Ask HN: How do I optimize my career?

3 points by throwabay 8 years ago | 5 comments

Hey all. Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I work at a large company as a software developer. Unfortunately, many of the teams are not up-to-date technically speaking.

When I was brought on I was quickly able to pick all of the low hanging fruit. Because of this I have become quite reputable in the company and have been promoted.

Despite this, I still don't feel very strong technically because of the fact that the problems I have been solving really should've been solved before my arrival. Being on here, I have an inferiority complex as my perceived ability is not commensurate with my title at other companies.

In particular -- despite having a few years of experience I haven't actually done anything at scale. Meaning the 100,000s of users (most I've done is 10,000s of internal users and customers). I feel like I haven't actually done serious software engineering work.

I was wondering if anyone has been in this position, being prominent in their company but still feeling poor technically. I feel if I were to interview at say, Dropbox I wouldn't do well just because I'm not practicing the right things at work.

Is quitting the only option, or is there a way for me to introduce solutions to problems that may require more technical expertise, to better not only myself but the company as well?

TLDR: Is it normal to not do "serious" software development work early in your career? Perfect example of this is the NYT article on scaling puzzles. I feel I'm currently not in a position to make those kind of decisions, and can only maybe 50% at most understand the rationale behind them.

nostrademons 8 years ago |

Try to do an internal transfer to an external product team (I assume your large company is actually a large software company, and has some external-facing products). Make friends with someone on the team, ask if there's anything you can help out with, and then once you've completed a small project or two, see if they can help you make a formal transfer. If you've got a good rep internally and have worked on tools the whole company uses, it should be a good foot in the door, and oftentimes revenue centers (i.e. external products) have staffing priority over cost centers (internal tools).

If that fails, yeah, look for a job at another company doing an external product. Note that you often need to take a step backwards in company prestige, eg. doing internal tools for a big company, then the primary product for a startup, then a secondary external product for a big company, then the primary external product for a big company, then founding your own company or something. (My own career progression was pretty similar to this, but with the first couple rungs as internships - my first job out of college was a secondary product for a startup, then was promoted to work on a primary product within 6 months or so.)

lackbeard 8 years ago |

> is there a way for me to introduce solutions to problems that may require more technical expertise, to better not only myself but the company as well?

Please do not think this way. You're there to solve business problems. Not to build solutions to scalability problems that don't exist. I've had to inherit the code of people who think like this and it's horrible.

Think about all the problems you could be solving for the company and what those problems _actually are_ and what the actual constraints are. If you can't find any satisfactory career growth in solving those problems then you probably should find a job that does have the kinds of problems you think working on would provide the career growth you want.

muzuq 8 years ago |

I can't specifically speak to this, but I would like to chime in with one thing:

A lot of your post reminds me of the common traits of Imposter Syndrome [1]. Even if you are actually below the norm, you may be exaggerating the gap through Imposter Syndrome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

JSeymourATL 8 years ago |

> I work at a large company...

Classic large company problem -- you've become adept at operating the internal corporate machine. Nothing wrong with that.

But if cutting-edge technical challenges give you juice. Start attending meetups & conferences.

Incidentally, these are great places to network and hear about hidden job opportunities > https://www.meetup.com/ScalingAgileNYC/

rafiki6 8 years ago |

Start a company...