Nobody is coming to save your career
alifeengineered.substack.com
alifeengineered.substack.com
"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.
From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
People also get old and retire (or die). By moving people around a bit you ensure that your training plan still works because you are using it. This also means there will be openings to move up the ladder, make sure you get the people on them. (There are stories from my company where after a big layout they got scared and hired almost nobody for the next 20 years, then those who made it passed the layoffs started retiring and there wasn't a mid level of engineers following to promote).
But this one didn’t. 20 years at one place, at least 10 with minimal support. Maybe all those managers were bad; but maybe they realized this individual wasn’t a flight risk, and had a reasonable strategy for maximizing what they got out of them, since they knew they didn’t have to guard against departure.
Now weird at all, and maybe that's "most managers" within your career? I've seen my share of complacent managers who were fine with status quo.
I don't know why people assume managers are interested in increasing salaries and distributing promotions. Every incentive and preference works against those things. If you want change, you have to ask for it.
They'll just keep selling and profit gaining anyway possible. Give me a product where they legitimately care.
A dimension people hate looking at is credit is far too easy in the US, which means too many companies are heavily optimized for extracting that money from people that didn’t really earn it in the first place. This means a lot of the smartest workers are preoccupied on the wrong things instead of helping advance society.
Credit is a great tool if you get the value of the thing while you are paying for it. Paying for a car on credit (including insurance, taxes, fuel, maintenance...) is a great idea if you get the car payment worth of value (including what it does for your ego - if you are honest that is why you have it) from having a car every month , paying for a car on credit that you don't get the payments worth of value from is a waste. Similar for a house - I plan to live in this house for the next 10+ years, so I shouldn't pay for it all up front.
Most things though don't give value over time worth their payment. I don't get a payments worth of value from having gone on vacation a few months ago, so I should have paid for that up front (which I did but many do not). I like musical instruments, but I can't be sure to get $100/month of value out of my fumbling playing (or having them for my ego) so I won't buy them on credit.
You can't take it with you, so no sense in dieing with a mattress full of cash (unless that really is worth it to you). You should have some rainy day savings. Most things in life get value today only and should be paid for today.
This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.
one who expects the worst, yet is continually surprised when they get it. Sometimes secretly an embarrassed optimist.
My first loyalty is to my team, and it's been clear to me why I have not rising as high.
Don't assume everyone is like the worst person in your head.
That said, if you bring this opinion to your next job then you also won't really leave much room to build these connections at a personal level. My one suggestion would be to leave a BIT of room for vulnerability and caring about folks at a personal level - even if the company is secondary here. In the end, people matter and the relationships you build will be the thing that sustains you in your career.
Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.
If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.
On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.
I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.
Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.
I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.
This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.
I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.
"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin
Also, for what it's worth, when I was let go from my previous job, my former manager actually kept checking my LinkedIn profile on a weekly basis, presumably to see if I'd landed a job. I think that might count as "giving a shit".
Not that I gave a shit. I was 46-50 and on my 8th job and knew what I was getting myself into from day one. I came in with a plan and had a job and multiple offers within 10 days
Managers will sometimes not help you because they are lazy. In a few cases culture will make them discriminate against you. However in general managers like you and want you to do well.
Any manager will let me go if their manager tells them to.
If you treat your managers like soulless entities and don’t build relationships with them, they’ll probably do the same to you. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
When I was being recruited as a strategic early hire, one of my requirements was that I must report to the CTO/director and not a line level toothless engineering manager.
Also, every meaningful raise I’ve gotten has only come when I was reporting to someone above a line level manager.
>really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor”
That's fair. Though I didn't choose my domain for the reasons you work. So I cared more about managers who felt like they were empathetic and invested their time to help me succeed. Not whoever can have me climb the corporate ladder the fastest.
Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.
To a lesser extent performance reviews / ratings are the same - "you're doing great, keep it up!" - they don't really tell you what you need to do to progress. You have to figure that out and drive it for yourself.
The important part is when you do something that saves the day make sure people know. Never save the day quietly, if you write some defensive code so you don't get an emergency call at 2am you won't get promoted for saving the day at 2am! You have to make sure everyone knows you wrote that code. I've seen many people over my career who did those quiet works - they got a small senior position at best, then when they left the company quickly discovered how important those things were and suddenly they have a small department of very senior people doing that thing one person was quietly doing before. (this isn't just code - I know of a company that laid of their maintenance person because nothing ever went wrong so they must not need them - then needed 3 people to replace him in 6 months)
A real career advice should sound like "You are too good for this company. Find you future opportunities and growth elsewhere."
Frankly I’ve had _too many_ managers at Amazon wanting to talk about career growth. Maybe it’s just my org, but everyone is obsessed with it.
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.
No one cares if you find it “interesting” when it is time for your promo doc. It’s visibility.
The real advice to aspiring engineers who don’t want to have trouble sleeping from years of pagerduty and high blood pressure is to work in middle management as soon as possible. Forget IC work. The rewards are so much less than the morons who manage. Unless you are at a major dev first company (if you have VCs you aren’t) your manager will always outearn you by a large margin, have an easier life, and way more leeway. Every company I have been to only middle management converts to the VP/C level jobs where you do virtually nothing all day but waste everyone’s time. This is the ideal job. The absolute wastes of precious air in management have the life you want.
If you’re like me and followed this terrible advice decide on an amount of money that is good enough and then decide on how much competence that buys. Volunteer for nothing beyond that, game the ticketing system, use as much vacation as you possibly can without a PIP, vibe the shit out of even the most trivial amount of work, and fuck off once your house is paid off and accounts are appropriate for retirement in T+30 years. Use that time to take up goat herding, wood working, or conservationist work.
The author suggests that nobody is going to come tap you on the shoulder and let you know it's time. Well, that's what happened to me where I am at now - hired at bottom level, regularly promoted, now at top level. Took 6 years to get to principal. Granted, my group is not SWE's, it's more like an Architect role.
What I learned having made principal is that the yearly bonuses can be lower, because expectations are so high. I got bigger bonuses at a lower title, because I was exceeding the expectations of that role by so much. Apparently principal's have such high expectations you almost never get beyond the target bonus for your role. Then there's the stress from all the layoffs across tech - a lot of Principal level people where I work got cut over the last ~2 years, presumably to save on costs. I almost wish I'd stayed at the lower level to get bigger bonuses, lower salary and higher job security. YMMV.
How else can we expect to get the best out of people?
Overly pessimistic article that is more absolute than reality.
From managers perspective, maybe. As an IC this is 100% accurate to every word.
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.
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.
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.
> But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”
This quote absolutely floored me. The author had a lot of bad management.
Collecting paycheck, protecting status quo, creating impression of work?
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."
Although I once worked at a data center, I was on the facility side of things, but was always around the white shirt workers. All of us were happy to be gainfully employed and raising families, paying taxes, pursuing hobbies,etc.
I heard a radio article yesterday which said AI was very concerning for the future of data/tech workers, which was worrying to me. To paraphrase: it claimed that tens of thousands of tech workers are entering data in many different fields and in the process are doing what humans are doing as mentioned above. It claimed that the fear was that AI will replace these workers and instead of all those worker paying taxes/providing for families, perhaps ten or fifteen companies will be using AI to replace them and, as we all know, will pay a fraction of the taxes. (I don't mean to imply that paying taxes and employing people are equal, just that taxes are an important part of any economy.)
I don't have any expertise in business or economics, but it seems to me if AI isn't regulated somehow, not only will this threaten workers, it will further widen the gap between the haves and the have nots.
This guy is apparently a jerk, who apparently thrived in a jerk atmosphere. Don't listen to him.
If there is no protection for the employee no one would get into a dependent employment relationship in the first place, especially when the pay is universally worse than being self-employed.
Most of the managers that I worked with opened up our first conversation together with how they "care about people and their careers".
Now, intrinsically, the job of a manager is to serve the company by serving those they manage. They do this by enabling workers to do the work that needs to be done. A middle manager is supposed to represent his team to upper management. However, too often, middle management is more interested in schmoozing with upper management rather than standing by their team. And if he is too difficult, upper management can just replace him with a more compliant manager who will function as a faithful messenger and nothing more.
So, there's no structural way to ensure these things work. Culture and personal virtue are necessary.
That, and the "you need to change companies frequently (at most one each year)" are the two things I always say to people on a computer science career.
Cherry picking a few businesses and then saying all businesses are doomed because of unions is exactly propaganda.
https://www.igmetall.de/service/berufeglossar/informatik-gru...
With the current geopolitical climate and the arrival of AI, I'm predicting a sharp economic downturn at the end of the year the likes of which we haven't seen in a century.
I mean the Housing Bubble popping and the Dot Bomb were bad, but the US national debt was so much lower then. Income inequality was lower. Student loan debt was lower. Healthcare was more affordable. Homes were more affordable. Food was more affordable. We had (some) faith in our electoral process.
When the cheap capital runs out, when value of the dollar collapses due to unforced error, when the overseas investment dries up, when billionaires panic and yank their investment in AI (leaving us with a duopoly like always), when the employment rate peaks never to return, when companies stop hiring for the foreseeable future, when people stop visiting websites or buying software, when we abandon liberal arts for the trades in Service Economy 2.0, when hospitals and universities close, when farms go bankrupt, when interest on the US national debt consumes its social safety net, when we sell our public lands for pennies on the dollar, when nobody is held accountable..
That's when we the people will remember who we are. Somehow, like every other time before, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps from nothing. Without time, money or resources, we'll come together and find a way to rebuild. We won't even tax the rich or incite violence against them, we'll simply manifest the abundant reality that's been denied to us by them for so long.
That looks like organizing. Unions. Cooperatives. Mutual aid networks. Renewable energy. Permaculture. Voluntary employment and clock-in. Credit unions and crowdfunding. Automation. Distributed means of production. Fair trade. Class action lawsuits. Boycotts. Voting against incumbents. Solarpunk.
We'll transcend competition and see the matrix for the bill of goods that it is. Rather than trying to get the money and power back in futility, we'll make them irrelevant.
It's time to start thinking about selling those stocks. Divesting from the blood money of unearned income that comes from exploitation, suffering and war (even though they don't tell us that). Steering clear of prediction markets. Dropping the crypto.
We know they won't. But that's why they'll stay insulated from knowing what stuff they're made of, holding out as long as possible, lonely and alone. And the fun part is, they'll get to find out anyway when the music stops.
We're all gonna be right there with you. And 'safe' trade jobs like plumbers? Lol let's see how that works out when vastly fewer people can afford your services and millions are trying to panic retrain into anything still deemed safe.