> To help guard against discussion about career growth getting lost entirely, Spellbook conducts annual and midyear reviews of its employees, Stevenson said. That allows for "really deep conversation" about workers' careers and how to level up and advance, he said.

I have never had a "really deep conversation" about my career at a mid/full year review. Often, that's where I get feedback about something that happened months ago I was unaware my manager thought needed improvement.

The in-the-trenches feedback mentioned in the article would be an improvement over the lack-of-any feedback.

All of my favorite roles were actually not ones with the most interesting technical challenges, they were the ones where I felt like I had real leverage I could wield through my manager. If you want to get anything meaningful done, you need buy-in from leadership, and it's very difficult to get that when your manager is not on-board.

Bleak. This flat and fast structure assumes that ICs are all senior devs, able to be largely autonomous. Who supports the junior engineer who is struggling?

There’s a lot of talk about how AI shifted the job market away from junior roles, but companies had already removed the management capacity for them.

At least for myself as a manager, it’s simply that I don’t have the time. There are people on my team that I care about and want to grow but I’m so fucking tired myself. I put as much as I can into teaching, but at some point it’s not my responsibility to help a person understand. Seeing this article kind of made me laugh because it’s every fear I have. I’ve only been at this for 10 years, and I’m taking a sabbatical because of the burn-out. I’ve yet to figure out if I’m exhausted or if the world just keeps taking more and more, every single year. It drives me insane to have Sr. Managers/Directors/etc. act like it’s normal to push and push and expect IC’s to grind on large, hard projects, and then immediately start on another one. Where is the R&R time? Where’s the time for MOB? Tech debt? General learning? There’s no time for anything anymore.

AI has been great as a tool, but you need humans with brainpower to operate that tool. I’ve yet to see a use case where AI has actually made my life easier. It has helped me to crank out code but I could’ve done that given time. Overall I’ve turned into a feature factory instead of having time to think about anything.

It's very unlikely that your manager has any real organizational incentive to care about your career. It's rare for direct-report-career-growth to be more than one line item near the bottom of the list that they are being evaluated on. Across all of my jobs I've only had one manager that was interested, some even seemed to actively get in the way.

The "why" in this article doesn't exactly make sense to me. If the argument were "economic conditions suck in the industry right now so managers have to write more code", sure. But "AI" is supposed to be saving us time writing code so we can focus on other things.

One flaw in the article is that the sample size of surveyed people is quite small and seems biased toward a particular type of company.

> If you work in tech, your manager might still care about your career. They just might not have enough time to do much about it.

Narrator: They never did.

It is a free-for-all office politics game and it is your own responsibility and no-one else for your 'career' and it affects ALL levels from junior to senior staff.

Never did; they only really care about theirs.

Your career is your own responsibility. It isn’t your manager’s responsibility.