Nobody is coming to save your career

sheikhnbake

would be pretty sick to have a career to save in the first place

pjmlp

> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.” Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.

pm90

What many of these articles miss is that even if you do everything they say you will still not get the promotion you want for several reasons. My advice for Career Growth for engineers who like to do things is to be willing to take on problems that others might not want, things that aren’t “sexy”, if you find them interesting. Theres a lot of interesting problems and you can grow your career by following the direction that interests you rather than the company. And when it comes to promotions, its often easier and better compensated to get a new job rather than trying to convince a bunch of people that you should be promoted.

kyoob

Whether or not your manager is capable of helping you shape your career is an open question, for sure. But 20 people, over an 18-year career, and not a single one of them bring it up in a 1:1? And, oh okay, all those managers have worked at the same company? Seems like maybe a culture problem. I've had plenty of managers in sub-FAANG enterprises bring it up unprompted.

francisofascii

There is good advice here for sure, but the tone seemed focused on growing your career rather than "saving" it. Most people now want to know how to still be employed in this industry 10 years from now. Maybe this advice will be consistent with this goal, but I fear climbing the corporate ladder could make you more vulnerable to cuts and lead to burnout.

woeirua

Is a manager “good” if they’re not talking about your career growth? I disagree with the author on this point so the rest of it really doesn’t follow. Then again, he also had 20 managers in 18 years… so yeah I can see why none of his managers ever got around to asking about his career growth.

pkorzeniewski

Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.

moritonal

Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career. "I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history. "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird. "I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work. "Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally. "You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.

cmos

I always talked with the people I managed about their career goals, and always tried to adapt their job to be a closer fit to those goals. When I couldn't do that I would acknowledge that and even help them find a different job that did fit. How else can we expect to get the best out of people?

kwanbix

> Your company has figured out the perfect arrangement. You’re good at your job, and you don’t cause problems. Your manager knows they can count on you. From the company’s perspective, this is the ideal state. Why would they change anything? Whish I had knew this earlier in my career. I worked for IBM. I was very good at delivering usable software for internal use. They kept me there forever. They would give me awards and such, but never a change as the author says. If I needed something, I had to do it myself.

icemanx

It always surprised me when people talked about their Bosses / Managers like they were some sort of gods that were going to save them and protect them from all bad things in the world.

sailfast

Just gonna say that while thinking through your direct reports' career progression is not the only job you have as a manager, it is definitely an important part of the work and something that is prioritized at some companies. This article paints a dire picture of what managers could be like if they worked in healthier organizations (mentally, anyway?). There are two reasons for this. 1. Retention is good. And if you think about your direct's careers, you will retain them longer and build a better relationship because they will have more help being successful inside the company (assuming a larger org here) 2. It's actually part of the job description and something EMs are evaluated on at some companies. #2 is probably more rare these days, but it still exists, occasionally. Until it doesn't. To be clear, I don't disagree with the author's hypothesis in this emergent AI world - I think companies will completely forget to think about this soon - but over the last 10 years it's definitely been an important part of my career as a manager to help my employees succeed in their careers. It's very rewarding.

ike2792

I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?

rc_mob

its even worse than this. managers will pretend to br your career coach for one day per year at your employee reviews. theyll give you advice and even in the moment that manager will think to themselves how they want to help you. they still won't help, the post is correct about that.

stego-tech

It used to be that managers would take capable workers under their mentorship and prepare them to move into their old role, as their manager was helping them do the same. Everyone extended a hand down to pull someone up, because companies promoted internally and hired from within. That's not the case anymore. Your manager won't mentor you not because they don't want to, but because they're also struggling to find footing and progression in a corporate world where nobody gives a shit about the folks beneath them, nor do they have any vested interest in long-term organizational health. It's not personal, it's just the system our predecessors put into practice so they could have an easier time keeping money and power for themselves. If we want to care about the careers of others again, we have to build institutions where mentorship and training happen, as well as where good ideas are recognized and rewarded. That's something even the most "meritorious" of SV companies completely lack atm, and they're viewed as the companies to emulate by the rest of the investor class and industry. Until and unless other companies reject those fads in favor of strategies that grow and improve their orgs from within again, we're all kind of on our own.

dec0dedab0de

Every manager I ever had has spent time working on career growth with me. This is in fortune 100 companies, and smaller late stage startups.. heck, even when I worked in retail in the 90s they would have these conversations. What is going on at amazon?

zug_zug

I don't think any of this old-school advice applies when our employers are trying to go agentic in the next 5 years.

g947o

I recently went through an internal transfer at my company, moving to a very distant organization. My manager and my skip manager tried to persuade me out of the idea, saying they "want to make sure this is the correct decision". I politely acknowledged their concerns and declined. (It's not like they were offering anything for me to stay.) I really wanted to say, "If it's a bad decision, it's my decision. You guys couldn't care less about my career growth, otherwise you'd have promoted me or given me bigger scope. You just care about shipping products and staff retention."

jeffrallen

I am responsible for my colleague's careers, and they for mine. This guy is apparently a jerk, who apparently thrived in a jerk atmosphere. Don't listen to him.

genadym

Steve makes the key point precisely: "AI is compressing the value of routine expertise... If your entire value is built on repeating what you already know how to do, that value is shrinking." But what is the alternative? Most answers land on "learn new skills faster" — which is still repeating what you already know how to do, just in a different domain. The compression will catch up. The capacity that doesn't compress is the one that operates before expertise: arriving at a genuinely unknown situation without a preset conclusion, staying open to what's actually there, finding the structure underneath it before you know what to look for. That's not a skill category most professional development tracks for — and it's exactly what determines whether a person directs AI or is directed by it. Wrote about this specifically: https://medium.com/@genady_awarelife/youre-not-competing-wit...