7 ms·

Nobody is coming to save your career

106 points by herbertl 6mo ago

sheikhnbake 6mo ago
would be pretty sick to have a career to save in the first place
- righthand 6mo ago
  Or a union to at least take that charge.
  - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
    Exactly how would a union help?
    - pm90 6mo ago
      It would force a company to come to the negotiating table when laying off workers and grading their performance. It would prevent a lot of bs layoffs; at the very least concrete reasons would be needed for RIFs.
      - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
        I grew up in small town South GA that growing up has 5 or 6 factories. All but one left when they got tired of dealing with the unions. The one that is still there was never unionized
        righthand 6mo ago
        That’s propaganda. Businesses don't close because they’re “tired of dealing with the unions”.
        raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
        The business didn’t close a they moved to cheaper labor
        compiler-guy 6mo ago
        Nitpick the wording all you like, but “businesses avoid unionized workforces as best they can” isn’t propaganda.
        righthand 6mo ago
        Sure it is, show me one business that actually closed from union costs and I’ll show you a million unionized businesses that have never closed for that same reason. Cherry picking a few businesses and then saying all businesses are doomed because of unions is exactly propaganda.
        raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
        No one said businesses “closed”. I said they “moved”.
        righthand 6mo ago
        So other businesses moved for cheaper labor elsewhere but one stayed open is proof that the cost of living in GA went up not that unions cause businesses to move. The greed of the business owner is what caused them to move.
    - righthand 6mo ago
      See: automated train conductors
  - pjmlp 6mo ago
    Depends on your country, sorry in German, https://www.igmetall.de/service/berufeglossar/informatik-grundstaendig https://www.igmetall.de/service/berufeglossar/informatik-gru...
  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - zackmorris 6mo ago
    I don't know why you or your parent commenter got downvoted, but I use that as evidence that the end is very near. With the current geopolitical climate and the arrival of AI, I'm predicting a sharp economic downturn at the end of the year the likes of which we haven't seen in a century. I mean the Housing Bubble popping and the Dot Bomb were bad, but the US national debt was so much lower then. Income inequality was lower. Student loan debt was lower. Healthcare was more affordable. Homes were more affordable. Food was more affordable. We had (some) faith in our electoral process. When the cheap capital runs out, when value of the dollar collapses due to unforced error, when the overseas investment dries up, when billionaires panic and yank their investment in AI (leaving us with a duopoly like always), when the employment rate peaks never to return, when companies stop hiring for the foreseeable future, when people stop visiting websites or buying software, when we abandon liberal arts for the trades in Service Economy 2.0, when hospitals and universities close, when farms go bankrupt, when interest on the US national debt consumes its social safety net, when we sell our public lands for pennies on the dollar, when nobody is held accountable.. That's when we the people will remember who we are. Somehow, like every other time before, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps from nothing. Without time, money or resources, we'll come together and find a way to rebuild. We won't even tax the rich or incite violence against them, we'll simply manifest the abundant reality that's been denied to us by them for so long. That looks like organizing. Unions. Cooperatives. Mutual aid networks. Renewable energy. Permaculture. Voluntary employment and clock-in. Credit unions and crowdfunding. Automation. Distributed means of production. Fair trade. Class action lawsuits. Boycotts. Voting against incumbents. Solarpunk. We'll transcend competition and see the matrix for the bill of goods that it is. Rather than trying to get the money and power back in futility, we'll make them irrelevant. It's time to start thinking about selling those stocks. Divesting from the blood money of unearned income that comes from exploitation, suffering and war (even though they don't tell us that). Steering clear of prediction markets. Dropping the crypto. We know they won't. But that's why they'll stay insulated from knowing what stuff they're made of, holding out as long as possible, lonely and alone. And the fun part is, they'll get to find out anyway when the music stops.
    - righthand 6mo ago
      Mine was downvoted because unionizing is the last thing people on a startup forum want to hear.
- someprick 6mo ago
  It'd be pretty sick if the relevant discipline / sector / market of every single career path I embark upon, didn't summarily shit itself as soon as I begin making costly and irreversible personal investments therein.
  - bayarearefugee 6mo ago
    Well at least you won't be alone in that regard when AI takes 90% of the knowledge jobs in the next few years and the world economy crashes for everyone because of any lack of political planning for this eventuality! We're all gonna be right there with you. And 'safe' trade jobs like plumbers? Lol let's see how that works out when vastly fewer people can afford your services and millions are trying to panic retrain into anything still deemed safe.
    - sheikhnbake 6mo ago
      Trade jobs will be scarce, but there could be some exciting opportunities in the leather clad marauder department
pjmlp 6mo ago
> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.” Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.
- raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
  Amazon has a career matrix (former employer). But they didn’t proactively help me with my career - not that I cared. My entire goal was to survive my 4 year initial offer and get the f** out of dodge. I was 46 when I was hired.
  - giantg2 6mo ago
    I'm at a different comapny and it's the same. They have some basic framework/matrix, but managers aren't going to help you get to the next level. In my experience the matrix isn't followed anyways - they promote whoever they want whether or not they meet the stuff in the matrix. It's all just opinion based anyways.
- tacostakohashi 6mo ago
  For the most part, "career matrixes", "development plans", and the like are just generic internal marketing to placate people and create the illusion that managers / the company care about their career development, and they don't have to do anything. To a lesser extent performance reviews / ratings are the same - "you're doing great, keep it up!" - they don't really tell you what you need to do to progress. You have to figure that out and drive it for yourself.
  - geodel 6mo ago
    In my experience (mainly IT related), when one first starting a career, first 5-10 years are standardized are promotion/title change for an average employee. After that if one is known by at least 1-2 level above their managers and/or other team managers, to have any chance of further growth. IME as time go by current managers have less and less power to promote as gap between manager and employee reduces.
pm90 6mo ago
What many of these articles miss is that even if you do everything they say you will still not get the promotion you want for several reasons. My advice for Career Growth for engineers who like to do things is to be willing to take on problems that others might not want, things that aren’t “sexy”, if you find them interesting. Theres a lot of interesting problems and you can grow your career by following the direction that interests you rather than the company. And when it comes to promotions, its often easier and better compensated to get a new job rather than trying to convince a bunch of people that you should be promoted.
- raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
  This is not how things work at any company where I have worked at with real leveling guidelines (including one BigTech company). It’s all about “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. It’s stated in different ways depending on the company. No one cares if you find it “interesting” when it is time for your promo doc. It’s visibility.
  - wiseowise 6mo ago
    What they're saying is work on stuff that interests you and then find another job that values what you did.
    - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
      And when you interview at the next company and they level you, they are still going to ask behavioral questions that are concerned with scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity…
      - wiseowise 6mo ago
        You do both.
- stuffn 6mo ago
  This is recipe to be track locked and miserable. It’s the exact path I have taken over my unfortunately long career as an IC. Now I’m too useful doing bullshit work, tied with a golden ball and chain, and have no hope of ever seeing a management track/easy job. I’m currently planning my exit from the field as I am becoming too interested in actual life to learn frameworks, do bullshit 8 tier 3 month coding interviews, and collect experience to write CRUD bullshit for the next 10 years. The real advice to aspiring engineers who don’t want to have trouble sleeping from years of pagerduty and high blood pressure is to work in middle management as soon as possible. Forget IC work. The rewards are so much less than the morons who manage. Unless you are at a major dev first company (if you have VCs you aren’t) your manager will always outearn you by a large margin, have an easier life, and way more leeway. Every company I have been to only middle management converts to the VP/C level jobs where you do virtually nothing all day but waste everyone’s time. This is the ideal job. The absolute wastes of precious air in management have the life you want. If you’re like me and followed this terrible advice decide on an amount of money that is good enough and then decide on how much competence that buys. Volunteer for nothing beyond that, game the ticketing system, use as much vacation as you possibly can without a PIP, vibe the shit out of even the most trivial amount of work, and fuck off once your house is paid off and accounts are appropriate for retirement in T+30 years. Use that time to take up goat herding, wood working, or conservationist work.
kyoob 6mo ago
Whether or not your manager is capable of helping you shape your career is an open question, for sure. But 20 people, over an 18-year career, and not a single one of them bring it up in a 1:1? And, oh okay, all those managers have worked at the same company? Seems like maybe a culture problem. I've had plenty of managers in sub-FAANG enterprises bring it up unprompted.
francisofascii 6mo ago
There is good advice here for sure, but the tone seemed focused on growing your career rather than "saving" it. Most people now want to know how to still be employed in this industry 10 years from now. Maybe this advice will be consistent with this goal, but I fear climbing the corporate ladder could make you more vulnerable to cuts and lead to burnout.
woeirua 6mo ago
Is a manager “good” if they’re not talking about your career growth? I disagree with the author on this point so the rest of it really doesn’t follow. Then again, he also had 20 managers in 18 years… so yeah I can see why none of his managers ever got around to asking about his career growth.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  Even if any did, none could have done anything meaningful to push his career growth.
  - woeirua 6mo ago
    Exactly. They probably barely knew his name.
- 9rx 6mo ago
  Absolutely. Good managers are invisible. They don't need to talk about career growth as they have already silently, in the background, removed any impediments that might have prevented you from growing. All you need to do is move in the direction you want to go.
pkorzeniewski 6mo ago
Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
  A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?
  - doublerabbit 6mo ago
    Does anyone notice all the users who can afford the product now? No. They'll just keep selling and profit gaining anyway possible. Give me a product where they legitimately care.
  - mosura 6mo ago
    Focus on making products/services for people that actually do have money to spend then. A dimension people hate looking at is credit is far too easy in the US, which means too many companies are heavily optimized for extracting that money from people that didn’t really earn it in the first place. This means a lot of the smartest workers are preoccupied on the wrong things instead of helping advance society.
    - bluGill 6mo ago
      Careful there. You are not wrong, but you are not really correct either. Credit is a tool. Many people are using credit wrong and getting away with it because it is too easy. However that doesn't mean credit is a bad tool, just that it isn't used correctly. Credit is a great tool if you get the value of the thing while you are paying for it. Paying for a car on credit (including insurance, taxes, fuel, maintenance...) is a great idea if you get the car payment worth of value (including what it does for your ego - if you are honest that is why you have it) from having a car every month , paying for a car on credit that you don't get the payments worth of value from is a waste. Similar for a house - I plan to live in this house for the next 10+ years, so I shouldn't pay for it all up front. Most things though don't give value over time worth their payment. I don't get a payments worth of value from having gone on vacation a few months ago, so I should have paid for that up front (which I did but many do not). I like musical instruments, but I can't be sure to get $100/month of value out of my fumbling playing (or having them for my ego) so I won't buy them on credit. You can't take it with you, so no sense in dieing with a mattress full of cash (unless that really is worth it to you). You should have some rainy day savings. Most things in life get value today only and should be paid for today.
moritonal 6mo ago
Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career. "I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history. "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird. "I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work. "Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally. "You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
- deleted 6mo ago
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- nicce 6mo ago
  > "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird. From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    The problem is bored employees find a new job elsewhere. Employees who feel they are not valued find a new job elsewhere. If you can find them a new job in the company you can have them train their replacement - years later the replacement can ask "do you remember why you did...". It also means if the old project has an emergency you have a bunch of people who can jump in much faster - to some extent this adding people to a late project won't make it latter (only some extent, it isn't perfect). People also get old and retire (or die). By moving people around a bit you ensure that your training plan still works because you are using it. This also means there will be openings to move up the ladder, make sure you get the people on them. (There are stories from my company where after a big layout they got scared and hired almost nobody for the next 20 years, then those who made it passed the layoffs started retiring and there wasn't a mid level of engineers following to promote).
cmos 6mo ago
I always talked with the people I managed about their career goals, and always tried to adapt their job to be a closer fit to those goals. When I couldn't do that I would acknowledge that and even help them find a different job that did fit. How else can we expect to get the best out of people?
- 3yr-i-frew-up 6mo ago
  Yeah I agree. I can get people to work harder and cheaper if I can align their career goals with mine. Overly pessimistic article that is more absolute than reality.
  - wiseowise 6mo ago
    > Overly pessimistic article that is more absolute than reality. From managers perspective, maybe. As an IC this is 100% accurate to every word.
- apple4ever 6mo ago
  That's great. I wish there were more of us but I'm glad we still are out there doing the best for our people.
kwanbix 6mo ago
> Your company has figured out the perfect arrangement. You’re good at your job, and you don’t cause problems. Your manager knows they can count on you. From the company’s perspective, this is the ideal state. Why would they change anything? Whish I had knew this earlier in my career. I worked for IBM. I was very good at delivering usable software for internal use. They kept me there forever. They would give me awards and such, but never a change as the author says. If I needed something, I had to do it myself.
black_13 6mo ago
[dead]
icemanx 6mo ago
It always surprised me when people talked about their Bosses / Managers like they were some sort of gods that were going to save them and protect them from all bad things in the world.
- weinzierl 6mo ago
  I'm all for personal responsibility but when it comes to employer/employee relationship there is a certain duty of care (beyond paying you) from the employer side. In many countries this is even coded in law but even if not it makes sense. If there is no protection for the employee no one would get into a dependent employment relationship in the first place, especially when the pay is universally worse than being self-employed.
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  > It always surprised me when people talked about their Bosses / Managers like they were some sort of gods that were going to save them and protect them from all bad things in the world. Most of the managers that I worked with opened up our first conversation together with how they "care about people and their careers".
- lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
  Given the way the world is, that's true. Now, intrinsically, the job of a manager is to serve the company by serving those they manage. They do this by enabling workers to do the work that needs to be done. A middle manager is supposed to represent his team to upper management. However, too often, middle management is more interested in schmoozing with upper management rather than standing by their team. And if he is too difficult, upper management can just replace him with a more compliant manager who will function as a faithful messenger and nothing more. So, there's no structural way to ensure these things work. Culture and personal virtue are necessary.
sailfast 6mo ago
Just gonna say that while thinking through your direct reports' career progression is not the only job you have as a manager, it is definitely an important part of the work and something that is prioritized at some companies. This article paints a dire picture of what managers could be like if they worked in healthier organizations (mentally, anyway?). There are two reasons for this. 1. Retention is good. And if you think about your direct's careers, you will retain them longer and build a better relationship because they will have more help being successful inside the company (assuming a larger org here) 2. It's actually part of the job description and something EMs are evaluated on at some companies. #2 is probably more rare these days, but it still exists, occasionally. Until it doesn't. To be clear, I don't disagree with the author's hypothesis in this emergent AI world - I think companies will completely forget to think about this soon - but over the last 10 years it's definitely been an important part of my career as a manager to help my employees succeed in their careers. It's very rewarding.
ike2792 6mo ago
I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?
- foobarian 6mo ago
  I stayed away from the management track but friends who didn't tell me one of the metrics they are graded on is retention, i.e. if your reports leave at a more than average rate you will have a problem.
  - ike2792 6mo ago
    Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.
- pragma_x 6mo ago
  In my short-lived stint as the same, I also had the same take. > But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.” This quote absolutely floored me. The author had a lot of bad management.
  - apple4ever 6mo ago
    Agreed and sadly I'm not surprised. There are a lot of bad managers out there. But there are a good amount of good ones too.
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  > If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing? Collecting paycheck, protecting status quo, creating impression of work?
rc_mob 6mo ago
its even worse than this. managers will pretend to br your career coach for one day per year at your employee reviews. theyll give you advice and even in the moment that manager will think to themselves how they want to help you. they still won't help, the post is correct about that.
dec0dedab0de 6mo ago
Every manager I ever had has spent time working on career growth with me. This is in fortune 100 companies, and smaller late stage startups.. heck, even when I worked in retail in the 90s they would have these conversations. What is going on at amazon?
stego-tech 6mo ago
It used to be that managers would take capable workers under their mentorship and prepare them to move into their old role, as their manager was helping them do the same. Everyone extended a hand down to pull someone up, because companies promoted internally and hired from within. That's not the case anymore. Your manager won't mentor you not because they don't want to, but because they're also struggling to find footing and progression in a corporate world where nobody gives a shit about the folks beneath them, nor do they have any vested interest in long-term organizational health. It's not personal, it's just the system our predecessors put into practice so they could have an easier time keeping money and power for themselves. If we want to care about the careers of others again, we have to build institutions where mentorship and training happen, as well as where good ideas are recognized and rewarded. That's something even the most "meritorious" of SV companies completely lack atm, and they're viewed as the companies to emulate by the rest of the investor class and industry. Until and unless other companies reject those fads in favor of strategies that grow and improve their orgs from within again, we're all kind of on our own.
zug_zug 6mo ago
I don't think any of this old-school advice applies when our employers are trying to go agentic in the next 5 years.
g947o 6mo ago
I recently went through an internal transfer at my company, moving to a very distant organization. My manager and my skip manager tried to persuade me out of the idea, saying they "want to make sure this is the correct decision". I politely acknowledged their concerns and declined. (It's not like they were offering anything for me to stay.) I really wanted to say, "If it's a bad decision, it's my decision. You guys couldn't care less about my career growth, otherwise you'd have promoted me or given me bigger scope. You just care about shipping products and staff retention."
jeffrallen 6mo ago
I am responsible for my colleague's careers, and they for mine. This guy is apparently a jerk, who apparently thrived in a jerk atmosphere. Don't listen to him.
genadym 6mo ago
Steve makes the key point precisely: "AI is compressing the value of routine expertise... If your entire value is built on repeating what you already know how to do, that value is shrinking." But what is the alternative? Most answers land on "learn new skills faster" — which is still repeating what you already know how to do, just in a different domain. The compression will catch up. The capacity that doesn't compress is the one that operates before expertise: arriving at a genuinely unknown situation without a preset conclusion, staying open to what's actually there, finding the structure underneath it before you know what to look for. That's not a skill category most professional development tracks for — and it's exactly what determines whether a person directs AI or is directed by it. Wrote about this specifically: https://medium.com/@genady_awarelife/youre-not-competing-with-ai-you-re-either-its-director-or-its-servant-75fb57bc22f0 https://medium.com/@genady_awarelife/youre-not-competing-wit...
TrianguloY 6mo ago
Similar with salary. If you want a raise, you need to ask for it. It's sad, but that's what it is. (I'm aware of some companies that do raise the salary annually, and there is also the performance benefit if you have it, but I don't think that's common). That, and the "you need to change companies frequently (at most one each year)" are the two things I always say to people on a computer science career.
bloomingeek 6mo ago
I'm retired from working in the trades. My bosses only cared if I could do the job, period. Put up or shut up and go home. The only slight exception was when I went to work for an airline, for obvious reasons. Although I once worked at a data center, I was on the facility side of things, but was always around the white shirt workers. All of us were happy to be gainfully employed and raising families, paying taxes, pursuing hobbies,etc. I heard a radio article yesterday which said AI was very concerning for the future of data/tech workers, which was worrying to me. To paraphrase: it claimed that tens of thousands of tech workers are entering data in many different fields and in the process are doing what humans are doing as mentioned above. It claimed that the fear was that AI will replace these workers and instead of all those worker paying taxes/providing for families, perhaps ten or fifteen companies will be using AI to replace them and, as we all know, will pay a fraction of the taxes. (I don't mean to imply that paying taxes and employing people are equal, just that taxes are an important part of any economy.) I don't have any expertise in business or economics, but it seems to me if AI isn't regulated somehow, not only will this threaten workers, it will further widen the gap between the haves and the have nots.
apple4ever 6mo ago
Really great advice. There are some managers out there like myself who do care about your career. It's one reason I got into management- to be different and better than other managers who never think about it.
johnnyanmac 6mo ago
Very tragic. We need more people to guide juniors. My first job was just "do task and do more task", but my next jump clearly had people invested in training and advising me for that job and beyond. I don't know why we all collectively decided that "sink or swim" is the best way to teach new grads how to transition into enterprise software environments.

106 points by herbertl 6mo ago

sheikhnbake 6mo ago

would be pretty sick to have a career to save in the first place

righthand 6mo ago
Or a union to at least take that charge.
- raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
  Exactly how would a union help?
  - pm90 6mo ago
    It would force a company to come to the negotiating table when laying off workers and grading their performance. It would prevent a lot of bs layoffs; at the very least concrete reasons would be needed for RIFs.
    - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
      I grew up in small town South GA that growing up has 5 or 6 factories. All but one left when they got tired of dealing with the unions. The one that is still there was never unionized
      - righthand 6mo ago
        That’s propaganda. Businesses don't close because they’re “tired of dealing with the unions”.
        raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
        The business didn’t close a they moved to cheaper labor
        compiler-guy 6mo ago
        Nitpick the wording all you like, but “businesses avoid unionized workforces as best they can” isn’t propaganda.
        righthand 6mo ago
        Sure it is, show me one business that actually closed from union costs and I’ll show you a million unionized businesses that have never closed for that same reason. Cherry picking a few businesses and then saying all businesses are doomed because of unions is exactly propaganda.
        raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
        No one said businesses “closed”. I said they “moved”.
        righthand 6mo ago
        So other businesses moved for cheaper labor elsewhere but one stayed open is proof that the cost of living in GA went up not that unions cause businesses to move. The greed of the business owner is what caused them to move.
  - righthand 6mo ago
    See: automated train conductors
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  Depends on your country, sorry in German, https://www.igmetall.de/service/berufeglossar/informatik-grundstaendig https://www.igmetall.de/service/berufeglossar/informatik-gru...
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- deleted 6mo ago
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- zackmorris 6mo ago
  I don't know why you or your parent commenter got downvoted, but I use that as evidence that the end is very near. With the current geopolitical climate and the arrival of AI, I'm predicting a sharp economic downturn at the end of the year the likes of which we haven't seen in a century. I mean the Housing Bubble popping and the Dot Bomb were bad, but the US national debt was so much lower then. Income inequality was lower. Student loan debt was lower. Healthcare was more affordable. Homes were more affordable. Food was more affordable. We had (some) faith in our electoral process. When the cheap capital runs out, when value of the dollar collapses due to unforced error, when the overseas investment dries up, when billionaires panic and yank their investment in AI (leaving us with a duopoly like always), when the employment rate peaks never to return, when companies stop hiring for the foreseeable future, when people stop visiting websites or buying software, when we abandon liberal arts for the trades in Service Economy 2.0, when hospitals and universities close, when farms go bankrupt, when interest on the US national debt consumes its social safety net, when we sell our public lands for pennies on the dollar, when nobody is held accountable.. That's when we the people will remember who we are. Somehow, like every other time before, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps from nothing. Without time, money or resources, we'll come together and find a way to rebuild. We won't even tax the rich or incite violence against them, we'll simply manifest the abundant reality that's been denied to us by them for so long. That looks like organizing. Unions. Cooperatives. Mutual aid networks. Renewable energy. Permaculture. Voluntary employment and clock-in. Credit unions and crowdfunding. Automation. Distributed means of production. Fair trade. Class action lawsuits. Boycotts. Voting against incumbents. Solarpunk. We'll transcend competition and see the matrix for the bill of goods that it is. Rather than trying to get the money and power back in futility, we'll make them irrelevant. It's time to start thinking about selling those stocks. Divesting from the blood money of unearned income that comes from exploitation, suffering and war (even though they don't tell us that). Steering clear of prediction markets. Dropping the crypto. We know they won't. But that's why they'll stay insulated from knowing what stuff they're made of, holding out as long as possible, lonely and alone. And the fun part is, they'll get to find out anyway when the music stops.
  - righthand 6mo ago
    Mine was downvoted because unionizing is the last thing people on a startup forum want to hear.
someprick 6mo ago
It'd be pretty sick if the relevant discipline / sector / market of every single career path I embark upon, didn't summarily shit itself as soon as I begin making costly and irreversible personal investments therein.
- bayarearefugee 6mo ago
  Well at least you won't be alone in that regard when AI takes 90% of the knowledge jobs in the next few years and the world economy crashes for everyone because of any lack of political planning for this eventuality! We're all gonna be right there with you. And 'safe' trade jobs like plumbers? Lol let's see how that works out when vastly fewer people can afford your services and millions are trying to panic retrain into anything still deemed safe.
  - sheikhnbake 6mo ago
    Trade jobs will be scarce, but there could be some exciting opportunities in the leather clad marauder department

pjmlp 6mo ago

> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.” Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.

raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
Amazon has a career matrix (former employer). But they didn’t proactively help me with my career - not that I cared. My entire goal was to survive my 4 year initial offer and get the f** out of dodge. I was 46 when I was hired.
- giantg2 6mo ago
  I'm at a different comapny and it's the same. They have some basic framework/matrix, but managers aren't going to help you get to the next level. In my experience the matrix isn't followed anyways - they promote whoever they want whether or not they meet the stuff in the matrix. It's all just opinion based anyways.
tacostakohashi 6mo ago
For the most part, "career matrixes", "development plans", and the like are just generic internal marketing to placate people and create the illusion that managers / the company care about their career development, and they don't have to do anything. To a lesser extent performance reviews / ratings are the same - "you're doing great, keep it up!" - they don't really tell you what you need to do to progress. You have to figure that out and drive it for yourself.
- geodel 6mo ago
  In my experience (mainly IT related), when one first starting a career, first 5-10 years are standardized are promotion/title change for an average employee. After that if one is known by at least 1-2 level above their managers and/or other team managers, to have any chance of further growth. IME as time go by current managers have less and less power to promote as gap between manager and employee reduces.

pm90 6mo ago

What many of these articles miss is that even if you do everything they say you will still not get the promotion you want for several reasons. My advice for Career Growth for engineers who like to do things is to be willing to take on problems that others might not want, things that aren’t “sexy”, if you find them interesting. Theres a lot of interesting problems and you can grow your career by following the direction that interests you rather than the company. And when it comes to promotions, its often easier and better compensated to get a new job rather than trying to convince a bunch of people that you should be promoted.

raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
This is not how things work at any company where I have worked at with real leveling guidelines (including one BigTech company). It’s all about “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. It’s stated in different ways depending on the company. No one cares if you find it “interesting” when it is time for your promo doc. It’s visibility.
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  What they're saying is work on stuff that interests you and then find another job that values what you did.
  - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
    And when you interview at the next company and they level you, they are still going to ask behavioral questions that are concerned with scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity…
    - wiseowise 6mo ago
      You do both.
stuffn 6mo ago
This is recipe to be track locked and miserable. It’s the exact path I have taken over my unfortunately long career as an IC. Now I’m too useful doing bullshit work, tied with a golden ball and chain, and have no hope of ever seeing a management track/easy job. I’m currently planning my exit from the field as I am becoming too interested in actual life to learn frameworks, do bullshit 8 tier 3 month coding interviews, and collect experience to write CRUD bullshit for the next 10 years. The real advice to aspiring engineers who don’t want to have trouble sleeping from years of pagerduty and high blood pressure is to work in middle management as soon as possible. Forget IC work. The rewards are so much less than the morons who manage. Unless you are at a major dev first company (if you have VCs you aren’t) your manager will always outearn you by a large margin, have an easier life, and way more leeway. Every company I have been to only middle management converts to the VP/C level jobs where you do virtually nothing all day but waste everyone’s time. This is the ideal job. The absolute wastes of precious air in management have the life you want. If you’re like me and followed this terrible advice decide on an amount of money that is good enough and then decide on how much competence that buys. Volunteer for nothing beyond that, game the ticketing system, use as much vacation as you possibly can without a PIP, vibe the shit out of even the most trivial amount of work, and fuck off once your house is paid off and accounts are appropriate for retirement in T+30 years. Use that time to take up goat herding, wood working, or conservationist work.

kyoob 6mo ago

Whether or not your manager is capable of helping you shape your career is an open question, for sure. But 20 people, over an 18-year career, and not a single one of them bring it up in a 1:1? And, oh okay, all those managers have worked at the same company? Seems like maybe a culture problem. I've had plenty of managers in sub-FAANG enterprises bring it up unprompted.

francisofascii 6mo ago

There is good advice here for sure, but the tone seemed focused on growing your career rather than "saving" it. Most people now want to know how to still be employed in this industry 10 years from now. Maybe this advice will be consistent with this goal, but I fear climbing the corporate ladder could make you more vulnerable to cuts and lead to burnout.

woeirua 6mo ago

Is a manager “good” if they’re not talking about your career growth? I disagree with the author on this point so the rest of it really doesn’t follow. Then again, he also had 20 managers in 18 years… so yeah I can see why none of his managers ever got around to asking about his career growth.

bluGill 6mo ago
Even if any did, none could have done anything meaningful to push his career growth.
- woeirua 6mo ago
  Exactly. They probably barely knew his name.
9rx 6mo ago
Absolutely. Good managers are invisible. They don't need to talk about career growth as they have already silently, in the background, removed any impediments that might have prevented you from growing. All you need to do is move in the direction you want to go.

pkorzeniewski 6mo ago

Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.

NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?
- doublerabbit 6mo ago
  Does anyone notice all the users who can afford the product now? No. They'll just keep selling and profit gaining anyway possible. Give me a product where they legitimately care.
- mosura 6mo ago
  Focus on making products/services for people that actually do have money to spend then. A dimension people hate looking at is credit is far too easy in the US, which means too many companies are heavily optimized for extracting that money from people that didn’t really earn it in the first place. This means a lot of the smartest workers are preoccupied on the wrong things instead of helping advance society.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    Careful there. You are not wrong, but you are not really correct either. Credit is a tool. Many people are using credit wrong and getting away with it because it is too easy. However that doesn't mean credit is a bad tool, just that it isn't used correctly. Credit is a great tool if you get the value of the thing while you are paying for it. Paying for a car on credit (including insurance, taxes, fuel, maintenance...) is a great idea if you get the car payment worth of value (including what it does for your ego - if you are honest that is why you have it) from having a car every month , paying for a car on credit that you don't get the payments worth of value from is a waste. Similar for a house - I plan to live in this house for the next 10+ years, so I shouldn't pay for it all up front. Most things though don't give value over time worth their payment. I don't get a payments worth of value from having gone on vacation a few months ago, so I should have paid for that up front (which I did but many do not). I like musical instruments, but I can't be sure to get $100/month of value out of my fumbling playing (or having them for my ego) so I won't buy them on credit. You can't take it with you, so no sense in dieing with a mattress full of cash (unless that really is worth it to you). You should have some rainy day savings. Most things in life get value today only and should be paid for today.

moritonal 6mo ago

Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career. "I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history. "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird. "I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work. "Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally. "You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.

deleted 6mo ago
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nicce 6mo ago
> "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird. From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  The problem is bored employees find a new job elsewhere. Employees who feel they are not valued find a new job elsewhere. If you can find them a new job in the company you can have them train their replacement - years later the replacement can ask "do you remember why you did...". It also means if the old project has an emergency you have a bunch of people who can jump in much faster - to some extent this adding people to a late project won't make it latter (only some extent, it isn't perfect). People also get old and retire (or die). By moving people around a bit you ensure that your training plan still works because you are using it. This also means there will be openings to move up the ladder, make sure you get the people on them. (There are stories from my company where after a big layout they got scared and hired almost nobody for the next 20 years, then those who made it passed the layoffs started retiring and there wasn't a mid level of engineers following to promote).

cmos 6mo ago

I always talked with the people I managed about their career goals, and always tried to adapt their job to be a closer fit to those goals. When I couldn't do that I would acknowledge that and even help them find a different job that did fit. How else can we expect to get the best out of people?

3yr-i-frew-up 6mo ago
Yeah I agree. I can get people to work harder and cheaper if I can align their career goals with mine. Overly pessimistic article that is more absolute than reality.
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  > Overly pessimistic article that is more absolute than reality. From managers perspective, maybe. As an IC this is 100% accurate to every word.
apple4ever 6mo ago
That's great. I wish there were more of us but I'm glad we still are out there doing the best for our people.

kwanbix 6mo ago

> Your company has figured out the perfect arrangement. You’re good at your job, and you don’t cause problems. Your manager knows they can count on you. From the company’s perspective, this is the ideal state. Why would they change anything? Whish I had knew this earlier in my career. I worked for IBM. I was very good at delivering usable software for internal use. They kept me there forever. They would give me awards and such, but never a change as the author says. If I needed something, I had to do it myself.

black_13 6mo ago

[dead]

icemanx 6mo ago

It always surprised me when people talked about their Bosses / Managers like they were some sort of gods that were going to save them and protect them from all bad things in the world.

weinzierl 6mo ago
I'm all for personal responsibility but when it comes to employer/employee relationship there is a certain duty of care (beyond paying you) from the employer side. In many countries this is even coded in law but even if not it makes sense. If there is no protection for the employee no one would get into a dependent employment relationship in the first place, especially when the pay is universally worse than being self-employed.
wiseowise 6mo ago
> It always surprised me when people talked about their Bosses / Managers like they were some sort of gods that were going to save them and protect them from all bad things in the world. Most of the managers that I worked with opened up our first conversation together with how they "care about people and their careers".
lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
Given the way the world is, that's true. Now, intrinsically, the job of a manager is to serve the company by serving those they manage. They do this by enabling workers to do the work that needs to be done. A middle manager is supposed to represent his team to upper management. However, too often, middle management is more interested in schmoozing with upper management rather than standing by their team. And if he is too difficult, upper management can just replace him with a more compliant manager who will function as a faithful messenger and nothing more. So, there's no structural way to ensure these things work. Culture and personal virtue are necessary.

sailfast 6mo ago

Just gonna say that while thinking through your direct reports' career progression is not the only job you have as a manager, it is definitely an important part of the work and something that is prioritized at some companies. This article paints a dire picture of what managers could be like if they worked in healthier organizations (mentally, anyway?). There are two reasons for this. 1. Retention is good. And if you think about your direct's careers, you will retain them longer and build a better relationship because they will have more help being successful inside the company (assuming a larger org here) 2. It's actually part of the job description and something EMs are evaluated on at some companies. #2 is probably more rare these days, but it still exists, occasionally. Until it doesn't. To be clear, I don't disagree with the author's hypothesis in this emergent AI world - I think companies will completely forget to think about this soon - but over the last 10 years it's definitely been an important part of my career as a manager to help my employees succeed in their careers. It's very rewarding.

ike2792 6mo ago

I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?

foobarian 6mo ago
I stayed away from the management track but friends who didn't tell me one of the metrics they are graded on is retention, i.e. if your reports leave at a more than average rate you will have a problem.
- ike2792 6mo ago
  Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.
pragma_x 6mo ago
In my short-lived stint as the same, I also had the same take. > But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.” This quote absolutely floored me. The author had a lot of bad management.
- apple4ever 6mo ago
  Agreed and sadly I'm not surprised. There are a lot of bad managers out there. But there are a good amount of good ones too.
wiseowise 6mo ago
> If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing? Collecting paycheck, protecting status quo, creating impression of work?

rc_mob 6mo ago

its even worse than this. managers will pretend to br your career coach for one day per year at your employee reviews. theyll give you advice and even in the moment that manager will think to themselves how they want to help you. they still won't help, the post is correct about that.

dec0dedab0de 6mo ago

Every manager I ever had has spent time working on career growth with me. This is in fortune 100 companies, and smaller late stage startups.. heck, even when I worked in retail in the 90s they would have these conversations. What is going on at amazon?

stego-tech 6mo ago

It used to be that managers would take capable workers under their mentorship and prepare them to move into their old role, as their manager was helping them do the same. Everyone extended a hand down to pull someone up, because companies promoted internally and hired from within. That's not the case anymore. Your manager won't mentor you not because they don't want to, but because they're also struggling to find footing and progression in a corporate world where nobody gives a shit about the folks beneath them, nor do they have any vested interest in long-term organizational health. It's not personal, it's just the system our predecessors put into practice so they could have an easier time keeping money and power for themselves. If we want to care about the careers of others again, we have to build institutions where mentorship and training happen, as well as where good ideas are recognized and rewarded. That's something even the most "meritorious" of SV companies completely lack atm, and they're viewed as the companies to emulate by the rest of the investor class and industry. Until and unless other companies reject those fads in favor of strategies that grow and improve their orgs from within again, we're all kind of on our own.

zug_zug 6mo ago

I don't think any of this old-school advice applies when our employers are trying to go agentic in the next 5 years.

g947o 6mo ago

I recently went through an internal transfer at my company, moving to a very distant organization. My manager and my skip manager tried to persuade me out of the idea, saying they "want to make sure this is the correct decision". I politely acknowledged their concerns and declined. (It's not like they were offering anything for me to stay.) I really wanted to say, "If it's a bad decision, it's my decision. You guys couldn't care less about my career growth, otherwise you'd have promoted me or given me bigger scope. You just care about shipping products and staff retention."

jeffrallen 6mo ago

I am responsible for my colleague's careers, and they for mine. This guy is apparently a jerk, who apparently thrived in a jerk atmosphere. Don't listen to him.

genadym 6mo ago

Steve makes the key point precisely: "AI is compressing the value of routine expertise... If your entire value is built on repeating what you already know how to do, that value is shrinking." But what is the alternative? Most answers land on "learn new skills faster" — which is still repeating what you already know how to do, just in a different domain. The compression will catch up. The capacity that doesn't compress is the one that operates before expertise: arriving at a genuinely unknown situation without a preset conclusion, staying open to what's actually there, finding the structure underneath it before you know what to look for. That's not a skill category most professional development tracks for — and it's exactly what determines whether a person directs AI or is directed by it. Wrote about this specifically: https://medium.com/@genady_awarelife/youre-not-competing-with-ai-you-re-either-its-director-or-its-servant-75fb57bc22f0 https://medium.com/@genady_awarelife/youre-not-competing-wit...

TrianguloY 6mo ago

Similar with salary. If you want a raise, you need to ask for it. It's sad, but that's what it is. (I'm aware of some companies that do raise the salary annually, and there is also the performance benefit if you have it, but I don't think that's common). That, and the "you need to change companies frequently (at most one each year)" are the two things I always say to people on a computer science career.

bloomingeek 6mo ago

I'm retired from working in the trades. My bosses only cared if I could do the job, period. Put up or shut up and go home. The only slight exception was when I went to work for an airline, for obvious reasons. Although I once worked at a data center, I was on the facility side of things, but was always around the white shirt workers. All of us were happy to be gainfully employed and raising families, paying taxes, pursuing hobbies,etc. I heard a radio article yesterday which said AI was very concerning for the future of data/tech workers, which was worrying to me. To paraphrase: it claimed that tens of thousands of tech workers are entering data in many different fields and in the process are doing what humans are doing as mentioned above. It claimed that the fear was that AI will replace these workers and instead of all those worker paying taxes/providing for families, perhaps ten or fifteen companies will be using AI to replace them and, as we all know, will pay a fraction of the taxes. (I don't mean to imply that paying taxes and employing people are equal, just that taxes are an important part of any economy.) I don't have any expertise in business or economics, but it seems to me if AI isn't regulated somehow, not only will this threaten workers, it will further widen the gap between the haves and the have nots.

apple4ever 6mo ago

Really great advice. There are some managers out there like myself who do care about your career. It's one reason I got into management- to be different and better than other managers who never think about it.

johnnyanmac 6mo ago

Very tragic. We need more people to guide juniors. My first job was just "do task and do more task", but my next jump clearly had people invested in training and advising me for that job and beyond. I don't know why we all collectively decided that "sink or swim" is the best way to teach new grads how to transition into enterprise software environments.