I don't know where I see myself in 5 years, but it might actually be still just coding, no actual change in title or function. It's fun and challenging and I imagine it can be like that for a long time.
Instead, a dead end job for me would be caused by projects that are boring, or that the process has become overly bureaucratic, or that the company interests or culture have become too corporate or political.
There was no more challenge in it. I could still learn new tech, but I wasn't learning anything new about myself an my abilities.
Even when it came to doing "new" stuff (which as you discover in time is often just repackaged old stuff), I already was 99.9% sure I would master it, and it was just a matter of time and hard work. That not only took away the challenge, but also made me less motivated than my younger coworkers for whom everything was shiny and new, and who didn't have the experience to always avoid obvious (to me at least) modes of failure.
Managing was a challenge I could actually fail at (and still do on a regular basis...).
Yeah, programming is still more "fun" to do than managing, but it now is the kind of fun I do as a hobby (as in, hacking in stuff that will never get finished), not a job. A dead end job for me is a job that offers no more real challenges, and a challenge for me includes the risk of failure.
(Of course one other key motivator was 20+ of experiencing how bad management can completely suck all fun and productivity out of programming.)
The general idea was that as you progressed through your technical career, you would be making more and more important technical decisions, measured by the impact to the company.
A junior engineer would be making technical choices that affected one subsystem, a principal engineer might define a protocol between two large components, and an architect would be making technical decisions that affected the entire company.
You can always nitpick these things to death, but I liked the general idea.
There are many great things that a CIO can do without having to spend a lot of their time tracking things.
Also: Because he was a manager for a few years, that means that his technical skills were almost zero. So he wouldn't be able to be as agile in finding another position as he was as a developer.
> "Yes, unfortunately, even good jobs can be dead-end jobs—or positions with little to no room for advancement."
This is the massive obsession our culture has developed around growth and progress. The whole premise of this article is that if you are not eager to make it big and shoot for the starts in your chosen profession, there's something flawed inside you and you should take immediate action to fix it.
There might be a bit of hyperbole from my part, but the article actually suggest to switch careers and follow your passion if you find yourself unable to keep moving ahead. As if the work of a lifetime can be thrown down the window every other day.
Another petite peeve is that you shouldn't want to "still [be] doing the exact same work today as you did two years ago when you first started with the company." If that is the case, it either took you just a few weeks to master your position, or you have never taken the time to actually master anything. Whichever it is you better keep hopping, because sooner or later someone like me is going to come and automate that job from under your feet.
In my case, I had to leave a position I really liked because it simply didn't pay a livable wage, with no raise or promotion in sight. Taking low pay to engage your passion is great when you're single, but the game changes once you get married and/or have kids. For me, leaving had nothing to do with the rat-race and everything to do with meeting the basic needs of my family. I suspect others who've found themselves in this situation would be able to give other reasons, too, that are not related to growth for the sake of it.
My original point was that it is a qualitatively different position to be stuck in a job that prevents you from reaching your goals (or even get a paycheck above poverty line), than to be "stuck" in a job that fails to challenge your intellectual curiosity.
The trouble is that I am one of those people who feels a drive to keep "moving forward," whatever that means. I have had a job that was by most measures great, but after 5 years, I was still doing exactly the same thing. I was very good at it, and could do it in my sleep, but that meant the challenge had gone out of it. I needed something new. Sadly, I expect that I will spend most of my life like that. As soon as I master one challenge, I will be seeking a new one.
But as you make progress, you hopefully gain experience and insight. You learn what it's like out there and what role you want to play in it. Otherwise, the world comes and tell you who you are and who you should be. At this stage, course correction and precision triumph over raw speed. There's a song I like a lot which says: "I don't know which goes faster, the mountain or the crab".
At the end of day, every life form starts with rapid growth. Some of those reach stability, others reach the carrying capacity of their environment.
It seems a reasonable premise, given the audience of that site.
Though they might want to have considered prioritization. E.g. If you're constantly networking, job-hunting, and proving yourself at new firms, that's necessarily less time for you to 'hack' other areas of your life.
A 'good' dead-end job is a pretty great place to be if your spare time is focused on writing a book, building a house, training for a triathlon, etc.
if been in this position once, good pay, secure job, no risk of being fired even during crisis ( apoint proofen during 2009 and 2011). Yet, being under 30 back than I considered the risk of being unemployable hire than the benefits. Would I have been 50+ I would never have considered leaving.
What actually shocked me was how HARD it really was to work somewhere else. And I almost failed, so only one year more at this job would have been my career end. Yet another shock was how used I had been to that kind of security, it's right that freedom can be scarry. in retrospect, despite everything, I still consider that one my better decisions up to now.
I've basically given up on fighting the politics and instea focus on working on self-starting things that can't be derailed while studying for a career realignment.
My biggest fear is staying to so long that I atrophy and/or find myself molded by the culture such that I'm unhirable.
I'm hoping to move on without taking too dramatic a pay cut (<25%).
In an interview many years ago, an HR monkey told him, he'll just hire 3 young people for the money. One of them will certainly make it.
Golden handcuffs indeed. So the point with the missing raise is not necessarily a good point.
If you are programmer and your manager and his/her manager are PMPs , you are in a dead end job.
The tendency of any cost center is to be replaced by cheaper consultancy or automated away. And in companies with entrenched managers, hackers never move up.
It's hard to imagine a working programmer making $80K at a stable company as being in a dead-end job. Maybe in the strictest sense of the word it's a dead-end if they don't have the opportunity to advance, but if that is the end, then they didn't do so bad - and if you're in that situation and you do think that way, ask the janitor who empties your trash at 8pm how he feels about your dead end job.
If you feel like you're not reaching your potential, then yeah, I know what you mean. I feel the same way. But me not reaching my potential is different than having a dead end job.
Many positions aren't designed for growth, and you really need to ask your self if you have been growing professionally when in that position. You risk losing whatever edge you once had.
IMO having side projects (with some sort of attached business goal) / and some contracting is a great option if you aren't ready to leave a job that is going nowhere.
A good manager should be able to promote and advance their employee if they're adding significant value even if it doesn't mean taking the manager's position.
Do we live in the same world?
I've never seen a manager promote anyone based on performance, this is even irrational (if it's doing a good job with the current salary, leave at it). If you're too valuable to a company, chances are your manager is looking at ways to not be dependent on you rather than luring you in staying with a promotion.
The only time I see employees promoted, it's for political reasons (e.g., a manager promoting someone he can control between himself and some employee he can't deal with).
In other firms, new tasks come along and they need good people to lead them. People who have developed a smaller system that is now in maintenance mode are a perfect candidate. And that is how you advance.
1) I've been reading about startups and etc for ~2 years but have never did my own project ("but well there is XYZ which is perfect..."). At the moment, I have tabs open and looking for ideas for MVPs home page's design. The experience will be extremely valuable for the future.
2) I felt like I have something to say, but kept in my mind. Now I write everything to google docs, leave for a while to cool down (sometimes it looks like awesome idea but a day later I find it as an embarrassing) and going to publish as a blog.
The hardest thing about it? There's almost all the time "well it's not totally perfect... just few more days!".
Since I'm still a student (one year left), many people at networking events are like 'oh sounds interesting... you just graduated?' 'nope, one more year' 'oh......', the opportunities are a bit more limited.
For the last nearly 2 years I make living from doing part-time gigs. At one gig I was lucky to have a rather experienced manager and he taught me about OOP design, a bit on Agile practices and testing. That was an eye opener and put me on the right track for other gigs.
When my class mates talk 'oh man that agile thing is such shit, I just wanna write some code' I tried to convince them at first, now I just smile :)
The plan is that you work until you have enough money to hold you for a year or two (so you can work on your projects). If they cut your pay then the quit date is pushed back, if they give you a raise then it's pushed up. I think that covers it.
So dead end means... no raise in sight?
I have gotten used to taking pride in the fact that I deliver only slightly shitty work under very shitty circumstances.
This is a nightmare compared to everything we did before. I always liked to work in Java, but I never realized how powerful it is compared to the other stuff. We as a team are close to switching languages and starting from scratch, its so bad.
Considered FreePascal or Go, maybe? Pascal doesn't have a garbage collecter, but it's not "pointers everywhere" like C, and string values are reference counted. Having done a lot of C, I really miss function pointers when working in Java. (Pascal calls them procedural types instead of func ptrs)
And this very site itself is another reality distortion.
