[HN Gopher] I followed my dreams to get demoted to software deve...
___________________________________________________________________
I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 273 points
Date : 2021-02-08 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackoverflow.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackoverflow.blog)
| aoeuhtns wrote:
| Great story! Could relate to some of the emotions as I went from
| a founder ceo in biotech to sales engineer in tech, to software
| engg, then manager, then back to software engg with some
| unintentional devops detour in the middle!
|
| That 'demotion' from founder ceo to sales engg was rough... but
| since it was in different geographies, I actually made more money
| and life quality was better!
| SMAAART wrote:
| That is one of the best articles I have read in a very long time.
| danaliv wrote:
| I went from being a software engineer to a flight instructor (83%
| pay cut - _gulp_ ), and that eventually landed me a gig as a
| spacecraft operator.
|
| Here's to risky career moves!
| kioleanu wrote:
| That's a very clickbaity title. I was reading the article and
| sharpening my pitchfork up until the middle when I had to stop
| and put it down (the metaphorical pitchfork)
| rkangel wrote:
| Yes, it isn't very clear about whether the demotion was chosen
| or not. "I followed my dreams to be demoted to software
| developer" or "I followed my dream of being demoted to..."
| would be much clearer.
| duckfruit wrote:
| I don't know if I'd call it clickbait. Whimsically worded,
| sure, but the author did literally go from being a Director of
| design to an associate software developer so it doesn't seem
| inaccurate to call it a demotion.
| cperciva wrote:
| This reminds me of a joke about a violist who finds a magic
| lamp and asks to become a better musician. Promotion depends
| on perspective.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| Do you mean this joke? [1] Don't disrespect the violists!
|
| [1] (https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/ab5oht/a_violi
| sts_3_...)
| cperciva wrote:
| Yes, subject to minor variations. The version I heard had
| him going from the back of the section in a community
| (amateur) orchestra to playing in the Toronto Symphony to
| leading the viola section in the Berlin Philharmonic --
| and making the same wish ("make me a better musician")
| each time.
| saghm wrote:
| This might be excessively nitpicky, but the use of the phrase
| "_got_ demoted" (emphasis mine) implies to me a lack of
| control over the situation. It's technically correct, but it
| sounds like it was a punishment rather than what it actually
| was (namely, a career choice).
| emptyfile wrote:
| Same. English isn't my first language so I'm not sure, but
| the title doesn't' seem sincere when the subtitle reads
| "Kristina Lustig, formerly our Director of Design, explains
| why she _took a new role_ as an associate software
| developer "
| bradlys wrote:
| English is my first language. I'm American on top of it.
| This is a clickbait title. It conveys an incorrect
| meaning. People can talk about formal definitions all
| they want - it doesn't matter. Language isn't always
| about formal definitions - it's more often about how
| people use it. In this case - the headline is being used
| to grab eyes, is clickbait, and is wrong about the
| contents of the article.
|
| Your new headline would be better but it wouldn't have
| attracted any views.
| fossislife wrote:
| The website's title is okay "to get demoted", it is the Hacker
| News title that is clickbait: "and got demoted".
| delecti wrote:
| It seems clear to me from the title that the demotion was
| deliberate. The content of the article was more or less exactly
| what I expected from the title, which seems to contradict the
| notion that it's clickbait.
| yashap wrote:
| I took a sort-of similar route. I was a Senior Data Analyst who
| loved to code, and managed to transition to Junior Software
| Developer. I've stayed hungry and constantly improved as a dev,
| and over the years have incrementally moved up to my current
| role, Staff Software Developer. Stick with it Kristina! One of
| the great things about programming is that bright, passionate,
| hard working people can be highly successful despite coming from
| non-traditional backgrounds.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| From someone who's spent nearly 20 years trying to stay near the
| bottom of the org chart, welcome!
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| My strategy: pursue a lot of things as hobbies. If you view
| amateur in the true sense as "not paid" vs. "not good" you can
| do so many things for a much purer motivation - it's sooo much
| more rewarding. Nothing wrecks something you love like having
| to do it.
| progre wrote:
| I've always fought to _stay_ a developer as well. It seems that
| as soon as I know a codebase well enough to be really
| productive, there is a "team lead" or "scrum master" role
| waiting. Once or twice I've even fallen for it but the result
| have always been more meetings, less customer interaction, more
| responsibility and somehow less power over the product. Pay has
| stayed the same of course.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Interviewing for my last two jobs, I told them very
| explicitly that my career goal was to _never_ become a
| manager.
| munk-a wrote:
| I don't think I've ever interviewed from the same angle but
| I have been clear with my managers that I want to avoid
| moving into any sort of people management. It hasn't been
| an issue and when you've marked yourself out as a long term
| developer you can get more momentum behind technical pushes
| that might have a long project lifetime since the company
| will be less concerned about putting a big weight in your
| hands - they can trust you to carry it through[1].
|
| 1. I mean - assuming no life changes which you should never
| feel guilty about making to suit your own interests.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Don't ever agree to move up unless you are paid more.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Or unless you're actually looking to get that kind of
| experience
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I guess I could amend it to "Never move up when someone
| else wants you to unless you get a pay bump."
|
| If you want to move up and someone else is iffy on it,
| sure, skip the raise to help convince them.
|
| It's a matter of who is prompting the move, and what
| extra responsibility is required and such. If your boss
| asks you to take on more responsibility, ask for more
| money. That's really all I'm saying.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I've always found it difficult to come up with OKRs (goals -
| insert company BS euphemism here) that were acceptable but
| didn't force me towards a management position. It is just
| assumed that the goal in any company that a person should
| want to herd cats as a living.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Then on the other hand, you have unusual guys like me who are
| trying over and over to get into management, but 20+ years in
| I'm still at the bottom of the totem pole. It's always the
| same need-experience-to-get-experience catch-22: "Well, [JOE]
| already has management experience and you don't so [JOE] is
| now your manager." It's always a struggle: If you want X and
| don't want Y, somehow you're always going to be offered Y and
| have to fight for X.
| ddelt wrote:
| I'm right there with you - despite feeling like I'd be more
| passionate about being the more managerial and less "hands-
| on coder" on every team I've ever been on, including having
| a biz/IT degree vs pure CS, and having worked in a variety
| of industries in a variety of roles ... it's always "well
| we want you to be the dev because reasons" and I can't
| quite figure out what I'm missing. I have a feeling it's
| just that my resume doesn't say I've already been a manager
| and that when I interview, I don't lie and tell people how
| I've managed teams of direct reports. That doesn't mean I'm
| incapable, or that I wouldn't be great at it, but I guess
| orgs see management as high risk so they never want to take
| a chance. Either that or I'm always doomed for some sort of
| "BUZZWORD-Ops" role
| tharkun__ wrote:
| If pay stayed the same, then something went wrong. And I get
| it. I've had some friends go through this, where they'd get
| offered a lead position but technically it's 'Lead in
| training' so he gets the old pay while they evaluate him etc.
|
| Complete BS. If they offer it to him, they think he would be
| a good fit and they're just trying to pay less. Contrast it
| with my experience, where I just stepped up to fill the gaps
| whenever I saw them, my boss noticed, offered a lead position
| including pay bump.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I've always believed and practiced this too. You get the
| promotion & bump because you're already essentially doing
| the job. I'm OK with a trial without the promotion, but
| many (most?) seem to think you should get the opportunity
| to succeed or fail, with the rewards up front. I do't get
| this viewpoint.
| throwaway667555 wrote:
| This is mild exploitation widespread in employment, and I
| think you're identifying with the exploiter.
|
| It's not the rewards up front, it's the rewards as-you-
| go. Or it's the rewards at the end of the previous rank.
|
| Always having your pay 1yr behind your responsibilities
| is wrong. You're doing the job, you get the pay.
|
| On day 1 of being a lead, you've never been a lead
| before, but you are now. Year 1 leads get lead pay.
|
| "You've done great, you're at the top of your rank! No, I
| can't reward you for it yet, just start at the next rank
| and we'll wait and see pleasethankyou." No. We saw. Pay
| me.
| dasil003 wrote:
| This is like a playbook for hollowing out an
| organization's talent via the Peter Principle.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Some of us dont have to try...
| verst wrote:
| I'm literally about to do this.
|
| Switching from (Senior) Developer Advocate to Software Engineer
| (2) at Microsoft. Both jobs are on the same ladder / pay scale
| and in the same engineering org. I was promoted just last
| September and am effectively undoing my promotion.
|
| I had never worked as a SWE/SDE 100% of my time. I have a Math &
| CS degree and have built lots of random integrations, apps, and
| created technical architecture designs / product requirements.
|
| I realized I enjoy projects where I get to code or dive deep into
| technology best. I also want a role that is easier understood by
| industry across companies.
|
| The hope is that I can perform well to quickly get promoted back
| to my current job level (and compensation).
|
| The sacrifice is worth it to me.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > The hardest part for me has been getting used to working on
| code that lots of other people had worked on.
|
| This is probably the single most significant differentiator
| between skills academic CS or programming courses and real world
| development.
| nottrobin wrote:
| Does "director" mean something much lower than it sounds like? Or
| does "associate" mean something higher?
|
| To me, a "director" is someone who understands the business
| deeply, knows how to lead, take initiative, communicate very
| well, has years of business experience under their belt...
|
| They want to be a dev. Sure, they need to learn git, python etc.
| But these are not that hard at all. The harder part of being a
| developer is communication, making hard decisions, showing
| leadership. Things a director should be pretty damn good at.
|
| "Demoting" her to an associate developer is stupidly patronising.
| encoderer wrote:
| > They want to be a dev. Sure, they need to learn git, python
| etc. But these are not that hard at all. The harder part of
| being a developer is communication, making hard decisions,
| showing leadership. Things a director should be pretty damn
| good at.
|
| This is really only true if you already know how to read and
| write code. For the vast majority of people, communication
| skills are easier to acquire than developer skills.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Director is a rank with very different meaning in the industry;
| I know people with this rank at Adobe, Amazon, Microsoft, in
| banks, FMCG and there is attempt from some companies to catch
| up with the naming of various positions versus the rest of the
| market, but it's gone wrong in some places, director being a
| pretty low position of what used to be mid level managers or
| worse. A "sales director" is many times just an inflated title
| to senior sales people with no budget to administer and no
| organization to manage, maybe leading a team of 2-3 junior
| sales guys. I know a bunch of IT directors that failed the
| interviews as entry level managers, so it is impossible to me
| to figure out what the real level of a rank is when the name is
| Director.
| geophile wrote:
| Good for you.
|
| I was in startups for 25 years, (except for a few years in an
| acquiring company), and I had this ongoing debate with myself and
| my bosses for many years: Should I stay on the technical side
| (developer, architect), or go into management?
|
| On one hand, I thought that I "should" go into management because
| ... that's what people do, right? On the other hand, I loathed
| management. Even as a team lead, meetings made me literally sick
| to my stomach, (well, once).
|
| I kept torturing myself with this decision over the years, until
| my boss cleared it up for me. He said that if I hated being a
| manager, that I would suck at it, and be constantly miserable. So
| don't do it. It was so obvious once he said it. So I didn't
| become a manager, and I never worried about it again.
| smileysteve wrote:
| > On the other hand, I loathed management. Even as a team lead,
| meetings made me literally sick to my stomach,
|
| I don't know that you should use this criteria as the sole deal
| breaker. Managers should be shielding teams from unproductive
| meetings and pushing for productivity (action items) from the
| meetings that happen - holding their peers to a degree of
| standards.
|
| Now, if you hate 1:1, org planning, and successful meetings,
| that's another thing.
| geophile wrote:
| Everything about it. Every moment spent organizing, planning,
| reviewing, coordinating, is just torture. If, at work, I am
| doing anything but working on code, or preparing to
| (researching, reading, etc.), I feel like I am wasting my
| time, and it is just draining. At the end of a work day, my
| mood is completely determined by how much time I spent on
| code.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Exactly this! A couple of times in my career I've stepped
| over into management, and regretted it each time, in large
| part because I can never get to the point where the
| manager-y stuff "counts" as work; instead it's stuff that
| gets in the way of doing "real" work, so the job is
| constant misery.
| strgcmc wrote:
| I'm always thrilled to hear stories from people who have or
| reach this level of self-awareness, about what determines
| their mood/satisfaction. It's so wonderfully freeing to
| know yourself to that level, and understand part of what
| makes you tick internally.
|
| I myself am a former-engineer and current-manager, and I
| also remember absolutely loathing meetings as a waste of
| time, explaining things to people who don't really care
| that much about what I have to say, and plus why should I
| contort myself to speak "their" language and why can't they
| be bothered to learn to speak "my" language as an engineer?
|
| But over time, I think I've come to develop a taste for,
| the style of communication that happens in most typical
| business meetings. If you think about coding and entering a
| "flow" state, to me the core of that flow is being able to
| clearly and concisely conceptualize the software
| abstractions you have in your head, mapping them
| effectively from business concepts or technical
| requirements and into code, and being able to just churn
| out a beautiful representation of all those things into
| something tangible (an application, a service, etc.).
|
| Believe it or not, in roundabout ways, meetings can achieve
| that kind of "flow" state as well, creating a shared
| understanding of a beautiful abstraction, and resulting in
| high-bandwidth exchange of ideas. Certainly it is much
| harder to achieve "flow" for meeting communication than for
| coding/engineering (IMHO at least) since it involves lots
| of other people with lots of different backgrounds and
| different levels of understanding, but I find that
| nonetheless it is something I can find enjoyment from the
| pursuit of that state. Not every meeting succeeds in
| reaching that "flow" state, but more and more I can
| perceive and introspect why/why-not it didn't, and come out
| with tangible lessons for myself for improving. So long as
| I have a flywheel for getting better, it doesn't feel so
| draining or so pointless anymore even when I "fail". And
| sometimes, I really do come out of the most productive
| meetings feeling very energized, and hearing from my peers
| how much clarity they gained or how much more confident
| they are about a decision that was previously
| questionable/uncertain, is truly a great feeling (at least
| as good for me, as producing a solid piece of beautiful
| code).
| munchbunny wrote:
| I'm glad that people are becoming increasingly aware of
| this.
|
| I found that I don't mind managing, but it's such a
| different type of work. As an IC I went home (before COVID
| anyway) mentally exhausted. As a manager I went home
| emotionally exhausted. Different people are better at
| recovering from either state of exhaustion.
| allenu wrote:
| I feel this too. I've been working in industry since the
| early 2000s and for me I've known for a while now that I do
| not want to be a manager. There have been times where I've
| considered it, but like you, I find organizing, planning,
| reviewing, coordinating tortuous. I would rather design and
| implement a system, or work with others to do so, than
| spend time doing the meta-work to get work done.
|
| That said, to get a title promotion, I've found that you
| have to do more of the organizing, planning, coordinating
| stuff to be noticed. Performance reviews are biased towards
| "the next step" in your career and companies are forever
| trying to get you to do more "meta-work" which I really
| dislike.
| noelsusman wrote:
| The work of shielding my hypothetical team from useless
| meetings sounds just as miserable as the useless meetings
| themselves. Now that I think about it, my own boss shields us
| from these meetings primarily by taking the meeting himself.
| lucifersam wrote:
| I have this dilemma at the moment. My company has a management
| and non-management track. I feel like the company is pushing me
| up the levels and that all focus across engineering is on
| getting promoted to the next level. My problem is now that I've
| got to Staff level I feel like I'm a manager even though _my_
| manager insists I 'm not. I hardly ever get to code, and my
| calendar is full of meetings. I spend a lot of time writing
| planning documents and having meetings about spreadsheets and
| OKRs and to be honest I absolutely hate it. I've been trying to
| work out if it's like this everywhere, or if this is specific
| to my company. I spoke to a few people and they pretty much
| said "Yeah, the more senior you get the less you get to code".
| The articles I read about Staff Engineer level seem to imply
| it's more about architecture and planning. I'm really tempted
| to demote myself back to Senior and just stick there, but I'd
| probably take a salary cut and I also feel like I'd taint my
| career and be viewed as a failure. I thought we'd move forwards
| by creating twin tracks that means engineers don't
| automatically have to go into management to get ahead, but it
| feels like it hasn't changed that much. I know some people are
| great at that level of engineer role, and I can see why
| companies need it. I keep coming back to the question: why do
| we take people who are good at coding and say "OK, you're great
| at that so I'm going to promote you into a role where you
| hardly ever get to do it"?
|
| For what it's worth, I enjoy mentoring and explaining things,
| writing docs, and being involved in design of systems and
| influencing technical strategy. It's nice to be making
| technical choices. But when you're more familiar with a
| spreadsheet than an IDE, something has gone wrong.
| ostenning wrote:
| I really wouldn't worry about "being viewed as a failure". I
| think it's admirable if you choose your passion over
| normality. You'll be better at your work and at life, you'll
| be happier and live longer. Job titles are, in my humble
| opinion, a trap.
|
| So my advice is to set boundaries. If you don't want to be
| sitting in meetings, then stand your ground or come to a
| compromise. If they don't understand then quit! Find the path
| for you, life is too short to be unhappy and someone else's
| pencil pusher.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > I enjoy mentoring and explaining things, writing docs, and
| being involved in design of systems and influencing technical
| strategy
|
| One of the great dilemmas is that these things are always
| interwoven with the non-technical aspects of being a manager.
| There is some aspect in which it is essential - "how long
| will this work take" depends intimately on the technical
| complexity, exactly how skilled the available resources are
| in the necessary areas etc. Other aspects are completely non-
| essential - "responsibility for staff completing health and
| safety training lies with line management". I would really
| like to see a model where these are disentangled.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Seniority to some degree is about enabling others and having
| the overview. The big problems are rarely the precise code
| being written (it /can/ be the case when working on a
| specific algorithm or something) but large parts are about
| architecture, code review, ... and understanding the business
| needs aside from core technical skills. If a senior shares
| their experience with 5 juniors it is (especially long-term)
| better spent than them hacking something alone.
|
| But as always: ymmv
| quicklime wrote:
| At the companies that I've seen that have a good IC track,
| including some of the FAANGs, the staff+ level engineers are
| measured by impact. There are many ways to have that impact,
| and that could be by architecture, design and influencing
| technical strategy, or it could be by churning out tons of
| code, or it could be by highly specialized domain knowledge.
| It's fairly normal for staff-level engineers to spend a lot
| of time in meetings, but there are also staff engineers who
| spend most of their time coding.
| ritchiea wrote:
| Great for her, amazing that she was working at the type of
| organization that actually wants to keep people around. This
| coming from someone who recently had my work praised for 6 months
| then was let go just before my probation period ended.
| hbarka wrote:
| Nice
| lmilcin wrote:
| Don't think in categories of promotion/demotion.
|
| The best you can do for yourself is to find the right place for
| you. If you don't feel well with what you are doing it does not
| matter how high on the corporate ladder you are.
|
| Treat it as a whole package of which prestige and pay is only one
| factor. I know personally a guy who left being a director at a
| large company and moved with his wife to a small farm. They don't
| earn a fraction of what he earned before but he said he would not
| come back.
|
| I have skipped over promotions to keep working with code because
| I don't feel well spending more than fraction of my time managing
| projects and teams.
|
| I have recently built my own electronics lab and am tinkering
| with increasingly complex designs because it is just fun.
| Complemented with my ability to code I plan to use that to maybe
| build some some products. No concrete plans other than explore
| what feels interesting to me and do it at my own pace.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Reminds me of a "self-demotion" that worked out well: That of a
| certain Allan Vermeulen [0] who, by some accounts, was the chief
| architect of Amazon S3 [1], and by all accounts, an engineer
| extraordinaire. Vermeulen managed the _Platform Services_ group
| when he joined [2], and later moved to a CTO role with focus on
| the then very nascent _Web Services_ initiative [3], but
| eventually "demoted" himself to an "AWS Engineer" role to
| actually build key technological pieces that would underpin a
| _lot_ of distributed systems at AWS [4]. Not bad at all.
|
| [0] https://books.google.co.in/books?id=yG3PAK6ZOucC&pg=PT229
|
| [1] https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2016/03/a-decade-of-
| innova...
|
| [2]
| https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20040418&slug...
|
| [3]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20091226191003/paulwallis.ulitze...
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVvFVwyElLY
| rebyn wrote:
| Being a Distinguished Engineer is the highest there is for an
| engineer. He moved away from management and max'd out on the
| engineering track.
|
| https://college.lclark.edu/programs/entrepreneurship/firesid...
| ignoramous wrote:
| Yeah, and Amazon HR might be forced to create newer, higher
| rungs just for alv (and quite possibly a few others like
| James Hamilton and Eric Brandwine).
|
| The "self-demotion" is real though, especially since,
| according to the (much disputed) book, The Everything Store,
| alv declined Bezos' offer to lead AWS, and the job then of
| course was Andy Jassy's (who took over from Colin Bryar)
| which laid the foundation for him to eventually become the
| CEO-elect of one of the most enduring companies of all time.
|
| I mean, in an alternate universe, alv _is_ the CEO-elect :)
| Imagine the scenes!
| amzn-throw wrote:
| alv is a role model to so many inside Amazon, because
|
| 1) His internal tech talks are fun, peculiar, and make complex
| concepts easy to understand
|
| 2) His contributions go far beyond "Just S3" - though that
| would be enough. His low level frameworks and concepts underpin
| almost all complex AWS distributed systems - from databases to
| messages.
|
| 3) he STILL Codes, iterating on ideas, and pushing scalability
| of distributed systems to the next level
| tcgv wrote:
| Defines himself as a "techinical dude" in his LinkedIn profile
| xD
|
| - https://www.linkedin.com/in/allan-vermeulen-58835b/
| torgard wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I had not heard about him.
| austincheney wrote:
| > Most importantly, I was right: I thought I'd love writing code
| professionally, and it turns out, I do!
|
| She must clearly not be writing JavaScript.
|
| I love writing JavaScript applications, but not professionally.
| It's a matter of actually building a product versus spinning your
| wheels with hundreds of megabytes of dependencies and stupidity
| and circular processes.
| draw_down wrote:
| I truly love HN's ability to shit on Javascript -- even when no
| one was talking about it at all! Hats off to ya.
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| I was a senior product manager and made the transition to
| frontend dev. I've never been happier!
| robinhood wrote:
| Most of the time, going to a management position is not a
| promotion. It's a change of career. And yet, our culture (from
| the University to the press) pushes us to be promoted to manager,
| because if you are not a manager, you've failed somewhere.
| mindfulplay wrote:
| It's great to see someone being able to dictate success on your
| terms and not by a career ladder imposed on by an imaginary
| committee.
|
| Importantly she acknowledges that this is not all roses and fun
| (which makes it a proper job).
|
| So kudos to her for taking a demotion in the minds of career
| ladderists but in reality this sounds like a great way to
| managing opportunity costs properly and having fun while getting
| paid.
| mcherm wrote:
| From a [flagged][dead] comment:
|
| > This is not an economic move for the company.
|
| I'm not at all sure I agree with you on this. I've worked for
| quite a few years as a software engineer in banking. At one of
| the companies where I worked, we had an intentional policy of
| taking people from non-technical roles (such as "telephone
| support") and giving them opportunities to move within the
| company to technical roles... sometimes QA, sometimes development
| roles.
|
| It is certainly true that these people were less productive for
| the first year or so than if we had hired a new graduate. And
| these people rarely (I can't think of any examples) became our
| algorithm experts who led the way in optimizing the scaling of
| large systems.
|
| But in my opinion, it was a HUGELY successful program. I mean, it
| was nice that the people who went through this program had a
| strong company loyalty. And it sure didn't hurt the morale in
| roles like telephone support to see some of their former
| colleagues entering a programming career. But what I really mean
| is that these people made some of our best developers.
|
| Because you need a mix of different skills as a developer.
| Sometimes you need someone who knows the latest algorithms or
| tools for optimizing performance or choosing the best new
| language to build in. But far more frequently, what you really
| need is someone who knows the business problem and can
| communicate about it clearly in the customer's own language. A
| project nudged into right direction to meet poorly expressed but
| still important business needs is easily worth thousands of
| developer-hours of work. And understanding of the business is
| what these people had, in spades.
|
| So, perhaps Ms. Lustig brings important skills that complement
| her developer role. I'm going to go out on a limb here and
| suggest that perhaps she knows a LOT more about UI design than
| the average developer. She may also know a lot about the company
| and its needs. And these are VERY valuable things for a developer
| to know.
|
| (The flagged comment ALSO contained some completely unwarranted
| -- and unsubstantiated -- sexist assumptions which I think are
| better ignored than disputed.)
| [deleted]
| decafninja wrote:
| My current dream is to be "demoted" from senior SWE at a non-tech
| company to a mid level (or even junior! if possible) SWE at a mid
| to top tech company.
| draw_down wrote:
| I know what you mean. Junior isn't the cakewalk it sounds like
| though, there's an "up or out" requirement that you advance to
| terminal level or get fired. So eventually you'd end up back at
| senior. Plus a lot of places use former interns in those junior
| roles so those positions are ironically very hard to come by.
|
| But yes, I can identify with that. Being one level below senior
| for the rest of my career would be great if it were possible.
| bargl wrote:
| I switched careers 4 years after I graduated college. It wasn't
| as much a demotion and more of a lateral move, but it is never
| too late to change careers.
|
| That isn't to say there is no risk involved. Taking a new
| position has risks, and just like investing (which we've all
| heard too much about lately), you want to hedge your risks.
|
| Make sure you've got a good buffer in the bank, potentially a
| fall back position if it's a pay-cut, talk to your partner (if
| you have one), check out how to decrease your budget if needed,
| or supplement for a while if possible.
|
| I love these stories, I love seeing streamers make it, people
| move from a corporate job to starting their own thing, it's
| awesome. Most people who were successful had a safety net. They
| didn't jump without knowing the risks and being able to take the
| lower pay for a while. They also had a plan to make money. This
| is really important because I've also seen a ton of people who
| have been forced to switch careers due to not having a plan to
| make money.
|
| I'm not a researcher/etc. This is all anecdotal evidence I've
| seen, just sharing my thoughts and opinions.
|
| Anyway, congrats to anyone who does makes this kind of quality of
| life change!
| Geminidog wrote:
| If she didn't get a pay downgrade to associate swe then she is
| not even remotely close to starting from scratch. The company is
| basically letting her learn a new field on their dime, which is
| fine, but this is basically a story less about her earning her
| skills as a software engineer and more about the charity of her
| Boss and the company allowing her to learn these skills.
|
| This is not an economic move for the company. They are better off
| hiring a new CS grad, and if her pay wasn't reduced they are
| better off with a senior engineer. An action like this is
| literally an act of charity. People go through a lot to learn dev
| skills and she is being handed these skills as a gift.
|
| What I'm going to say next might come off as a bit sexist and
| keep in mind it's just representative of my own anecdotal
| experiences and others may have completely different experiences.
|
| I have found that when a female developer isn't doing so well on
| her job she's given a lot more leeway then a male developer.
| Additionally a lot more people (men) will go out of their way to
| help her because of her sex. Part of the fact she was even
| offered a role as a developer very likely has to do with some
| aspect of this.
|
| Frankly, I can't see this same situation happening as often for a
| dude. Men are subconsciously judged more for their competency
| while women (especially attractive women) trigger good Samaritan
| vibes, making competency take a back seat while people do
| everything they can to foster a community of help and assistance.
|
| Nothing wrong with taking advantage of it, but if I was a janitor
| in an engineering company and I asked the director for a starring
| role as a SWE they'd look at me funny. But if I was a really hot
| female... I can see the possibility of a director trying to
| establish himself into a mentor-ship role.
|
| I'm not implying men do this consciously. I think most men and
| people in general like to think of themselves as non-biased so
| most of this happens as subconscious actions.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Edit: actually, you've done this so many times before that I've
| banned the account. Please stop creating accounts to break HN's
| rules with. We're trying to avoid internet hell here, so
| repeatedly being pushed into a flaming pit is something we'd
| kind of prefer to avoid.
|
| You broke the site guidelines egregiously by turning this into
| a gender flamewar. Seriously not cool. Please don't do this on
| HN again.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| carlisle_ wrote:
| I find these anecdotes to be completely untrue. Women are often
| assumed to be less competent, and are often passed over during
| hiring for men of equal competence.
|
| I've seen some incredibly useless dudes sit back and rest and
| vest for months and months without any repercussions. I don't
| have an equivalent story for women because I work with
| significantly less women. Let's try focusing on the apparent
| and obvious biases against women before we start keeping score
| on how men are so disenfranchised.
| zapdrive wrote:
| Found the feminist.
| Geminidog wrote:
| Nothing wrong with being a feminist. Both genders deserve
| equal treatment. I consider myself to be a feminist.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| Yes you did, did you expect me to be ashamed about this?
| jansan wrote:
| No, but you should not feel superior, either.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| What'd you really hope to accomplish with this post?
| jansan wrote:
| What did the parent try to achieve?
| carlisle_ wrote:
| You want me to speak for somebody else instead of you
| speaking for yourself?
| jansan wrote:
| Whatever, dude, the parent comment came from you. You
| asked if you should be ashamed for being feminist, I
| replied no, but you should also not be proud of this,
| because there is nothing easier and more mainstream today
| than being a feminist. That's all.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| Why didn't you reply with this instead of answering my
| question with a question?
| trollolo1 wrote:
| Where'd the comment go? I wanted to say tell that guy that
| my manager is actually competent, so he has my respect, but
| I would not capitalize the word "boss". He may pay your
| bills, yet that doesn't make him family[1].
|
| Anyway, I see guys mentoring guys all the time. There's
| nothing sexual 'bout it!
|
| [1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/capitalization-family-
| title/
| Geminidog wrote:
| I've mentored guys and girls and I knew one coworker who
| literally had sex with the interns he "mentored." It can
| be both sexual and non-sexual and both at the same time.
| Definitely if the minuscule "possibility" of sex is open,
| that is an "advantage" that a woman may knowingly or
| unknowing take advantage of.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| Htf do you call yourself a feminist with posts like this?
| Geminidog wrote:
| Because I support equal opportunity for all genders. I
| assume this is what feminism supports as well.
|
| Is there somewhere in my post where I implied otherwise?
| Please cite what I said that made you think I am not a
| feminist.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| Dude you have two flagged posts talking about women and
| you're going to try to convince me you're a feminist?
| Geminidog wrote:
| How does two flags make me not a feminist? My reputation
| or two flags has nothing to do with whether or not I'm a
| feminist or not. It doesn't even make sense how I was
| flagged.
|
| I literally worked in a place where a coworker had sex
| with the interns he "mentored" and he "mentored" them
| directly for the opportunity of sex. This happened, and
| it's not in my power to control what happens in the real
| world.
|
| My coworker also "hired" these interns and I can
| guarantee you they wouldn't have been hired if they were
| dudes. Not saying this happens everywhere, but this stuff
| definitely happens.
|
| Literally what did I say or do that was against equal
| opportunities for both genders? Nothing. If I'm wrong,
| find evidence and make your case.
| kazinator wrote:
| You can't find someone else's anecdotes untrue.
|
| Reverse sexism is completely real, just like "regular"
| sexism. It doesn't compensate for it in any way, of course.
|
| Reverse sexism helps some women, some of the time.
|
| It doesn't help women, as such, in the big picture.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| >You can't find someone else's anecdotes untrue.
|
| Sure I can when they're filled with obvious and apparent
| cognitive biases.
| kazinator wrote:
| But that's what personal anecdotes are. They are not
| something like "objective observations providing raw
| data, without any selection or interpretation".
|
| Anecdotes might not support the conclusions they are
| intended to support, but that doesn't make the anecdotes
| _per se_ false.
|
| Anecodotes are, well, "anecdotal".
| carlisle_ wrote:
| I mean, you gonna stick up for the guy that just got
| banned?
| kazinator wrote:
| No, I'm sticking up for the idea that people's anecdotal
| experiences are valid, within their
| epistemological/cognitive limits, and not simply "false".
|
| That doesn't depend on whether or not someone got banned.
|
| That user unfortunately resorted to some behaviors that
| looked like antagonizing another user at the personal
| level.
|
| His interpretations of some of his experiences are off
| the mark.
|
| E.g. how some coworker hired interns in order to sexually
| victimize them is clearly not an example of women getting
| some sort of easy advancement or free pass. That the
| events happened is plausibly true; there is no basis for
| denying the raw facts of the anecdote. It's just not a
| relevant anecdote, really.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| You want to argue that the guy espousing sexism through
| his anecdotal experiences has valid anecdotes?
| kazinator wrote:
| Since everyone has valid anecdotes, and that person is a
| member of everyone, the inescapable logical conclusion is
| that, indeed, he has valid anecdotes.
|
| I reiterate that I'm using a standard for "valid" that is
| befitting of anecdotes, which is confined to the facts.
| It doesn't cover the cherry-picking of observations that
| are selected as the basis for anecdotes, or the means of
| drawing conclusions, or the appropriateness or relevance
| of the anecdotes to the discourse and the like.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| Nobody is going to care about how semantically correct
| you are given one of his anecdotes was him admitting he
| treats women differently because of their gender. Feel
| free to call that valid to appease your dictionary
| definition, however colloquial definitions matter just as
| much in casual conversation.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _admitting he treats women differently because of their
| gender_
|
| OK, I see the misunderstanding.
|
| I'm not aware of a colloquial usage of "anecdote" which
| covers confessions of a behavior, let alone a habitual
| behavior. (By which I don't intend to deny that the usage
| is real; it's just not known to me.)
|
| An anecdote could certainly include an admission;
| anything can happen in personal stories.
|
| Still, even if your definition of "anecdote" extends to
| admissions, I don't see how you could then call it false.
|
| If someone confesses that he treated specific women A, B
| and C differently, or else that he habitually does so,
| then the only way that can be false is that he's making
| it up.
| Geminidog wrote:
| >I find these anecdotes to be completely untrue.
|
| You can't find my anecdotal experiences to be untrue because
| you haven't experienced my anecdotal experience. This is
| physically impossible.
|
| What you can claim is that my anecdotal experiences do not
| apply to women in engineering corporations in general.
| However, this is not a claim that I made as I caveated my
| point with the fact that what I'm saying is based off of my
| own anecdotal evidence.
|
| > I don't have an equivalent story for women because I work
| with significantly less women.
|
| Evidence is the only way to make sense of the reality we live
| in and there are two basic types: Anecdotal and Statistical.
| You claim here that you have no anecdotal evidence. That
| means statistical evidence is your only option (a stronger
| option btw) so where is it?
|
| >Let's try focusing on the apparent and obvious biases
| against women before we start keeping score on how men are so
| disenfranchised.
|
| Why should I focus on your claim that has no evidence? If men
| are indeed disenfranchised shouldn't that deserve focus? Are
| womens' rights superior to mens rights? Are you implying men
| can't be treated unfairly?
|
| Why can't we focus on the rights of both genders?
| carlisle_ wrote:
| >Why can't we focus on the rights of both genders?
|
| Ask yourself that question. In response to somebody writing
| about their experience changing careers you brought up how
| men aren't treated fairly.
| Geminidog wrote:
| I did. I responded because imo under normal circumstances
| nobody would be offered this kind of deal. It doesn't
| make economical sense for the company.
|
| She was given leeway and my guess is because she's a
| woman among other things. Women do have advantages that
| men don't.
|
| Women also have disadvantages but that is not my point. I
| am simply pointing out one area where women have an
| advantage in a male dominated field. It's a real
| advantage.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| Oh no, women have one advantage over men (if it were
| true) in a male dominated field.
|
| How do you not see how contradictory that statement is?
| kazinator wrote:
| It isn't. Sometimes women are given an advantage, in a
| way that is completely unfair and only gives a small
| boost to certain women with certain personality,
| attractiveness and age characteristics. Men with certain
| outward characteristics get a least as much of a boost.
| Geminidog wrote:
| So your saying women have zero advantages over men? That
| absolutely none exist or has ever existed?
|
| Out of all possible advantages (let's say 1000 in total)
| your saying men hold 100% of all these advantages and
| women can't even hold one advantage?
|
| What in your mind is more realistic?
| carlisle_ wrote:
| I'm saying what's the point of even keeping score when
| the odds are so stacked against women. Your complaints
| are entirely anecdotal, meanwhile it's very easy to point
| at empirical data showing how women are treated poorly.
|
| If you wanna line up your complaints alongside mountains
| of empirical evidence showing how women are
| disenfranchised repeatedly feel free, just don't expect
| people to take you seriously when you call yourself a
| feminist.
|
| If you actually want to call yourself a legitimate
| feminist you should spend more time listening and
| learning. It might make you actually feel silly to
| complain about how men are treated in tech.
| Geminidog wrote:
| >Your complaints are entirely anecdotal, meanwhile it's
| very easy to point at empirical data showing how women
| are treated poorly.
|
| Show me the data for this specific case of horizontal
| movement in engineering organizations for women and you
| have an argument that can change my view.
|
| >If you actually want to call yourself a legitimate
| feminist you should spend more time listening and
| learning. It might make you actually feel silly to
| complain about how men are treated in tech.
|
| I am listening and learning. Show me your data. <-- that
| is literally a call for you to prove your points so that
| I can "listen and learn"
|
| >I'm saying what's the point of even keeping score when
| the odds are so stacked against women.
|
| Who's keeping score? I'm just bringing up one specific
| case of unfair treatment. I never tried to turn this into
| a battle of "which sex is treated more unfairly"
| carlisle_ wrote:
| You wanna get educated go educate yourself. I'm frankly
| pretty disgusted by your posts and don't have the
| patience to educate somebody who is stubborn and
| unwilling to consider other perspectives.
| nadllik wrote:
| How am I stubborn. I'm literally asking you to show me
| evidence. I am allowing you to present your perspective
| with evidence.
| [deleted]
| agumonkey wrote:
| Sexism is complicated, I've known useless women at work
| (crippled, not enough mastery or drive) and even abusive ones
| (charm as a pass to delegate their work to others).
|
| I think one of the issue of work is that you have to be
| overly bold to crack through the process, even if you're an
| incompetent employee on many levels, you'll get there through
| tribal-ish reflexes. And I think masculine traits align with
| that, which make them get hired a lot more.
| skratlo wrote:
| This is such a horrible misogynistic comment, it saddens me
| greatly this crap is on top, tells a tale about HN audience.
| Janitor? Charity? Hot female? Just listen to yourself, you're
| so full of hate.
| VSerge wrote:
| Consider the last sentence : "I think most men and people in
| general like to think of themselves as non-biased so most of
| this happens as subconscious actions."
|
| Pretty sure this commenter thought of themselves as non-
| biased. Irony is a cruel mistress.
| Geminidog wrote:
| How is my statement biased? Men can suffer from unfair
| treatment as well. I never said anything to discount
| feminism, I simply stated one case where men are treated
| less well then women and I caveated that statement saying
| that this was based off of my own anecdotal experiences
| implying that your experience could be different.
|
| Do you think it's possible to live in a world where women
| are the only gender that is mistreated? Or do you think
| it's more realistic to live in a world where infractions
| are committed against both genders?
|
| This is off topic, but if my statement about this one case
| pissed you off because you're an ardent supporter of
| womens' rights I think you need to watch the video below
| and keep in mind... I literally never said anything AGAINST
| women's rights.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMuzhQXJoY
| dang wrote:
| We've banned the account. Obviously that was egregious
| vandalism, if not arson.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26069552
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26069593
|
| You have to judge this sort of thing by the entire community
| response cycle, though. Indignation, provocation, trolling
| often gets heavily upvoted--but then the rest of the
| community reacts appropriately and flags it. Usually that
| will bring it to our attention, too, in which case we can
| take further moderation action.
| nadllik wrote:
| that's not true. trolling does not get upvoted here. HN
| users are usually above the mob mentality. You're just
| defining it as trolling because you disagree with the
| upvotes. You are enforcing your own personal opinion here.
| Geminidog wrote:
| I didn't say anything hateful towards women. I think women
| get this better treatment then men but I didn't say they
| should turn it down nor did I say they didn't deserve it. I
| simply pointed out a difference.
|
| And what wrong with switching from Janitor to SWE? Same basic
| job switch from one another field with completely different
| skillets but completely different treatment due to perceived
| ranking.
| wizzard wrote:
| The problem is that you are likening her to a janitor to
| create the impression that she has zero programming
| experience. First of all, if you'd read the article you'll
| find she probably has as much experience as a lot of
| bootcamp grads. You're also kind of insulting janitors by
| assuming none of them could possibly have any coding
| skills.
|
| So many people nowadays learn coding using "non-
| traditional" means, and some of those people are REALLY
| good. Her skills were evaluated over a period of time and
| she was found to be worthy of a place. Why is that so
| difficult to believe? If this story were about a man, how
| would your reaction be different?
| Geminidog wrote:
| >The problem is that you are likening her to a janitor to
| create the impression that she has zero programming
| experience.
|
| You're completely right. Change "janitor" to "janitor who
| went to bootcamp" and my statement still stands. This
| girl didn't even go to bootcamp.
|
| Stop implying I have insulted people. I haven't said
| anything hateful at all.
|
| >If this story were about a man, how would your reaction
| be different?
|
| My reaction would be completely different. You're right.
| You could actually go find a similar story for a man,
| post it here and that can help change my view on this
| subject. The more similar stories you find for men who
| have done this the more evidence you will have to support
| your case. As it stands I find that it is much less
| likely for a man to be offered this act of charity.
|
| My views are based off of anecdotal evidence and I will
| flip flop my views and do a full 360 based off of all
| available data.
|
| As a side note, men tend to find rank more important
| learning a new skill or career. Due to this less men will
| even try to take up this deal when offered the
| opportunity. I think it has happened but it's just much
| less likely.
|
| To build a realistic data set you need to find the
| percentages success vs. failures of both men and women
| who have tried a horizontal career switch within the same
| company. Unfortunately this data is likely very hard to
| build so both of our arguments are quite speculative.
| Still I have anecdotal data, you haven't offered any.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _I think women get this better treatment_
|
| Don't forget that chubby, 59-year-old females are also
| women, though.
| Geminidog wrote:
| Good point. It's an attraction thing. Women who are
| unattractive do not have these advantages.
| kristinamay wrote:
| (Blog post author here) Referring to my job change as the
| company offering me charity is offensive and incorrect (I
| took a pay cut and worked hard to learn what I need to in
| order to be effective).
|
| Asserting that someone working in UX research/design is in
| an entirely unrelated field from software development is
| also wildly incorrect. UX folks work with SWEs regularly
| and are working on the same projects, albeit from a
| different perspective.
|
| There are also examples of men at my company making fairly
| similar changes across organizations. I'd love for you to
| take a minute and consider why you approached my story with
| the preconceived notion that I've only gotten this
| opportunity because I'm a woman.
| Geminidog wrote:
| >Referring to my job change as the company offering me
| charity is offensive and incorrect (I took a pay cut and
| worked hard to learn what I need to in order to be
| effective).
|
| It was not intended as an insult, so apologies. But I
| still stand by my statements because I believe them to be
| true.
|
| Other things that will lead to clearer views on this is
| your overall software skills relative to other people in
| the same position, but such ratings are also colored with
| the lens of bias.
|
| As it stands though, the deal is still obviously
| uneconomical and therefore a charity or a gift to you.
| Nothing wrong with this and it wasn't intended as an
| insult.
|
| >There are also examples of men at my company making
| fairly similar changes across organizations
|
| If that's the case present your data! This will
| definitely help change my view point.
|
| >I'd love for you to take a minute and consider why you
| approached my story with the preconceived notion that
| I've only gotten this opportunity because I'm a woman.
|
| I have. It is not preconceived. The hypothesis was made
| based off of available data. Like I said, the business
| deal the company made with you is not economical, so
| there must be another reason why the company gave you
| such a one sided deal when they can get a better deal.
|
| My assumption is that part of it is because of your sex
| and your looks. This goes inline with my anecdotal
| experience of working with women in engineering.
|
| If your saying the exact reason why you were hired over
| say a new CS grad or boot camper is because of your
| domain knowledge and UX experience, then sure I grant you
| that as a major possibility. However it does not discount
| the possibility that what I said is true. You wouldn't
| know because you manager either gave you that deal
| subconsciously or he won't admit it.
|
| There's really no avenue to determine either argument
| definitively. I propose not continuing.
|
| As a side note, I've worked hard to get where I am right
| now. And no company paid me to learn software on the job.
| If they did it would be an act of charity and I would be
| grateful to them if they did.
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the
| site guidelines. Please read
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26069552 and stop
| creating accounts to do hellish things on HN.
|
| Haranguing other users who show up here to discuss there
| work is one of the worst things anyone can possibly do
| here--and yes, that's what you've did: "If that's the
| case present your data!" -- that you were not hired
| because of your sex and your looks? What the fuck.
|
| We want authors show up on HN to discuss their writings.
| The choice between having that vs. having trolls who
| personally attack them is not a difficult one.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| nadllik wrote:
| >Haranguing other users who show up here to discuss there
| work is one of the worst things anyone can possibly do
| here--and yes, that's what you've did: "If that's the
| case present your data!" -- that you were not hired
| because of your sex and your looks? What the fuck.
|
| No. She said she knows of many cases where men made the
| exact same horizontal moves in her organization. She said
| she HAS data. I am simply asking her to present it. Your
| attitude here is one that is too quick to judge.
|
| >We want authors show up on HN to discuss their writings.
| The choice between having that vs. having trolls who
| personally attack them is not a difficult one.
|
| Except I'm not trolling. I am presenting a legitimate
| view point that is not a personal attack. Her case is
| very abnormal and I am addressing the abnormality, which
| is very very reasonable.
|
| You don't hear of many cases where a horizontal shift
| like this is possible. So it is not an attack. It don't
| know her personally and I have no reason to attack her.
| Your statement is categorically incorrect.
|
| I also think your dismissing the intelligence and
| judgement of your users. This post had a quite high
| number of upvotes and users of HN are not your classic
| reddit mob.
|
| The votes are evidence that users of this site don't
| share your opinion so you used your own biased view
| points to override my view point and dismissed the
| majority who agreed with me. Let's be real the people who
| flagged me are just a vocal minority.
|
| You are moderating based off of your own personal biases
| and I wish you would just moderate the flame war instead
| of censoring the topic.
|
| I'm using another account here which you can ban as well
| (I'll just get another one). I'll be more mindful to
| follow your guidelines in the future including the
| arbitrary guideline you made up here on the fly to
| support your personal biases. I like this site but a
| highly disagree with your moderation practices.
| seankimdesign wrote:
| I love this story. I can intensely relate as I too have made the
| pivot from being a UX professional to software engineering a few
| years back. Sure I hadn't achieved anything close to being the
| director of design for a known tech firm; My design career was
| just starting to flourish when I'd made the move. But so much of
| the sentiment regarding confidence and self-doubt were the exact
| emotions that I had experienced . It felt as if there was this
| huge gap in knowledge that I'd never be able to fill. It took a
| lot of effort from me to overcome that fear of inadequacy and
| make the jump, so I know it must've not been easy for the author
| either. It's also funny how the activities she chose to express
| her desire to code - tinkering with Arduino, participating in
| Ludum Dare - were the exact stuff I was doing too!
|
| Huge congrats to Kristina, and I hope her engineering career
| brings her as much joy and fulfillment as it has brought me.
| 100011_100001 wrote:
| I went from a Sr. Manager to Jr. Developer. The pay cut sucked.
| The first year working as a developer was rough. Everyone
| assumed that I knew a lot because of my age, but I was mostly a
| newbie.
|
| Fast forward 8 years later, I am a Lead Developer and making
| double what I made as a Sr. Manager. I am still learning, I am
| still behind compared to my peers. Technology feels like it's
| moving too fast.
|
| But in the end, the best part is to open my IDE and write code.
| It makes me the happiest.
| notyourday wrote:
| Two questions:
|
| 1. Did the new role come with a pay cut? If no, it was not a
| demotion.
|
| 2. Is someone else pulling enough money where 1. did not matter?
| If so, then it is a hobby move.
| jansan wrote:
| She may have felt superior to software developers, so in her
| eyes it may look like a demotion.
|
| I run a small company which does software development and
| graphic design. i could describe myself as a CEO, entrepreneur,
| software engineer or graphic designer. But whenever someone
| asks me what my job is, I say "programmer". That's how I
| identify and IMHO it is a very challenging and honorable job.
| hinkley wrote:
| > During these few years in which I've been coding in earnest on
| the side, I also found myself regularly discouraged and confused
| by the sheer number of possible things that I could learn or do.
|
| AITOO who sees a huge disconnect between the number of viable
| technologies, the prereqs for job openings, and the notion that
| there is a 'shortage of developers'?
|
| I'm not sure what changed, or when, but it definitely feels like
| there are tons of tools that can solve the same set of problems,
| and the tech choice is more down to preference than killer
| features separating complete products from also-rans. The odds
| that a company whose ad intrigued you uses almost none of the
| same tools as your current employer seems to be growing, and yet
| the ads that admit to on the job training or humbly ask for "or a
| similar tool" seem to be no more prevalent than ten years ago.
|
| There are plenty of people, just not ones who believe in your
| goals and also have 3 years of Laravel and React Native
| experience. Or I think my favorite pairing so far, .NET and
| MongoDB.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Kind of frustrating to see this framed as a "demotion". But it's
| great to see someone starting over in a new career track that
| suits them better.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| It's tongue-in-cheek as a sibling commenter is saying, but I'd
| argue it's also quite literal.
|
| She was running the Product Design team at SO, assumably
| managing people, and went on to work as a staff software
| developer.
|
| I'm not making a judgement on the worth of the different jobs -
| I've been a manager, I'm now both a designer and a developer,
| and I personally prefer the latter above all else - and I don't
| think she is either. Maybe she even makes close to the same
| amount of money, who knows.
|
| It's just that by most organizational standards it is a
| demotion. At any rate, I don't see any of it derogatory for
| neither developers nor product design managers.
| cldellow wrote:
| > demotion (n) - a reduction in rank or status
|
| But it is a demotion! I think perhaps we view that as a
| negative thing when it's done as a punishment, or due to
| factors outside one's control. But in this case, she chose it
| (indeed, worked for it!), so she must think it was worth it.
|
| Her rank is literally demoted. She went from being high on the
| job ladder ("Director") to low on the job ladder ("Associate"),
| reflecting the fact that she's still developing the
| capabilities needed to do her new discipline. I guess maybe if
| one viewed this as a commentary on management vs IC work, it
| could be seen negatively -- but I didn't personally interpret
| the framing that way.
|
| Ditto for status - she likely went from having lots of soft
| power due to her time and relationships in the design org, to
| essentially starting over in the development org.
|
| Are these bad things? I don't think so. Presumably she was
| pretty clear on the short-term negative impacts of the change,
| and still wanted it.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| As I said in another comment, I completely agree with this.
|
| I guess you and I are taking a more literal definition of
| demotion, whereas others may interpret it through the lens of
| the feelings of shame that would normally come with it, or
| perhaps even through a more "anarchist" view that no man is
| ever above any other.
| amelius wrote:
| > demotion (n) - a reduction in rank or status
|
| Ok, it was a reduction in rank, but an increase in status (if
| you ask most software engineers) ;)
| munk-a wrote:
| I still disagree - I think there is too much of a conflation
| between managing people and rank/status. Once upon on a time
| master craftsmen were the pinnacles of their industries but
| mechanization has shifted the framing to place "doers" below
| "directors" - I don't think this is strictly accurate and
| prefer to think of people managers as peers that manage the
| interpersonal side of the business (which I think is quite
| important to take care of - I just suck at it) - similarly I
| think that directors, if they're good, are managing long term
| strategy and that senior craftsmen need to be in on this
| conversation to supply expert advice on what's possible
| similar to salespeople being in on the conversation to try
| and inform what may sell.
|
| Org-charts are about management structure and directors
| weirdly get very highly placed on them while their role isn't
| person-management driven. I've always found them exceeding
| strange except in their highlighting of SMEs and to aide in
| inter-departmental communication.
|
| But this all may just be the socialist in me shining through
| as someone working with a team to make widgets that do their
| thing well.
| cldellow wrote:
| I think I agree with almost all of what you said! I don't
| view ICs as below or above management, but as complementary
| to each other.
|
| I don't actually know what her role was, but I'm not sure
| it matters too much. Typically, I've seen directors in two
| kinds of capacity: people management or strategic/technical
| vision. For both of them, there's a ladder. For example
| your career progression might look like:
|
| - Manager, Senior Manager, Director - Product Designer,
| Product Design Lead, Director
|
| In both cases, "Director" isn't an entry-level role. You
| don't get hired into it fresh out of school, for example,
| and your scope of influence is expected to be much larger
| (regardless of whether you're influencing people or vision)
| than someone at the "bottom".
|
| By contrast, her new role (Associate Developer) _is_ an
| entry-level role.
|
| That's where I think the "demotion" terminology makes
| sense. I also agree with other commenters who note that
| it's most likely meant in a tongue-in-cheek way to drive
| clicks. But for me, there's a bit more to it than just the
| cheeky clickbait headline. Have you ever wanted to change
| things up at your company, but felt constrained, knowing
| that others would perceive you based on your previous
| performance in a previous role? I definitely have. The
| allure of a demotion seems pretty real to me.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| If you're a manager at a McDonald's, and you switch to being
| a programmer, were you demoted then too? I think every time
| I've heard the word 'demoted' it was in the context of
| staying on the same ladder. It just doesn't seem like the
| right word choice, even if it is arguably correct.
| fma wrote:
| The title wouldn't be as interested if it was "I followed
| my dreams to change my career a software developer"
|
| I do not view career changes as a promotion or demotion.
| You're starting at neutral.
|
| When I clicked the article I thought it would be about
| maybe a Senior Developer, Technical Manager or Architect
| going to developer...which...is kinda what happened to me
| (less meetings & responsibilities, more coding).
|
| But alas the story had little relationship to what I
| expected.
| dlkf wrote:
| I interpreted it as tongue-in-cheek. On my reading, the point
| of the article is that titles and prestige are far less
| important than being excited about what you're working on. If
| having a more fulfilling job means a less fancy title (and you
| can afford the pay cut) you should go for it.
|
| Sometimes people working in tech lose sight of why they went
| into this field. The author's enthusiasm is a great reminder
| why. Fantastic article.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I would agree with it being tongue-in-cheek. The wording
| could be chosen to not include the negative connotations
| though.
|
| These two are quite different:
|
| I followed my dreams and got demoted to software developer
|
| I follow my dreams and got promoted from Development Team
| Team to Software Developer
| munchbunny wrote:
| I think it's just to make an attention grabbing title.
|
| After reading this, I'm just genuinely happy for the author. I
| think that not everyone is in a position to do that kind of
| thing, but for those who can, I wish we all had that kind of
| courage and the willingness to put in the extra work to make it
| happen.
|
| For context, my last job change was also a diagonal step down
| and an overall step up in happiness. Not as dramatic though. I
| also did it because I felt like I was innately more suited to a
| different role.
| ballenf wrote:
| As someone who reached quite a high rung on the ladder (from
| outward appearances anyway) in a different career path prior to
| development, I think it's really healthy to see it as a
| demotion or step down.
|
| If you stay in denial and hang on to your old title or status,
| you will struggle coming to terms. Having relatively little
| influence over strategic decisions is super difficult as one
| example. Also no one really respects you for expertise you
| bring from a prior career either since they don't really know
| how to judge your "stature" in that field. Not to mention that
| if you mention it much at all, it can raise questions in
| colleagues minds about your dedication to the new field.
|
| All that being said, I couldn't be happier with my change and
| am so much happier as a person.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I am quite happy being a developer. In this the tail of my career
| I'm happy to work as a consultant with peers, getting contracts
| and billable hours for all of us.
|
| I never wanted management in a corporation. Used to be only half
| of America for instance worked in a big company. The rest of us
| worked in small business, or as individuals. That's changing I
| guess.
|
| I hope there continues to be room for those of us who prefer a
| life to a career.
| jmd509 wrote:
| As a non-technical professional (yes we also peruse HN), I can't
| stress enough the value of having career conversations early and
| often with your manager. It's not just HR mumbo-jumbo. OP's story
| is just one example of a potential benefit.
|
| Most organizations actively try to support internal mobility
| (admittedly with varied success). Companies invest resources in
| hiring, training, and keeping you. Your manager, as a
| representative of the company, is wise to amicably transfer an
| unsatisfied employee to another part of the organization. And as
| a human being, they probably want to see you engaged and happy at
| work, even if it means losing you to another team. Plus in this
| example, OP was a high performer and had already shown
| initiative, putting in legwork to upskill themselves for the new
| role. Demonstrated value/performance and initiative are always
| helpful when asking for something of your employer.
|
| Don't be dissuaded by cynical examples to the contrary - those
| who told their manager about other interests and suddenly and
| inexplicably got fired. Remember there are two sides to every
| story - for example, maybe they were underperforming and
| disengaged for a long time, and then randomly raised the question
| after their manager reached a breaking point? They won't share
| that in their post. Also remember availability bias - just
| because we see these people complaining on forums or "know a guy"
| doesn't mean it happens frequently enough in real life to be
| seriously concerned.
|
| In the end you'd be surprised what you accomplish by simply
| talking to your manager early and often, having general
| conversations about potential aspirations and leaving the door
| open for them to say "How can I help?"
| epsilonclose wrote:
| I don't know. For a sufficiently large change, it isn't
| necessarily in your company's best interest to try to keep you
| happy. You have banked knowledge and skill in X. You have
| limited skill in Y but wish to learn. The loss of some fraction
| of X is always going to hurt the company more than your gain in
| Y will benefit them, so they are going to try to keep you doing
| as much of X as possible for as long as possible. If they were
| to let you switch to Y, they'd have to have already needed a
| junior person there, and they will now have to replace the
| person doing X. Maybe this is a small vs large company thing,
| but I think it is entirely possible to "typecast" yourself into
| a corner such that the best thing you can do if you want to
| pivot is jump ship.
| xutopia wrote:
| I find too many workplaces see the only way for a developer to
| move ahead in their career is to become a manager. I'm glad I
| don't work at such a place.
|
| At my workplace those who really thrive on technical stuff can
| follow a path to technical glory and those who love the
| intricacies of managing people get to do just that. We end up
| with more competent managers and developers in the end.
| can16358p wrote:
| "Demoted" from a common perspective, promoted from a true
| perspective: life isn't that long to do something that you don't
| love, or at least that you love less. No matter how much less (if
| it does) they get paid, congratulations on following your dreams.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| My story has some similarities to Kristina's, but I didn't I get
| to choose when I switched. I went from being a "Flash"
| designer/developer, which I loved, to being unemployed and
| drowning in debt, to physically moving to another city, to going
| to a bootcamp. Fortunately I am stable now.
|
| The hard part is how 15 years of prior experience is mostly wiped
| out. It makes for a colorful background, but largely ignored.
| Recruiters called it "soft skills" when you have corporate
| experience, but it's not directly applicable to software
| development.
| vyndion_1427 wrote:
| Shaking off your former titles and successfully career changing
| is really hard to do, as I'm learning the hard way. Grats to her
| on her new opportunity!
| kodah wrote:
| An inspirational story that anyone, at any level, can always
| reinvent themselves given time, patience, and a plan. That said,
| "demotion" doesn't seem like the right word. Yes, going from
| Director to general population is technically a step down, but
| more realistically this is a lateral move. In a lateral move
| sometimes you get to keep your pay but almost never your rank.
| charlesu wrote:
| Does it say she kept her old salary? The going rate for a
| design director is probably a lot higher than that of an entry-
| level software engineer.
| mooreds wrote:
| Came here to ask this. It doesn't say, but I think that'd be
| a key part of the "frank discussions" she had with her
| manager.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Perhaps that's the explanation for the controversial
| "demoted" word ...
| kristinamay wrote:
| Hi! Blog post author here. I didn't keep my old salary, nope. I
| took a substantial pay cut in order to do this.
| kodah wrote:
| Ah, so not a lateral move. Demotion does make sense in that
| case, though, I wish that outcome would be different. It
| seems like whatever skills and experience you bring with you
| would still be relevant, even in an entirely different
| domain.
| kristinamay wrote:
| I was prepared for that and expecting it. I also didn't
| start at the very lowest rung of pay for this role: they
| took into account my years of building up knowledge about
| our product and other non-programming skills like
| communication and design in determining my new salary.
| nonamenoslogan wrote:
| Thanks for your insight. I'm at a similar crossroads
| currently and leaning toward staying in my current role.
| Basically about 14 years ago, I left a Fortune 500 company
| where I was a Network Administrator for a decade to go to a
| University and took a large pay cut to become an IT Analyst.
| Primary reason was wanting to get another degree, cheaply.
| After 7 years as an Analyst, I was promoted to manager of the
| team. After 3 years of that, I realized I wasn't good at
| managing people and I was a "do-er," and left from managing
| (with a HUGE paycut, again) to go back to Analyst in county
| government.
|
| Fast forward 3 years and here I am, being asked to be an
| Interim-Director as the director here is now retiring and I'm
| the only one with management experience. They are then in
| turn 'encouraging' me to apply for the full time director
| position, saying how I'm the most qualified and despite the
| "promote from within" policy, they want me to go up against
| external candidates to "earn" the job they asked me to
| interim.
|
| I've wracked my brain for a week now--I'm an engineer level
| do-er, I'm not a manager, but 22K a year is a NICE increase
| and I want to buy a home. Part of me says "thanks but no
| thanks, I'm not going to apply for a promotion to a job you
| obviously think I'm qualified for but won't offer out-right
| if its going to be a massive paradigm shift AGAIN for me,"
| and another part says, "Dude, you're so dumb if you don't
| apply for a job that pays 30% more than you're currently
| making!"
|
| I've got a couple weeks to decide--money isn't my driving
| factor, the ability to "turn off" at the end of the day is.
| thebean11 wrote:
| > Director to general population is technically a step down,
| but more realistically this is a lateral move.
|
| What makes you say this? An entry level SWE is lateral to a
| director who is presumably multiple rungs up on the org chart?
| kodah wrote:
| It could be considered a lateral move if she retained her
| pay, but she responded to my comment saying she didn't, which
| is unfortunate.
| CivBase wrote:
| Can someone explain to me why titles like Engineer, Architect,
| and Developer are perceived as having less value than titles like
| Manager or Director? Managing products requires a completely
| different skill set from managing people. Both skills are vital
| to the success of a business and neither are trivially developed
| or easily replaced.
|
| If you ask me, the "demotion" in this article is not going from
| Director of Design to Software Developer. The demotion is going
| from a senior level position to an entry level one. But that's
| not how it's presented.
| cccc4all wrote:
| As companies get larger and larger, the need to manage people
| becomes even greater challenge. The C level people start to
| disassociate from "tech" people and start associating more with
| "management". Even guys that start out as engineers, Mark
| Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, etc. get swallowed up by management
| layer deep state.
|
| You'll start noticing when the "Star" employees of the late
| stage start up are more from HR, director groups, instead of
| product, tech, etc.
|
| A single developer developing an app vs large team building an
| enterprise SAAS application have exponential differences.
| ballenf wrote:
| Making a big mistake as a manager can cost the company a lot
| more than a big mistake as an individual Engineer, Architect or
| Developer, especially if you consider that the latter roles
| will catch many of each others' mistakes.
|
| The manager level can result in entire teams quitting, failing
| to support each other or an atmosphere where catching each
| others' mistakes is discouraged.
|
| Some jobs are paid based (roughly) on the value they bring and
| others are paid based on the threat/cost of large mistakes.
| 100011_100001 wrote:
| This is factually not true. Developers can make big mistakes
| to bring entire companies down with them. Of course it
| depends on the definition of "mistake". However I can claim
| that a single defect caused by a developer can cost the
| company money and downtime, if nothing else a bad user
| experience.
|
| Managers don't generate defects. Developers do. Not to
| mention that a lot of the times it's much harder to reverse
| an engineering decision vs a managerial one.
|
| Most outages are caused by developers and IT, not managers.
| This perception that there is higher risk as a manager is
| false. As a developer I make multiple decisions daily,
| interpret vague requirements, make judgement calls, request
| new technologies etc. My manager understands about 20% of the
| decisions I make. Here is the kicker since I work in DevOps,
| with a super heavy emphasis on the Dev side. 70% of my
| decisions have wide ranging effect, much wider than my
| manager's eight person team.
|
| Finally note that no one really talks about 10x Managers, but
| people talk about 10x Developers. Why is that? Managers are
| glorified cheerleaders. Most managers are average, their
| value is vague but they are controlled by managers so its an
| endless loop till you hit the worker layer that get things
| done.
| jedberg wrote:
| You sound like someone who has never been a manager or has
| no idea what a manager does.
|
| Yes, you're right that defects are made by developers. But
| you'd be hard pressed to find an example of a software
| defect that destroyed a company. Even if you as a DevOps
| engineer cause your company to be down for a day, it
| probably would have little effect on your company's bottom
| line.
|
| I was in charge of Reliability for Netflix. Our whole site
| was down for Christmas Day one year. No one was fired, and
| it barely affected anything. That was a pretty major
| defect.
|
| However, the way that management handled that outage had a
| huge effect on the company surviving that incident. Making
| sure we focused on the right problems to solve to prevent
| it from happening again. Creating entire new groups of
| engineers and then hiring them to solve specific problems
| of moving traffic between regions.
|
| So yeah, management is really important, and a good manager
| is definitely more effective than a single engineer. And
| management decisions can destroy a company, but I doubt you
| can find even one example of a single engineer's decision
| that took down a company.
| 100011_100001 wrote:
| I was a Sr Manager for about 4 years, two different
| "teams", one IT based, one QA based. Regardless, perhaps
| we need to define the word "Manager", mainly because your
| example said:
|
| > Creating entire new groups of engineers and then hiring
| them to solve specific problems of moving traffic between
| regions.
|
| Albeit admirable, like heck yeah that was a great
| outcome, it's not a manager decision. Most likely it was
| a VP or Sr Director decision. Perhaps a manager brought
| it up as an idea. So if we are talking about Sr
| Director's+ then yes, their decisions can absolutely
| bring down a business. Granted I am not familiar with
| Netflix's org chart so perhaps it works differently, from
| some basic reading it looks like Netflix follows a
| decentralized command of sorts.
|
| My beef with the original poster was the implication of
| risk. Both managers and devs have risk with their
| decisions. It's not just a manager thing. In the end,
| when Netflix went down where did the mistake come from? A
| manager or an architecture decision? Probably it was
| both.
| jedberg wrote:
| > In the end, when Netflix went down where did the
| mistake come from? A manager or an architecture decision?
| Probably it was both.
|
| In that particular case it was an engineer making a
| mistake, but my point was that it wasn't anywhere close
| to a fatal mistake.
|
| But more importantly, when a team had repeated technical
| failures, it was usually the manager who suffered the
| consequences. Especially if their failures were causing
| problems with other teams.
|
| The manager had the higher risk job because they were
| blamed for their team's failures. Therefore they had to
| be compensated to account for that risk to their job.
|
| It's the same reason CEOs get huge golden parachutes.
| Because their job is constantly at risk for not only
| their decisions but the decisions of everyone below them.
| So they get compensated for that risk.
| CivBase wrote:
| Why does potential for costly mistakes result in greater
| perceived value and higher pay?
| ironmagma wrote:
| Higher risk begets higher premiums.
| CivBase wrote:
| Why?
|
| The relationship between contribution and compensation is
| obvious. If you bring more value to the company, the
| company compensates you directly with a portion of that
| value.
|
| But why does a position with greater risk necessitate
| greater compensation?
|
| _EDIT: Everything below here was in the original post.
| However, I re-read it and realized it had little to do
| with the relationship between risk and compensation._
|
| I don't buy the idea that managers are liable for the
| mistakes of their reports. That would cause a snowball
| effect in large organizations, resulting in extremely
| high turnover for leadership positions.
|
| Managers share _some_ liability for their reports '
| mistakes, but they also share some reward for their
| reports' successes. Those liabilities and rewards are
| split across all of their reports, resulting in what are
| usually relatively stable positions within a company. A
| lazy manager can get along by just regularly pruning
| reports who produce more liability than reward.
| ben509 wrote:
| > But why does a position with greater risk necessitate
| greater compensation?
|
| There are various methods to address risk:
|
| 1. Avoid the risk
|
| 2. Reduce the risk
|
| 3. Transfer the risk
|
| 4. Accept the risk
|
| When you buy insurance, you're doing #3. If you self-
| insure, you're doing #4. Either strategy requires putting
| some money towards premiums, the expected possible cost
| of the risk.
|
| It's much cheaper to pursue #1 or #2. You're then saving
| an amount exactly equal to the premiums don't have to pay
| under #3 or #4.
|
| Thus, you can pay a person to do #1/#2 a fraction of the
| equivalent cost of #3/#4 and still come out ahead.
|
| > A lazy manager can get along by just regularly pruning
| reports who produce more liability than reward.
|
| Yup, and the books will balance.
| ironmagma wrote:
| It's a generally accepted principle in economics/finance
| that the more risk you take on, the more up-front
| compensation you can expect. This is less about the risk
| the reports pose to the manager and more about the risk
| of the manager position itself and the high opportunity
| for spectacular failure.
| mtberatwork wrote:
| > Making a big mistake as a manager can cost the company a
| lot more than a big mistake as an individual Engineer,
| Architect or Developer, especially if you consider that the
| latter roles will catch many of each others' mistakes.
|
| Of course anything is possible, but there is often a chain of
| managerial command (managers of managers) to catch mistakes.
| It's pretty hard for a single, middling manager to inflict
| costly mistakes anymore than an individual engineer. Also,
| I've seen management levels that are 0 - 1 subordinates deep
| (managers of none).
| tyingq wrote:
| Because Leadership people make policy that rewards Leadership
| people. Consciously or not.
| username90 wrote:
| Yeah, managers higher up have a strong incentive to create
| compensation structures where managers are paid more the more
| people they manage. But like, being a manager doesn't say
| much at all about what you do. A non technical manager who
| managers engineers doesn't add much value and instead the
| engineers will be mostly self organizing, as such they are
| mostly there to provide administrative support. Your average
| office worker can do that, there is no reason such managers
| should be well compensated unless they also do other work
| like product management or similar.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Because, as a manager, you're responsible for the mistakes your
| people make, not them.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| "Associates" are fired with no warning and no reason.
|
| Employees are the first to get fired when a company
| struggles.
|
| Managers are less likely to be fired, and when it happens
| they can have more savings as they salaries are higher.
|
| CEOs quit failing companies with multi-million exit bonuses.
|
| So no, salaries are based on power, and so is the ability to
| dodge risks and responsibilities.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact
| of that decision has a multiplicative force.
|
| As an individual contributor, the impact of your decisions may
| be broad, but however broad your individual impact is, your
| manager's impact on you is [broad * number of directs], so it's
| always "greater" (note: not _better_ , just _greater_ ).
|
| So in _that_ sense, the "value" of a manager/director is
| "higher".
|
| IMO it's all just a series of roles, and you need someone to do
| both. Someone has to be designing and building code while
| someone _else_ attends meetings and understands the larger
| context of that code, making sure the code makes sense a week
| /month/year later.
|
| In fact, I prefer it when managers take on a much less "HR"
| role, and instead act as "go-fers" for their team, a la "how
| can I unblock you today?". Bonus points if they can mentor, but
| not necessary.
|
| Being an individual contributor isn't a "demotion", but it is a
| change in where your impact hits (people vs. things). You need
| both, and it's fundamentally a partnership, I wish more people
| realized that.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the
| impact of that decision has a multiplicative force._
|
| Every time I hear this explanation, I can't help but think
| "so we're still smoking Luck Strikes, huh?"
|
| When you make a decision as a software engineer, the impact
| of that decision can often have a multiplicative or even
| exponential force.
|
| The goal of 21st century organizations -- especially software
| organizations -- should be to make things scale in way that's
| at most sublinear with the number of people you throw at it.
|
| Automation prints money and businesses that can harness
| automation have huge profit margins.
|
| People are expensive and body shops are shitty companies
| waiting to be replaced when technology catches up with
| whatever work they're throwing bodies at.
|
| It's not 1960 anymore. Invest in your automators and treat
| your people managers as a low-value-add cost center.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| One question for you: how does an engineer know what to
| automate?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| How does a people manager know what to automate?
|
| And, more importantly, what might be the massive
| unintended consequences of routing your org's permission
| structure in the same way you route its head-count?
|
| Strategic decision-making is not the same as people
| managing, and people managing can even create blind-spots
| that get in the way of good decision-making.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| A manager (who said anything about people manager? I even
| explicitly said otherwise) knows what to build because
| she's coordinated with the groups who spend their entire
| day focusing on the customer, as well as the other
| developer groups to make sure everyone isn't working on
| the same thing, as well as leadership so they know what's
| being built and how it aligns with their goals and vision
| into the market (because that's what their expertise is
| in), as well as within her own team to make sure people
| are building things that can work together
| smoothly/cleanly, as well as covering for people who have
| illness/unavailability, and so on...
|
| Would you rather have developers wearing every hat in an
| org? When would they find time to code? I know many
| developers who don't want to have to do all of that work
| simultaneously, and are extremely grateful for a manager
| who can take many of these tasks off their plate.
|
| When was the last time you tried to add a recurring
| meeting to a development team's calendar? They... don't
| like it, in my experience, and I respect the hell out of
| that.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Where did I say we don't need managers? I explicitly said
| otherwise: _Invest in your automators and treat your
| people managers as a low-value-add cost center_.
|
| Just because you treat something as low-value-add or
| admit it's a cost center doesn't mean you don't need that
| work to happen!
|
| _> When was the last time you tried to add a recurring
| meeting to a development team 's calendar?_
|
| Yes, I agree, managers' secretarial and political work is
| incredibly important to the success of an org. But the
| 1960s idea that it's a "force multiplier" worth high comp
| is a mistake.
|
| I'm not contesting whether managerial work is important
| or necessary or to be respected. I'm contesting the idea
| that managerial work is a force multiplier for individual
| contributors, in any sense other than in the same sense
| that janitorial work or admin assistant work is a force
| multiplier. The only orgs where I've seen managers to be
| actual force multipliers were body shops.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| A good manager is worth 10x a good developer, and a good
| developer managed by a good manager is 100x base
| developer value.
|
| This is why managers often get paid more, and it applies
| even more the further up the chain you go. A good CEO is
| worth every single penny of the millions they get paid,
| because of the multiplicative force they have on everyone
| below them on the org chart.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> This is why managers often get paid more_
|
| I think we are disagreeing because we're talking past one
| another. Hopefully the following observation helps make
| my point:
|
| The average base pay for a manger in the USA is much
| lower than the average base pay for an engineer in the
| USA.
|
| I'm talking about _management as a discipline in general_
| and _engineering as a discipline in general_.
|
| _> A good manager is worth 10x a good developer, and a
| good developer managed by a good manager is 100x base
| developer value._
|
| Can you define "good" in a way that would allow us to
| empirically test this statement that doesn't make this
| statement a literal tautology?
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Even those tiny orgs follow what I'm talking about,
| you're mistaking bloat for specialization.
|
| The skills involved in figuring out what to build are
| entirely separate from the skills involved in building,
| and you are making the classic mistake of worshiping the
| skill of building to the exclusion of all other skills.
|
| It is much rarer to know what to build than it is to know
| how to build.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Even those tiny orgs follow what I 'm talking about,
| you're mistaking bloat for specialization._
|
| Right. The whole thing is a silly tautology.
|
| Good managers are force multipliers. Better hire good
| managers! and then if they don't force multiply they must
| not have been good managers :(
|
| It's literally an unfalsifiable tautology.
|
| _> The skills involved in figuring out what to build are
| entirely separate from the skills involved in building,
| and you are making the classic mistake of worshiping the
| skill of building to the exclusion of all other skills._
|
| "Knowing what to build" is not what 90+% of managers do.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| No, it is not a tautology. You are misusing that word.
|
| A good manager will improve the performance of her direct
| reports. If you can't understand this fact, then I don't
| think you and I have anything more to discuss.
|
| Have a good day!
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> A good manager will improve the performance of her
| direct reports._
|
| Right. A good manager indisputably force multiplies
| because a good manager is _defined_ as someone who
| improves the performance of her direct reports...
|
| Importantly, any empirical evidence that less management
| structure improves outcomes is easy to dismiss because
| it's really just proof that _the particular manager
| /company that failed_ wasn't a "good" manager/management
| structure. After all, if they were "good", then the
| output of engineers would have been multiplied, right?!
|
| Tautology (n): a statement that is true by necessity or
| by virtue of its logical form.
|
| Saying that we know _good_ managers force multiply by
| improving performance of reports -- and then defining
| "good" to mean "improve the performance of her direct
| reports" -- is absolutely a tautology.
|
| More importantly, ignoring empirical evidence by making a
| rational appeal to the truth of this tautology creates a
| rather pointless conversation.
|
| Given the choice between blind faith in a tautology that
| "good managers = good" and empirical evidence that
| sometimes "less emphasis on/power for managers = better",
| I prefer the latter.
|
| You have a good day as well :)
| CivBase wrote:
| > So in that sense, the "value" of a manager/director is
| "higher".
|
| That depends on how high the multiplier is and how many
| direct reports a manager has. A manager with 5 direct reports
| and a multiplier of 110% is only producing as much net value
| as 0.5 of his/her reports. A manager with 20 direct reports
| and a multiplier of 106% produces a net value of 1.2 of
| his/her reports.
|
| It's not safe to say that managers in general produce more
| value. Some do, some don't. It depends on their ability and
| the abilities of those they share a management relationship
| with. But the same could be said about
| engineers/architects/devs.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Much more importantly, it depends on the multiplicative
| effect that an engineer is positioned to have.
|
| It's 2002. Does a Kohls Director Of Whatever with tens of
| direct reports and thousands of people below those reports
| have more leverage than a single engineer at Amazon?
|
| It's 2021. Does a manager of hundreds of warehouse workers
| have more leverage/impact potential than a single engineer
| in a robotics R&D division?
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Totally fair. The potential impact a manager can have is
| much higher (good manager multiplying their positive impact
| across good engineers), but an ineffective manager can be
| less impactful (or even actively harmful) to their direct
| reports (bad engineer multiplying their negative impact
| across bad engineers).
| makapuf wrote:
| Problem is, an 1x manager with 2x engineers will often be
| credited for it.
| [deleted]
| 100011_100001 wrote:
| In a lot of companies Managers and Directors make more money
| than being a Developer. On top of that the perception of status
| is higher from the outside if you are a Director vs a
| Developer.
|
| Smart tech companies have two paths, the management and the
| engineer path. Where they both have certain expectations but
| there is no pay ceiling. Bad tech companies tend to disregard
| this and there is a point that you can no longer get a raise
| unless you "move up" and become a manager.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Smart tech companies have two paths, the management and the
| engineer path.
|
| In my 25 working years, I've learned this is mostly lip
| service. Yes, there are ICs who make as much as a VP. But
| look at Amazon. There are maybe ten people in that company
| that are IC level making what VPs make. And thousands of VPs.
|
| To be a VP, you have to be a really great manager. To get VP
| pay as an IC (ie. Distinguished Engineer), you have to be the
| best in the world in your field.
|
| So yeah, it's _possible_ to have equivalent tracks, but the
| reality is that you will never make as much as an IC than if
| you switch to the management track.
| 100011_100001 wrote:
| Absolutely true. Even non FAANG companies have that
| problem. For example in IBM you have to start producing new
| patents etc. In short the qualifications a VP vs an IC (as
| you called them) are in different stratospheres.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| This is true within companies but at least in Software is
| often not true between companies.
|
| E.g., the 2nd/3rd-to-last rung of a FAANG IC ladder makes
| _much_ more than managers and directors at most other
| companies in the USA.
|
| This is significant because it's much easier to become a
| senior IC at a FAANG than to become a Regional Director at
| the typical company in the USA.
| cccc4all wrote:
| I wish her well in her endeavors.
|
| Her staying at her current company is a warning flag. It doesn't
| sound like she went through any other interview process at other
| companies, so she doesn't yet have full understanding of what's
| required to be in software engineering field.
|
| The most likely path is that she will be guided into some sort of
| Software Development Management role after couple of lackluster
| years as "software developer" role. Many, if not most, software
| engineers burn out after couple of years or get into comfort zone
| and stagnate or get moved into management roles.
|
| There's huge propaganda push to get certain groups into software
| engineering, women, minorities, etc. The central planners decided
| software engineering field had to change. The motivation is
| mostly financial, they need to increase number of available
| candidates to drive down salary increases in software
| engineering.
|
| The quality of candidates has suffered because of this push, men,
| women, etc. Most people are simply not interested in software
| engineering field. Some people find out too late, after spending
| too much money and time trying to pursue a career in software
| engineering.
| spicymaki wrote:
| I just get a feeling that no matter how privileged you are, how
| intelligent you are, how high or low a position you are in, or
| how much money you make there is going to be some random article
| on HN to make you feel insecure.
| gumby wrote:
| What about it makes you insecure? It's about someone who
| changed jobs because they decided they'd prefer to do something
| else.
|
| It isn't one of those "in six weeks I turned my side gig into a
| Nobel-prize winning web site and now I'm a billionaire"
| clickbait articles.
| ysavir wrote:
| Probably due to the very poor and misleading article title,
| which frames the situation as a "demotion", something that
| happens _to_ us, not something that we _decide_ to do.
|
| The article has a good message, but the title is absolute
| click-bait. Many people might come across the title, and
| although not interested in reading it, walk away with the
| idea that following dreams leads to negative consequences. I
| hope the author changes it.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| The online article's title is a bit less click bait than
| the transcription here on HN, but it's still misleading.
|
| "I followed my dreams, left management, and love being a
| coder again" might be more on target.
|
| Demotion has a very negative connotation.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The article has a good message, but the title is
| absolute click-bait._
|
| Well, it is a demotion, though: "reduction in rank or
| status".
|
| And it's interesting here exactly because it was by choice.
| itronitron wrote:
| The title undermines any message that the author _may_ have
| cared about conveying. This is why I rarely read articles
| where the title has a whiff of clickbait.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Yeah, the title of the article is pretty poor. It kind of
| sounds like someone who was promoted from a developer to
| something else, rose to the level of their incompetence,
| then reversed the promotion to go back to doing what they
| enjoyed.
|
| This person was not a developer previously, so I don't
| understand how they were "demoted." Other than management >
| individual contributor.
|
| What really happened was they changed jobs to do something
| they found more fulfilling. Which is great, but if I
| decided to change careers to building furniture, I wouldn't
| say I "got demoted to making furniture."
| purple-again wrote:
| They were director of design! I am not part of that
| company so it's possible that director is a joke there
| but in most companies that's the highest level prior to
| the c suite/owners (public company/professional services
| firms). That would mean she likely had immense autonomy
| and a large group of direct reports whom themselves had
| teams of direct reports. Going from that to "just a
| coder" ie one team member of one team responsible for
| only their contributions to their current projects.
|
| In nearly every organization that would be a huge
| demotion WITH a huge pay cut. In this instance because
| coders are paid so much more than most other professions
| it's possible it was a lateral move or even a pay raise!
| But no question as far as responsibility for the
| direction of the organization it's a huge demotion.
| itronitron wrote:
| Outside of the film industry, director is usually a joke
| title.
| bradlys wrote:
| > That would mean she likely had immense autonomy and a
| large group of direct reports whom themselves had teams
| of direct reports.
|
| As someone who has worked at a variety of companies -
| this isn't true. It's just a title. I've seen plenty of
| "director of X" with no direct reports. I don't know how
| big Stack Overflow's design department is but with only
| 300 people in the company - I can't imagine it being
| massive enough to warrant a typical director title you'd
| see at some truly big corps where a director has 50+
| people under them.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I have seen all members of a sales team all have the
| title of 'Director of Business Development'
| simultaneously.
|
| I don't know what one calls the director of directors,
| though.
| lazide wrote:
| Senior director or Vice President (or in a team like you
| describe, 'sales manager' hah)
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Director to junior engineer is absolutely a demotion
| (albeit a voluntary one), and might even come with a
| paycut.
| pc86 wrote:
| She was a director (manager of managers), so going from
| that to an IC developer is absolutely a demotion by any
| definition of the word.
| ysavir wrote:
| If you want to be strict, sure. But there's no arguing
| that when people hear the term "demotion", it's almost
| universally regarded as a non-voluntary change of
| negative consequence. Perhaps if the title was "To follow
| my dreams I asked my manager for a demotion" it would be
| decent usage, but the current phrasing in the title is
| entirely misleading. It's probably the use of the word
| "got", implying that it was an external decision, not
| their own.
| throwaheyy wrote:
| Not really if it's by choice. She decided more to
| "retire" from being a director. A "demotion" is
| involuntary.
|
| It's not a demotion in the same way that voluntarily
| deciding on a career change from IC to management is not
| a promotion. A promotion is given to someone, not chosen
| by them.
| ballenf wrote:
| > Probably due to the very poor and misleading article
| title, which frames the situation as a "demotion",
| something that happens to us, not something that we decide
| to do.
|
| Not seeing the connection with that and feeling inferior. I
| agree with your point, just still can't figure out the top
| level comment.
| ysavir wrote:
| Not feeling inferior, but feeling insecure. The message
| in the title can easily reinforce people's insecurities
| and discourage them from pursuing their dreams, because
| they'll just get "demoted".
| gumby wrote:
| We have a fairly diversified economy. If you feel
| promotion is more important to you, pursue that. If you
| feel performing a different kind of task is important to
| you, pursue that. Neither is "better" in some absolute
| sense, much less moral sense.
|
| Life is full of tradeoffs though sometimes they are easy
| and that's wonderful ("doing X isn't worth the money to
| me" or "I don't really like doing Y but I don't mind
| because the extra money will allow me to Z"). Some people
| couldn't care less about titles (e.g. me) while some
| people think they are even more important than pay (e.g.
| my mum who grew up in such a culture). I can't claim
| either is bad or wrong; people just have different itches
| to scratch.
|
| The "choices" we should worry about are those forced upon
| people who don't actually have a choice ("I have to drag
| myself to my second minimum wage job because otherwise
| I'll be homeless").
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Don't look at it that way!
|
| Sometimes we by nature map self-worth to title... don't do it!
| At this point in my career, I'm a senior director, accountable
| for nine figures of turnover annually and driving things that
| truly matter and are meaningful to me. I'm reasonably good at
| what I do, and am blessed to have an incredible team. But, if I
| could make the money work and not have to relocate, I'd happily
| be a staff engineer again. I miss the technical problem solving
| (ie. learning alot about a thing vs. learning a little about
| 100 things), the small team and mentoring new people.
|
| I'm not grousing, it's just a different set of things, but I
| think that I would miss the "perks" of what I do now less. It
| also makes an impression on me that for a brief window,
| technical "stuff" made me a rockstar to my nieces and nephews
| 10-15 years ago. Now, my 9 year old eyerolls at my "conference
| call commando" skills.
| hinkley wrote:
| Security is an illusion and like kerning, you can both inform
| and break people by bringing their attention to the 'solutions'
| to that problem.
|
| There are other ways to look at the world. In some ways they
| can be both more and less stressful than contemporary western
| ideology.
| malux85 wrote:
| Curious, can you elaborate?
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm not the best messenger, but nothing is certain, and in
| some cases fighting against it makes you more susceptible
| to crushing disappointment.
|
| If you want to go all the way to Eastern Philosophy, you
| can, but even without going into that, there comes a point
| where contingency planning is more fruitful than doubling
| down on trying to force a thing to happen no matter what.
|
| Memento mori (remember you will die) as the Stoics say.
|
| Certainty is an illusion, one that romantic partners and
| anxious bosses in particular don't want to hear about.
| Great insight for a smoke jumper, not so good for
| valentine's day or SLA violations.
| twitch-chat wrote:
| I get a feeling you commented after reading the headline and
| didn't read the article. This is a positive story and I'm glad
| the person was given the opportunity to chase her dreams.
| [deleted]
| VSerge wrote:
| I second this wholeheartedly, it is a very positive story,
| albeit with a cheeky title. The article explains how a person
| in a "higher" position (director of design) made the active
| choice to change career path and start again as an associate
| developer.
|
| It didn't come out of thin air, as this person had been
| coding as a hobby for a few years (Ludum Dare rocks!). So she
| actually did have some skills, though maybe not as formal or
| structured as say, a tech recruiter, might want to.
|
| Furthermore, it's great that she is working in an
| organisation that would support such a change. It makes this
| career change much easier than having to quit your job and
| trying to get gigs or get hired without having formal
| credentials or experience.
| xivusr wrote:
| I related to a lot of this and really appreciate the authenticity
| and how humble the author is. Good luck on this next chapter and
| congratulations on pursuing your dreams! Also: keep doing the
| side projects :-)
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| Ah, nice to see the mention on Lua-based game libraries (Corona2D
| (now Solar2D), and Love2D), which have also fueled my programming
| interests in the teens.
| mdbauman wrote:
| I came here to say this as well. I'm glad these libraries (and
| Ludum Dare!) are encouraging people to explore programming.
| nix23 wrote:
| When you think Managers (Directors) are more worth then the
| peoples who actually create something.
|
| Maybe have a look at Gates and Musk who are actually engineers
| rather then Managers....or more correct Managing-Engineers.
|
| But congratulation for your "demotion".
| soperj wrote:
| I looked at Gates' game DONKEY.BAS, you're right in that he did
| create something...
| mssundaram wrote:
| What you're ignorant of is intangible value. Sure there are
| managers and C levels that don't, but I'd bet that most are
| successful at creating value that you're just quite not able to
| see.
| cambalache wrote:
| How convenient. A huge percentage of managers in large
| organizations are expert on talking the talk, read this:
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
|
| Any big organization will optimize for people who can extract
| as much value from their peers/subordinates and present it as
| their own.
|
| By the way, this does not mean they are not smart or hard
| working, but you could say the same about any other worker.
| nix23 wrote:
| >but I'd bet that most are successful at creating value that
| you're just quite not able to see.
|
| I did not say they create nothing, i just said that they
| should not be held to a higher "rank" than people who
| actually create something real, with that said there should
| not be a feeling of "demotion" from director to
| developer...quite the opposite in fact.
|
| BTW: Look at your reaction, instantly calling me ignorant
| because i think managers are just gears in the system and NOT
| drivers.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Most of the value that Gates created was as a pure manager.
|
| He was a programmer before, possibly amazing at it too, but I'd
| hardly say his role at Microsoft was that of an engineer-
| manager.
|
| He regularly attended engineering meetings throughout his
| tenure as CEO (he says so in that Netflix mini-series about
| him) but by far his largest drivers for creating value were how
| he envisioned software eating the world (esp. the enterprise),
| and how he executed a commercial strategy to perfection to
| build a monopoly around that vision.
|
| Not to downplay the difficulty of building operating systems at
| scale, or that Microsoft might have made some impressive
| innovations in the 80s and 90s, but they always had a
| reputation for their products being "OK" at best, so I'd argue
| their dominant position was acquired through wheelin' and
| dealin' more than anything else.
| nix23 wrote:
| I think he was more engineer than manager, hence Steve
| Ballmer.
| leowoo91 wrote:
| As someone trapped into the software, does anyone know how I can
| go out?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'd say just tough it out with the goal to F.I.R.E.
| gryn wrote:
| not all software developpers work in the US.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Implying that FIRE participants are only in the US is just
| as wrong as assuming all developers are in the US.
| gberger wrote:
| So?
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| It's much less practical of a goal in some places. High
| taxes for example, make it harder to save as much.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It might be harder, but could still be possible. Just
| because the US has lower taxes, doesn't mean expenses are
| the same (tons of variables) - just look at our
| healthcare costs.
| gberger wrote:
| I live in the UK and aiming for FIRE
| rantwasp wrote:
| do you like design? :)
| can16358p wrote:
| Sure. No one can tell you exactly what job to apply, only you
| know what you'd really love. If you feel "trapped", start
| searching for something that you love doing (and also can get
| paid for that) that doesn't feel trapped. When you find it,
| you'll feel that it's the right thing.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Unfortunately I'm never remotely qualified for the rare
| occasion I see I job I'd "love".
| idontpost wrote:
| So do what you need to do to become qualified.
|
| Or don't.
|
| It's your life.
| toyg wrote:
| If you want to get on the managerial side, you have to learn
| how to get people to listen to you and do what you ask of them.
| You have to become an annoyingly squeaky wheel and develop your
| soft-skill Jedi mind-tricks.
|
| Or you can drop it all and start your business, which means all
| of the above plus sales plus lots of patience and little or no
| pay.
|
| Otherwise, you can always change career completely.
| _wldu wrote:
| You are never _" just a whatever"_ and you should not think of
| yourself like that. You are a human and you have just as much
| value as any other. Your life experience and views create the
| diversity that makes us all strong.
| site-packages1 wrote:
| I think the title on HN is different than the title in the actual
| article, and has different implications. The HN title implies
| that getting "demoted" wasn't the goal but a bad effect of
| following dreams. The title from the actual article, "I followed
| my dreams to get demoted to software developer," is much better:
| clearly the "demotion" was the goal of following their dreams.
| seankimdesign wrote:
| Right, and given HN's policy towards preserving the original
| title when you can, it's especially puzzling as to why the
| title was edited to introduce this shade of negativity.
| kristinamay wrote:
| FWIW I saw the feedback in here on the title, agreed with the
| potential for misinterpretation, and changed it in the original
| blog post to make its intended meaning more clear. The title
| was correct when it was posted.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks for clearing that up. Changed above now!
| jonas21 wrote:
| Ah, interesting. One word can make a huge difference!
| onlyfortoday2 wrote:
| i thought this was going to be about someone who wanted to become
| a CTO but was stopped for some reason... weird title
| kevinventullo wrote:
| It's a little tongue-in-cheek, but at Facebook when an IC
| switches to EM, I often hear people offer their condolences. When
| an EM switches to IC, they are congratulated on their promotion.
| oakfr wrote:
| Kudos to you and to your manager. I feel like we all kind of
| "stutter" in our career... "You are smart as hell. Don't let it
| define you."
| nomdep wrote:
| A terrible career move. As other commenter said, if there wasn't
| a pay cut, is because of the company charity.
|
| Now she has to be not only a good coder but a great one, (and in
| a tech stack she didn't had used already).
|
| Otherwise, a year from now, they might not feel so charitable,
| and the story will be "from director of design to fired IC".
|
| A friend of mine made a similar mistake once, believing the BS of
| the "parallel management and engineering tracks".
| seankimdesign wrote:
| I wouldn't jump to that conclusion so fast. It depends on what
| you're looking for in your career. I too have made a similar
| move from UX designer -> Junior engineer a few years back. The
| paycut hurt at the beginning and it took a lot of self-
| learning, but looking back I'm very with the decision I made.
| We spend so much of our lives at work, so what's wrong with
| aligning it with something you love?
|
| Besides, it's not like software engineering doesn't pay. Even
| before I landed by current SV big tech job, I had more than
| made up for the initial paycut I took at a local startup.
| heisenbit wrote:
| You underestimate the value of having a different perspective.
| Yes, it can be a bad move if she is a disaster at coding. But
| think about what value for the company it is to have a
| developer who has a clue about design and can communicate way
| above average. How much of our developer job is really about
| coding?
|
| It is a risky move and not one I would recommend to anyone -
| but it is one I've done myself (incl. pay cut) to get the
| experience to boost my career. Also keep in mind that careers
| span decades and while specialization is sought the landscape
| does shift (sometimes quickly) and diversity of skills can
| provide a degree of robustness.
|
| And yes, the career track slides are not a foundation on which
| to base decisions.
| SamBam wrote:
| I'll add my reply that I was typing out for the other post
| before it was deleted.
|
| To make your assertion requires far too many assumptions for
| you to know whether this was an act of "charity" or not.
|
| People are with more than their paper skill sets. If this
| person had been working at Stack Overflow for years, then she
| probably knows far more about the company itself than a new CS
| grad. That can be a huge asset. Likewise, her experience of
| being a manager of the Production Design team, and the Director
| of Design, can be great experiences to add depth to the
| development team.
|
| I am a senior software engineer. I am far from the best
| programmer on my team. A new CS grad could probably out-
| whiteboard any CS problem thrown at me. But my knowledge of 12
| years of the company's development history, my gut-
| understanding of what kinds of decisions are good for the
| company, my ability to communicate well with product owners and
| elicit the right kinds of information and foresee design
| problems before they happen all contribute to me being an
| invaluable member of the team.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| Best career move I ever made was to quit a managerial job and
| learn coding.
|
| Three years later I was making more $$ as an IC with none of
| the stress and nuisance of management.
|
| Five years later I was making 2x my old salary and
| significantly happier w my day to day work.
|
| To each their own...
| sethammons wrote:
| That's interesting. I'm facing the choice of going to
| management for a pay cut in the short term but with longer
| term potential upside.
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| I wonder how many other of us have had "non conventional"
| careers, stepping down from (whatever) higher paying positions in
| order to work as developers. Similar to the author of the
| article, I stepped down from management, took a pay cut, in order
| to become a developer. Eventually, after many years, my pay
| caught up and the temporary sacrifice was totally worth it.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I've been thinking about going the other way
| (developer->something else) and all I have to say is holy shit
| being in software is in many ways a godsend. When I look at
| other fields and the credentials required/pay it's somewhat a
| marvel that some uneducated kid with barely no experience such
| as myself was able to get into what's considered a high paying
| technical field.
| soneca wrote:
| Similar here. I took a 50% cut from a Director at an NGO to
| junior frontend developer (with a 8-month no earnings interval
| while I studied software development). Now, 4 years later, I am
| earning 6 times that pre-dev earnings.
| mettamage wrote:
| I studied a bachelor CS / master CS, having worked for 2 years
| (odd jobs as a dev), and I have to struggle interview after
| interview by myself. I dream about getting this kind of
| mentorship from a such an amazing company. Yet, when I apply to
| Stackoverflow, I don't even get a chance to be interviewed. The
| mentorship that she received is so super lucky, I hope she
| realizes that.
|
| I'll bet you this: if I (or most CS master graduates from The
| Netherlands [1]) would receive a similar kind of treatment, then
| they'd nail that software developer position in terms of skill
| [2].
|
| [1] I can't comment on other CS master programs, but I've
| followed lectures at: Utrecht, Amsterdam (both of them) and have
| seen what they're capable of at Delft.
|
| [2] I'm not making claims about culture or communication.
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