←back to thread

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

108 points throwaway929997 | 1 comments | 14 Mar 25 14:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.518s | source

(Throwaway for hopefully obvious reasons) I’m a software developer (web, fullstack) that’s been in the industry for about 10 years now and I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t care about advancing my career. My current title is Senior Software Engineer and, if I had it my way, I would be happy to keep that title for the rest of my career. I tried being a manager for a bit and hated it, and, in a similar fashion, the increased responsibility and scope of going down the road of Staff+ engineer holds no interest to me.

My only issue is that my current job has a very strong “up or out” mentality that I’m starting to push up against. And most other places I’ve worked at or talk about with friends seem to have similar attitudes toward career progression. I just want to do my job well, learn new things, and contribute to the businesses success. I don’t want to have to try and figure out with my manager what projects I should work on to make myself look good and be able to work my way up the ladder.

Has anyone worked somewhere that they felt they could just do their job without worrying about the career advancement aspect? I’ve contracted a bit and know that this would align well with this goal, but I enjoy having health insurance and not having to scrounge for work all the time.

1. jchw ◴[14 Mar 25 14:44 UTC] No.43363108[source]▶
Obviously some jobs and some managers may not "get" it, but, if you make it clear to your manager that your only interest is being an individual contributor, this should totally be possible. I have only ever managed once and don't really intend to do it again, simply because I am not particularly good at it. I don't think I've ever left a company because there is pressure to ascend to management, not even Google was pushing me towards that.

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.