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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

[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.)