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Ask HN: Hired to write, but mostly code, what to do?

2 points by techmarketerguy ↗ HN
Hello denizens of Hacker News. I could really use your help.

Background: I've been slowly building up my webdev skills since I attended a bootcamp about a year and a half ago. I've been at my current job about 8 months (after doing freelance content work before then), where I was initially hired to write, but also told I would be given the freedom to develop my skills.

And they have completely, totally come through for me, allowing me to build tools like:

A realtime-ish dashboard built in Node and React that displays data from our industry database (can't be too specific!) on TV screens in our office lobby (built this at the CEO's request)

A twitterbot (also in Node) that tweets statistics to our members (we're an industry association) and can respond to specific stats queries with the relevant information

Scraping tools (mix of some hacked-out Python and Node again) for keeping member data up to date

And I'm currently a big bart of building our new site, as well as a website for the event-booking business our company wants to develop.

So now the current problem: I like it here, but I'm no longer interested in the written portion of my duties (or at least, writing about the subject of our industry). I want to keep building digital tools and not creating marketing collateral.

Is there a way I could address my future plans (and salary expectations) and how they could fit in at my current work? Am I being unreasonable since they have given me such good work to develop my portfolio?

Thanks in advance!

16 comments

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monroepe
I don't think it's unreasonable. I would speak to your manager about it. And honestly if he/she doesn't understand your career goals or is not willing to work with you on them, you should look for work elsewhere.
js4
I second this.

Your time is really valuable and you should be spending it on things that you want to do (for whatever reason).

darkwulph03
I was in a similar boat with my last job doing Support/QA/Custom Development for 2 years while the "official" devs went off and made a new version of the product. About a year and a half in i brought it up and they agreed to move me out of support, but the pay raise wasn't nearly adequate for the duties expected. And I regretfully agreed to half raise now, half a raise later... (24k to 32k total) and ended up getting dev/support removed leaving me with QA (devs wanted dev back and I wasn't invited to the party). I promptly left the company and found a much better job doing Dev for 55k, which sadly burnt some bridges with people i liked.

They will likely agree that you should be moved more officially into a dev position, but since you're moving up within the same company you shouldn't expect to get paid what you think is adequate for the duties. Giant pay bumps are an extreme rarity when moving up in the same company. This isn't just an IT problem, but it is why developers don't generally stay at the same company for more than 2-3 years.

Have a friendly conversation with the right people about it, but make sure you have terms laid out that you can agree to in the long run with them, otherwise start looking elsewhere.

techmarketerguy
Did you have any trouble finding that new position, coming from an "official" non-dev job? Or was it pretty straightforward once you showed them what you could do? I know getting your foot in the door is hard as a junior developer, so I'm inclined to stay here if they switch my title and duties.
darkwulph03
I was worried about it since I only have my Associates (no plans to go back), but I code A LOT in my free time. I didn't realize it at the time, but I have the benefit of living in an area that has high demand and low supply of good developers. That helps a lot and I had 2 offers off the bat. I didn't even know the language i was hired to use, just had to show i knew how to code and solve problems.

If they can't offer what you want long term, take what they are willing to give. Having a dev title for a year or so will help, but there isn't anything stopping you from searching shortly after you take what your current company offers. Then once you get an offer from somewhere else, you can see what your current company will do to keep you, but make sure you are willing to take the other job before you do that (doesn't always end well).

djb_hackernews
If you really did build all of those things and can talk about them confidently you shouldn't be calling yourself a junior developer and definitely not a marketer/content writer if you are looking for a dev role.
techmarketerguy
Thank you. I definitely have an impostor complex about development, but you're right that I should drop the "technical marketer" title
tehwebguy
> I promptly left the company and found a much better job doing Dev for 55k, which sadly burnt some bridges with people i liked.

If those bridges are burnt because you left (or even joined a competitor) you are much, much better off. Employment is a transaction, your former employer chose not to pay you market rate.

natch
You could outsource the writing portion of your work, as long as it doesn't involve anything confidential.
smeyer
This also requires not having any moral qualms about misleading your employer. That's probably a bigger block than confidentiality for most people.
joeblau
Your company should have some sort of review process where they go over your performance and goals. These are usually the best places to express your passions and career path. If they don't have that, you can always try and seek out one of the leadership team members and request a 1 on 1. If the leadership is reasonable, it would make sense to keep you coding and hire someone else that is a little more jr. to do the writing. The financial compensation might be a little trickier, but I think you should be able to negotiate that accordingly as well.
jtfairbank
I'd just talk to them about it. Sounds like you are at a startup, so the likely hood is you will still have to write marketing content- everyone wears many hats. But they could compensate you as a developer instead of a marketer.

At my startup, I spend about 75% of my time working on sales because that is something we need to do, and I'm the best person to do it. As a coder at heart, I take an engineering approach to sales and use my coding skills to automate parts of the process.

rajacombinator
If they hired you as a writer (at a writer's rate) and instead got a competent programmer, they should be fairly happy with that and willing to give you a pay bump.