Ask HN: Unhappy with current position. – Need Advice | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Unhappy with current position. – Need Advice

3 pointsChallengeWork3 comments

Hello HN! I am currently working as a C#/.NET dev and have been at my current company almost 2 years.

This is my first position out college, and while I have learned a lot I am beginning to feel un-challenged, bored, and annoyed.

I have relayed this all to my manager (who has only been here for 1.5 months), and I have gotten no feedback. I have also been waiting 5 months for a review (I first asked for it five months ago). The lack of focus/goals at any level in the company is what is most annoying (Aside from my almost 1 hour 45 minute round trip commute each day).

All I really want is to work on software that helps others, keep learning, and work with other intelligent people (I previously worked with 2 other devs, but I am the only dev at the company again).

I just feel like this position is stagnating, and I don't want to feel that way any longer. I'm not sure if I should begin looking for new jobs, or just stick it out and see how it plays out. Any advice is appreciated.

Is there a position within your company that you'd like to be in (some other team doing more exciting work, etc)? If so, try to figure out what it'd take to move there. If not, get a new job.

But before doing that, do the following (which you should be doing anyway):

* learn about new things in your / neighbouring fields that interest you - this is a career where you want to be learning all the time, and much of the learning will be on your own time/dime (the upshot is that you don't need to slog thhrough new things - breadth is more important than depth)

* keep an eye on the potential new jobs (interesting new jobs or companies), maybe apply to a few places to see how far you go

* increase your visibility; blog, relevant activity on hn/reddit/stackoverflow/quora/..., source code examples or open source contributions, community involvement (organising / speaking on events), screencasting your coding sessions - whatever sounds more fun to you

Doing these three will help make you more valuable (and more clearly valuable) to the company so that you might have an easier time of convincing your manager(s) to give you more challenges/responsibility, and if that fails, you'll be in much better position when looking for a new job.

Not particularly - since I work for a non-tech company doing dev work it's pretty stale and the open positions are unrelated to dev work.

Well there is very little information here, but i will just throw my suggestion in the bucket.

You already have 2 years of experience it should be perfect for you to start applying to other companies.

There are tons of jobs out there, you can be sure that if you are proficient you will clear 6 out of 10 interviews.

Also if you are bored n have lot of time and energy left after work you can learn a few new technologies like Cloud, AI etc,. in this time and accumulate tons of skills and then make a big switch with big package and company of your dreams and stuff. In this case you may decide to spend 3 to 6 months more in same company irrespective of how it goes.

But while you switch you also have to pay attention to make sure same issues doesn't crop up in the new place.

You can ask enough question during interview to filter the right job.

You can make a list of priority items and if the current job doesn't match more than 50% of them simply switch.

Don't be too confused, Try to get a better opportunity and if you can just go for it. You cannot switch companies every few months but making a first switch at 2 years is definitely not bad.

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