> To help guard against discussion about career growth getting lost entirely, Spellbook conducts annual and midyear reviews of its employees, Stevenson said. That allows for "really deep conversation" about workers' careers and how to level up and advance, he said.
I have never had a "really deep conversation" about my career at a mid/full year review. Often, that's where I get feedback about something that happened months ago I was unaware my manager thought needed improvement.
The in-the-trenches feedback mentioned in the article would be an improvement over the lack-of-any feedback.
All of my favorite roles were actually not ones with the most interesting technical challenges, they were the ones where I felt like I had real leverage I could wield through my manager. If you want to get anything meaningful done, you need buy-in from leadership, and it's very difficult to get that when your manager is not on-board.
At least for myself as a manager, it’s simply that I don’t have the time. There are people on my team that I care about and want to grow but I’m so fucking tired myself. I put as much as I can into teaching, but at some point it’s not my responsibility to help a person understand. Seeing this article kind of made me laugh because it’s every fear I have. I’ve only been at this for 10 years, and I’m taking a sabbatical because of the burn-out. I’ve yet to figure out if I’m exhausted or if the world just keeps taking more and more, every single year. It drives me insane to have Sr. Managers/Directors/etc. act like it’s normal to push and push and expect IC’s to grind on large, hard projects, and then immediately start on another one. Where is the R&R time? Where’s the time for MOB? Tech debt? General learning? There’s no time for anything anymore.
AI has been great as a tool, but you need humans with brainpower to operate that tool. I’ve yet to see a use case where AI has actually made my life easier. It has helped me to crank out code but I could’ve done that given time. Overall I’ve turned into a feature factory instead of having time to think about anything.
Bleak. This flat and fast structure assumes that ICs are all senior devs, able to be largely autonomous. Who supports the junior engineer who is struggling?
There’s a lot of talk about how AI shifted the job market away from junior roles, but companies had already removed the management capacity for them.
Is there a newer 'be autonomous' culture? Or did I just grow up a bit?
10-20 years ago people would love to talk about technical topics. Ask help, give help, offer pointers, debate merits.
Now I guess we ask AI, figure it out ourselves, and/or grin and bear it?
What happened? Is it from remote work? Or everything's easy now? Or nobody wants to stick their neck out? Time constraints? Knowledge gaps?
I don't struggle, exactly, but I run up into all kinds of situations where there's no obvious best choice (everything's awesome and everything is too limited all at once), so either some tough choices need to be made or maybe there IS a better way but it's just VERY non-documented or too much of a PITA to do right away (or simply, silo'd and well-protected).
There ARE avenues to get things done. There ARE multiple valid channels to ask or follow up in. The answer is basically: do it, don't ask. And yet...
GIVEN an culture/expectation/want to be "autonomous" (heck that's what agents need to be, mostly), I think something is missing.
It's like people learned somewhere "be independent", "be autonomous", "don't require help" as somehow "virtuous" outside of the "normal" bounds.
Am I the only one noticing this? Or did something shift?
It's a new culture. Combination of AI making junior engineers redundant, new grad skill levels cratering if they used AI to skate their way through college, and filtering through job applications being functionally impossible with huge floods of perfect ai generated resumes etc leading people to fall back to hiring through their network instead of applicants from open listings (and senior engineers are going to have better developed networks). And at least personally (+ for people around me) - AIs increased productivity comes with increased cognitive load and workload.
Plus you don't want to take a risk on training a new grad anymore because usually they'll leave after a couple years, which was a good thing since you'd backfill with a new grad some other company had trained/ideas circulated in the industry/early career engineers built their networks and got exposure to different tech stacks and company styles etc. that's really tough now too since nobody else is hiring and training juniors so you would be wasting time and effort training some for some other company to hire away - nash equilibriulm vibes.
So yes something shifted- the new grad/junior market is in the gutter rn. And if AI plateaus in this range of capability idk what happens as the current generation of engineers age out/retire. The juniors that aren't being trained today are going to lead to a vacuum of senior engineers tomorrow.
It's very unlikely that your manager has any real organizational incentive to care about your career. It's rare for direct-report-career-growth to be more than one line item near the bottom of the list that they are being evaluated on. Across all of my jobs I've only had one manager that was interested, some even seemed to actively get in the way.
The "why" in this article doesn't exactly make sense to me. If the argument were "economic conditions suck in the industry right now so managers have to write more code", sure. But "AI" is supposed to be saving us time writing code so we can focus on other things.
One flaw in the article is that the sample size of surveyed people is quite small and seems biased toward a particular type of company.
> If you work in tech, your manager might still care about your career. They just might not have enough time to do much about it.
Narrator: They never did.
It is a free-for-all office politics game and it is your own responsibility and no-one else for your 'career' and it affects ALL levels from junior to senior staff.
> To help guard against discussion about career growth getting lost entirely, Spellbook conducts annual and midyear reviews of its employees, Stevenson said. That allows for "really deep conversation" about workers' careers and how to level up and advance, he said.
I have never had a "really deep conversation" about my career at a mid/full year review. Often, that's where I get feedback about something that happened months ago I was unaware my manager thought needed improvement.
The in-the-trenches feedback mentioned in the article would be an improvement over the lack-of-any feedback.
All of my favorite roles were actually not ones with the most interesting technical challenges, they were the ones where I felt like I had real leverage I could wield through my manager. If you want to get anything meaningful done, you need buy-in from leadership, and it's very difficult to get that when your manager is not on-board.
At least for myself as a manager, it’s simply that I don’t have the time. There are people on my team that I care about and want to grow but I’m so fucking tired myself. I put as much as I can into teaching, but at some point it’s not my responsibility to help a person understand. Seeing this article kind of made me laugh because it’s every fear I have. I’ve only been at this for 10 years, and I’m taking a sabbatical because of the burn-out. I’ve yet to figure out if I’m exhausted or if the world just keeps taking more and more, every single year. It drives me insane to have Sr. Managers/Directors/etc. act like it’s normal to push and push and expect IC’s to grind on large, hard projects, and then immediately start on another one. Where is the R&R time? Where’s the time for MOB? Tech debt? General learning? There’s no time for anything anymore.
AI has been great as a tool, but you need humans with brainpower to operate that tool. I’ve yet to see a use case where AI has actually made my life easier. It has helped me to crank out code but I could’ve done that given time. Overall I’ve turned into a feature factory instead of having time to think about anything.
Bleak. This flat and fast structure assumes that ICs are all senior devs, able to be largely autonomous. Who supports the junior engineer who is struggling?
There’s a lot of talk about how AI shifted the job market away from junior roles, but companies had already removed the management capacity for them.
Is there a newer 'be autonomous' culture? Or did I just grow up a bit?
10-20 years ago people would love to talk about technical topics. Ask help, give help, offer pointers, debate merits.
Now I guess we ask AI, figure it out ourselves, and/or grin and bear it?
What happened? Is it from remote work? Or everything's easy now? Or nobody wants to stick their neck out? Time constraints? Knowledge gaps?
I don't struggle, exactly, but I run up into all kinds of situations where there's no obvious best choice (everything's awesome and everything is too limited all at once), so either some tough choices need to be made or maybe there IS a better way but it's just VERY non-documented or too much of a PITA to do right away (or simply, silo'd and well-protected).
There ARE avenues to get things done. There ARE multiple valid channels to ask or follow up in. The answer is basically: do it, don't ask. And yet...
GIVEN an culture/expectation/want to be "autonomous" (heck that's what agents need to be, mostly), I think something is missing.
It's like people learned somewhere "be independent", "be autonomous", "don't require help" as somehow "virtuous" outside of the "normal" bounds.
Am I the only one noticing this? Or did something shift?
It's a new culture. Combination of AI making junior engineers redundant, new grad skill levels cratering if they used AI to skate their way through college, and filtering through job applications being functionally impossible with huge floods of perfect ai generated resumes etc leading people to fall back to hiring through their network instead of applicants from open listings (and senior engineers are going to have better developed networks). And at least personally (+ for people around me) - AIs increased productivity comes with increased cognitive load and workload.
Plus you don't want to take a risk on training a new grad anymore because usually they'll leave after a couple years, which was a good thing since you'd backfill with a new grad some other company had trained/ideas circulated in the industry/early career engineers built their networks and got exposure to different tech stacks and company styles etc. that's really tough now too since nobody else is hiring and training juniors so you would be wasting time and effort training some for some other company to hire away - nash equilibriulm vibes.
So yes something shifted- the new grad/junior market is in the gutter rn. And if AI plateaus in this range of capability idk what happens as the current generation of engineers age out/retire. The juniors that aren't being trained today are going to lead to a vacuum of senior engineers tomorrow.
I always thought "be autonomous" meant "don't sit around waiting for someone to notice you're blocked", not "never consult with your colleagues".
It's very unlikely that your manager has any real organizational incentive to care about your career. It's rare for direct-report-career-growth to be more than one line item near the bottom of the list that they are being evaluated on. Across all of my jobs I've only had one manager that was interested, some even seemed to actively get in the way.
The "why" in this article doesn't exactly make sense to me. If the argument were "economic conditions suck in the industry right now so managers have to write more code", sure. But "AI" is supposed to be saving us time writing code so we can focus on other things.
One flaw in the article is that the sample size of surveyed people is quite small and seems biased toward a particular type of company.
https://archive.ph/iRDL8
Never did; they only really care about theirs.
> If you work in tech, your manager might still care about your career. They just might not have enough time to do much about it.
Narrator: They never did.
It is a free-for-all office politics game and it is your own responsibility and no-one else for your 'career' and it affects ALL levels from junior to senior staff.
So you are saying: backstab your manager and get them fired so you can take their place?
It's not like they ever hesitate to do that to you when it benefits them in some way.
Your career is your own responsibility. It isn’t your manager’s responsibility.
A manager that does not care about the careers of the people on their team is not a good manager
If you care about being a good manager you should care about building your teams careers
Your career extends beyond your current manager.
Your manager can help, but they are not responsible for your career.
No one said they are responsible for your career, but they should care about it while you work for them at least. :/
That really doesn't seem like it should be controversial
Yes we’re saying the same thing.
Found the manager.
[dead]