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Comment by copper | Hacker News Reader

> Similarly, if you manage a junior employee and they ask you about their career development, you can say what comes naturally and generally get away with it.

Somehow, the wording of that statement makes me reluctant to work for the author as a junior employee.

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His point was that you can be more open and easy going with junior employees. Letting an ambitious programmer lead a project of his own is pretty low risk.

There's also much more room for creating opportunity for one person without removing it for someone else.

In a business there's usually only one spot for a COO, but you can have many senior developers. Therefore the stakes are lower, because other members of staff don't see an opportunity vanishing when a promotion to senior dev is announced.

Hm, where's vgr when you need him :) His Office posts tend to nail this particular point of the story nicely.

He's saying that a junior employee, who isn't experienced with corporate politics will take your advice to heart and that'll be the end of it. With the executive team, they're much more likely to use that advice as political ammunition, so you should be careful with what you tell them when they ask for more responsibility.

Oh, his point is perfectly clear - I particularly like the example that follows. It's just the choice of words is so unfortunate as to obscure the rest of the message.

For what it's worth, though, he underestimates the harm that a politically naive junior employee might be capable of wreaking - by simply being ignorant of political undercurrents that might exist.

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