
Signs You’re in a Dead-End Job - dunamis1
http://www.thedailymuse.com/career/3-signs-youre-in-a-dead-end-job/
======
rjprins
For software developers, I feel this career thing works a bit differently.
Going up the ladder means managing people or projects, but that is not
necessarily more fun than writing code.

I don't know where I see myself in 5 years, but it might actually be still
just coding, no actual change in title or function. It's fun and challenging
and I imagine it can be like that for a long time.

Instead, a dead end job for me would be caused by projects that are boring, or
that the process has become overly bureaucratic, or that the company interests
or culture have become too corporate or political.

~~~
rwmj
I read that first paragraph "Are you sitting at the same desk, working for the
same manager, doing the same work, and earning the same salary as you are
right now?" and thought, if I've still got all of this in 5 years time, I'm
going to count myself very fortunate.

~~~
theorique
Office Space: "It would be _nice_ to have that kind of job security!"

------
crpatino
The title says it is about Dead End Jobs, but it is not. It is about People
That Cannot Stay Put In a Damned Place. Look at this quote:

> "Yes, unfortunately, even good jobs can be dead-end jobs—or positions with
> little to no room for advancement."

This is the massive obsession our culture has developed around growth and
progress. The whole premise of this article is that if you are not eager to
make it big and shoot for the starts in your chosen profession, there's
something flawed inside you and you should take immediate action to fix it.

There might be a bit of hyperbole from my part, but the article actually
suggest to switch careers and follow your passion if you find yourself unable
to keep moving ahead. As if the work of a lifetime can be thrown down the
window every other day.

Another petite peeve is that you shouldn't want to "still [be] doing the exact
same work today as you did two years ago when you first started with the
company." If that is the case, it either took you just a few weeks to master
your position, or you have never taken the time to actually master anything.
Whichever it is you better keep hopping, because sooner or later someone like
me is going to come and automate that job from under your feet.

~~~
verisimilidude
If you ever find yourself in a dead-end job that you love, you'll understand.

In my case, I had to leave a position I really liked because it simply didn't
pay a livable wage, with no raise or promotion in sight. Taking low pay to
engage your passion is great when you're single, but the game changes once you
get married and/or have kids. For me, leaving had nothing to do with the rat-
race and everything to do with meeting the basic needs of my family. I suspect
others who've found themselves in this situation would be able to give other
reasons, too, that are not related to growth for the sake of it.

~~~
crpatino
I have found myself in that situation too, and I also decided to jump ships.

My original point was that it is a qualitatively different position to be
stuck in a job that prevents you from reaching your goals (or even get a
paycheck above poverty line), than to be "stuck" in a job that fails to
challenge your intellectual curiosity.

------
t2d2
I'm in a job a bit like that, not much room for advancement. Not much of a
challenge, but the pay is about double what most other places in my town are
paying because it's a small location of a much bigger company. my family is
here and we have no intention of leaving so for now it's a very comfy dead end
job with good benefits etc.

~~~
dustinupdyke
Golden handcuffs.

~~~
mironathetin
Yes I agree. My brother works in a bank and I think he complains since 25+
years. The only problem: he earns so much, where ever he'll go, it will be
significantly less.

In an interview many years ago, an HR monkey told him, he'll just hire 3 young
people for the money. One of them will certainly make it.

Golden handcuffs indeed. So the point with the missing raise is not
necessarily a good point.

------
manishsharan
If you are a programmer in a company where IT is seen as a cost center, you
are in a dead end job.

If you are programmer and your manager and his/her manager are PMPs , you are
in a dead end job.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
Spot on.

The tendency of any cost center is to be replaced by cheaper consultancy or
automated away. And in companies with entrenched managers, hackers never move
up.

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stevetursi
When I think of "Dead End Job", I think of a clerk at a convenience store or
fast food joint, the guy who drives a tractor for the company that won the
contract to cut the grass on the side of the highway, or the janitor comes to
clean our offices at night.

It's hard to imagine a working programmer making $80K at a stable company as
being in a dead-end job. Maybe in the strictest sense of the word it's a dead-
end if they don't have the opportunity to advance, but if that is the end,
then they didn't do so bad - and if you're in that situation and you do think
that way, ask the janitor who empties your trash at 8pm how he feels about
your dead end job.

If you feel like you're not reaching your potential, then yeah, I know what
you mean. I feel the same way. But me not reaching my potential is different
than having a dead end job.

------
swinnipeg
5 years experience is very different than 1 year of experience repeated 5
times.

Many positions aren't designed for growth, and you really need to ask your
self if you have been growing professionally when in that position. You risk
losing whatever edge you once had.

IMO having side projects (with some sort of attached business goal) / and some
contracting is a great option if you aren't ready to leave a job that is going
nowhere.

------
changdizzle
Most of the responses here are from developers but from a more business
perspective, I find this article somewhat flawed. Regarding "It Would Take a
Big Event for You to Get Promoted," the author says "For example, say your
boss has been in her position for five years, and her boss has been in his
position for seven—and they both seem very comfortable where they are. That
means, in order for you to move up, something would have to entice one of
those big wigs out of his or her position. "

A good manager should be able to promote and advance their employee if they're
adding significant value even if it doesn't mean taking the manager's
position.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
> A good manager should be able to promote and advance their employee if
> they're adding significant value even if it doesn't mean taking the
> manager's position.

Do we live in the same world?

I've never seen a manager promote anyone based on performance, this is even
irrational (if it's doing a good job with the current salary, leave at it). If
you're _too_ valuable to a company, chances are your manager is looking at
ways to not be dependent on you rather than luring you in staying with a
promotion.

The only time I see employees promoted, it's for political reasons (e.g., a
manager promoting someone he can control between himself and some employee he
can't deal with).

~~~
mturmon
You're making it seem inevitable that valuable people will be held back in
stale roles. Things don't have to be this way, although I have heard of places
where they are.

In other firms, new tasks come along and they need good people to lead them.
People who have developed a smaller system that is now in maintenance mode are
a perfect candidate. And that is how you advance.

------
gedrap
I've found myself recently in that situation. That's what I am going to do
about it:

1) I've been reading about startups and etc for ~2 years but have never did my
own project ("but well there is XYZ which is perfect..."). At the moment, I
have tabs open and looking for ideas for MVPs home page's design. The
experience will be extremely valuable for the future.

2) I felt like I have something to say, but kept in my mind. Now I write
everything to google docs, leave for a while to cool down (sometimes it looks
like awesome idea but a day later I find it as an embarrassing) and going to
publish as a blog.

The hardest thing about it? There's almost all the time "well it's not totally
perfect... just few more days!".

Since I'm still a student (one year left), many people at networking events
are like 'oh sounds interesting... you just graduated?' 'nope, one more year'
'oh......', the opportunities are a bit more limited.

~~~
wheaties
You're still a student? The first year at a full time gig is going to feel a
bit overwhelming. You'll have so much you have to catch up on, either
technology wise, development practices with a larger team-wise, or just
design-wise. This type of thing will sink in once you've been somewhere at
least 2 years. Then you'll understand.

~~~
gedrap
I know what you mean :)

For the last nearly 2 years I make living from doing part-time gigs. At one
gig I was lucky to have a rather experienced manager and he taught me about
OOP design, a bit on Agile practices and testing. That was an eye opener and
put me on the right track for other gigs.

When my class mates talk 'oh man that agile thing is such shit, I just wanna
write some code' I tried to convince them at first, now I just smile :)

~~~
a-priori
To be fair to your mates, a lot of places that claim to do 'Agile' do a shit
job at it. It turns into a cargo cult where they wrap their bad practices in
Agile lingo to make them sound good. I've seen that happen a lot at various
companies.

If that's the only 'Agile' you've been exposed to, then it's perfectly
reasonable to think 'oh man that agile thing is such shit'.

~~~
voltagex_
How can I tell the difference between Agile and 'Agile' then?

~~~
a-priori
The same way you spot other cargo cults: look at the team's processes
critically. Start from the basics, with the Agile Manfiesto. It's well
summarized on the Wikipedia page here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#Agil...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#Agile_Manifesto).

I believe that manifesto is the only important part of Agile. _Everything else
is just suggestions about how to accomplish that goal._ If a particular
practice does not make sense for you, in your particular situation, then it's
garbage. So, look at your team's processes and ask yourself this:

If you were to reverse engineer a process that would accomplish the goals of
the Agile Manifesto (e.g. the developers know what needs to be built, and
there's short feedback loops between developers and stakeholders), would you
end up with something that looks like what they're doing? Could you drop any
part of your process and have things still work?

If you discover too many red flags -- things that serve no purpose except to
"look Agile" \-- then you may be in a cargo cult.

------
swayvil
If you spend 40+ hours a week working on other people's projects, hasn't the
worst that can happen already happened?

The plan is that you work until you have enough money to hold you for a year
or two (so you can work on your projects). If they cut your pay then the quit
date is pushed back, if they give you a raise then it's pushed up. I think
that covers it.

So dead end means... no raise in sight?

------
godisdad
But what if I don't want a promotion and want to cultivate mastery instead?
This article is kind of wide of the mark for HN.

------
_pmf_
It's kind of depressing to see that the current mindset seems to be to quit as
soon as it gets a little difficult.

I have gotten used to taking pride in the fact that I deliver only slightly
shitty work under very shitty circumstances.

~~~
chrisbennet
I think the attitude is more like "quit when it gets too easy".

------
dschiptsov
Oh, that's simple - you are 9-to-5 coder in a language which name begins with
J or ends with #.

~~~
mironathetin
In what kind of mind distortion field are you living? I used to write code in
Java and Jython for a big science project. Now I switched (avoid the word
advanced) to a new big science project, where we use c, c++ and python.

This is a nightmare compared to everything we did before. I always liked to
work in Java, but I never realized how powerful it is compared to the other
stuff. We as a team are close to switching languages and starting from
scratch, its so bad.

~~~
vonmoltke
A significant portion of the ML/NLP world runs on Java. Its the worst language
for the job, except for all the others.

~~~
yummyfajitas
[http://www.scala-lang.org/](http://www.scala-lang.org/)

~~~
jbooth
A lot of people (myself included) see Scala as being one step forward, two
steps back. Some good features, and then a whole bunch of poorly thought out,
wankerish features that can only serve to screw up your code base if some
developer gets bored and makes the mistake of using them.

~~~
happy_dino
> and then a whole bunch of poorly thought out, wankerish features that can
> only serve to screw up your code base if some developer gets bored and makes
> the mistake of using them.

I'd love to see an example of that!

~~~
jbooth
Sure, the crazy symbolic operator overloading and a bunch of libraries that
encourage you do do things like a :=: b and have it mean something.

Also, there's something about the net sum of the type system where it feels
like there are a lot of concepts at work and it's easy to get lots with what
type something is, exactly, especially if you didn't write the code and you're
just skimming it.

~~~
happy_dino
Scala has neither operators nor operator overloading and I don't know any
library which "encourages" doing those crazy things.

There are a few places where symbolic method names are used, and in pretty
much every case, it is well-established prior art: +, -, *, /, etc for math
operations, ! for sending actor messages (Erlang), &, | ,^ for bit operations
(C and friends).

Regarding the type system ... well, the alternative is stuff like reflection
and casting. Both introduce the possibility of runtime failures and make
refactoring and reasoning a lot harder.

Sure, sometimes a well-placed I-assume-this-can-never-fail cast is exactly
what one needs, but I'm happy that Scala gives developers another, safer
option here.

