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108 points throwaway929997 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.302s | 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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JohnFen ◴[] No.43363092[source]
> Has anyone worked somewhere that they felt they could just do their job without worrying about the career advancement aspect?

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.

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giantg2 ◴[] No.43363437[source]
My non-tech company seems to also have this up or out mentality. They don't have a specific timeline, but if you're a midlevel for too long like me, they definitely try to manage you out. I've had a few friends who are managers confirm this.
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aaronbaugher ◴[] No.43363478[source]
Yeah, you can run into it anywhere. When I was in the pizza delivery business in my early 20s, once you got into management, there was very much an up-or-out mentality. You couldn't just be a really good assistant manager; you were pushed to move up to manager and then to a bigger store and so on. It just seems to bother the climbers to see someone content to stay in the position he knows he's best suited for.
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1. hellisothers ◴[] No.43364108[source]
My theory is they want more than they pay for. They want to pay you the salary for Level X while you work hard to get to Level X+1