| ▲ | goalieca 4 hours ago |
| There’s too much emphasis on career growth into leadership. I know so many programmers who simply want to solve the trickiest of technical problems, do good work they can feel proud of, and go home to their families. They want stability more than anything. |
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| ▲ | TimTheTinker 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| There are rare software companies where this is exactly what programmers do. The pay is lower than at FAANG & SV/LA/NYC startups, but work-life balance is great, stability is great, and most of all they get to just focus on doing great work. It's not about making quarterly goals, it's about stewarding (or perhaps gardening) a software project for many years. Engineers grow a lot from all the deep, focused feature work and problem solving. I worked at such a place for 15 years. The downsides for me were lower pay, no equity, and not getting broad industry experience. I ended up leaving, and I now make a lot more money, but I do miss it. |
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| ▲ | zem 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | the saddest thing is that it used to be possible to do it at at least some of the megacorps too. "senior engineer" (one level below staff) was widely accepted as an "I have reached as high as I want to in my career, and just want to work on interesting problems now", you would basically never get a raise other than cost-of-living but you could do your work and go home and live your life too. that's still doable to an extent but the recurring layoffs have added a measure of precarity to the whole situation so now you have to care more about all the self promotion and "being seen to be doing something" aspects of the job a lot more than you used to. | | |
| ▲ | Inityx an hour ago | parent [-] | | Do they even do cost-of-living raises anymore? When I was at FAANG, my raises in the same role didn't even match inflation. | | |
| ▲ | zem 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | good point, it was often less than inflation, so a very nominal sort of raise |
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| ▲ | mh2266 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Google lets people stay at L4 forever and Meta does at L5 with no expectation of further growth. Yes the expectations are probably still higher, but these companies don’t expect everyone to grow past “mostly self-sufficient engineer” as the parent comment suggests, and for people that do want to do that there’s a full non-management path to director-equivalent IC levels. My impression is that small companies are more likely to treat management as a promotion rather than as a lateral move to a different track (whenever I hear “promoted to manager” I kinda shudder) | | |
| ▲ | cweld510 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Depends on the team — managing can be quite a bit more scope than being a senior IC, depending on expectations for that role. You have broader ownership of technical outcomes over time, even aside from the extra responsibility for growing a team. Managers have all the responsibility of a senior engineer plus more. In that way manager feels to me like a clear promotion to me. Manager vs staff eng, maybe not though. | | |
| ▲ | mh2266 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Management not being a promotion doesn’t mean that managers aren’t (usually—I’ve both been at equal and higher levels than my managers at times) higher levels than their reports. It means that switching to a management role from IC is never a promotion itself (ie always L6 -> M1 in Google/Meta levels) and it never comes with any difference in compensation. |
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| ▲ | tayo42 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What interesting problems have you solved recently? | | |
| ▲ | TimTheTinker an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Shipping the frontend for features in a core product area on a large team, just like a lot of other devs here :) To go into specifics of actual problems solved and do so intelligibly, I'd have to provide specific context, which I'm not comfortable doing here. It's a lot easier to describe "interesting problems solved" using less identifiable (and more generally interesting) details if one is in platform/infra and/or operating at a Staff+ level -- both of which I have been in the past (and loved it), but am not at the moment. | |
| ▲ | LtWorf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most people are under NDAs | | |
| ▲ | twojacobtwo 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm pretty sure no one is going to be hunting down NDA infractions on HN unless the poster is silly enough to give specifics about the workplace and time at which they solved the problem. If it takes some kind of investigative work to piece together the most basic details, I think that's within the terms of most NDAs anyway. |
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| ▲ | LtWorf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think no equity isn't necessarily worse than equity followed by bankruptcy :D | | |
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| ▲ | mh2266 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Google’s terminal level is one past new grad and it has a full parallel non-management IC track, I don’t think that they’re pushing people that hard into leadership roles. |
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| ▲ | raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And then what happens when you are looking for your next job and you get a behavioral interview question and all you can say is “I pulled Jira tickets off the board for a decade”? |
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| ▲ | proc0 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's precisely why programmers become programmers. It baffles me that tech careers put most on a leadership track when people study CS for many years for a reason. Why would I want to throw those technical skills away. |
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| ▲ | venturecruelty 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You mean if everyone works really hard, we can't all be CEOs? :( |
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