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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: 0.001s | 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.

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giantg2 ◴[14 Mar 25 15:10 UTC] No.43363392[source]▶
Maybe just job-hop. Sure, you're a senior for 10 years at one company, then be a senior at another company for another 10 years. I know that's easier said than done, and could run into ageism as you get older.
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seanw444 ◴[14 Mar 25 15:16 UTC] No.43363448[source]▶
I keep hearing about this "ageism" but it's never made sense to me. I would always want to hire an older, wiser developer, if I were calling the shots. Why is this a thing?
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1. dowager_dan99 ◴[14 Mar 25 15:22 UTC] No.43363509[source]▶
I'm 50+ and it's a thing, but not really different than any other bias lots of people here likey deal with. It's not legit but does make sense: any groups that you don't identify with are assessed differently based on the delta. Sometimes this is positive; most times negative.