to write APIs using a commercial enterprise platform. Its been great. I did that for almost a year before they promoted me to operations for the project.

I should have moved away from JavaScript work much earlier in my career. I had on reverse beer goggles. I love JavaScript and writing programs in the language, but the problem is that almost nobody in work force liked JavaScript. All the cool JavaScript applications in the wild tend to be hobby projects, because at work most people struggle just to put text on screen. Employment writing JavaScript always felt like a race to the bottom. If I could go back in time and give myself career advise I would recommend an MBA and a PMP and just ignore programming as a career. It is absolutely a wonderful skill to have for personal use, but you will always do better in a more structured work industry.

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Projects managers are absolutely getting slaughtered right now

How so?

The people they would manage are getting fired, so they're also becoming redundant by consequence.

Project managers typically manage projects, not people

Sure but projects don't complete themselves.

Not with that attitude they won’t.

I once worked in a company where one of my colleagues actively created phantom projects for his department, oversaw them, checked off metrics, went to meetings, and “deployed” solutions for capabilities that the company already had but had forgotten about. He once confided to me that he hadn’t actually made anything in over a decade. He still works there, 15 years later.

I salute your colleague's silent resistance to wage slavery.

Project management tooling is strong and you need a lot less time for the logistics of managing a project, so the responsibility got absorbed into other roles. From my experience, project management in tech is done partly by product managers, engineering managers, and tech leads

Which company? Can I join it?

What about Node.js backend with typescript?

I am extremely confident in my Node.js performance and TypeScript. I do not see many Node jobs without also looking for some giant frontend frameworks like React.

My fear when looking at jobs that lean too heavily on a tech stack or tool list is that the job is too focused upon delivery in a narrow repeatable context as opposed to solutions delivery. That’s a huge red flag for me that just screams low confidence. I don’t want to work with people who are constantly afraid to do their jobs. That’s what most of my career feels like.

I don’t want to go back to a low confidence environment. It’s just too negative, too irrationally defensive, and too hostile. I would rather do something else, even for less money.

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