8 ms·

The Most Dangerous Email (to my career) I've Sent

91 points by dnoberon 2y ago

dnoberon 2y ago
The title might be a little dramatic, but I poured my heart into this article. I had to make some drastic decisions and big changes with regards to my career trajectory - and if I can inspire others to be true to themselves, then I'll be happy.
- ezekg 2y ago
  I'm assuming it went good? Sorry if I missed it in the article.
  - dnoberon 2y ago
    It went well yeah, it's a little bit at the end that I should have spent more time on :). We're stopping the climb up the management ladder and are identifying other resources to handle those responsibilities.
- jeffreygoesto 2y ago
  You already are. Thank you for describing how these thoughts can pull you in the two directions and that you could prevent to let them tear you apart in the end. I hope you found mentor(s) who you could reflect the path forward with without having to burn bridges. In fact a sequel how it turned out would be interesting.
- x0x0 2y ago
  > meetings, on-sites, and bureaucracy - leaving very little time for actual work which produced any kind of real artifact All those things are actual work, they just produce different artifacts, eg an aligned team and correct decisions and proper risk assessment diffused through an org. Again, nothing wrong with choosing the career you want, but I think this perspective is simply wrong.
  - dnoberon 2y ago
    You're absolutely right. I guess those artifacts don't resonate with me - and I did mention there's nothing wrong with enjoying this in the article. Good catch, I'll see if I can't reword it a bit :)
- smodo 2y ago
  It definitely resonates. I am afraid of there being an upper bound to the amount of management work I can do without burning out. And yet I still get promoted every year and continue up the ladder… interestingly I have the exact same rationale for this: that I need to be untouchable by the time I’m 50. So your article is a nice reminder that all that is something I made up and keep telling myself.
- foobarian 2y ago
  I'm fortunate to be in a company where there isn't a stereotypical push for senior dev to "switch to management." I'm happily doing the IC thing but feel like I am on the other end of the pendulum swing a bit, in that I feel like I maybe should look into the management path before I get too old and out of date. The main thing that stops me is that so far I've been able to adopt and learn new tech reasonably well (or so I think!) so I suppose as long as that continues I shouldn't mess with what ain't broken. :-)
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Thanks for doing this. It’s hard to talk about this sort of thing with yourself, much less the world! I’ve been fortunate to be able to reboot a few times within an organization, most recently running a division with hundreds of people then pivoting to a small, strategic group with a specific high priority mission. It’s good to reboot sometimes and good to be able to tamp down the ego aspects of advancement that often keep us doing things we don’t like.
- jjulius 2y ago
  Good for you for recognizing what you need and shooting for it. Like you say in the article, you're one of the lucky who have taken that shot and had it work out for you, and I feel like I'm in a similar boat. Our first kid was born two weeks before California shut down (the first state to do so) for the pandemic. I was stuck in a shitty job with shitty bosses who expected the world (eg, made me lay off 75% of my team in 2019 and proceeded to insist I produce more than before, while telling me to expect "More of the same!", with a perverse enthusiasm, in the coming years when I asked what our long-term plan was, but I digress - shoutout to Apto Solutions!). We had no family living near us, so it was just the two of us raising our first kid in the middle of a lockdown while I worked in-office and my wife tried to somehow simultaneously work FT from home while caring for a newborn. That wasn't tenable, so we uprooted to a more affordable region that had us surrounded by family in early 2021. I did the stay-at-home-dad thing for the better part of 2021 until it was time to get back into the swing of things. My first interview was at Intel, through a staffing agency, and it sounded goddamned miserable as a new-ish father - rotating shifts (so I'd be required to do graveyards and swing shifts every few weeks), no office (the team I'd be working with said that they had to come in every morning and find whatever conference room might be available that day to post up in), the expectation that on my off days (yes, even vacations) I would need to respond to all emails and messages within one hour (so, how do I fly on a plane or hike in the woods on my day off?), and at the end of every week you had to present your numbers for the week to Intel staff in a way that sounded a hell of a lot like, "Please justify your existence to us and convince us that we should keep you here". It sounded goddamned miserable. My next interview was the opposite - for a company in the education sector that promoted a healthy work-life balance and a focus on family. So, I leaned into it hard - I told my now-boss during the interview that I was coming out of a very rough, stressful and unreasonable working environment and that I have no desire to put up with anything like that ever again. I said that my primary focus has to be my family, and that I refused to "take home" any stress or work, that I would put 110% into my job while I'm in the office but 0% outside, that my phone would be set up to not notify me of anything afterhours, and that at that point in my life, I had zero desire to climb the corporate ladder and would be more than content sitting in the same position for a good chunk of time. I thought for sure that their rhetoric around work-life balance and such would be bullshit, but I got the job, and it's exactly like they described. The flexibility and support for all of us to prioritize ourselves, whatever that looks like, is amazing, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here. I can shut off at the end of the day and, in three years, I've yet to take work home with me in any sense of the phrase. And now that three years have passed and my kids are a bit older, I've been candid about taking more on and maybe moving up the ladder a bit (within reason/my sanity), and they've been very supportive of it. All that rambling is to say, lean in to whatever it is that you know you need. Reach for it, ask for it, insist on it. It might not always work out, but you may get lucky and end up getting it, and boy is it damn sweet if you do.
- rekabis 2y ago
  You figured out what is right for you. Kudos ×100. Far too few people ever recognize their breaking point, and just continue trying to push forward because that’s the capitalist manifesto - growth at any cost. You learned from your own breaking point, and intentionally chose an alternative path that fit you better. That by default makes you more self-aware than many.
- Terretta 2y ago
  The dangerous thing to me was not the email, it was asserting the misunderstanding that additional years results in inutility. "Up or out" doesn't have to mean up the org chart. It can mean up your value through mastery, which you clearly feel you have within a set of disciplines. It took some number of years to become "the best" at those things you described being good at. Whatever activities you were doing those years that made you the best, keep doing them … applied to adjacencies. Later in life, after people have been good at some things for a while, it's an ego boost. They forget what it felt like to be not good at things, and that that was OK. They become inhibited from learning by both ego pain of doing something badly, and mental pain of reformatting brain and behaviors to fit in new learning. If at 40 you have 20 years of getting good at things, at 60 you can have another 20 years of getting good at additional things. Innovation and mastery of systems comes from multi-disciplinary, multi-system understanding. The additional years can make you more useful, not less. Arguably, it boils down to: do you like learning, and do you like what you do. If yes to both, there's no reason you can't keep accumulating ability to deliver value.
dsdxd 2y ago
[flagged]
- dnoberon 2y ago
  Hi, author here. Just want you to know that there's a human being with thoughts, feelings, hopes, etc. on the other side of that article. My experience in life isn't worthless. While it doesn't sound like it was valuable to you, I feel like it might be valuable to others in the same position. So if you have some constructive criticism on the writing - I'd be grateful - but if all you have is vitriol and lack of empathy, just move on.
  - elliotbnvl 2y ago
    Well said! I totally agree. Sorry you had to read the grandparent message, OP. (To be clear I am agreeing with the author of the article!)
- dang 2y ago
  Please don't call names in HN comments and please don't post shallow dismissals. We're trying for something different here. Even if we assume you're right, a comment like this poisons the commons. What's worse, these toxins accumulate over time. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
htrp 2y ago
I think this is a great article explaining exactly why it's okay to step off the career progression ladder and say this is what I want to do. The alternative is the Peter principle where you end up promoted upwards until you fail. OP, I wonder if you had frank talks with your line management about your long term career trajectory or if this was a sudden realization?
- dnoberon 2y ago
  We talked frequently but I always kept my reservations about continually moving up the ladder pretty hidden. It wasn't until this realization and acceptance that I finally was extremely open and frank about things.
- Xcelerate 2y ago
  > The alternative is the Peter principle where you end up promoted upwards until you fail. I mean... to play devil’s advocate, if each promotion accelerates the compounding of your investments to the point where by the time you fail you’ve already reached financial independence, then oh well? Can always go back down the ladder or jump to different types of ladders at your convenience then.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    I'd love to live in a world where failure is free, but this aint it. This seems like it has potential to poison your image and potentially harm others as well.
ComputerGuru 2y ago
There are many different types of "dangerous" things you can do for your career, and some are worse (and more permanent) than others. The most "dangerous" thing for my career was when I started posting about what's happening in Gaza and Palestine on my public social media accounts. I've heard similar horror stories from others, ranging from being let go from their jobs to missing out on new opportunities and positions, specifically or "incidentally" as a result of their decision to speak out.
- ebcode 2y ago
  Yeah, I wonder if OP could replace "most dangerous" with "most honest" and not lose the meaning. Good on you for speaking out, and thanks for doing so.
- marcellus23 2y ago
  Thankfully it seems like the danger around that is much less now than it was in the first few months after October 7. Though unfortunately probably still present.
  - quinttttle 2y ago
    Which is repulsively a phenomenon politicians and officials will knowingly exploit. I believe the number of murdered children in Gaza in the first few months was in the thousands. They get their dirty work done fast while others are not allowed to speak out.
- engineer_22 2y ago
  Yeah, freedom of speech used to be sacred... No longer.
  - mikepurvis 2y ago
    Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from consequences, particularly in one's dealings with private individuals or corporations. At best it's supposed to mean no reprisals from public institutions, such as the TSA, IRS, DMV, and the like.
ezekg 2y ago
I resonate with this. Thanks for sharing. I had similar emotions when I penned my resignation email after I decided to go full-time on my business.
- dnoberon 2y ago
  I hear that - these moments are hard to forget.
neilv 2y ago
> I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary. If that was your fear, then I'm sorry you had that fear, and I hope it was unfounded. Unfortunately, there's externalities to voicing a negative stereotype in some venues, reinforcing it there.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  Sounds like an extremely prejudiced individual...
- dnoberon 2y ago
  Thank you. I think it is unfounded, but it's still a visceral belief and those can be hard to overcome. I'm hoping with time I can change my feelings on it.
  - mcguire 2y ago
    Because I am the bluebird of happiness, there are a couple of things you may want to be aware of here. "I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary." First, keep in mind that many of your co-workers will still feel this way, even if you provide evidence to the contrary. Second, after you have been around the dharma wheel too many times, it becomes difficult to hop onto the hype-train as quickly as you used to, which is one reason many of your co-workers will feel that way. The tech industry has never had a career path for technical people other than directly into management or into a pseudo-management "architecture" roles that are neither technical nor management---you don't get many of the advantages of either and what you can do is mostly based on your personal relationships with managers or technical people. As a result, if you remain technical, you may find that your salary and influence stagnate. Oh, and 40 is still pretty young. I'm 56 and it wasn't until the last 8-10 years that serious burnout set in. (Salary isn't really an important factor in job satisfaction; influence very much is.) Personally, I've never had to write a letter like yours because I shot the suggestion of a more management-oriented position down in flames, twice. Lucky me! :-)
j-scott 2y ago
I've lurked on hacker news for a number of years, and this post is what inspired me to finally make an account. Thank you for sharing; this aligns with my current situation and reinforces my recent decision that I need to make a change.
- dnoberon 2y ago
  I hope that the change goes well!
slibhb 2y ago
The email could have been pared down significantly. The idea that a programmer might want to solve problems directly rather than manage others should be well known at this point. The company I work for has an "individual contributor" career track for this reason. You can simply say it straight out without all the fluff, which is most of the email. That aside, I'm happy it worked out and I understand it's hard to send an email like that.
- jll29 2y ago
  > The company I work for has an "individual contributor" career track for this reason. I once worked for a large information company that had a split between technical career paths (individual contributors to architects) and managerial career paths (individual contributor to manager to directors). So I stated in my HR profile that I aspire a technical career track to make sure, and told my management. A few months on, I was sitting on a beach in Croatia during a vacation with my now-wife when my phone rang, and my boss told me I was promoted to Director. The reasoning was that the group I was leading would be taken more seriously if it was headed by someone who was himself at Director level, the same level as the peers that I would be doing projects for/with. Thankfully my team was small enough so I could stay reasonably technical, but I still envied the folks that "were allowed to write code every day" a bit.
martin293 2y ago
How did it work out for you in the end?
hluska 2y ago
I enjoyed the article and it reminded me of many experiences in my career. However, this sentence bothers me: “I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary.” I’m in my forties and none of those things are true about me. Nor are they true about any of the other older developers I know. There isn’t this magic switch that goes off when we turn forty. When I extrapolate from there, it makes me genuinely wonder how many of the writer’s problems stem from the position versus how many stem from a serious lack of empathy and the communication difficulties that creates. The best management advice that I ever received was to always consider if a management problem is actually the sign of a personal problem. If it is, it’s my job to manage to fix that before I make my workplace more toxic.
- recursive 2y ago
  Having decades of experience gives me a certain degree of skepticism about promises that some shiny new widget will solve all my problems. From the outside, this might look like I'm stuck in my ways.
- partypete 2y ago
  For what it’s worth, I am a relatively young engineer who has recently been working very closely with other engineers over the age of 55 on a daily basis. It has been one of the more enriching periods in my career so far. I often wonder if the ageism that I see so often referred to on Hackernews is more projection than reality because I consistently find it pleasant to work with individuals who have a very large body of experience to draw from. Ageism in general baffles me as one could very well ask the question: “would you rather have a carpenter with 2 years of experience working on your house, or one with 30 years of experience?” The answer seems obvious to me, and the question could easily be applied to software engineering.
  - howard941 2y ago
    Being on the receiving end of ageism I can assure you it's not the victim doing the projecting. Management, that's the problem.
pacija 2y ago
To realize one does not want to climb the ladder is fine. To realize there isn't any ladder to climb is enlightenment.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
big-green-man 2y ago
It's said that people rise to the level of their incompetence. Some leaders might see this and think, this guy is dangerous and we can't have that. If I were a leader at his firm and I got that email I'd be thrilled. If everyone admit their limits and thought like this all companies would run more smoothly. He rises to the level of maximum competence, the perfect place for him, he won't be bitter about not getting the next promotion and cause trouble by leaving for seemingly greener pastures, and he will be reliable in handling his work load because he's comfortable with it. People like this are valuable assets in an organization, it's a shame that a lot of people don't see it, they look upon ladder climbing as admirable, but ambition is about taking you where you want to be, recognizing when you've achieved that is much more admirable.
arp242 2y ago
> I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary. There are always people who have a lot of "soft power" just on account of years on the job. This probably happens everywhere, in all types of jobs. I've also seen this in sales departments and warehouses. This is compounded by the fact that incompetency tends to chase away the competent (not even "talented", just "competent") once the incompetency reaches a critical mass. I do feel that lack of older programmers saying "steady on there kiddo" is a problem. "Stuck in your ways"? Maybe. But there's a lot of value in both "proven to work" and "knowing the devil you're dealing with".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pjsg 2y ago
I felt this way as well, but I was fortunate enough to be working in a large company that had a senior engineer track leading to Distinguished Engineer (DE) and then Fellow. I knew that I wasn't Fellow material, but being a DE meant that I could focus on technical issues and not on management issues. Of course, management being management, they tried to give me a project that was not going well, so I left to join an early stage startup. I'm going to succeed in having my entire 40+ year career in software without ever having had to manage another person. I'm fortunate enough to have had a number of managers who can recognize my strong (and weak) points and then use me in the most effective manner.
WirelessGigabit 2y ago
I was in this position. Either advance to Staff Engineer (with 0% coding) or leave the group. The group I was a part of did not realize that not all good developers make good managers. I've always firmly believed that I am not good in a people leading position, and that I excel as an IC. I never ended up finding a new group in the company, as a company-wide layoff of software engineers ended my relationship with them. I just found a new role as an IC, and I couldn't be happier.
elena4151 2y ago
[flagged]

91 points by dnoberon 2y ago

The title might be a little dramatic, but I poured my heart into this article. I had to make some drastic decisions and big changes with regards to my career trajectory - and if I can inspire others to be true to themselves, then I'll be happy.

ezekg 2y ago
I'm assuming it went good? Sorry if I missed it in the article.
- dnoberon 2y ago
  It went well yeah, it's a little bit at the end that I should have spent more time on :). We're stopping the climb up the management ladder and are identifying other resources to handle those responsibilities.
jeffreygoesto 2y ago
You already are. Thank you for describing how these thoughts can pull you in the two directions and that you could prevent to let them tear you apart in the end. I hope you found mentor(s) who you could reflect the path forward with without having to burn bridges. In fact a sequel how it turned out would be interesting.
x0x0 2y ago
> meetings, on-sites, and bureaucracy - leaving very little time for actual work which produced any kind of real artifact All those things are actual work, they just produce different artifacts, eg an aligned team and correct decisions and proper risk assessment diffused through an org. Again, nothing wrong with choosing the career you want, but I think this perspective is simply wrong.
- dnoberon 2y ago
  You're absolutely right. I guess those artifacts don't resonate with me - and I did mention there's nothing wrong with enjoying this in the article. Good catch, I'll see if I can't reword it a bit :)
smodo 2y ago
It definitely resonates. I am afraid of there being an upper bound to the amount of management work I can do without burning out. And yet I still get promoted every year and continue up the ladder… interestingly I have the exact same rationale for this: that I need to be untouchable by the time I’m 50. So your article is a nice reminder that all that is something I made up and keep telling myself.
foobarian 2y ago
I'm fortunate to be in a company where there isn't a stereotypical push for senior dev to "switch to management." I'm happily doing the IC thing but feel like I am on the other end of the pendulum swing a bit, in that I feel like I maybe should look into the management path before I get too old and out of date. The main thing that stops me is that so far I've been able to adopt and learn new tech reasonably well (or so I think!) so I suppose as long as that continues I shouldn't mess with what ain't broken. :-)
Spooky23 2y ago
Thanks for doing this. It’s hard to talk about this sort of thing with yourself, much less the world! I’ve been fortunate to be able to reboot a few times within an organization, most recently running a division with hundreds of people then pivoting to a small, strategic group with a specific high priority mission. It’s good to reboot sometimes and good to be able to tamp down the ego aspects of advancement that often keep us doing things we don’t like.
jjulius 2y ago
Good for you for recognizing what you need and shooting for it. Like you say in the article, you're one of the lucky who have taken that shot and had it work out for you, and I feel like I'm in a similar boat. Our first kid was born two weeks before California shut down (the first state to do so) for the pandemic. I was stuck in a shitty job with shitty bosses who expected the world (eg, made me lay off 75% of my team in 2019 and proceeded to insist I produce more than before, while telling me to expect "More of the same!", with a perverse enthusiasm, in the coming years when I asked what our long-term plan was, but I digress - shoutout to Apto Solutions!). We had no family living near us, so it was just the two of us raising our first kid in the middle of a lockdown while I worked in-office and my wife tried to somehow simultaneously work FT from home while caring for a newborn. That wasn't tenable, so we uprooted to a more affordable region that had us surrounded by family in early 2021. I did the stay-at-home-dad thing for the better part of 2021 until it was time to get back into the swing of things. My first interview was at Intel, through a staffing agency, and it sounded goddamned miserable as a new-ish father - rotating shifts (so I'd be required to do graveyards and swing shifts every few weeks), no office (the team I'd be working with said that they had to come in every morning and find whatever conference room might be available that day to post up in), the expectation that on my off days (yes, even vacations) I would need to respond to all emails and messages within one hour (so, how do I fly on a plane or hike in the woods on my day off?), and at the end of every week you had to present your numbers for the week to Intel staff in a way that sounded a hell of a lot like, "Please justify your existence to us and convince us that we should keep you here". It sounded goddamned miserable. My next interview was the opposite - for a company in the education sector that promoted a healthy work-life balance and a focus on family. So, I leaned into it hard - I told my now-boss during the interview that I was coming out of a very rough, stressful and unreasonable working environment and that I have no desire to put up with anything like that ever again. I said that my primary focus has to be my family, and that I refused to "take home" any stress or work, that I would put 110% into my job while I'm in the office but 0% outside, that my phone would be set up to not notify me of anything afterhours, and that at that point in my life, I had zero desire to climb the corporate ladder and would be more than content sitting in the same position for a good chunk of time. I thought for sure that their rhetoric around work-life balance and such would be bullshit, but I got the job, and it's exactly like they described. The flexibility and support for all of us to prioritize ourselves, whatever that looks like, is amazing, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here. I can shut off at the end of the day and, in three years, I've yet to take work home with me in any sense of the phrase. And now that three years have passed and my kids are a bit older, I've been candid about taking more on and maybe moving up the ladder a bit (within reason/my sanity), and they've been very supportive of it. All that rambling is to say, lean in to whatever it is that you know you need. Reach for it, ask for it, insist on it. It might not always work out, but you may get lucky and end up getting it, and boy is it damn sweet if you do.
rekabis 2y ago
You figured out what is right for you. Kudos ×100. Far too few people ever recognize their breaking point, and just continue trying to push forward because that’s the capitalist manifesto - growth at any cost. You learned from your own breaking point, and intentionally chose an alternative path that fit you better. That by default makes you more self-aware than many.
Terretta 2y ago
The dangerous thing to me was not the email, it was asserting the misunderstanding that additional years results in inutility. "Up or out" doesn't have to mean up the org chart. It can mean up your value through mastery, which you clearly feel you have within a set of disciplines. It took some number of years to become "the best" at those things you described being good at. Whatever activities you were doing those years that made you the best, keep doing them … applied to adjacencies. Later in life, after people have been good at some things for a while, it's an ego boost. They forget what it felt like to be not good at things, and that that was OK. They become inhibited from learning by both ego pain of doing something badly, and mental pain of reformatting brain and behaviors to fit in new learning. If at 40 you have 20 years of getting good at things, at 60 you can have another 20 years of getting good at additional things. Innovation and mastery of systems comes from multi-disciplinary, multi-system understanding. The additional years can make you more useful, not less. Arguably, it boils down to: do you like learning, and do you like what you do. If yes to both, there's no reason you can't keep accumulating ability to deliver value.

dsdxd 2y ago

[flagged]

dnoberon 2y ago
Hi, author here. Just want you to know that there's a human being with thoughts, feelings, hopes, etc. on the other side of that article. My experience in life isn't worthless. While it doesn't sound like it was valuable to you, I feel like it might be valuable to others in the same position. So if you have some constructive criticism on the writing - I'd be grateful - but if all you have is vitriol and lack of empathy, just move on.
- elliotbnvl 2y ago
  Well said! I totally agree. Sorry you had to read the grandparent message, OP. (To be clear I am agreeing with the author of the article!)
dang 2y ago
Please don't call names in HN comments and please don't post shallow dismissals. We're trying for something different here. Even if we assume you're right, a comment like this poisons the commons. What's worse, these toxins accumulate over time. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

htrp 2y ago

I think this is a great article explaining exactly why it's okay to step off the career progression ladder and say this is what I want to do. The alternative is the Peter principle where you end up promoted upwards until you fail. OP, I wonder if you had frank talks with your line management about your long term career trajectory or if this was a sudden realization?

dnoberon 2y ago
We talked frequently but I always kept my reservations about continually moving up the ladder pretty hidden. It wasn't until this realization and acceptance that I finally was extremely open and frank about things.
Xcelerate 2y ago
> The alternative is the Peter principle where you end up promoted upwards until you fail. I mean... to play devil’s advocate, if each promotion accelerates the compounding of your investments to the point where by the time you fail you’ve already reached financial independence, then oh well? Can always go back down the ladder or jump to different types of ladders at your convenience then.
- itishappy 2y ago
  I'd love to live in a world where failure is free, but this aint it. This seems like it has potential to poison your image and potentially harm others as well.

ComputerGuru 2y ago

There are many different types of "dangerous" things you can do for your career, and some are worse (and more permanent) than others. The most "dangerous" thing for my career was when I started posting about what's happening in Gaza and Palestine on my public social media accounts. I've heard similar horror stories from others, ranging from being let go from their jobs to missing out on new opportunities and positions, specifically or "incidentally" as a result of their decision to speak out.

ebcode 2y ago
Yeah, I wonder if OP could replace "most dangerous" with "most honest" and not lose the meaning. Good on you for speaking out, and thanks for doing so.
marcellus23 2y ago
Thankfully it seems like the danger around that is much less now than it was in the first few months after October 7. Though unfortunately probably still present.
- quinttttle 2y ago
  Which is repulsively a phenomenon politicians and officials will knowingly exploit. I believe the number of murdered children in Gaza in the first few months was in the thousands. They get their dirty work done fast while others are not allowed to speak out.
engineer_22 2y ago
Yeah, freedom of speech used to be sacred... No longer.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from consequences, particularly in one's dealings with private individuals or corporations. At best it's supposed to mean no reprisals from public institutions, such as the TSA, IRS, DMV, and the like.

ezekg 2y ago

I resonate with this. Thanks for sharing. I had similar emotions when I penned my resignation email after I decided to go full-time on my business.

dnoberon 2y ago
I hear that - these moments are hard to forget.

neilv 2y ago

> I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary. If that was your fear, then I'm sorry you had that fear, and I hope it was unfounded. Unfortunately, there's externalities to voicing a negative stereotype in some venues, reinforcing it there.

yodsanklai 2y ago
Sounds like an extremely prejudiced individual...
dnoberon 2y ago
Thank you. I think it is unfounded, but it's still a visceral belief and those can be hard to overcome. I'm hoping with time I can change my feelings on it.
- mcguire 2y ago
  Because I am the bluebird of happiness, there are a couple of things you may want to be aware of here. "I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary." First, keep in mind that many of your co-workers will still feel this way, even if you provide evidence to the contrary. Second, after you have been around the dharma wheel too many times, it becomes difficult to hop onto the hype-train as quickly as you used to, which is one reason many of your co-workers will feel that way. The tech industry has never had a career path for technical people other than directly into management or into a pseudo-management "architecture" roles that are neither technical nor management---you don't get many of the advantages of either and what you can do is mostly based on your personal relationships with managers or technical people. As a result, if you remain technical, you may find that your salary and influence stagnate. Oh, and 40 is still pretty young. I'm 56 and it wasn't until the last 8-10 years that serious burnout set in. (Salary isn't really an important factor in job satisfaction; influence very much is.) Personally, I've never had to write a letter like yours because I shot the suggestion of a more management-oriented position down in flames, twice. Lucky me! :-)

j-scott 2y ago

I've lurked on hacker news for a number of years, and this post is what inspired me to finally make an account. Thank you for sharing; this aligns with my current situation and reinforces my recent decision that I need to make a change.

dnoberon 2y ago
I hope that the change goes well!

slibhb 2y ago

The email could have been pared down significantly. The idea that a programmer might want to solve problems directly rather than manage others should be well known at this point. The company I work for has an "individual contributor" career track for this reason. You can simply say it straight out without all the fluff, which is most of the email. That aside, I'm happy it worked out and I understand it's hard to send an email like that.

jll29 2y ago
> The company I work for has an "individual contributor" career track for this reason. I once worked for a large information company that had a split between technical career paths (individual contributors to architects) and managerial career paths (individual contributor to manager to directors). So I stated in my HR profile that I aspire a technical career track to make sure, and told my management. A few months on, I was sitting on a beach in Croatia during a vacation with my now-wife when my phone rang, and my boss told me I was promoted to Director. The reasoning was that the group I was leading would be taken more seriously if it was headed by someone who was himself at Director level, the same level as the peers that I would be doing projects for/with. Thankfully my team was small enough so I could stay reasonably technical, but I still envied the folks that "were allowed to write code every day" a bit.

martin293 2y ago

How did it work out for you in the end?

hluska 2y ago

I enjoyed the article and it reminded me of many experiences in my career. However, this sentence bothers me: “I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary.” I’m in my forties and none of those things are true about me. Nor are they true about any of the other older developers I know. There isn’t this magic switch that goes off when we turn forty. When I extrapolate from there, it makes me genuinely wonder how many of the writer’s problems stem from the position versus how many stem from a serious lack of empathy and the communication difficulties that creates. The best management advice that I ever received was to always consider if a management problem is actually the sign of a personal problem. If it is, it’s my job to manage to fix that before I make my workplace more toxic.

recursive 2y ago
Having decades of experience gives me a certain degree of skepticism about promises that some shiny new widget will solve all my problems. From the outside, this might look like I'm stuck in my ways.
partypete 2y ago
For what it’s worth, I am a relatively young engineer who has recently been working very closely with other engineers over the age of 55 on a daily basis. It has been one of the more enriching periods in my career so far. I often wonder if the ageism that I see so often referred to on Hackernews is more projection than reality because I consistently find it pleasant to work with individuals who have a very large body of experience to draw from. Ageism in general baffles me as one could very well ask the question: “would you rather have a carpenter with 2 years of experience working on your house, or one with 30 years of experience?” The answer seems obvious to me, and the question could easily be applied to software engineering.
- howard941 2y ago
  Being on the receiving end of ageism I can assure you it's not the victim doing the projecting. Management, that's the problem.

pacija 2y ago

To realize one does not want to climb the ladder is fine. To realize there isn't any ladder to climb is enlightenment.

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big-green-man 2y ago

It's said that people rise to the level of their incompetence. Some leaders might see this and think, this guy is dangerous and we can't have that. If I were a leader at his firm and I got that email I'd be thrilled. If everyone admit their limits and thought like this all companies would run more smoothly. He rises to the level of maximum competence, the perfect place for him, he won't be bitter about not getting the next promotion and cause trouble by leaving for seemingly greener pastures, and he will be reliable in handling his work load because he's comfortable with it. People like this are valuable assets in an organization, it's a shame that a lot of people don't see it, they look upon ladder climbing as admirable, but ambition is about taking you where you want to be, recognizing when you've achieved that is much more admirable.

arp242 2y ago

> I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary. There are always people who have a lot of "soft power" just on account of years on the job. This probably happens everywhere, in all types of jobs. I've also seen this in sales departments and warehouses. This is compounded by the fact that incompetency tends to chase away the competent (not even "talented", just "competent") once the incompetency reaches a critical mass. I do feel that lack of older programmers saying "steady on there kiddo" is a problem. "Stuck in your ways"? Maybe. But there's a lot of value in both "proven to work" and "knowing the devil you're dealing with".

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pjsg 2y ago

I felt this way as well, but I was fortunate enough to be working in a large company that had a senior engineer track leading to Distinguished Engineer (DE) and then Fellow. I knew that I wasn't Fellow material, but being a DE meant that I could focus on technical issues and not on management issues. Of course, management being management, they tried to give me a project that was not going well, so I left to join an early stage startup. I'm going to succeed in having my entire 40+ year career in software without ever having had to manage another person. I'm fortunate enough to have had a number of managers who can recognize my strong (and weak) points and then use me in the most effective manner.

WirelessGigabit 2y ago

I was in this position. Either advance to Staff Engineer (with 0% coding) or leave the group. The group I was a part of did not realize that not all good developers make good managers. I've always firmly believed that I am not good in a people leading position, and that I excel as an IC. I never ended up finding a new group in the company, as a company-wide layoff of software engineers ended my relationship with them. I just found a new role as an IC, and I couldn't be happier.

elena4151 2y ago

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