I mean this is well-intentioned, but with all career advice I've seen it's mostly a bunch of hocus-pocus.
For example maybe your company gets bought by private equity and 0 people get promoted for years on end.
Or maybe you have a speech impediment and you never get promoted beyond a certain point.
The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.
> The biggest gains come from combining disciplines.
Someone else said it's a good trick to be good at two things, because there are N things but there are N-squared pairs of things, so it allows you to specialize in a smaller niche without spending a lot of effort on gaining new skills. Can't remember who.
I think the most important skill after the actual engineering is ability to write well (and inclination to do it early and often).
pg and tptacek and patio11 really drove that home to me - they are as well known and well regarded as they are because they tell people about it, well and often.
Even if it’s just on an internal wiki - get the stuff in your head out there.
Agency is a great observation. But also bring up these conversations with your direct management so they recognize the work you do. Employees with less responsibilities outside of work (no kids, no families, etc) might appear to be high-agency while in reality being less effective. When a senior eng with perceived "low-agency" suddenly takes a leave, those effects are felt way more than if a "high-agency" junior does. All's this to say, make your impact know with blunt discussions. Don't distract yourself with blog posts and dashboards solely to prove you have impact.
Think of bands, that are together for like 40 or 50 years. 40-50 years of studios, tour buses, airports, soundcheks, press etc. together. It is not enough to be an excellent musician for this to be possible.
This is true. It's complicated. Also, if you're too good, some people above you may feel threatened and they can absolutely destroy your career. It's total bullshit that people at the top want to pay it forward. They don't necessarily. They want to help people who remind them of themselves or a lesser version. They often don't want to help someone who might be better than them in any way.
it references a The Staff Engineers Path, i think staff is a new senior and it's easy to get to it and hard to jump over when joining a new company. I don't really care abount one more level raise from being engineer X3 to X4, I want to get to X7 or be self employed, getting raise at a job is super easy you just kinda work there
> And in the long run, the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.
Love this quote.
And just a comment on agency: it's not necessarily rewarded or even acknowledged in all environments. Some expect that you're literally a worker-robot and just need someone to carry out menial tasks from up top. You don't want to end up at one of these places, regardless of what your life situation is.
I agree with that. I've seen people get frustrated with this where they and their employer (as embodied by their manager or colleges) are talking past each other, in a sense.
Employee is very good at X, and wants their job to be about X and be judged on X. But to their manager and colleges, the job they want them to do is only partially about X; they'd also like a lot of Y and some Z in there as well.
Anyway, I generally agree with sentiment of the article, though it's too self-helpy for me.
Also: A lot of stuff happens in life that has no regard for your hard work, skill and diligence. Learning to roll with the punches is one of those soft skills everyone tends to need sooner or later, sometimes too frequently.
Yep, this was a lesson that took me a bit to learn as well. Perfect code that doesn't get used because it doesn't solve the right problem is useless to a company, so no one is going to want to pay someone for it (much less promote them).
On another hand, I'm observing that most goods purchased and sold are of lesser quality compared to 15-20 years ago. Even on comparable price tags.
It's become easier to make "good enough" products that are of subpar quality. Just an example that's relevant for me recently: faucet heads. My local supermarket sells one that is identical—but 3 times the price—of one sold on AliExpress. The faucet head breaks after a few months.
If I start looking for them, I could make a whole post on goods and services like that.
So, while I agree that you must be excellent to stand out among your peers, that is certainly not what companies are recruiting or fostering. I didn't want to talk about LLMs, but one can easily imagine how that will impact product quality.
It's getting easier to be "good enough". Or at least fake it.
If this is true, you’ve hit the jackpot. Competence is usually rewarded by spreading the competent people thin enough that they rarely get to collaborate.
> High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait.
> ...the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.
It's unclear what problem(s) this advice is meant to address but perhaps TFA means obstacles to promotion, although TFA seems to assume a strong correlation between "impact" or feature/product delivery and promotion/career-advancement.
The fastest way to get promoted is:
1. don't get fired/let go
2. frequently interview for higher positions with other companies and become good at interviewing
There are exceptions but, on average, it is much harder to advance via internal promotion than by getting hired somewhere else with a higher title/compensation.
The reason for this is multi-faceted:
1. It's difficult to measure employee value, so companies rarely have a good handle on it. This incentivizes set rates of advancement ("employees" perceive "fairness") and creates a fear of promoting someone unready or unreliable for a new position.
2. Employees want to "advance" by being promoted to positions with higher responsibility and higher compensation. The ability to allow for this advancement requires a higher level employee to leave or a business case for creating the position out of thin air. Thus, companies don't always have a position available.
This is true in the lower rungs, but you'll hit a glass ceiling where this starts to work against you. At a certain point your reputation with those whom you have worked closely matters much more than interviewing skills.
Add "sales" to the list. Even if you don't have strong "product thinking, project execution, nor people skills" you can reach out to sales and offer technical advice, or offer to write the tech portion of proposals. This will get you promoted. Eventually, you will learn the sales pipeline, BD, capture, execution, deal closing etc. You will even learn deal qualification, so you can help leadership focus on the winners. Tech Skills + Sales will pay dividends.
I would have agreed to that but I'm corporate it's just bullshit fuckery. Politics and Sycophancy triumphs over everything. It's just too much bullshit fuckery.
27 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] threadFor example maybe your company gets bought by private equity and 0 people get promoted for years on end.
Or maybe you have a speech impediment and you never get promoted beyond a certain point.
The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.
Slate Star Codex agrees https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any...
> The biggest gains come from combining disciplines.
Someone else said it's a good trick to be good at two things, because there are N things but there are N-squared pairs of things, so it allows you to specialize in a smaller niche without spending a lot of effort on gaining new skills. Can't remember who.
pg and tptacek and patio11 really drove that home to me - they are as well known and well regarded as they are because they tell people about it, well and often.
Even if it’s just on an internal wiki - get the stuff in your head out there.
Being far above good isn't enough either. Being highly productive and effective result in work done faster.. and more work given !
Better to use your skill at your service rather seek/hope for promote.
Only a certain tiny subset of SV engineers have this hypercompetitive mindset. If you think you're LeBron, good luck to you.
Love this quote.
And just a comment on agency: it's not necessarily rewarded or even acknowledged in all environments. Some expect that you're literally a worker-robot and just need someone to carry out menial tasks from up top. You don't want to end up at one of these places, regardless of what your life situation is.
Currently, statistics show that changing jobs rapidly pays much more than staying one place, no matter whether you deserve it or not.
Whether or not you deserve it is not a metric that is often applied in this field.
I agree with that. I've seen people get frustrated with this where they and their employer (as embodied by their manager or colleges) are talking past each other, in a sense.
Employee is very good at X, and wants their job to be about X and be judged on X. But to their manager and colleges, the job they want them to do is only partially about X; they'd also like a lot of Y and some Z in there as well.
Anyway, I generally agree with sentiment of the article, though it's too self-helpy for me.
Also: A lot of stuff happens in life that has no regard for your hard work, skill and diligence. Learning to roll with the punches is one of those soft skills everyone tends to need sooner or later, sometimes too frequently.
It's become easier to make "good enough" products that are of subpar quality. Just an example that's relevant for me recently: faucet heads. My local supermarket sells one that is identical—but 3 times the price—of one sold on AliExpress. The faucet head breaks after a few months.
If I start looking for them, I could make a whole post on goods and services like that.
So, while I agree that you must be excellent to stand out among your peers, that is certainly not what companies are recruiting or fostering. I didn't want to talk about LLMs, but one can easily imagine how that will impact product quality.
It's getting easier to be "good enough". Or at least fake it.
If this is true, you’ve hit the jackpot. Competence is usually rewarded by spreading the competent people thin enough that they rarely get to collaborate.
> That’s how you increase your impact.
> High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait.
> ...the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.
It's unclear what problem(s) this advice is meant to address but perhaps TFA means obstacles to promotion, although TFA seems to assume a strong correlation between "impact" or feature/product delivery and promotion/career-advancement.
The fastest way to get promoted is:
1. don't get fired/let go
2. frequently interview for higher positions with other companies and become good at interviewing
There are exceptions but, on average, it is much harder to advance via internal promotion than by getting hired somewhere else with a higher title/compensation.
The reason for this is multi-faceted:
1. It's difficult to measure employee value, so companies rarely have a good handle on it. This incentivizes set rates of advancement ("employees" perceive "fairness") and creates a fear of promoting someone unready or unreliable for a new position.
2. Employees want to "advance" by being promoted to positions with higher responsibility and higher compensation. The ability to allow for this advancement requires a higher level employee to leave or a business case for creating the position out of thin air. Thus, companies don't always have a position available.
3. (etc.)