Hello denizens of Hacker News. I could really use your help.<p>Background: I've been slowly building up my webdev skills since I attended a bootcamp about a year and a half ago. I've been at my current job about 8 months (after doing freelance content work before then), where I was initially hired to write, but also told I would be given the freedom to develop my skills.<p>And they have completely, totally come through for me, allowing me to build tools like:<p>A realtime-ish dashboard built in Node and React that displays data from our industry database (can't be too specific!) on TV screens in our office lobby (built this at the CEO's request)<p>A twitterbot (also in Node) that tweets statistics to our members (we're an industry association) and can respond to specific stats queries with the relevant information<p>Scraping tools (mix of some hacked-out Python and Node again) for keeping member data up to date<p>And I'm currently a big bart of building our new site, as well as a website for the event-booking business our company wants to develop.<p>So now the current problem: I like it here, but I'm no longer interested in the written portion of my duties (or at least, writing about the subject of our industry). I want to keep building digital tools and not creating marketing collateral.<p>Is there a way I could address my future plans (and salary expectations) and how they could fit in at my current work? Am I being unreasonable since they have given me such good work to develop my portfolio?<p>Thanks in advance!
I was in a similar boat with my last job doing Support/QA/Custom Development for 2 years while the "official" devs went off and made a new version of the product. About a year and a half in i brought it up and they agreed to move me out of support, but the pay raise wasn't nearly adequate for the duties expected. And I regretfully agreed to half raise now, half a raise later... (24k to 32k total) and ended up getting dev/support removed leaving me with QA (devs wanted dev back and I wasn't invited to the party). I promptly left the company and found a much better job doing Dev for 55k, which sadly burnt some bridges with people i liked.<p>They will likely agree that you should be moved more officially into a dev position, but since you're moving up within the same company you shouldn't expect to get paid what you think is adequate for the duties. Giant pay bumps are an extreme rarity when moving up in the same company. This isn't just an IT problem, but it is why developers don't generally stay at the same company for more than 2-3 years.<p>Have a friendly conversation with the right people about it, but make sure you have terms laid out that you can agree to in the long run with them, otherwise start looking elsewhere.
I don't think it's unreasonable. I would speak to your manager about it. And honestly if he/she doesn't understand your career goals or is not willing to work with you on them, you should look for work elsewhere.
Your company should have some sort of review process where they go over your performance and goals. These are usually the best places to express your passions and career path. If they don't have that, you can always try and seek out one of the leadership team members and request a 1 on 1. If the leadership is reasonable, it would make sense to keep you coding and hire someone else that is a little more jr. to do the writing. The financial compensation might be a little trickier, but I think you should be able to negotiate that accordingly as well.
I'd just talk to them about it. Sounds like you are at a startup, so the likely hood is you will still have to write marketing content- everyone wears many hats. But they could compensate you as a developer instead of a marketer.<p>At my startup, I spend about 75% of my time working on sales because that is something we need to do, and I'm the best person to do it. As a coder at heart, I take an engineering approach to sales and use my coding skills to automate parts of the process.
If they hired you as a writer (at a writer's rate) and instead got a competent programmer, they should be fairly happy with that and willing to give you a pay bump.