5 ms·

> you’ll be pigeonholed into that slot as long as you remain in that team That's a good thing: it gives you great leverage to ensure good retention-pay. -----

> you’ll be pigeonholed into that slot as long as you remain in that team That's a good thing: it gives you great leverage to ensure good retention-pay. ------- During your 1:1s/"connects"/perf-evals, don't frame it as "I hate being the only one here who knows SQL, I'm quitting/gimmie-a-raise", instead frame it as "I'm proud of the great accomplishments that my unique and deep understanding of both database-theory and SQL in-practice have brought to the company; given my significant responsibilities I now have in the team/company I'm sure you'll "recognize" my now quite-significant leading-role...." (for best effect make the "money-gesture" with your fingers during the last part). ...I wish I had the gall to do that when I was younger.

glenda 5y ago
But if you truly find it boring it’s still going to be difficult to frame it that way. Picking up too much work you don’t want to do can make you resent a job very quickly.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Most of the world works at jobs that are repetitive, demeaning, dangerous, and insecure. And all that for the payoff of barely continuing to survive. It's truly a point of privilege to turn up your nose to a top 10% first world salary because shuffling things around in a database is distateful to your sensibilities .
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    And much of the world has food insecurity, but I still don't eat bananas...
- ekkeke 5y ago
  idiotsecant, other people having worse jobs doesn't mean you should be happy with the same (or even better). Should we limit ourselves to be content with doing better than 90%? Where would the Torvalds, Stroustups, and Dijkstras come from then? Being pigeon holed into boring work just because you're "the guy" is crap, no matter how good the salary is. I quit my last job because of this, and would encourage anyone feeling the same to do so.
kelnos 5y ago
I know enough people who have gotten pigeonholed as "the database person" to believe that's not an enviable place to be. You end up getting a lot of tedious, fiddly work dumped on you by people who have no idea what they're doing and need you to clean up their messes. No amount of retention pay would raise my spirits in that situation.
- nrmitchi 5y ago
  > people who have no idea what they're doing and need you to clean up their messes Not even this. It's worse when you end up with a whole bunch of tedious, yet very basic work dumped on your by people who have no desire to know what they're doing because "the database guy" can just do it instead. Note that it's not only "databases" where this happens.
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    Worse than that, you can get set with OKRs set by people with no context and then judged because you didn’t meet them. Then your expertise is discounted.
  - jan_Inkepa 5y ago
    I became one of the 'version control' guys at a company once. It was nice to be a go-to person for certain crises, but it had its down-sides for sure.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
It also creates problems that normally wouldn't exist. I was "the regex guy" at my last company. Every couple of days someone would be trying to solve a problem that would much more reasonably be handled by a few string.split() or indexOf() calls and some logic in their application's language. Instead they would message me "I need to do blahblahblah, can you give me a regex for that?" Or even worse "I've written this regex but it doesn't work on a few cases, can you help me fix it?" and then share some 600 character long regex monstrosity. 90% of the time my answer was simply "Yeah... That's a bad use-case for a regex. You can use this java snippet to accomplish the same thing." At the start I would actually solve their request with some hairy regex, but it generally did not perform well and when requirements change they'd be unable to edit it and would find me again to change it.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Did the company ever use the "internal market" paradigm? If so, keep track of your time spent on other-peoples-problems and record it in a spreadsheet, and invoice other peoples' managers accordingly :)
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    When I joined it was still a pretty early stage startup so that wouldn't have been reasonable. When I left it was pretty solidly in the mid-sized company category, so maybe something like that would have been doable (invoices are pretty rude though). I did enjoy helping cross-team though, it's fun working with people you don't work with on a daily basis, and they were/are my friends. I wouldn't even have minded being seen as the "string pattern/parsing guy". But I was specifically regex-guy in their minds. Also story for another day and another thread, I was also the MongoDB-guy. Similar to the regex stuff though, in 90% of the questions they'd send to me MongoDB was not the correct choice. Overall it's more nuanced then could ever fit into an HN comment (yes I brought it up with management, and other issues), but there are a number of reasons I quit. I quit a couple months before a company buyout we knew was going to happen and I had equity. I felt like it was probably the right choice then. I recently got some beers with some of my friends who stayed through the buyout and had equal amounts of equity and learned I did make the correct choice.

glenda 5y ago

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

idiotsecant 5y ago
Most of the world works at jobs that are repetitive, demeaning, dangerous, and insecure. And all that for the payoff of barely continuing to survive. It's truly a point of privilege to turn up your nose to a top 10% first world salary because shuffling things around in a database is distateful to your sensibilities .
- aidenn0 5y ago
  And much of the world has food insecurity, but I still don't eat bananas...
ekkeke 5y ago
idiotsecant, other people having worse jobs doesn't mean you should be happy with the same (or even better). Should we limit ourselves to be content with doing better than 90%? Where would the Torvalds, Stroustups, and Dijkstras come from then? Being pigeon holed into boring work just because you're "the guy" is crap, no matter how good the salary is. I quit my last job because of this, and would encourage anyone feeling the same to do so.

kelnos 5y ago

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

nrmitchi 5y ago
> people who have no idea what they're doing and need you to clean up their messes Not even this. It's worse when you end up with a whole bunch of tedious, yet very basic work dumped on your by people who have no desire to know what they're doing because "the database guy" can just do it instead. Note that it's not only "databases" where this happens.
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  Worse than that, you can get set with OKRs set by people with no context and then judged because you didn’t meet them. Then your expertise is discounted.
- jan_Inkepa 5y ago
  I became one of the 'version control' guys at a company once. It was nice to be a go-to person for certain crises, but it had its down-sides for sure.

squeaky-clean 5y ago

It also creates problems that normally wouldn't exist. I was "the regex guy" at my last company. Every couple of days someone would be trying to solve a problem that would much more reasonably be handled by a few string.split() or indexOf() calls and some logic in their application's language. Instead they would message me "I need to do blahblahblah, can you give me a regex for that?" Or even worse "I've written this regex but it doesn't work on a few cases, can you help me fix it?" and then share some 600 character long regex monstrosity. 90% of the time my answer was simply "Yeah... That's a bad use-case for a regex. You can use this java snippet to accomplish the same thing." At the start I would actually solve their request with some hairy regex, but it generally did not perform well and when requirements change they'd be unable to edit it and would find me again to change it.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
Did the company ever use the "internal market" paradigm? If so, keep track of your time spent on other-peoples-problems and record it in a spreadsheet, and invoice other peoples' managers accordingly :)
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  When I joined it was still a pretty early stage startup so that wouldn't have been reasonable. When I left it was pretty solidly in the mid-sized company category, so maybe something like that would have been doable (invoices are pretty rude though). I did enjoy helping cross-team though, it's fun working with people you don't work with on a daily basis, and they were/are my friends. I wouldn't even have minded being seen as the "string pattern/parsing guy". But I was specifically regex-guy in their minds. Also story for another day and another thread, I was also the MongoDB-guy. Similar to the regex stuff though, in 90% of the questions they'd send to me MongoDB was not the correct choice. Overall it's more nuanced then could ever fit into an HN comment (yes I brought it up with management, and other issues), but there are a number of reasons I quit. I quit a couple months before a company buyout we knew was going to happen and I had equity. I felt like it was probably the right choice then. I recently got some beers with some of my friends who stayed through the buyout and had equal amounts of equity and learned I did make the correct choice.