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Ask HN: How do I optimize my career?

3 点作者 throwabay将近 8 年前
Hey all. Throwaway for obvious reasons.<p>I work at a large company as a software developer. Unfortunately, many of the teams are not up-to-date technically speaking.<p>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.<p>Despite this, I still don&#x27;t feel very strong technically because of the fact that the problems I have been solving really should&#x27;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.<p>In particular -- despite having a few years of experience I haven&#x27;t actually done anything at scale. Meaning the 100,000s of users (most I&#x27;ve done is 10,000s of internal users and customers). I feel like I haven&#x27;t actually done serious software engineering work.<p>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&#x27;t do well just because I&#x27;m not practicing the right things at work.<p>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?<p>TLDR: Is it normal to not do &quot;serious&quot; software development work early in your career? Perfect example of this is the NYT article on scaling puzzles. I feel I&#x27;m currently not in a position to make those kind of decisions, and can only maybe 50% at most understand the rationale behind them.

5 条评论

nostrademons将近 8 年前
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&#x27;s anything you can help out with, and then once you&#x27;ve completed a small project or two, see if they can help you make a formal transfer. If you&#x27;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).<p>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将近 8 年前
&gt; 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?<p>Please do not think this way. You&#x27;re there to solve business problems. Not to build solutions to scalability problems that don&#x27;t exist. I&#x27;ve had to inherit the code of people who think like this and it&#x27;s horrible.<p>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&#x27;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将近 8 年前
I can&#x27;t specifically speak to this, but I would like to chime in with one thing:<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Impostor_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Impostor_syndrome</a>
JSeymourATL将近 8 年前
&gt; I work at a large company...<p>Classic large company problem -- you&#x27;ve become adept at operating the internal corporate machine. Nothing wrong with that.<p>But if cutting-edge technical challenges give you juice. Start attending meetups &amp; conferences.<p>Incidentally, these are great places to network and hear about hidden job opportunities &gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;ScalingAgileNYC&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;ScalingAgileNYC&#x2F;</a>
rafiki6将近 8 年前
Start a company...