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

108 points throwaway929997 | 2 comments | 14 Mar 25 14:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.413s | 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. seabit ◴[14 Mar 25 15:16 UTC] No.43363449[source]▶
I've mostly worked as an IC and a manager in technical organizations outside of VC backed startup land. In those orgs I've found that most places consider 'Senior Engineer' to be a terminal level. By that I mean until you get to senior engineer it us up or out. In fact, as I manager, I've had explicit timelines on which I've had to get people to senior, or manage them out. Once you DO get to senior engineer they are happy to let you stay there forever because a) senior engineers are what keeps the tech org going day to day b) the staff+ path and management path are not just 'up' from senior - they are actually different jobs from senior requiring a different skillset. The downside of this is don't expect anything more than cost-of-living increases in pay.
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2. kingnothing ◴[14 Mar 25 15:23 UTC] No.43363522[source]▶
I'm also a manager and came here to say the same thing. Senior is a terminal level at plenty of mature companies. If you're in the startup world, you'll probably face big pressure to take on a Staff+ or manager title, but you can certainly successfully push against that if you have good rapport with the leadership team. I knew several engineers with decades of experience who were very happy being senior engineers in that world. They had their niches and knew them well. One had been writing email systems since the 90s, for example.