Rendered at 18:56:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
sajithdilshan 1 days ago [-]
The senior you get the more you realise that the only reward for hard work is more work. Then, you learn to say no more often and set boundaries and negotiate like if you want me to work on project A, then I won’t have capacity to work on project B.
Unfortunately, this is something you have to learn through experience and cannot be taught by someone else.
coldpie 5 hours ago [-]
> the only reward for hard work is more work.
Yup. I work 35-40 hours a week. I do not put work stuff on my personal devices, I do not open my work laptop at home. This isn't something I negotiated or made explicit, it's just what I do. No one has ever objected to my work or output and I keep getting raises every year.
az09mugen 1 hours ago [-]
You're totally right, I do the same and on the other hand, but less relevant here, I also don't connect to personal web sites on my work laptop.
camdenreslink 1 hours ago [-]
Not possible with jobs with on-call responsibilities (most senior software engineering jobs in my experience).
tosapple 24 hours ago [-]
you know, that's not completely true. taking breaks or shifting from one idea to the next doesn't necessarily stop the ingenuity and ideas from flowing down the first path.
your hands might be limited that way, but your mind isn't.
battered8310 16 hours ago [-]
I completely agree with you. As I’ve moved up the chain in engineering I’ve realized I suck at multi tasking. Constant reprioritization of tasks to focus on the urgent while also moving lower-priority ones forward has helped me accomplish short-term needs and slow-burning tasks.
aleph_minus_one 7 hours ago [-]
> The senior you get the more you realise that the only reward for hard work is more work. Then, you learn to say no more often and set boundaries and negotiate like if you want me to work on project A, then I won’t have capacity to work on project B.
This is something that you already realise very, very early in your career. The only hard thing is how to set boundaries and negotiate without infuriating the other side and burning bridges forever.
dude250711 1 days ago [-]
It's like capitalism/communism, where your hard work will just define a new baseline expectation.
aleph_minus_one 7 hours ago [-]
> will just define a new baseline expectation
This assumes that you care about (at least a little bit) what the other side expects from you.
stasomatic 6 hours ago [-]
But in communism, you are less likely to need to find a bridge to live under.
grim_io 6 hours ago [-]
Instead you'll probably starve to death.
stasomatic 4 hours ago [-]
I left Ukraine in ‘89, so familiar with the concept. Different trade-offs, my point.
NewtDev 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
> and what happens is they start disappearing for longer periods of time... they quit their jobs because they think, “you know what, this is not salvageable.”
I've interviewed several great senior engineer candidates over the last few years, and then had to watch do this and walk themselves right out the door inside of 6 months. I've developed a marked preference for promoting internally, because you get longer to head this sort of thing off.
Incidentally, this sort of thing is why software engineering desperately needs some sort of formal levelling criteria and/or mentorship programs. It's really hard for senior folks to calibrate themselves against their rapidly shrinking peer group.
hirako2000 1 days ago [-]
I've interviewed for several senior jobs lately. And found that the more pragmatic and honest I was, the quicker I was dropped from the pipeline.
It goes both ways, and I would argue the spiral happens because the other side expects something above an beyond the possible.
OutOfHere 23 hours ago [-]
I concur - I have repeatedly seen that the only way to pass the interview is to lie and cheat at every step in it. I expect this from someone without experience who is struggling to get a foot in the door, but when a senior with experience does this, they soon begin to become dishonest even with themselves, taking the firm down with them. What I don't understand is why the investors don't step in.
AnimalMuppet 23 hours ago [-]
Wow, I have never had to do that. Not to get a job, not to keep one. I mean, I have seen good jobs go bad, but I have never seen one where the truth would get me fired. (Maybe I just didn't stay long enough when I felt things starting to go bad...)
Tangurena2 3 hours ago [-]
I leave because it stops being "fun". The way my father put it is "when you start a job, they hand you 2 buckets. One they fill with money. The other they fill with crap. When the bucket of crap weighs more than the bucket with money, you leave."
autotune 1 days ago [-]
It is hard to take almost any mentorship program seriously that is not a formal university education, and even then, at most universities they do not teach skills that are directly applicable at companies given they are not intended to directly be job training programs. Not that I am on any hiring committee currently, but if I was, I would rather see a candidate with a degree and open source project contributions than App Academy dreck, for example.
watwut 23 hours ago [-]
If every senior you hired left in 6 months, there is something wrong with your company. Likely on three levela ends - when evaluating people, when telling them who you are so that they can select themselves out and when they are in.
Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.
scruple 23 hours ago [-]
I had the same impression. Surely we aren't the ones who are wrong! It couldn't be us!
I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.
DanielHB 7 hours ago [-]
Similar for me except that my tenures are usually 4-6 years, except this one job that I lasted 1 month because I fundamentally didn't want to do the work I was assigned to do (and would keep doing for at least a few months, probably longer).
The work was essentially web scraping complex systems, which is not a case of "you don't need someone with my experience to do this" and more like I just didn't want to do it because it did not improve my current skills at all.
It is not like in the interview they told me: you will be doing web scraping for months on end. Or that I even thought to ask.
swiftcoder 23 hours ago [-]
> I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years
You've had a somewhat traditional career there by HN standards. Most of Silicon Valley was promo-hopping ever 1-2 years for the whole middle period of your career (somewhat curtailed now by the job market). It was really popular to FAANG -> startup for 6 months -> FAANG-1-level-up for a good chunk of the 2010s
scruple 22 hours ago [-]
Sure, but I went through startups, too. I just hung on for dear life and the people above me were willing to hear about issues with culture and work on it. Only the last 4 years of my career have been at a FAANG.
swiftcoder 23 hours ago [-]
You aren't necessarily wrong, but the data also isn't there - one engineering hire bouncing per year is not really significant.
I do think that startups are pretty rough when it comes hiring. We don't pay BigTech salaries, we expect engineers to wear a lot of hats, and we don't offer the kind of management chain isolation a big company does. It takes a particular kind of engineer to enjoy/thrive in that environment, and a lot of engineers transitioning from big companies don't realise the extent of that until they've struggled with their first startup role.
DanielHB 7 hours ago [-]
I dunno, I found that kind of environment a lot easier to work with. The really hard environments are when the tech teams are large, to get something done you need to talk to 3 different teams and get them all to agree to do something and _when_ they are going to do it.
And that is just when you can talk to the engineers directly, it gets worse when you need to escalate on the management chain.
Startups are easier because most of the time you usually only need one rubberstamp (and sometimes none!) to do something.
It gets much worse though once the startup scales up and becomes massive. Then it tends to be worse than big corps because there at least they have processes.
verzali 12 hours ago [-]
Also the engineers that do manage in that environment tend to get screwed anyway when you scale up.
rubzah 10 hours ago [-]
I guess "senior" just means older, but in the usual sense, the more senior you are, the more your job involves coordinating with other people. So I don't see how you could disappear when promoted. But I think in this case it's just "you do more work".
swiftcoder 2 hours ago [-]
> I don't see how you could disappear when promoted
A lot of your work at the senior level is harder to track. If a junior engineer stops pulling tickets off the queue, somebody is going to notice. If a senior spends a couple of weeks taking cross-functional meetings and writing docs at the start of a new project, nobody really blinks an eye. Sometimes the manager doesn't catch in time that they aren't coming back out of that phase...
23 hours ago [-]
slowin 1 days ago [-]
At least we know this wasn't written by an LLM (unless it was GPT-2).
The best advice I can give on moving your career forward is to not try and get a promotion at your current job. Apply for better positions at other companies while you still have your current role. You'll have maximum leverage and unlimited time to choose the best possible option. Trying to claw your way up the ladder in a single company is the least efficient (and more often than not hopeless) strategy.
xdertz 7 hours ago [-]
The 'job hopping advice' is always so one-dimensonal as if salary maxing is the only metric that counts. You should always take everything into account
- work climate and coworkers
- work life balance
- legal rewards for staying (This might not apply to the US but in most of Europe you get progressively harder to fire the longer you stay at one company)
jghn 6 hours ago [-]
This. I hate interviewing. I hate having to "learn" new people and corporate processes. I like being able to rely on intuition I've built up over time, both about my colleagues and the products.
Bouncing from place to place could have earned me more money over time, but I valued the stability of sticking around for longer stints.
KptMarchewa 5 hours ago [-]
It is still good advice at early to mid stages of career. You can get into senior level much faster, and potentially learn much more, since you're less pigeonholed into current role, and you see more of how other organizations work.
gonzalohm 1 days ago [-]
I don't agree with that advice.
Interviewing sucks. I know, if you currently have a job then you don't lose anything. Other than precious time and I already feel like I don't have enough free time, I don't want to invest the remaining interviewing.
I have been in a few companies and yes, sometimes getting a promotion is literally impossible. I remember one company that didn't give me a promotion until I threatened to leave.
But if you find the right company, then you shouldn't even need to ask for a promotion.
And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement
slowin 1 days ago [-]
I think you need to be strategic. Leverage your network, don't just go in cold. Smaller startups are also much easier to get a job at than a FAANG.
> And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement
This I absolutely agree with. I quit my last job for ethical reasons and indeed, the same problem I faced is so pervasive in our industry that it limits the pool of places I'd work. That being said, I think the advice holds. Jumping around is a much easier way to move your career forward than staying at a single place.
JeremyNT 23 hours ago [-]
This used to be true during the zero interest rate days when you could leapfrog up the chain but I think the times have changed.
By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.
If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.
christophilus 1 days ago [-]
“Your job isn’t your job. Your job is to find your next career step.” Paraphrasing from memory from Scott Adams’ “How to fail at almost everything and still win big.”
I haven’t followed that advice, because I quite like my jobs, and getting deep into a problem space is one of life’s pleasures. But, I do think it’s sound advice all the same.
b112 1 days ago [-]
It was written by the bro (LLM) app.
ennepoai 9 hours ago [-]
its both. i hopped mostly because i got to see how other places build things, different stack, different ideas about how to run a project, and you just dont get that staying at one company even a good one. internal promo really depends where you are. small startup, sure its easy to get promoted but youre basically doing the same job with a fancier title. big co you can move around and actually learn stuff but then you have to deal with the politics
sheepscreek 10 hours ago [-]
Err..I would take this with a BIG pinch of salt. It massively depends on the workplace culture.
Perhaps I am lacking context on the “seniority” of this individual. Unless they are a Principal engineer, or operating as an architect/staff engineer, or as a “tech lead”, I would absolutely expect them to be solid engineers delivering code.
They would have clear deliverables in sprints that would typically be heavier and more complex than their junior peers.
Take this from someone who has worked in all of the above roles and subsequently in management.
Dizcorded 1 days ago [-]
I’m in this exact position and I don’t know the next steps forward. I’m on a sabbatical because I burnt out after a massive project but the expectation is that I come back and lead another massive project.
I’ve yet to decide if that’s what I actually want or if there is another solution out there. Is leaving the only real solution?
justonceokay 18 hours ago [-]
I went through this and ended up becoming (through a long and twisted path) a maintenance super for an apartment building near my house. Maybe an overreaction but every day is a blessing compared to the mental anguish I experienced making corporate software
nstart 16 hours ago [-]
Would you be willing to share your story? Feels like it would be something a lot of folks would take peace in reading. Only if comfortable though. Thanks! :)
justonceokay 2 hours ago [-]
It’s not really a story with a beginning and an end, but I guess I just got so fed up with how anxious the industry was making me. I put up a good fight for over 10 years at different companies and in different roles, but just couldn’t find the right place.
So I quit and became a bartender for about a year. Fun, but the hours are horrible. Then while doing that I got my massage licence, mostly just on a lark. Then I worked at a candle factory for some years, and found I enjoy that kind of work. Apartment maintenance was mostly a compromise I made, because apartments are a much more stable career than manufacturing in Seattle.
So now I’ve got my toolkit and I debug and maintain all day just like I used to, but in meatspace instead of virtually. I like being a part of my local community and work with a great team. Some days I touch poop, but I never feel like my brain is being taken over by useless facts about software that just makes people’s lives worse.
coldpie 5 hours ago [-]
Close your laptop no more than 8 hours after you opened it. Never work on weekends. If they need more hours worked than that, then they can hire another person to work them. If they fire you (they won't) then I guess you have your answer.
SauciestGNU 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder how this advice still holds true as the industry is taking a big turn toward stack ranking and implicit or even explicit 996 expectations.
coldpie 5 hours ago [-]
> the industry is taking a big turn toward stack ranking and implicit or even explicit 996 expectations.
I don't think this is actually happening. Maybe a few high profile businesses trying to burn through and exploit inexperienced workers are doing that, but there's a whole lot of businesses out there that aren't run by sociopaths. You just don't hear about 'em on the news.
hsbalanxvxjsmab 1 days ago [-]
I'm a staff engineer and I haven't thought about trying to get promoted a single day in my life. Do good work and be nice the rest follows
Arainach 1 days ago [-]
This was never really true at most places, and even where it was sort of true, it's been false since 2023.
The ladder has collapsed. No more juniors to mentor and grow (in some cases no more US hiring period), and all of the carrots have been replaced with sticks. If you're lucky, the reward for doing good work and being nice is 'not being laid off', but the promo budget is gone and it's not like your boss gets a say in who's laid off so may the odds be ever in your favor.
hsbalanxvxjsmab 1 days ago [-]
Find a new job because this is absolutely not the case at any company where I know ppl in tech
mixmastamyk 20 hours ago [-]
Did good work, but haven’t had any since the last contract ended two years ago. What would you suggest?
b112 1 days ago [-]
Maybe it's your fancy name, which gets you those promotions.
qwerpy 15 hours ago [-]
Apparently no one liked this, but I did. Harmless humor joking about a letter salad of a username.
6 hours ago [-]
hluska 1 days ago [-]
Grow up.
b112 22 hours ago [-]
The guy's handle is literally 20 random characters, it's hardly harmful to joke about it. Why the anger?
Arainach 20 hours ago [-]
In general, joking that people's promotions are due to their names is thinly veiled racism, especially considering it's a very real phenomenon[0].
Jokes in general are, if not explicitly against site norms, discouraged: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." [1]
I have no idea what the person's real name is, their ethnicity, where they come from. How on earth could you make a racist statement about someone, if you don't know any of those things?
What a ridiculous presumption.
Arainach 18 hours ago [-]
If you have no idea what their real name, and their user name doesn't seem to be related to their real name, then the "joke" doesn't make any sense and would fall flat.
So either you made a joke that isn't funny or one that is offensive. Either way, there's your answer to why people didn't react positively.
rerdavies 14 hours ago [-]
False dichotomy. I thought it was funny, and not in the least bit offensive. (And I also think it's a great handle).
vuurmot 17 hours ago [-]
lmao you are insane
cucumber3732842 6 hours ago [-]
I know a dude with a traditionally female name. Dude just job hops. The wide "HR bins 99/100 resumes" part of the filter doesn't seem to apply to him...
He's a fine guy, and a fine coworker, but he's not the hot shit his resume progression would suggest.
I guess that's worth being taunted in graded school.
cafebabbe 9 hours ago [-]
Well I disagree, at least in Europe - i don't know the state of the US market.
Sure, promotions are harder to get, but the "ladder hasn't collapsed" and many companies I know (at least in tech) will reward above-average dedication (that average being quite low...).
hluska 1 days ago [-]
It’s been very true at many places. It may not be your experience but that’s about your career.
Arainach 1 days ago [-]
I have no doubt every organization is different, and to some degree different teams in organizations are different, but I've been fortunate enough to work at several employers where "staff" or "principal" truly mean things, and still have friends at all the FAANGs and many of the other companies of similar tier. They all report what I've said - the idea of just doing good work and getting promoted is basically dead. Perhaps if you work literally on a frontier AI product it's different, but what I said is the norm.
ytoawwhra92 16 hours ago [-]
> Do good work and be nice the rest follows
Nice little soundbite but for this to work your personal interpretation of "good work" and "be nice" needs to align with the people around you and the broader organisation.
billsly 1 days ago [-]
In my experience, this only works at some companies. At others you have to play the promotion game (or have your manager play it for you).
donbox 1 days ago [-]
Absolutely agree, I had my manager play it for me in my first company. And since I did not learn how to play it effectively or the importance of it, I think I suffered/suffering in my subsequent job(s).
hsbalanxvxjsmab 1 days ago [-]
Don't disagree with that. If you have the luxury seek out the companies that aren't like that. Obviously easier said than done but they are out there
StevePrefontain 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t think this is universal advice. I’m also a staff engineer and had to ask to get promoted to senior and staff level. Yes, you have to actually be doing good work and operating at that level as you say, but promotion culture has enormous variance. Sometimes you have to advocate for yourself. A mentor of mine was a VP of Engineering at mid-size companies for ~20 years and told me that he never got a promotion he didn’t ask for.
pfogain 1 days ago [-]
I've seen people who don't follow this become emotional wrecks, which as a manager makes me feel like Dr. Phil.
sajithdilshan 1 days ago [-]
You got really lucky. That was my exact thought as well when I started my career and looking back that was so naive.
hsbalanxvxjsmab 1 days ago [-]
I don't think I got lucky I think you got unlucky. My experience at all 5 bay area tech companies I have worked at has been the same in this regard
voidfunc 1 days ago [-]
This, I dont do worry about TC or promos. If youre executing and people are happy then rewards and status usually follow. If not,you move along.
toast0 1 days ago [-]
You do need to worry about TC until it's enough and if it's not enough, you do need to figure out what needs to happen to get more... Whether that's chasing promos or job hopping or whatever.
If you have at least enough for now, you can start by just doing a good job and see what happens and if you're rewarded, not have to specifically chase. Hopefully you'll get to enough for the future without having to focus on promos etc. It's certainly nicer that way.
Then you can take on big projects when they make sense, instead of forcing them. Big projects that benefit your team/company where you're the right person to do it are more likely to work out than ones where you're a bad fit (or the project is a bad fit for the org!) but you think it will get you promoted.
theli0nheart 1 days ago [-]
You're pretty lucky. Most people I know who've gotten to this point have had to think about it a lot.
hsbalanxvxjsmab 1 days ago [-]
I think the senior -> staff certainly could require a concentrated effort to mke that leap in a lot of situations so don't doubt I was luckier there. But again I never took on work with the thought "this will help me reach staff" it was always "this will help the company" or "this will help my team" which is the distinction I was trying to make
Betelbuddy 1 days ago [-]
You are confusing your rating in the profession, with your rating within your company...
1 days ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
b0rtb0rt 20 hours ago [-]
i’m very happy in the “terminal” senior position at my company, there are higher levels but it’s fine to stay at the level that i’m at forever. i don’t need to pick up extra work because im not trying to get promoted and i can usually get by just by having smart sounding ideas in meetings, helping figuring out the more ambiguous tasks and just doing enough to meet expectations. the expectations of the higher levels seem
pretty unpleasant , and the guys at lower levels than me are happy to pick up extra work because they want to get promoted lol
SauciestGNU 4 hours ago [-]
I just left somewhere where Senior used to be terminal, but they changed level expectations and senior's expectations became what staff were pre-LLM and then staff became what senior staff or even principal was, and senior lost its terminal status and everyone was given a time box to get promoted to staff or gtfo.
kwertyoowiyop 5 hours ago [-]
Please use capital letters when you write.
superxpro12 3 hours ago [-]
no
gabrieledarrigo 1 hours ago [-]
> he was asking me how to do a 60 to 80-hour week
It's simple: just don't do it.
runamuck 1 hours ago [-]
> “oh, if I work harder, do a bigger thing, then I will be rewarded with promotions and what have you,” right?
Answer: No.
atom_arranger 10 hours ago [-]
Sometimes to look like a genius you have to look incompetent for a bit.
In a place operating with SCRUM you're often expected to be shipping things every sprint, and sometimes with a large and important piece of work the experimentation, and the building of the thing, doesn't fit in a sprint, and if you tried to ship incrementally you'd just be shipping junk.
So you're going to end up giving some standup updates that do not inspire confidence for a bit. "I tried this thing, didn't work out", "still working on X, tried another thing", etc.
It's possible at the end of it you figure it out, and the result justifies the time investment.
The spiral is friction with a system that disincentivizes taking on ambitious goals.
I wouldn't just blame the engineer for not shipping smaller things, being less ambitious, talking more instead of working, I'd blame the company culture for disincentivizing deep work and ambitious goals.
Obviously there's a limit to this. You do need to ship something useful eventually. It's possible you spend extra time and still fail to accomplish the thing you wanted. It might be damaging to your reputation. You win some you lose some.
With AI there's less time between having the idea to do something or try something, and it being done or ruled out, so I see this being less of an issue now. The main barrier is knowing what to do and describing it.
aleph_minus_one 7 hours ago [-]
>
In a place operating with SCRUM you're often expected to be shipping things every sprint
... or you don't care about these expectations, and give a big "f*ck you" to them.
ab_io 1 days ago [-]
AI coding tools can really make the "in the next week, I’ll do a whole month’s work. and no one will know" feel especially tempting, particularly if you're deep in the execution phase of a project. Truth is that can end up like Brooks's law on steroids.
Instead, just communicate with your stakeholders asap. Chances are they already know the project is at risk, and they'll be amendable to either descoping or pushing back the deadline.
OutOfHere 23 hours ago [-]
In reality, I can fully see engineers under pressure churning out buggy unreviewed vibe code and calling it a day.
derf_ 24 hours ago [-]
This is fine advice up to a certain point, but you do not accomplish bigger and grander things by working harder, nor even, as this implies, by working more diligently. You accomplish them through leverage.
It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.
He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of lines of code written, commits landed, and tickets closed can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.
plexor-labs 1 days ago [-]
The single, most important leading indicator of your success will be who you’re having lunch with every day.
I wish that I could travel back in time and tell my 25-year-old self this information.
OnionBlender 1 days ago [-]
You created a new account just to post this twice?
orf 14 hours ago [-]
Did you copy this from a LinkedIn motivational slop post?
ungreased0675 1 days ago [-]
I didn’t understand this because of the stream-of-consciousness delivery.
shrikant 10 hours ago [-]
I call this (well, in my head) the Sam Altman Fellow Kids style.
It's clearly a deliberate affectation that they're putting on because other words are properly capitalise (COVID, PIP, I, his own name, etc.). The author's other posts are properly formatted so I assume this was a a stylistic choice they made to illustrate their point on it being stream-of-consciousness.
I just find it more annoying on tweets because they've clearly fought the phone keyboard to override autocaps just to sound down with their fellow kids.
verzali 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe they wrote it on a laptop. Or even a desktop.
Pannoniae 1 days ago [-]
TL;DR: You got promoted or you wanted to get promoted. You decide you want to make a bigger project to show ambition, advance your career and whatnot. You embark on making some grand project, disappearing from view. This often leads to you getting stuck with something, falling behind and various negative effects like getting a PIP or becoming depressed.
His prescription to avoid this is to keep checking in and show some progress on something every day so you don't lose touch.
(My analysis: I don't think this is particularly a senior engineer problem, to me it just reads like ADHD-coded problems with time and interests)
throwaway173738 8 hours ago [-]
The real prescription to stopping this is to only commit to looking at the problem for a few days regardless of how much progress you’re making. And never take on open-ended tasks with no sunset date. A CTO had me take an open-ended dev project once and I learned that the lack of a time box made it really miserable.
nchmy 1 days ago [-]
I concluded long ago that anyone who writes without capitalizing the first letter of their sentences is not worth paying attention to, due to some combination of hubris, delusion, etc...
Combined with the inner monologue stream of consciousness style, and it is certain that this article is devoid of insight
rpdillon 1 days ago [-]
I kind of feel this way except I have a guy on my team that I actually really respect, that for some reason can't capitalize things. It's just one of those quirks I'm willing to work around because he's otherwise awesome.
nchmy 21 hours ago [-]
What is he writing that doesn't get capitalized? Code comments or entire multi-hundred or thousand line issues, specs, etc? The context matters.
Moreover, the lack of capitals in this article is accentuated by the stream of consciousness writing style. It requires a very significant amount of effort to parse, so simply isn't worth it.
gradus_ad 1 days ago [-]
The only letter capitalized is "I"... Telling
jolmg 1 days ago [-]
No, they also capitalize abbreviations like COVID and PIP.
I remember having a phase as a teen where I didn't capitalize the first letter of sentences because it just seemed redundant. Periods are there; why need another signal that another sentence has started? It was like a redundancy = bad phase.
spider-mario 1 days ago [-]
Somehow, that reminds me: when I was younger and started learning programming, I had a phase where I seemed to hate most optional whitespace that wasn’t indentation. So each line would be indented to the proper level, but the rest of the line would look like this:
This is a perfect analogy. Just as we have coding standards, we have grammar and punctuation rules so that people can effectively communicate with each other.
Anyone who refuses to follow coding standards or punctuation rules is just an asshole. Obviously we relax them based on context - a comment here or text message are different from a blog post which is different from an academic paper. But surely publishing articles/essays on your blog, which you preusmably hope people will read, requires at least some minimal respect for language rules.
Evidently this person doesn't feel that way, so they have to accept (whether they do it consciously or not) that some people are just going to lint themselves away from reading it. Not worth the hassle.
jolmg 20 hours ago [-]
It's their blog. They can write in 1337 if they want.
analog8374 1 days ago [-]
i voice to text. in hopes of getting the thing to stop capitalizing every third word because it's somebody's trademark, i told it to stop autocapitalizing. So here i am. blame Google
rpdillon 1 days ago [-]
You probably need a better speech-to-text system then. I type 90% of my comments on HN with FUTO keyboard, which is a local speech to text engine, and it handles capitalization properly most of the time.
I don't mind as long as the author follow the other rules, and this author does: he capitalizes the word "I" and proper nouns, e.g., "Sunil".
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
> proper nouns, e.g., "Sunil"
it's kind of rude not to capitalise people's names, regardless of ones' stylistic preferences
layer8 1 days ago [-]
I also consider it rude to not capitalize the start of sentences.
layer8 1 days ago [-]
Indeed, it’s generally not worth the annoyance.
saulpw 1 days ago [-]
Yeah should have put it through an LLM to clean it up.
jacobgold 1 days ago [-]
I genuinely don't want to upset anyone, but as someone with 20+ years of engineering and management experience, I think it might help some people to hear what is most likely really going on here.
This is probably an example of the Peter principle:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
There's a huge amount of title inflation going on in the industry. We're now seeing the "Principal Engineer" title being given to people with 3 years of professional experience.
Unfortunately, this is simply not enough time to be very good at all, no matter how much raw talent you have. It takes a decade of experience just to know how to manage yourself effectively, let alone mentor others and lead large projects.
hluska 1 days ago [-]
You don’t want to upset anyone but you shit all over a lot of careers in your post? Sure buddy…
jacobgold 1 days ago [-]
Most people won't be honest with you about these things because there's very little incentive. People tend to react defensively like you are here. But it might actually help someone reading this to know the truth.
Maybe it helps you to know that early in my career I was also sometimes promoted into roles that were beyond my abilities.
geoffbp 1 days ago [-]
If a senior isn’t doing what they feel is meaningful work - or not communicating what they’re focused on, isn’t that partially on their manager?
obviously, more senior ICs should be creating/defining/delivering their own work. But either way, alignment with director or TL seems like a good idea to reduce anxiety
BatchJob 1 days ago [-]
The scenario laid out is pretty dated. Most scrum shops would not permit this level of backstory anymore. Admittedly I have seen this happen in the old days but it wasnt usually very impactful. It was in places where people had too much time on their hands and not much supervision.
Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.
If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.
dpark 1 days ago [-]
> Most scrum shops would not permit this level of backstory anymore … not much supervision
If someone needs close supervision to ensure they don’t get stuck like this and spiral, they probably aren’t ready to be a senior engineer.
Viliam1234 23 hours ago [-]
The agile sweatshops will give you as much supervision as they can regardless of whether you need it or not.
dpark 23 hours ago [-]
I suspect a lot of management have been sold on scrum because they see it as a way to micromanage employees rather than manage change.
drTobiasFunke 1 days ago [-]
After the initial prototype, starting your own company is mostly marketing, people management and more marketing. This “start your own company if you dont want to answer to anyone” is so romanticized that its comical. Its also completely inaccurate.
dpark 1 days ago [-]
“Start your own company” in this industry seems to generally mean “spend your time begging VCs for money”.
phendrenad2 10 hours ago [-]
I think this is true. Positions beyond senior, if a company is large and technical enough to have them at all (Google, Netflix, etc.) are mostly about paying you more and putting more pressure on you to churn out more code, and more polished code, which adheres to the needs of 25 different stakeholders. You're just a senior plus more stress.
docheinestages 1 days ago [-]
If you don't truly enjoy what you do, you'll get crushed by the pressure. Don't try to impress people. If you feel pressure, take a step back, reflect, and think about what's important to you. Then communicate this clearly to people around you, including yourself.
comrade1234 1 days ago [-]
My plan was to always "retire" to a comfy university job but I no longer feel that way - I still really enjoy what I do.
b112 1 days ago [-]
Walter White said the lab was still magic. It's the same being in the trenches.
msteffen 4 hours ago [-]
I liked this a lot. I have also struggled with this, and I feel compelled to suggest my own angle: this is often caused by issues that are not (just) professional skill gaps, though closing those gaps can help resolve it.
Avoiding status updates, needing to “prove yourself,” things like these, were all products of a deeper lack of trust for me. TFA alludes to this with “imposter syndrome”. I was so used to this that it took a long time to figure out. What helped me (and I wouldn’t say I’m better, but better than I was) was a few ideas:
1. Trust is equal parts competence and communication. Trust is lost when you expected X and didn’t get it, which means half the problem is not getting it and the other half is expecting it in the first place.
2. So trust requires clear communication, and clear communication requires trust in the other direction. At a totally dysfunctional company, all of engineering doesn’t trust leadership, so they're not honest with leadership, and soon enough leadership doesn't trust engineering, if that hasn’t happened already. So lack of trust in one direction breaks down trust in the other direction.
3. If you don't feel comfortable saying something that's true (anything! “I got nothing done yesterday because I still don’t really understand the problem I’m solving,” or whatever kind of thing you’re afraid to say), it means you don't trust whoever you're talking to. This is a problem—see #2. In the context of TFA, this is the problem that leads to you skipping status updates or going off and building without prior discussion.
The solution is building your own trust, which can actually be hard to do and requires some self-knowledge (e.g. did you have a bad experience at a prior job? Are you dispositionally a nervous person? Did your boss/leadership break your trust in some way already—large or small?).
This is IMO what TFA is really about, and the strategy it suggests is a great one if a bit of positive feedback and encouragement is what helps you extend trust (which is fine! It's worth knowing that about yourself) and grunt work earns you that feedback (which it might, though you can't control what other people do—it may also help to communicate that you're looking for that, e.g. "I want to see what kind of contributions are celebrated here, and I thought these might be." A small trust exercise in the context of the larger one.)
It might be something else. Off the top of my head: will work respect my needs if a life event temporarily interferes with my work? If I'm missing context on a project, will I be given help or hostility? Am I being given a clear explanation of the expectations for the role?
(Finally, I think it's worth mentioning the version of this where your boss or leadership isn't building trust in you, and IMO it looks like you stuck in a marginal role and not given a path to larger ones, even though you're clear that you want them. Sometimes you can convince them to trust you, but you can't control what other people do. In particular, if you're building something without prior discussion, consider that a lack of trust from the company to you is now creating a lack of trust from you to the company. Maybe it'll be fixed, but no guarantees.)
jatins 1 days ago [-]
This hits home. Had the _exact_ scenario play out last year at my last role
it's self inflicted Peter principle speedrun. Not even a heuristic like "could they do the job eventually" but they try to become incompetent immediately.
LargeKakapo 17 hours ago [-]
Man this really hit close to home as a guy transitioning from engineering to GRC. The last 1.5 years I have absolutely burnt myself out going flat out trying to make the transition to the next level and it has gone so poorly.
Sadly in many organizations it really does come down to a “consensus” within the environment about if you are succeeding in the role and fit. Woof.
malux85 23 hours ago [-]
Disappearing for long periods of time and the giving vague updates like "everything going well guys" is not the behavior of a (even mediocre) senior. This is the behaviour of a poorly managed junior.
As a senior its your responsibility not to disappear into a cave but to do the opposite - show what you are doing, show your thought processes so juniors can learn. Discuss openly your problems and encourage discussion and feedback and show the juniors that its ok to be vulnerable and not know everything.
Then you have to keep management informed exactly whats going on, where your Blockers are, what intermediate goals you have and progress towards them.
godelski 22 hours ago [-]
> the thing they do is they tell themselves they need to almost cosplay being a more senior engineer than they are.
Isn't this explicitly written in every promotion guide? Every one I've ever read says you need to be working at X level for Y months before getting promoted to X. Thats not delusion, that's codified. There's good reason people work like that.
> like, for two, three weeks, you won’t hear anything from them.
Two might be fine, three is probably pushing it, but a lot of times this is just bad communication (which I think is more the point). But also our field is extremely rushed for some reason, especially with AI. Sometimes things do take time. Honestly, I think the whole industry could move a heck of a lot faster if we just cooled our jets for a bit. Innovation doesn't happen by slamming your head against the wall, it happens in the quiet moments after lots of head banging. But our culture acts like we can brute force our way.
We constantly say "I'll fix it later" and we never do or do it when the problem has turned from a small one into a big one. Why can't we fix problem while they're still small? It's penny wise and pound foolish. Does your manager actually know if it will become a big problem? More than you, the person in the weeds? How would they even know? Would you even tell them? Are you afraid to tell them?
We're constantly jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon, not taking any time to even check where we are or look up to see where we're going. And we attack anyone who pokes their heads up like we're afraid we'll get hosed reaching for a banana.
Is it really any wonder people burn out? You can't operate at high anxiety forever.
yesitcan 18 hours ago [-]
> Thats not delusion, that's codified
A Claudism if I ever read one
hluska 1 days ago [-]
I have a lot of trouble reading prose that’s written without capital letters. I can’t understand why writers would do that. Nor can I understand why readers engage with this.
aweb 10 hours ago [-]
Strongly agreed. Maybe it's the way it interacts with my ADHD but it makes it really difficult to read through and make sure I didn't skip anything. I need clearly visible sentence boundaries for that and capital letters truly help.
Writers, please think about us neurodivergent people and make the tiny effort of using your shift key please, it's not that difficult.
codedump 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
JonathanCross 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
almapater 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ls-a 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
alembic_fumes 1 days ago [-]
I am having a hard time believing that anyone who uses the word "bro" this much is capable of advising anyone with seniority, because I don't see how they themselves would have the necessary seniority to give such advise.
But I suppose the message, hard to read as it is, is something that some people need to hear. I've seen this first hand a few times, mostly in people who got promoted by working really hard and the more they got promoted the harder they felt like they must work to keep proving themselves. This often led into burnout.
I don't know; I don't really want to blame the people themselves or say that they're the ones responsible of their own condition. People, and I want to say technically minded people in particular, are each rather fallible when it comes to our own humanity and the psychology underneath. And so, I'd much rather see this same advise be targeted to managers and senior teammates: when you notice a colleague who seems to have gone in too deep, have a friendly chat. They might very well be blind to it, or trying to ignore it to push through just that one more time.
nixon_why69 1 days ago [-]
> I am having a hard time believing that anyone who uses the word "bro" this much is capable of advising anyone with seniority, because I don't see how they themselves would have the necessary seniority to give such advise
I hear you, but this is your regular check-in that the matrix came out 27 years ago and this year's interns weren't even born yet. Sorry.
toast0 23 hours ago [-]
Bro, I've been in this industry since before y2k, and in the right circles, people much older than me have been saying bro/brah forever.
Mostly surfers and skateboarders, but some of those peeps end up as senior engineers.
stasomatic 6 hours ago [-]
Bruv! Surf's up.
plexor-labs 1 days ago [-]
The single, most important leading indicator of your success will be who you’re having lunch with every day.
Unfortunately, this is something you have to learn through experience and cannot be taught by someone else.
Yup. I work 35-40 hours a week. I do not put work stuff on my personal devices, I do not open my work laptop at home. This isn't something I negotiated or made explicit, it's just what I do. No one has ever objected to my work or output and I keep getting raises every year.
your hands might be limited that way, but your mind isn't.
This is something that you already realise very, very early in your career. The only hard thing is how to set boundaries and negotiate without infuriating the other side and burning bridges forever.
This assumes that you care about (at least a little bit) what the other side expects from you.
I've interviewed several great senior engineer candidates over the last few years, and then had to watch do this and walk themselves right out the door inside of 6 months. I've developed a marked preference for promoting internally, because you get longer to head this sort of thing off.
Incidentally, this sort of thing is why software engineering desperately needs some sort of formal levelling criteria and/or mentorship programs. It's really hard for senior folks to calibrate themselves against their rapidly shrinking peer group.
It goes both ways, and I would argue the spiral happens because the other side expects something above an beyond the possible.
Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.
I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.
The work was essentially web scraping complex systems, which is not a case of "you don't need someone with my experience to do this" and more like I just didn't want to do it because it did not improve my current skills at all.
It is not like in the interview they told me: you will be doing web scraping for months on end. Or that I even thought to ask.
You've had a somewhat traditional career there by HN standards. Most of Silicon Valley was promo-hopping ever 1-2 years for the whole middle period of your career (somewhat curtailed now by the job market). It was really popular to FAANG -> startup for 6 months -> FAANG-1-level-up for a good chunk of the 2010s
I do think that startups are pretty rough when it comes hiring. We don't pay BigTech salaries, we expect engineers to wear a lot of hats, and we don't offer the kind of management chain isolation a big company does. It takes a particular kind of engineer to enjoy/thrive in that environment, and a lot of engineers transitioning from big companies don't realise the extent of that until they've struggled with their first startup role.
And that is just when you can talk to the engineers directly, it gets worse when you need to escalate on the management chain.
Startups are easier because most of the time you usually only need one rubberstamp (and sometimes none!) to do something.
It gets much worse though once the startup scales up and becomes massive. Then it tends to be worse than big corps because there at least they have processes.
A lot of your work at the senior level is harder to track. If a junior engineer stops pulling tickets off the queue, somebody is going to notice. If a senior spends a couple of weeks taking cross-functional meetings and writing docs at the start of a new project, nobody really blinks an eye. Sometimes the manager doesn't catch in time that they aren't coming back out of that phase...
The best advice I can give on moving your career forward is to not try and get a promotion at your current job. Apply for better positions at other companies while you still have your current role. You'll have maximum leverage and unlimited time to choose the best possible option. Trying to claw your way up the ladder in a single company is the least efficient (and more often than not hopeless) strategy.
- work climate and coworkers - work life balance - legal rewards for staying (This might not apply to the US but in most of Europe you get progressively harder to fire the longer you stay at one company)
Bouncing from place to place could have earned me more money over time, but I valued the stability of sticking around for longer stints.
Interviewing sucks. I know, if you currently have a job then you don't lose anything. Other than precious time and I already feel like I don't have enough free time, I don't want to invest the remaining interviewing.
I have been in a few companies and yes, sometimes getting a promotion is literally impossible. I remember one company that didn't give me a promotion until I threatened to leave.
But if you find the right company, then you shouldn't even need to ask for a promotion.
And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement
> And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement
This I absolutely agree with. I quit my last job for ethical reasons and indeed, the same problem I faced is so pervasive in our industry that it limits the pool of places I'd work. That being said, I think the advice holds. Jumping around is a much easier way to move your career forward than staying at a single place.
By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.
If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.
I haven’t followed that advice, because I quite like my jobs, and getting deep into a problem space is one of life’s pleasures. But, I do think it’s sound advice all the same.
Perhaps I am lacking context on the “seniority” of this individual. Unless they are a Principal engineer, or operating as an architect/staff engineer, or as a “tech lead”, I would absolutely expect them to be solid engineers delivering code.
They would have clear deliverables in sprints that would typically be heavier and more complex than their junior peers.
Take this from someone who has worked in all of the above roles and subsequently in management.
I’ve yet to decide if that’s what I actually want or if there is another solution out there. Is leaving the only real solution?
So I quit and became a bartender for about a year. Fun, but the hours are horrible. Then while doing that I got my massage licence, mostly just on a lark. Then I worked at a candle factory for some years, and found I enjoy that kind of work. Apartment maintenance was mostly a compromise I made, because apartments are a much more stable career than manufacturing in Seattle.
So now I’ve got my toolkit and I debug and maintain all day just like I used to, but in meatspace instead of virtually. I like being a part of my local community and work with a great team. Some days I touch poop, but I never feel like my brain is being taken over by useless facts about software that just makes people’s lives worse.
I don't think this is actually happening. Maybe a few high profile businesses trying to burn through and exploit inexperienced workers are doing that, but there's a whole lot of businesses out there that aren't run by sociopaths. You just don't hear about 'em on the news.
The ladder has collapsed. No more juniors to mentor and grow (in some cases no more US hiring period), and all of the carrots have been replaced with sticks. If you're lucky, the reward for doing good work and being nice is 'not being laid off', but the promo budget is gone and it's not like your boss gets a say in who's laid off so may the odds be ever in your favor.
Jokes in general are, if not explicitly against site norms, discouraged: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." [1]
[0]: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/vi...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What a ridiculous presumption.
So either you made a joke that isn't funny or one that is offensive. Either way, there's your answer to why people didn't react positively.
He's a fine guy, and a fine coworker, but he's not the hot shit his resume progression would suggest.
I guess that's worth being taunted in graded school.
Sure, promotions are harder to get, but the "ladder hasn't collapsed" and many companies I know (at least in tech) will reward above-average dedication (that average being quite low...).
Nice little soundbite but for this to work your personal interpretation of "good work" and "be nice" needs to align with the people around you and the broader organisation.
If you have at least enough for now, you can start by just doing a good job and see what happens and if you're rewarded, not have to specifically chase. Hopefully you'll get to enough for the future without having to focus on promos etc. It's certainly nicer that way.
Then you can take on big projects when they make sense, instead of forcing them. Big projects that benefit your team/company where you're the right person to do it are more likely to work out than ones where you're a bad fit (or the project is a bad fit for the org!) but you think it will get you promoted.
It's simple: just don't do it.
Answer: No.
In a place operating with SCRUM you're often expected to be shipping things every sprint, and sometimes with a large and important piece of work the experimentation, and the building of the thing, doesn't fit in a sprint, and if you tried to ship incrementally you'd just be shipping junk.
So you're going to end up giving some standup updates that do not inspire confidence for a bit. "I tried this thing, didn't work out", "still working on X, tried another thing", etc.
It's possible at the end of it you figure it out, and the result justifies the time investment.
The spiral is friction with a system that disincentivizes taking on ambitious goals.
I wouldn't just blame the engineer for not shipping smaller things, being less ambitious, talking more instead of working, I'd blame the company culture for disincentivizing deep work and ambitious goals.
Obviously there's a limit to this. You do need to ship something useful eventually. It's possible you spend extra time and still fail to accomplish the thing you wanted. It might be damaging to your reputation. You win some you lose some.
With AI there's less time between having the idea to do something or try something, and it being done or ruled out, so I see this being less of an issue now. The main barrier is knowing what to do and describing it.
... or you don't care about these expectations, and give a big "f*ck you" to them.
Instead, just communicate with your stakeholders asap. Chances are they already know the project is at risk, and they'll be amendable to either descoping or pushing back the deadline.
It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.
He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of lines of code written, commits landed, and tickets closed can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.
I wish that I could travel back in time and tell my 25-year-old self this information.
It's clearly a deliberate affectation that they're putting on because other words are properly capitalise (COVID, PIP, I, his own name, etc.). The author's other posts are properly formatted so I assume this was a a stylistic choice they made to illustrate their point on it being stream-of-consciousness.
I just find it more annoying on tweets because they've clearly fought the phone keyboard to override autocaps just to sound down with their fellow kids.
His prescription to avoid this is to keep checking in and show some progress on something every day so you don't lose touch.
(My analysis: I don't think this is particularly a senior engineer problem, to me it just reads like ADHD-coded problems with time and interests)
Combined with the inner monologue stream of consciousness style, and it is certain that this article is devoid of insight
Moreover, the lack of capitals in this article is accentuated by the stream of consciousness writing style. It requires a very significant amount of effort to parse, so simply isn't worth it.
I remember having a phase as a teen where I didn't capitalize the first letter of sentences because it just seemed redundant. Periods are there; why need another signal that another sentence has started? It was like a redundancy = bad phase.
This is a perfect analogy. Just as we have coding standards, we have grammar and punctuation rules so that people can effectively communicate with each other.
Anyone who refuses to follow coding standards or punctuation rules is just an asshole. Obviously we relax them based on context - a comment here or text message are different from a blog post which is different from an academic paper. But surely publishing articles/essays on your blog, which you preusmably hope people will read, requires at least some minimal respect for language rules.
Evidently this person doesn't feel that way, so they have to accept (whether they do it consciously or not) that some people are just going to lint themselves away from reading it. Not worth the hassle.
https://keyboard.futo.tech/
it's kind of rude not to capitalise people's names, regardless of ones' stylistic preferences
This is probably an example of the Peter principle:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
There's a huge amount of title inflation going on in the industry. We're now seeing the "Principal Engineer" title being given to people with 3 years of professional experience.
Unfortunately, this is simply not enough time to be very good at all, no matter how much raw talent you have. It takes a decade of experience just to know how to manage yourself effectively, let alone mentor others and lead large projects.
Maybe it helps you to know that early in my career I was also sometimes promoted into roles that were beyond my abilities.
obviously, more senior ICs should be creating/defining/delivering their own work. But either way, alignment with director or TL seems like a good idea to reduce anxiety
Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.
If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.
If someone needs close supervision to ensure they don’t get stuck like this and spiral, they probably aren’t ready to be a senior engineer.
Avoiding status updates, needing to “prove yourself,” things like these, were all products of a deeper lack of trust for me. TFA alludes to this with “imposter syndrome”. I was so used to this that it took a long time to figure out. What helped me (and I wouldn’t say I’m better, but better than I was) was a few ideas:
1. Trust is equal parts competence and communication. Trust is lost when you expected X and didn’t get it, which means half the problem is not getting it and the other half is expecting it in the first place.
2. So trust requires clear communication, and clear communication requires trust in the other direction. At a totally dysfunctional company, all of engineering doesn’t trust leadership, so they're not honest with leadership, and soon enough leadership doesn't trust engineering, if that hasn’t happened already. So lack of trust in one direction breaks down trust in the other direction.
3. If you don't feel comfortable saying something that's true (anything! “I got nothing done yesterday because I still don’t really understand the problem I’m solving,” or whatever kind of thing you’re afraid to say), it means you don't trust whoever you're talking to. This is a problem—see #2. In the context of TFA, this is the problem that leads to you skipping status updates or going off and building without prior discussion.
The solution is building your own trust, which can actually be hard to do and requires some self-knowledge (e.g. did you have a bad experience at a prior job? Are you dispositionally a nervous person? Did your boss/leadership break your trust in some way already—large or small?).
This is IMO what TFA is really about, and the strategy it suggests is a great one if a bit of positive feedback and encouragement is what helps you extend trust (which is fine! It's worth knowing that about yourself) and grunt work earns you that feedback (which it might, though you can't control what other people do—it may also help to communicate that you're looking for that, e.g. "I want to see what kind of contributions are celebrated here, and I thought these might be." A small trust exercise in the context of the larger one.)
It might be something else. Off the top of my head: will work respect my needs if a life event temporarily interferes with my work? If I'm missing context on a project, will I be given help or hostility? Am I being given a clear explanation of the expectations for the role?
(Finally, I think it's worth mentioning the version of this where your boss or leadership isn't building trust in you, and IMO it looks like you stuck in a marginal role and not given a path to larger ones, even though you're clear that you want them. Sometimes you can convince them to trust you, but you can't control what other people do. In particular, if you're building something without prior discussion, consider that a lack of trust from the company to you is now creating a lack of trust from you to the company. Maybe it'll be fixed, but no guarantees.)
Sadly in many organizations it really does come down to a “consensus” within the environment about if you are succeeding in the role and fit. Woof.
As a senior its your responsibility not to disappear into a cave but to do the opposite - show what you are doing, show your thought processes so juniors can learn. Discuss openly your problems and encourage discussion and feedback and show the juniors that its ok to be vulnerable and not know everything.
Then you have to keep management informed exactly whats going on, where your Blockers are, what intermediate goals you have and progress towards them.
We constantly say "I'll fix it later" and we never do or do it when the problem has turned from a small one into a big one. Why can't we fix problem while they're still small? It's penny wise and pound foolish. Does your manager actually know if it will become a big problem? More than you, the person in the weeds? How would they even know? Would you even tell them? Are you afraid to tell them?
We're constantly jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon, not taking any time to even check where we are or look up to see where we're going. And we attack anyone who pokes their heads up like we're afraid we'll get hosed reaching for a banana.
Is it really any wonder people burn out? You can't operate at high anxiety forever.
A Claudism if I ever read one
Writers, please think about us neurodivergent people and make the tiny effort of using your shift key please, it's not that difficult.
But I suppose the message, hard to read as it is, is something that some people need to hear. I've seen this first hand a few times, mostly in people who got promoted by working really hard and the more they got promoted the harder they felt like they must work to keep proving themselves. This often led into burnout.
I don't know; I don't really want to blame the people themselves or say that they're the ones responsible of their own condition. People, and I want to say technically minded people in particular, are each rather fallible when it comes to our own humanity and the psychology underneath. And so, I'd much rather see this same advise be targeted to managers and senior teammates: when you notice a colleague who seems to have gone in too deep, have a friendly chat. They might very well be blind to it, or trying to ignore it to push through just that one more time.
I hear you, but this is your regular check-in that the matrix came out 27 years ago and this year's interns weren't even born yet. Sorry.
Mostly surfers and skateboarders, but some of those peeps end up as senior engineers.