| What makes this whole thing worse is the concept of "non-terminal" levels, i.e. levels that you're not allowed to stay at indefinitely, which means that you must either get promoted or fired. I can understand not wanting to let people stay in a junior position forever, but I've seen this taken to a ridiculous extreme, where the ladder starts at a junior level, then goes through intermediate and senior to settle on staff engineer as the first "terminal" position. Someone should explain to the people who dream up these policies that the Peter Principle is not something we should aim for. It's even worse when you combine this with age. I'm nearing 47 years old now and have 26 years of professional experience, and I'm not just tired, but exhausted by the relentless push to make me go higher up on the ladder. Let me settle down where I'm at my most competent and let me build shit instead of going to interminable meetings to figure out what we want to build and who should be responsible for it. I'm old enough to remember the time when managers were at least expected to be more useful in that regard. |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 4 days ago | parent [-] | | If that's what you're looking for you can find it in academia. Universities have no problem paying people to stay around forever without promotion. Of course the pay won't be great, but the benefits are decent, PTO is usually excellent, and the work environment usually very low stress. | | |
| ▲ | CodeMage 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | FWIW, I'm starting to seriously consider this as a strategy that will allow me to get to retirement without completely messing up my health due to stress and burnout. That said, there's something deeply wrong with our industry if that's the way we expect things to work. I never felt that teaching was my calling, but I might end up being forced into it anyway and taking up a job that someone with proper passion and vocation could fill. Why? Because my own industry doesn't understand that unlimited growth is not sustainable. For that matter, "growth" is not the right word, either. We're all being told that scaling the ladder is the same thing as growing and developing, but it's not. | | |
| ▲ | lokar 4 days ago | parent [-] | | But the point of the rule is that unlimited growth is not expected. There is a fairly clear point you need to get to, and then you can stay put if you like. | | |
| ▲ | CodeMage 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, and I agree with that. But my reply was to a comment that seemed to dispute that idea and imply that if you wanted to stop growing at some point, then you should shift to academia. That said, there is an expectation of unlimited growth and it comes from a different source: ageism. At my age, the implicit expectation is that I will apply for a staff or even principal role. Applying for a "merely" senior role often rings alarm bells. That trend -- and certain others -- are what's making me consider taking up teaching instead. |
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| ▲ | lokar 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Are we talking about the same thing? The point of the terminal level rule is that there is a point, bellow which you are not actually contributing all that much more in output then it takes to supervise and mentor you. At some point you need to be clearly net positive. This generally means you can mostly operate on your own. If it becomes clear you won't make it to that level, then something is wrong. Either you are not capable, or not willing to make the effort, or something else. Regardless, you get forced out. | |
| ▲ | adobesubmarine 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In my experience, people who say this kind of thing about either industry or academia have usually worked in one, but not both. |
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