Ask HN: Any jobs that don't force you to always be advancing career wise?

A more practical solution as people mentioned here, is staying away from big tech / corporate America.

That's every place I've ever worked, to be honest, including tech megacorps. Lots of places will put a lot of emphasis on career advancement, but I've never seen anyone punished for not doing it. I'm not counting "won't get promoted" as a punishment, for obvious reasons.

That kind of stability and valuing "being effective at the role your comfortable with" meant a lot to me. I also felt like I saw the best versions of each role and fewer folks stretching parts of themselves across different aspects of different roles.

If you think about it, I'm sure you can think of coworkers around you that are in the boat of just being an IC long-term, usually working on specialist tasks. I think that's basically what you want, a niche that you can specialize in.

Most startups will fail or "exit" with a sale that profits only a few key investors and insiders.

But eating catfood is always an good idea no matter your net worth.

For OP, I feel there might be qualifiers that preclude such opportunities, like total comp or location. If you're looking for comp above the mid 100s or very low 200s at max, you're gonna struggle to find jobs that meet your criteria. On the converse side, these opportunities can be found in mid/low COL locations, so that number goes a lot farther.

The problems they're solving are pretty constant, but they go very deep technically for those who are interested. There's a very long learning curve compared to most private sector jobs, but you can power through it in proportion to your personal ambitions.

Downsides: (1) You're a political punching bag for 50% of the candidates in each federal election, except in years where military power is on the electorates' minds. (2) Mediocre pay. (3) Soul-crushing bureaucracy. (4) It's the only job I've ever had where the employer has missed payroll.

Other pros: (1) Working with the same folks for many years can be nice. (2) Within limits, national defense is really important. If you want it done well, this is an opportunity to pitch in.

Caveat: invading Greenland or Panama isn't what I'd call "national defense". But the learning curve / hiring process are too cumbersome to quit and rejoin every 4 years depending on politics. I know of no good solution to this one.

Maybe that’s the spot, find a small company (doesn’t have to be a startup without cash). There won’t be place to grow, so they actually prefer someone without that kind of ambition.

At least, it works for me so far

You will stagnate, and nobody will give a shit. People will come and go next to you, but you will be stable through the ages, like a pillar in an ancient Roman temple... Seasons will leave behind memories, but the winds will not take you with them. You will prevail, no matter what. Maybe forgotten, maybe overlooked, but more certainly not underestimated.

Also, most cat food smells pretty bad

This no-in-between you describe is for founder only, I believe.

I don't think this is a real issue if you are not wanting to make a lot of money.

Before November, I would have said the same thing as the parent comment. After January 20th, everyone who is left is currently looking for backups in case they get laid off.

Gov and fed contractor positions used to be the most stable jobs you could get. Now, they are just as uncertain as industry jobs. It's extremely unfortunate.

It's not unusual for people, in the case of an acqui-hire, to get a payout of $250k or so.

Mine does it in six minutes. 10x, baby. I can't afford to waste my own precious 10x engineering time on sitting in a chair dealing with such a mundane affair. 10x all the things!

Rather painful, though.

So if your concern is that you don't want to become a manager while still being well paid, that is an option. Other than that, the culture was pretty nice, especially in the Markham (Canada) office.

In other words the whole objective is to have a well run organisation with motivated employees. The objective is definitely not to force hard working and talented people to leave.

If you are hard working and talented it's incredibly unlikely they will want to push you out and then go through the whole process of hiring and training a replacement. It's worth having a conversation with your manager before looking for a new job.

As you've said, both Staff or Eng. Manager role carry out more responsibility, as they are both leadership positions, one being more technical and the other more related to people.

There's a natural push for sending experienced people into the Staff/Manager bracket but I see plenty of people in their 40s and 50s working happily as a Senior Developer.

I work for a medium-ish company (around 250 employees), and we're just a small team two devs, and a sysadmin basically and are pretty autonomous and there's no "up or out" expectation for anyone here.

There's definitely downsides - no one outside of our team has any technical ability whatsoever so communicating requirements back and forth is difficult, and a lot of the work is boring business CRUD and integrating SaaS products together, but it pays well enough and I love being pretty much autonomous on our small team. Most days it just fees like I'm a contractor.

All that being said, I'm almost 40 so I don't mind the boring enterprisey work. In my younger years this job would've burned me out super fast, just something to keep in mind.

The pay will probably be less, but it is a trade-off.

>> This outcome is inevitable, given enough time and enough positions in the hierarchy to which competent employees may be promoted.

So if you accept this, you need to find a place where there is no hierarchy: explicit, shadow or implicit.

In all senses, older developers want more and have a better positioning to negotiate from. For capitalists, this is exactly what they don't want.

It's not really ageism as much as it is the associations that come with older age. If you were as naive, desperate, and cheap as a new grad - you'd get more easily hired too. Oh and a lot of older devs don't like the grindy leetcode nature of interviews because it takes a lot of time outside of work to study for and they prefer to do other things with their time. (In half of my FAANG interviews, I get asked LC Hard problems regularly. The bar to pass is very high.)

All of which is to say, the fact that most people are L5s, including people who've been there for a long time, is due entirely to the very recent introduction of leveling and the high bar for L6. It tells you nothing on its own about whether L5 is perceived as a terminal level.

You'd know better than us if you work there, and reading between the lines of your comment it sounds like maybe it is?

Hmm, is this why must software products have tons of usability-destroying bugs that never get fixed, even while continually launching new features?

The bigs used to be great for this: the two problems a Googler manager has with talent management is A) motivating people who won't do work because they know they won't advance B) trying to placate people who work hard, when there's no significant reward for it, for years, and social mores mean there's no polite way to explain why.

Past that, and assuming you can just get a job wherever, I'd wonder why you want to actively not advance. You can't really say this to a manager with a straight face without getting "tsk tsk'd", even when everyone knows there's no real room for it. It'd get dissembled into not having a growth mindset or whatever if its actively voiced.

If you're looking for stability and WLB, my understanding of Amazon/FB from Googlers was they were somewhat ruthless in turning people over, and that's certainly gotten worse. And now it's happening at Google too, there's a defacto quota of ~10% of people who need to get hassled early. And it wasn't fair or rational necessarily who was.

It will never be the case that it's okay to coast for a long time at the lower/middle levels because in the grand scheme of things you're not worth the hassle for them.

Worked out great. They have their role and continue to enjoy it and perform well. The managerial role went to someone with clear upward intention, who is also enjoying it and performing well.

After 20 years, I was fortunate enough to know the right people, and be in the right places at the right time, for it to fall into my lap, so I have no advice on how to achieve that, but I never want to go back to regular employment again.

On the bright side, once you were inside and got your bearings, it was reasonably easy to get transferred to a department that better suited one's interests.

Off topic, but this is starting to feel like the rule rather than the exception. This practice should not be legal.

But I totally agree!

If you want to stay in swe, government jobs are the best, of you can get in as a permanent employee, not as a contractor.

- Has very specific domain expertise in an area critical to the company

- Can work across the stack and get a project done from 0 to 1 without throwing their hands up in defeat when they can't plow through it with SO/Copilot

- Gets a bunch of stuff out the door that management cares about

- Acts as technical lead on large cross-team initiatives

There's basically no consistency from company to company as to which of these truly qualifies somebody as Staff-level. As I'm so fond of pointing out there are places that call every non-Junior person a "Principal Engineer" and places that hire 24-year-olds as "Senior". Titles simply aren't fungible across companies. Show an Amazon employee this comment and they'll say that those first 3 are expected of a Senior engineer. I similarly was doing a lot of 2, 3, and 4 at a company that flat-out refused to promote me to Senior because I didn't meet some arbitrary HR criteria that they cooked up decades prior.

At this point I don't care what somebody calls me as long as I get paid market value to do things in a smart way with people that are well-intentioned.

Just one example: I was working at Stanford in the Med School and one of the admin people was forced out simply for the crime of being "old" without any specific performance problem or inability.

Another anecdotal negative confirmation: When I was 19, I was constantly offered jobs. You don't hear me singing that tune anymore.

It has never taken me more than a month to get a job when I was looking and most of the time at least two offers.

I changed jobs when I was 25, 34, 37, 39, 41, 44, 46, 49 and 50.

My first only and hopefully last job in BigTech was at 46.

If you are old and have the experience, network and reputation you should have built based on your age, the world is your oyster.

If you don’t have experience with current technology, you’re screwed.

But if I look back.

- 2008 (34) - spammed job boards.

- 2012 (37) - reached out to third party recruiters via LinkedIn

- 2014 (40) - reached out to internal recruiter on LinkedIn

- 2016 (42) - reached out to a recruiter I met earlier.

- 2018 (44) - reached out to a recruiter I met earlier

- 2020 (46) - Amazon (AWS Professional Services) recruiter reached out to me.

- 2023 (49) - targeted outreach to a recruiter based on a niche of niche within AWS where I was an SME.

- 2024 - responded to recruiter who reached out to me.

To be fair, in 2020, I did pivot from “software developer” to working in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - working full time for consulting departments/companies

Compare the downsizing of Twitter to the downsizing of the government.

Mark Cuban has the same idea

https://qz.com/mark-cuban-elon-musk-doge-shark-tank-business...

I await your downvotes.

Instead of employees "stagnating", employees would launch all sorts of initiatives and then abandon them after getting promoted.

Instead of maintaining legacy systems for decades, teams would turn down systems so that employees can work on shinier greenfield projects, leaving users in the lurch.

I do not oppose government efficiency. I support reforms to identify and eliminate waste in government. Unfortunately that's not what DOGE is doing.

I am not here to tell you what we SHOULD do. Not to tell you who SHOULD get a job. My point is to tell you that some people, in this crazy world, want to do some work, and some of that work is not fancy, and for that they get a special place in the current environment.

Yeah, politicians already do this. They use different words but to the same effect.

I am not going to pretend I have the ultimate solution to all of this, but the idea that government employees get to sit there, do bare minimum for the entirety of their careers, and without any desire to improve anything for the sake of the people they serve (because clearly they forgot they work for the citizens of the country in which said government operates) is just so wrong. Maybe we deserve to live in mediocrity.

You can, at least, vote out a congress, house, or a parliament member if they are mediocre and not doing much (doesn't always happen but the option exists). Government employees are un-elected (technically) and get to spend their entire life in a "stable" job regardless of their performance. Is this status quo actually good for the country?

And this is fine. It is good to recognize this and build around it. My comment and my annoyance is with the idea that the government is a good place to act as a, and I mean no offense, dumping ground for such people.

The reputation of government jobs being very stable attracts such people and they then form the majority and things stagnates and nothing improves because there is no will.

To be clear, I am not saying every government department should be a copy of google in how they work and hire. But a balance needs to be struck between keeping government departments stable and striving to trim the fat and improve.

This is substantiated entirely by feels. Do you actually know any government workers?

I saw the writing on the wall. I knew it didn’t make sense to try to build a development department - what I was originally hired to do. I became more of an “enterprise architect” responsible for managing and coordinating third party consulting companies.

I left a year and half later and went to work for a startup. I left there abs when I was looking for a job three years later, the company that acquired the startup offered me a job as a staff architect responsible for integrating all of their acquisitions. As soon as I found out it was PE backed, I noped out.

I still inadvertently ended up at a PE backed company that also had a roll up strategy. It was shitty and I only lasted a year before moving on

I worked there from 1999-2008. We didn’t even care about either the dot com bust, 9/11 or the housing market crash in 2008. The revenues stayed steady

I also have a slight disability. Are you saying there is no other place in the US where you can work? Not even remotely?

Honestly as I get older I find myself starting to look to that world in a more appealing light. Call it the tech version of Barrista FIRE but there's a certain appeal to getting a job crunching boring ass enterprise Java for some stupid company, getting a decent wage (relative to the rest of the country, not tech in general) and reasonable benefits.

Especially if you can work at Walmart where you have to stand on your feet and move stuff all day.

For reference: I have cerebral palsy that for all intents and purposes affects mostly my left hand. But standing all day in a retail job day in and day out would be detrimental because of a slight affect of CP on my left foot.

[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

(Many federal employees have a better work ethic than the average private sector worker. But you can't make that an expectation if you're paying less than they could make elsewhere.)