Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career.
"I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history.
"..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
"I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work.
"Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally.
"You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
> "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
I think most managers prefer the status quo; why wouldn't they? Charitably, you can think of it as an assumption on the manager's side that you're fine with the way things are, because you haven't said anything. Similar things can be said about salary.
I don't know why people assume managers are interested in increasing salaries and distributing promotions. Every incentive and preference works against those things. If you want change, you have to ask for it.
Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
> they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after
This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.
I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.
"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin
Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.
If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.
On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.
I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.
Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.
I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.
> Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.
A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?
Focus on making products/services for people that actually do have money to spend then.
A dimension people hate looking at is credit is far too easy in the US, which means too many companies are heavily optimized for extracting that money from people that didn’t really earn it in the first place. This means a lot of the smartest workers are preoccupied on the wrong things instead of helping advance society.
That's one way to look at employment in a purely capitalist manner. Doesn't mean it's the only way. If the capitalists intend for AI to take all our jobs, perhaps we should entertain alternatives?
This is certainly the most risk averse, conventional take on the topic to keep you safe and avoid vulnerability.
That said, if you bring this opinion to your next job then you also won't really leave much room to build these connections at a personal level. My one suggestion would be to leave a BIT of room for vulnerability and caring about folks at a personal level - even if the company is secondary here. In the end, people matter and the relationships you build will be the thing that sustains you in your career.
I recently went through an internal transfer at my company, jumping to a very different organization.
My manager and my skip manager tried to persuade me out of the idea, saying they "want to make sure this is the correct decision".
I politely acknowledged their concerns and declined... no there is nothing to decline because they were not offering anything for me to stay. I really wanted to say, "If it's a bad decision, it'smy decision. You guys couldn't care less about my career growth, otherwise you'd have promoted me or given me bigger scope. You just care about shipping products and staff retention."
> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”
Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.
For the most part, "career matrixes", "development plans", and the like are just generic internal marketing to placate people and create the illusion that managers / the company care about their career development, and they don't have to do anything.
To a lesser extent performance reviews / ratings are the same - "you're doing great, keep it up!" - they don't really tell you what you need to do to progress. You have to figure that out and drive it for yourself.
Amazon has a career matrix (former employer). But they didn’t proactively help me with my career - not that I cared. My entire goal was to survive my 4 year initial offer and get the f** out of dodge. I was 46 when I was hired.
I'm at a different comapny and it's the same. They have some basic framework/matrix, but managers aren't going to help you get to the next level. In my experience the matrix isn't followed anyways - they promote whoever they want whether or not they meet the stuff in the matrix. It's all just opinion based anyways.
What many of these articles miss is that even if you do everything they say you will still not get the promotion you want for several reasons.
My advice for Career Growth for engineers who like to do things is to be willing to take on problems that others might not want, things that aren’t “sexy”, if you find them interesting. Theres a lot of interesting problems and you can grow your career by following the direction that interests you rather than the company. And when it comes to promotions, its often easier and better compensated to get a new job rather than trying to convince a bunch of people that you should be promoted.
This is not how things work at any company where I have worked at with real leveling guidelines (including one BigTech company). It’s all about “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. It’s stated in different ways depending on the company.
No one cares if you find it “interesting” when it is time for your promo doc. It’s visibility.
This is recipe to be track locked and miserable. It’s the exact path I have taken over my unfortunately long career as an IC. Now I’m too useful doing bullshit work, tied with a golden ball and chain, and have no hope of ever seeing a management track/easy job. I’m currently planning my exit from the field as I am becoming too interested in actual life to learn frameworks, do bullshit 8 tier 3 month coding interviews, and collect experience to write CRUD bullshit for the next 10 years.
The real advice to aspiring engineers who don’t want to have trouble sleeping from years of pagerduty and high blood pressure is to work in middle management as soon as possible. Forget IC work. The rewards are so much less than the morons who manage. Unless you are at a major dev first company (if you have VCs you aren’t) your manager will always outearn you by a large margin, have an easier life, and way more leeway. Every company I have been to only middle management converts to the VP/C level jobs where you do virtually nothing all day but waste everyone’s time. This is the ideal job. The absolute wastes of precious air in management have the life you want.
If you’re like me and followed this terrible advice decide on an amount of money that is good enough and then decide on how much competence that buys. Volunteer for nothing beyond that, game the ticketing system, use as much vacation as you possibly can without a PIP, vibe the shit out of even the most trivial amount of work, and fuck off once your house is paid off and accounts are appropriate for retirement in T+30 years. Use that time to take up goat herding, wood working, or conservationist work.
Every company is a bit different. There's IC's where I work making more than some managers.
The author suggests that nobody is going to come tap you on the shoulder and let you know it's time. Well, that's what happened to me where I am at now - hired at bottom level, regularly promoted, now at top level. Took 6 years to get to principal. Granted, my group is not SWE's, it's more like an Architect role.
What I learned having made principal is that the yearly bonuses can be lower, because expectations are so high. I got bigger bonuses at a lower title, because I was exceeding the expectations of that role by so much. Apparently principal's have such high expectations you almost never get beyond the target bonus for your role. Then there's the stress from all the layoffs across tech - a lot of Principal level people where I work got cut over the last ~2 years, presumably to save on costs. I almost wish I'd stayed at the lower level to get bigger bonuses, lower salary and higher job security. YMMV.
It used to be that managers would take capable workers under their mentorship and prepare them to move into their old role, as their manager was helping them do the same. Everyone extended a hand down to pull someone up, because companies promoted internally and hired from within.
That's not the case anymore. Your manager won't mentor you not because they don't want to, but because they're also struggling to find footing and progression in a corporate world where nobody gives a shit about the folks beneath them, nor do they have any vested interest in long-term organizational health. It's not personal, it's just the system our predecessors put into practice so they could have an easier time keeping money and power for themselves.
If we want to care about the careers of others again, we have to build institutions where mentorship and training happen, as well as where good ideas are recognized and rewarded. That's something even the most "meritorious" of SV companies completely lack atm, and they're viewed as the companies to emulate by the rest of the investor class and industry. Until and unless other companies reject those fads in favor of strategies that grow and improve their orgs from within again, we're all kind of on our own.
It always surprised me when people talked about their Bosses / Managers like they were some sort of gods that were going to save them and protect them from all bad things in the world.
I'm all for personal responsibility but when it comes to employer/employee relationship there is a certain duty of care (beyond paying you) from the employer side. In many countries this is even coded in law but even if not it makes sense.
If there is no protection for the employee no one would get into a dependent employment relationship in the first place, especially when the pay is universally worse than being self-employed.
I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?
I stayed away from the management track but friends who didn't tell me one of the metrics they are graded on is retention, i.e. if your reports leave at a more than average rate you will have a problem.
Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.
I always talked with the people I managed about their career goals, and always tried to adapt their job to be a closer fit to those goals. When I couldn't do that I would acknowledge that and even help them find a different job that did fit.
How else can we expect to get the best out of people?
Just gonna say that while thinking through your direct reports' career progression is not the only job you have as a manager, it is definitely an important part of the work and something that is prioritized at some companies. This article paints a dire picture of what managers could be like if they worked in healthier organizations (mentally, anyway?).
There are two reasons for this.
1. Retention is good. And if you think about your direct's careers, you will retain them longer and build a better relationship because they will have more help being successful inside the company (assuming a larger org here)
2. It's actually part of the job description and something EMs are evaluated on at some companies.
#2 is probably more rare these days, but it still exists, occasionally. Until it doesn't.
To be clear, I don't disagree with the author's hypothesis in this emergent AI world - I think companies will completely forget to think about this soon - but over the last 10 years it's definitely been an important part of my career as a manager to help my employees succeed in their careers. It's very rewarding.
> Your company has figured out the perfect arrangement. You’re good at your job, and you don’t cause problems. Your manager knows they can count on you. From the company’s perspective, this is the ideal state. Why would they change anything?
Whish I had knew this earlier in my career. I worked for IBM. I was very good at delivering usable software for internal use. They kept me there forever. They would give me awards and such, but never a change as the author says. If I needed something, I had to do it myself.
Every manager I ever had has spent time working on career growth with me. This is in fortune 100 companies, and smaller late stage startups.. heck, even when I worked in retail in the 90s they would have these conversations. What is going on at amazon?
Is a manager “good” if they’re not talking about your career growth? I disagree with the author on this point so the rest of it really doesn’t follow. Then again, he also had 20 managers in 18 years… so yeah I can see why none of his managers ever got around to asking about his career growth.
Absolutely. Good managers are invisible. They don't need to talk about career growth as they have already silently, in the background, removed any impediments that might have prevented you from growing. All you need to do is move in the direction you want to go.
There is good advice here for sure, but the tone seemed focused on growing your career rather than "saving" it. Most people now want to know how to still be employed in this industry 10 years from now. Maybe this advice will be consistent with this goal, but I fear climbing the corporate ladder could make you more vulnerable to cuts and lead to burnout.
Whether or not your manager is capable of helping you shape your career is an open question, for sure. But 20 people, over an 18-year career, and not a single one of them bring it up in a 1:1? And, oh okay, all those managers have worked at the same company? Seems like maybe a culture problem. I've had plenty of managers in sub-FAANG enterprises bring it up unprompted.
its even worse than this. managers will pretend to br your career coach for one day per year at your employee reviews. theyll give you advice and even in the moment that manager will think to themselves how they want to help you. they still won't help, the post is correct about that.
It'd be pretty sick if the relevant discipline / sector / market of every single career path I embark upon, didn't summarily shit itself as soon as I begin making costly and irreversible personal investments therein.
Well at least you won't be alone in that regard when AI takes 90% of the knowledge jobs in the next few years and the world economy crashes for everyone because of any lack of political planning for this eventuality!
We're all gonna be right there with you. And 'safe' trade jobs like plumbers? Lol let's see how that works out when vastly fewer people can afford your services and millions are trying to panic retrain into anything still deemed safe.
It would force a company to come to the negotiating table when laying off workers and grading their performance. It would prevent a lot of bs layoffs; at the very least concrete reasons would be needed for RIFs.
Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career.
"I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history.
"..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
"I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work.
"Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally.
"You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
> "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
> most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
Now weird at all, and maybe that's "most managers" within your career? I've seen my share of complacent managers who were fine with status quo.
I think most managers prefer the status quo; why wouldn't they? Charitably, you can think of it as an assumption on the manager's side that you're fine with the way things are, because you haven't said anything. Similar things can be said about salary.
I don't know why people assume managers are interested in increasing salaries and distributing promotions. Every incentive and preference works against those things. If you want change, you have to ask for it.
Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
> they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after
This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.
I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.
"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin
People! They’re the worst!
Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.
If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.
On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.
I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.
Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.
I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.
> Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.
I have a lot of shit about my employees the first time I was a manager. It burned me out, but it made for an amazing team.
Was it worth it?
A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?
Focus on making products/services for people that actually do have money to spend then.
A dimension people hate looking at is credit is far too easy in the US, which means too many companies are heavily optimized for extracting that money from people that didn’t really earn it in the first place. This means a lot of the smartest workers are preoccupied on the wrong things instead of helping advance society.
I think confused.
Does anyone notice all the users who can afford the product now? No.
They'll just keep selling and profit gaining anyway possible. Give me a product where they legitimately care.
That's one way to look at employment in a purely capitalist manner. Doesn't mean it's the only way. If the capitalists intend for AI to take all our jobs, perhaps we should entertain alternatives?
This is certainly the most risk averse, conventional take on the topic to keep you safe and avoid vulnerability.
That said, if you bring this opinion to your next job then you also won't really leave much room to build these connections at a personal level. My one suggestion would be to leave a BIT of room for vulnerability and caring about folks at a personal level - even if the company is secondary here. In the end, people matter and the relationships you build will be the thing that sustains you in your career.
I recently went through an internal transfer at my company, jumping to a very different organization.
My manager and my skip manager tried to persuade me out of the idea, saying they "want to make sure this is the correct decision".
I politely acknowledged their concerns and declined... no there is nothing to decline because they were not offering anything for me to stay. I really wanted to say, "If it's a bad decision, it'smy decision. You guys couldn't care less about my career growth, otherwise you'd have promoted me or given me bigger scope. You just care about shipping products and staff retention."
> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”
Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.
For the most part, "career matrixes", "development plans", and the like are just generic internal marketing to placate people and create the illusion that managers / the company care about their career development, and they don't have to do anything.
To a lesser extent performance reviews / ratings are the same - "you're doing great, keep it up!" - they don't really tell you what you need to do to progress. You have to figure that out and drive it for yourself.
Are they actual career growth plans for just internal milestones for you to chase after, including promotions towards the next level?
A real career advice should sound like "You are too good for this company. Find you future opportunities and growth elsewhere."
Amazon has a career matrix (former employer). But they didn’t proactively help me with my career - not that I cared. My entire goal was to survive my 4 year initial offer and get the f** out of dodge. I was 46 when I was hired.
I'm at a different comapny and it's the same. They have some basic framework/matrix, but managers aren't going to help you get to the next level. In my experience the matrix isn't followed anyways - they promote whoever they want whether or not they meet the stuff in the matrix. It's all just opinion based anyways.
What many of these articles miss is that even if you do everything they say you will still not get the promotion you want for several reasons.
My advice for Career Growth for engineers who like to do things is to be willing to take on problems that others might not want, things that aren’t “sexy”, if you find them interesting. Theres a lot of interesting problems and you can grow your career by following the direction that interests you rather than the company. And when it comes to promotions, its often easier and better compensated to get a new job rather than trying to convince a bunch of people that you should be promoted.
This is not how things work at any company where I have worked at with real leveling guidelines (including one BigTech company). It’s all about “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. It’s stated in different ways depending on the company.
No one cares if you find it “interesting” when it is time for your promo doc. It’s visibility.
What they're saying is work on stuff that interests you and then find another job that values what you did.
This is recipe to be track locked and miserable. It’s the exact path I have taken over my unfortunately long career as an IC. Now I’m too useful doing bullshit work, tied with a golden ball and chain, and have no hope of ever seeing a management track/easy job. I’m currently planning my exit from the field as I am becoming too interested in actual life to learn frameworks, do bullshit 8 tier 3 month coding interviews, and collect experience to write CRUD bullshit for the next 10 years.
The real advice to aspiring engineers who don’t want to have trouble sleeping from years of pagerduty and high blood pressure is to work in middle management as soon as possible. Forget IC work. The rewards are so much less than the morons who manage. Unless you are at a major dev first company (if you have VCs you aren’t) your manager will always outearn you by a large margin, have an easier life, and way more leeway. Every company I have been to only middle management converts to the VP/C level jobs where you do virtually nothing all day but waste everyone’s time. This is the ideal job. The absolute wastes of precious air in management have the life you want.
If you’re like me and followed this terrible advice decide on an amount of money that is good enough and then decide on how much competence that buys. Volunteer for nothing beyond that, game the ticketing system, use as much vacation as you possibly can without a PIP, vibe the shit out of even the most trivial amount of work, and fuck off once your house is paid off and accounts are appropriate for retirement in T+30 years. Use that time to take up goat herding, wood working, or conservationist work.
Every company is a bit different. There's IC's where I work making more than some managers.
The author suggests that nobody is going to come tap you on the shoulder and let you know it's time. Well, that's what happened to me where I am at now - hired at bottom level, regularly promoted, now at top level. Took 6 years to get to principal. Granted, my group is not SWE's, it's more like an Architect role.
What I learned having made principal is that the yearly bonuses can be lower, because expectations are so high. I got bigger bonuses at a lower title, because I was exceeding the expectations of that role by so much. Apparently principal's have such high expectations you almost never get beyond the target bonus for your role. Then there's the stress from all the layoffs across tech - a lot of Principal level people where I work got cut over the last ~2 years, presumably to save on costs. I almost wish I'd stayed at the lower level to get bigger bonuses, lower salary and higher job security. YMMV.
It used to be that managers would take capable workers under their mentorship and prepare them to move into their old role, as their manager was helping them do the same. Everyone extended a hand down to pull someone up, because companies promoted internally and hired from within.
That's not the case anymore. Your manager won't mentor you not because they don't want to, but because they're also struggling to find footing and progression in a corporate world where nobody gives a shit about the folks beneath them, nor do they have any vested interest in long-term organizational health. It's not personal, it's just the system our predecessors put into practice so they could have an easier time keeping money and power for themselves.
If we want to care about the careers of others again, we have to build institutions where mentorship and training happen, as well as where good ideas are recognized and rewarded. That's something even the most "meritorious" of SV companies completely lack atm, and they're viewed as the companies to emulate by the rest of the investor class and industry. Until and unless other companies reject those fads in favor of strategies that grow and improve their orgs from within again, we're all kind of on our own.
[delayed]
It always surprised me when people talked about their Bosses / Managers like they were some sort of gods that were going to save them and protect them from all bad things in the world.
I'm all for personal responsibility but when it comes to employer/employee relationship there is a certain duty of care (beyond paying you) from the employer side. In many countries this is even coded in law but even if not it makes sense.
If there is no protection for the employee no one would get into a dependent employment relationship in the first place, especially when the pay is universally worse than being self-employed.
I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?
In my short-lived stint as the same, I also had the same take.
> But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”
This quote absolutely floored me. The author had a lot of bad management.
I stayed away from the management track but friends who didn't tell me one of the metrics they are graded on is retention, i.e. if your reports leave at a more than average rate you will have a problem.
Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.
I always talked with the people I managed about their career goals, and always tried to adapt their job to be a closer fit to those goals. When I couldn't do that I would acknowledge that and even help them find a different job that did fit.
How else can we expect to get the best out of people?
Yeah I agree. I can get people to work harder and cheaper if I can align their career goals with mine.
Overly pessimistic article that is more absolute than reality.
Just gonna say that while thinking through your direct reports' career progression is not the only job you have as a manager, it is definitely an important part of the work and something that is prioritized at some companies. This article paints a dire picture of what managers could be like if they worked in healthier organizations (mentally, anyway?).
There are two reasons for this. 1. Retention is good. And if you think about your direct's careers, you will retain them longer and build a better relationship because they will have more help being successful inside the company (assuming a larger org here) 2. It's actually part of the job description and something EMs are evaluated on at some companies.
#2 is probably more rare these days, but it still exists, occasionally. Until it doesn't.
To be clear, I don't disagree with the author's hypothesis in this emergent AI world - I think companies will completely forget to think about this soon - but over the last 10 years it's definitely been an important part of my career as a manager to help my employees succeed in their careers. It's very rewarding.
> Your company has figured out the perfect arrangement. You’re good at your job, and you don’t cause problems. Your manager knows they can count on you. From the company’s perspective, this is the ideal state. Why would they change anything?
Whish I had knew this earlier in my career. I worked for IBM. I was very good at delivering usable software for internal use. They kept me there forever. They would give me awards and such, but never a change as the author says. If I needed something, I had to do it myself.
Every manager I ever had has spent time working on career growth with me. This is in fortune 100 companies, and smaller late stage startups.. heck, even when I worked in retail in the 90s they would have these conversations. What is going on at amazon?
I don't think any of this old-school advice applies when our employers are trying to go agentic in the next 5 years.
Is a manager “good” if they’re not talking about your career growth? I disagree with the author on this point so the rest of it really doesn’t follow. Then again, he also had 20 managers in 18 years… so yeah I can see why none of his managers ever got around to asking about his career growth.
Even if any did, none could have done anything meaningful to push his career growth.
Absolutely. Good managers are invisible. They don't need to talk about career growth as they have already silently, in the background, removed any impediments that might have prevented you from growing. All you need to do is move in the direction you want to go.
There is good advice here for sure, but the tone seemed focused on growing your career rather than "saving" it. Most people now want to know how to still be employed in this industry 10 years from now. Maybe this advice will be consistent with this goal, but I fear climbing the corporate ladder could make you more vulnerable to cuts and lead to burnout.
Whether or not your manager is capable of helping you shape your career is an open question, for sure. But 20 people, over an 18-year career, and not a single one of them bring it up in a 1:1? And, oh okay, all those managers have worked at the same company? Seems like maybe a culture problem. I've had plenty of managers in sub-FAANG enterprises bring it up unprompted.
its even worse than this. managers will pretend to br your career coach for one day per year at your employee reviews. theyll give you advice and even in the moment that manager will think to themselves how they want to help you. they still won't help, the post is correct about that.
would be pretty sick to have a career to save in the first place
It'd be pretty sick if the relevant discipline / sector / market of every single career path I embark upon, didn't summarily shit itself as soon as I begin making costly and irreversible personal investments therein.
Well at least you won't be alone in that regard when AI takes 90% of the knowledge jobs in the next few years and the world economy crashes for everyone because of any lack of political planning for this eventuality!
We're all gonna be right there with you. And 'safe' trade jobs like plumbers? Lol let's see how that works out when vastly fewer people can afford your services and millions are trying to panic retrain into anything still deemed safe.
Trade jobs will be scarce, but there could be some exciting opportunities in the leather clad marauder department
Or a union to at least take that charge.
Depends on your country, sorry in German,
https://www.igmetall.de/service/berufeglossar/informatik-gru...
Exactly how would a union help?
It would force a company to come to the negotiating table when laying off workers and grading their performance. It would prevent a lot of bs layoffs; at the very least concrete reasons would be needed for RIFs.
See: automated train conductors