
Ask HN: Current role not what I was hired for; how should I handle interviews? - patagonia
When accepting the offer for my current role I was elated. The job description was a laundry list of my “must and nice to haves”. Linux environment? SQL &amp; Python? Start-up culture? Build an ETL solution? Check.<p>Fast forward 12 mos. My new boss had never headed up a dev group and was a business analyst not ETL developer &#x2F; engineer. Tasking was mainly repetitive, operations work. The only Python code was gross and ended up being deprecated. Anything more than a simple select statement is termed a “custom report”. My manager stopped hiring technical people and pushed back on any suggestions to use git or Ansible. Etc. Then came busy season, all operations. Grinding out tickets having nothing to do with development.<p>Feeling I’d shown I would pull my weight and wanting to move the team in the direction of automation and standardization, I expressed my concerns. That didn’t bear fruit so I suggested we call the whole thing off, no harm no foul, as a bad fit. I was asked to keep my head down through busy season, then my concerns would be addressed.
Fast forward 4 mos.<p>I did. They weren’t. My boss and I start butting heads because, I just don’t agree our tasking is in the best interest of the company. I am not learning anything helpful to my career path. If anything I’m learning bad habits I’ll have to un-learn. My salary trajectory has taken a hit. My motivation is bottoming out.<p>Why not move on after the first warning signs? I was just off a year of funemployment (some personal stuff I won’t go into, but it was valid, I had no problem explaining when job hunting for this role), and I didn’t want to risk looking like I’m bouncing around jobs in addition to an having a gap in my employment history. I didn’t want to leave my team high and dry during busy season.<p>I’m job hunting now. Interview turns to, “What are you doing now”? I simply don’t have anything great to say. And I don’t want to break the rule of “don’t diss on your current employer”. Any thoughts?
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icedchai
This is the sort of question that can be easily BSed. Say you've been mostly
working on custom reports, query performance optimization, or anything that
seems necessary but not terribly exciting. The company is cutting back on new
development projects, and you are concerned about the future if your
department... Something like that.

