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I didn’t understand this because of the stream-of-consciousness delivery.
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)
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
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".
it's kind of rude not to capitalise people's names, regardless of ones' stylistic preferences
I also consider it rude to not capitalize the start of sentences.
The only letter capitalized is "I"... Telling
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.
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:
iTs aLl thE sAMe to ThE comPuTeR! /s
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.
Indeed, it’s generally not worth the annoyance.
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
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.
https://keyboard.futo.tech/
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.
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.
Yeah should have put it through an LLM to clean it up.
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
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.
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.
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.
Find a new job because this is absolutely not the case at any company where I know ppl in tech
Maybe it's your fancy name, which gets you those promotions.
Grow up.
The guy's handle is literally 20 random characters, it's hardly harmful to joke about it. Why the anger?
It’s been very true at many places. It may not be your experience but that’s about your career.
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.
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).
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).
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
I've seen people who don't follow this become emotional wrecks, which as a manager makes me feel like Dr. Phil.
You're pretty lucky. Most people I know who've gotten to this point have had to think about it a lot.
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
You are confusing your rating in the profession, with your rating within your company...
You got really lucky. That was my exact thought as well when I started my career and looking back that was so naive.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
It was written by the bro (LLM) app.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
“Start your own company” in this industry seems to generally mean “spend your time begging VCs for money”.
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.
The agile sweatshops will give you as much supervision as they can regardless of whether you need it or not.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This hits home. Had the _exact_ scenario play out last year at my last role
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.
Walter White said the lab was still magic. It's the same being in the trenches.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's like capitalism/communism, where your hard work will just define a new baseline expectation.
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.
sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
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.
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
The single, most important leading indicator of your success will be who you’re having lunch with every day.
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.
You created a new account just to post this twice?
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?
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.
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.
You don’t want to upset anyone but you shit all over a lot of careers in your post? Sure buddy…
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.
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.
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.
In reality, I can fully see engineers under pressure churning out buggy unreviewed vibe code and calling it a day.
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.
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.
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.
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.