Ask HN: Career progression vs. meaningful/appealing products?
I've been in the market for a new job since spring. At the beginning, I was only focused on products I really liked to (in summary, what a futurist engineer geek would like to: AI, blockchain, security, etc). I had several interviews, but no one struck a deal, either because they decided to move on with other candidates or because I decided to drop off.
Fast forward to mid September, I decided to start applying to positions that suit my role and/or career progression, but in less appealing companies. And I have been very successful. The minimum offer I have received doubles my current salary.
So, I'm in this situation in which I have offers which look positive from a financial and career progression point of view, but in boring products which not interest me at all and which have no upside at all.
Have you ever been in that position? What did you do?
98 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 57.8 ms ] threadUse 1-2 years there to upskill in area you care about. Effectively work minimum needed to get a good review from them. Then apply again to area you want to work in, with new salary as your standard.
Will take patience and perseverance.
Sure, working for a Crypto exchange might be more fun and look cooler, but if they have 10 customers and you are constantly under pressure to hack stuff into production for an egomaniac CEO, it is not a great environment to grow and work in.
So personally I wouldn’t be so quick to write off the boring or unsexy opportunities. Especially early in your career when you need to learn how to do things properly.
My first advice would be that if you can double your salary, do it. We don't know what tomorrow will be made of.
Also you don't mention work-life balance and quality of relationships with colleagues which to me is more important than interest in the product.
That being said, you can also keep interviewing and try to find a job which checks all the boxes.
And I regret the times where I let money decide. It usually felt like "Ok, I'll just do this for a few years, make a boatload of money and then move on".
In retrospect it feels like I wasted those years. Life is so much bigger than a bank account. Time is priceless.
I wholeheartedly agree, but working at a company is selling time no matter how interesting the technology might be. It's not the same as working on personal projects; there will always be unpleasant aspects to it, certainly after more time passes (I've been through more M&A than I care to think about).
If the goal is to stop selling your time, then double the salary would achieve that goal twice as fast, assuming the job is at least tolerable. Never work for a shit hole where you dread coming in, but money is a means to an end. Money is freedom.
At one point, I personally took a short-term pay cut in order to join AWS, an organization I once really wanted to work with. Ultimately, the decision paid off, both financially and career wise; hard to put a price on working with great people, building great products, and stretching oneself.
Don't get me wrong, money is important and making that leap of 2x might be the right move for you, right now. That choice will also be advantageous when it comes to future negotiations. But if you are early on in your career, you might want to find a position that allows you to master your craft.
Life is short though, once your base needs are met, figure out what you want to work on and spend more time on whatever that is.
I dropped that and never looked back. My career is very happy, enjoyable, well paid.
As usual there are exceptions in every context, but what you seem to be doing is similar, I believe that focusing on the product is wrong.
Working on a type of product has little connection to the type of work that is going to be performed, which could be boring or very different from what expected.
My thought has always been: focus on the type of work you want to do, the rest comes naturally (potentially even passion for a new product!)
The money will follow. Maybe not in the same quantity, but money has a diminishing ROI after a certain point versus working on things you want to work with.
Obviously, there will be some products that viscerally excite you and others that don't, but let me elaborate: perhaps a company is working on a tool to help construction workers orchestrate cleanups at their work sites...or the company is working on a platform to help automate property management...whatever.
These may not seem as exciting, on the surface, as other products you may have seen out there, but it could be that digging into them further there are elements which will pique your interest. For example, perhaps the systems that need to be built in support of these products are particularly complex or they present particular scaling challenges, etc.
The underlying product may not be super interesting to you, but it could be that the engineering work involved in them is actually more interesting than some other product that feels more exciting to you. Or perhaps the business or operations side of these companies is very interesting and well-executed and there are things to learn on that front.
I'm not expressing this very well, but my main point is that there can be a divergence between products that are interesting and work that is interesting - often times the less exciting product presents more interesting/challenging work. To see that, you need to take into account the entire equation: the biggest challenges the company is facing, the long-term strategy, how sharp the business/ops side of the company is, etc.
Keep an open mind; things that, at first glance, don't seem interesting may turn out to involve _very_ interesting/rewarding work.
It sounds so boring but it turns out that every state has their own process (that they change without notifying you) and they use different pieces of data to identify workers and companies. Also everything was still paper-based so we got a scanned image and OCR text.
This was 10 years ago and we were doing fairly large scale NLP in PHP, matching millions of documents to claimants and companies and doing some amount of fraud detection.
It's still among the most interesting projects I've worked on.
However, all works and companies do not incentivize doing whatever work interestingly.
A few questions I use for potential employers:
- What's one idea that you came up with and implemented, in order to make your company better? What was that process like? (Read: find out how much the company supports bottom-up innovation)
- What's the process for getting adopting a new dev tool or standing up a new server at your company? (Read: differentiate between command/approval-driven companies and need/self-serve companies)
- All the basic boring stuff: What's your CVS system? Is code visible across the organization? What's your knowledge system? Are documents searchable and visible across the organization? What's your CICD system? (Read: make sure you aren't walking into a dumpster fire where basic hygeniene has been neglected)
For some forms the system actually put all the information from various sources on a digital recreation of the paper form we received and faxed it off. We only did that for the most common forms though.
I learned so much about database schemas and performance, since as I'm sure you've seen you often receive claims just before (or sometimes after) the response was due and if they're a minute late the claim gets paid by default and if the claim is due at 4:30 the HR person will casually log in at 4:28 to upload several documents and fill out a lengthy form.
One piece of advice I can give is to try asking during interviews what are the most interesting projects the interviewers did and why. It will give you a rough idea about what they are doing and if you would enjoy working there.
Also, I don't think there is any correlation between career progression and interesting projects. You can grow working on interesting or boring projects. The important thing is what you learned and what you achieved.
I currently work for an extremely large multi-national company on a really mundane sounding use case with a pretty vanilla Data stack. What we build has direct impact to our customers. That means that we can map what we are building to our customer experience, which means we need to understand the impact of what we make and use that to balance the various Engineering tradeoffs. I don't feel like I'm doing bullshit work.
I had another job cool sounding job with all sorts of buzzwords, including "AI." When I told people the use cases we were looking at and who I reported to, everybody thought I was doing some amazing stuff. Literally 90% of my work was chasing down BS ideas from VPs who seemed to want to find more complex ways of justifying their decisions. That job was the coolest sounding job I had and was 100% bullshit because nothing I was doing had any real impact on anything.
Bullshit work is not interesting, no matter how cool sounding it is.
>Have you ever been in that position? What did you do?
Yes, I chose the "boring" job that with fabulous compensation. (It was proprietary accounting systems and it paid better than FAANG.) I spent 10+ years at it and made a lot of money but it's also one of my biggest regrets. Consider 2 groups:
- (group A) prioritize money more than the particular job. They can compartmentalize the boring job and do the fun stuff on the weekend.
- (group B) people prioritize interesting work more than the money. As long as the job offers a decent salary, that's good enough.
I thought I was in group A but it turns out I was actually in group B.
However... the big caveat with my anecdote... The problem with answering your question is that the right choice depends on _your_ personality.
What-ifs are an impossible dilemma, and I wouldn't stress on what type of person I am: I know I change, so I am a different person at different points in time (and in large part, due to circumstances).
It sounds like you could comfortably take a couple years off to do whatever you regretted not doing earlier, and by the end of it, you should have no regrets. If you do, however, plan your days like it's work (I've taken multi-year leave, and I behaved as if I have all the time in the world, and I didn't really achieve much of what I wanted to ;-).
If you want to increase your ability to get the jobs you want, working at a well-known firm for a few years is the most straightforward way to boost your resume. People with a few years of Google or Microsoft on their resume often move to the front of the line for hiring.
Take one of the well-paying jobs. Do well, leave a good impression, and network well among the people you meet. Re-evaluate in a few years. Who knows, you may discover you like these companies a lot more than you think. If not, your resume will be well-prepped for the next move.
The most important thing about a new job in my opinion is not the technology you work with or the company you work for, but the PEOPLE, you work with / for...
Are they experienced? Motivated? Professional? How nerdy are they? How arrogant? Does the team work together or is it a toxic relationship? Are things like Coding Dojos, Pair Programming, Code Reviews, etc. well established? Is your potential boss fine with this or not?
The problem often is getting to know the team before you actually starting the job. I always ask for a "training day" to see, how the team is working on daily tasks...
Choosing the right "Team" and building trust over YEARS and having a work-life-balance is the most important step to build deep knowledge and still have fun, regardless in what technology. Much more important for "happiness" than money or hype hunting. If you are passionate for what you do, you will build confidence and learn much more than on the other path.
Just my 2 cents.
I know that is a dark way to look at things, but it is also quite pragmatic. People spend so much of their careers building up wealth, skills, and power, hoping for a future day when it all will give them everything they wanted. But often you can build the life you want earlier in life by looking at your options holistically, trying to balance satisfying and meaningful work that you could be proud of in the short term... while also making enough money and building skills to carry you forward if you are lucky enough to get a long-term.
I have always tried to strike that balance - I don't work for below market rate just to get meaningful work, but neither do I seek out the highest paycheck. I look for work that adds some value to the world.
—Yosemite golden-age climber Eric Jay Beck
There are many ways to happiness, sometimes you can just go for it directly, sometimes you build some security on your way there.
https://www.owleyes.org/text/walden/read/economy#root-14
One of the reasons I have a aversion to this question is that it's usually followed by "follow your passion" or something equally trite.
However, I do think it's useful when you are in a situation you hate and you wonder if it's worth leaving. Yes, definitely leave that.
If you have an "okay" job that lets you maximize your mental health and time for other things (e.g. family), maybe you'll feel like you made the right career tradeoff when that bus hits you.
It is not pleasant for me to imagine life w/o my family. We are certainly not perfect, but we try to be a benefit to each other, and we are. Our parents (who are now great-grandparents) have set examples of long-term unselfishness, which helps. Others can do that to start such trends and traditions of their own. So worthwhile.
There were some other HN discussions where I commented in more detail, and the containing discussions also have interesting comments. (And maybe I'm a cataloguing personality, and like these ideas...):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129921
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23452651
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28867645
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553508 (this one has a bunch of HN links to discussions on internal motivation)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708786
I'm more interested in stability now. On my last job hunt i was avoiding some more interesting work in favor of stability. I was in my late 30s at the time and just didnt want to go through all the start up problems I've experienced in the past.
That all said, I'm on a small team now working on an ecommerce site. It seems like a boring job, but I've been surprised at how much I've been able to use "interesting" tech to solve problems. You actually dont know when that boring job might be exactly what you want.
I chose to optimize for higher salary. I plan to get back into the nonprofit and social good world later in my career.
There's really only 3 kinds of money.
There's "I don't have to worry if I'll make rent or be able to buy groceries this month" money.
There's "I don't have to think about prices or when I go out to dinner" money.
And then there's "I can take unpaid time off whenever I feel like it, and travel to where I feel like" money.
Past that, everything is just bigger numbers.
It always resonated with me, because (a) it phrased money (which doesn't really matter directly) in terms of outcomes (which do matter directly), (b) it coalesced things down into a few, very different outcome buckets, & (c) it made the observation that in terms of life outcomes, there's definitely a ceiling: unless you're looking for ways to blow money, there's a cap on how much you can reasonably spend.
There are all kinds of projects that are potentially useful but not necessarily profitable. Having more millions of dollars means you could do more of them.
You see people here complaining that they can't go from $500k to $600k and everyone says that they're being greedy. But the dissatisfaction is a lot stronger at that range, and it only goes up when people become millionaires.
I think it's quite important to check that you're eating because you're hungry and not out of habit/greed/pride.
People who want "exactly one million, not less, not more" are less frequent in population than people for whom no amount of money is ever enough.
Even if you are not a long-term thinker, just doubling your pay for a year is almost like being able to skip work for 9 months after.
High paying jobs come with other externalities (managers who are beyond caring for anything other than their cars's model years, deadlines which are about some VP's travel schedule etc), which suck while it is happening, but having the ability to just step away from it for a 3-6 month period afterwards makes you feel less trapped in that.
The pain is real, but feeling less trapped can alleviate the suffering.
That's not to say that you should rush into a burnout factory, but getting paid more has immediate consequences to your time-value at a young age - I took a sabbatical at 28 years old, which was triggered by personal issues, but the fact that I could stop work & not worry about rent for 3 months was a big factor in actually doing it.
I'm about to take a big break to recover from burnout, and while I don't expect to have trouble getting back into the market next year, I'm not sure it's something I could do repeatedly without my resume looking suspicious.
You could try to find a product that interests you intrinsically rather than based on marketing? If you have passions, it's rarely a bad idea to pursue them unless the industry exploits said passion (ie, games industry). Failing that, money's always nice.
Funnily enough, my current job has been one of my favorites. There are always creative and interesting problems to solve. The feedback from my team and from the customers is also rewarding.
I certainly have some itches that I need to scratch in terms of personal projects, but generally, I'm satisfied with just how involved and exciting my "boring" job is.
Don't get discouraged if you're not seeing what you want right away. Consider cutting your teeth with some not-so-appealing companies. It may turn out that it's not so boring to you. And also, you'll get some additional experience for when those jobs turn up later.
"You do one for the money, one for the art, one for the money, one for the art, and one because you owe your friend a favor."
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneForTheMoneyOn...
your career is long :) do both!