> "..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.

> 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

At every job I’ve had, across all the managers I’ve had, my immediate manager (and usually their manager as well) genuinely cared about me and my team and our well being as well as our careers. My _company_ and its executives surely didn’t give a damn if they even knew our names, but the actual humans I work face to face with definitely do.

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.

I don't think any of my managers has ever been directly involved with having to deal with business expenses, so I don't think that's really a thing that they think about when managing me.

Also, for what it's worth, when I was let go from my previous job, my former manager actually kept checking my LinkedIn profile on a weekly basis, presumably to see if I'd landed a job. I think that might count as "giving a shit".

> 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 gave 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.

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?

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.

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.

Are they actual career growth plans or 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."

I work at Amazon and I’ve had almost the opposite experience. There are dedicated career check ins twice a year that managers are required to have (separate from pay change discussions). Each of the orgs I’ve worked in have also had their own career growth things - one of them required quarterly “how are you doing on your career goal?” questionnaires that you were supposed to review with your manager.

Frankly I’ve had _too many_ managers at Amazon wanting to talk about career growth. Maybe it’s just my org, but everyone is obsessed with it.

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.

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.

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.

> If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?

Collecting paycheck, protecting status quo, creating impression of work?

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.

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.

> 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.

Most of the managers that I worked with opened up our first conversation together with how they "care about people and their careers".

Given the way the world is, that's true.

Now, intrinsically, the job of a manager is to serve the company by serving those they manage. They do this by enabling workers to do the work that needs to be done. A middle manager is supposed to represent his team to upper management. However, too often, middle management is more interested in schmoozing with upper management rather than standing by their team. And if he is too difficult, upper management can just replace him with a more compliant manager who will function as a faithful messenger and nothing more.

So, there's no structural way to ensure these things work. Culture and personal virtue are necessary.

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.

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.

Or a union to at least take that charge.