Ask HN: Pigeonholed into role with no coding, what do I do?
Hi HN,
this is a follow-up post to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282410
TLDR of that post: 5yoe embedded engineer, started a new role within a highly dysfunctional organization with no clear responsibility or supervisors after a semi-burnout within a startup, felt extremely discouraged. Company is in aerospace development.
It's been little over a couple months since I've started and things have not improved yet. Sspposedly a lead engineer is going to start working with my team soon; however due to continuous changes of plans, lackluster collaboration coming from other teams and still no clear directions for the future of the project the morale of the other members of my team is that of extreme gloom, and there are days I find it very hard to bother doing what I'm being paid to because 1. I feel like fighting an uphill battle against not only work activities but also my own peers and 2. the feeling is almost always that we're simply doing busywork that will have to be redone in a few weeks/months time.
Keep in mind that all of this is simply technical writing (requirements) and involves no coding at all nor a particularly deep knowledge of the underlying technology, since it's iteratively monkey-pasted until it appeases some subjective and still unclear measures of the main customer, which also seems to have its own internal strifes regarding variability of staffing, which eventually leads to repeated re-thinking of the overall project. Worst of all is that we have to closely follow suit because some deadlines are approaching and if the project team does not manage to respect those basically the whole company is royally f*cked in the hindquarters.
Due to the overall situation, we (the SW team) received recent news from the project manager that for the foreseeable duration of the project (4-5y more or less) there will be no internal SW development made because of de-risking, and everything will be outsourced instead. I will personally not delve into why I think this is a dumb decision, but it is what it is; only that at this point I really don't understand which reasons I have to keep working here, aside from the relatively cozy position (which btw does not differ much from previous positions I held). I have plans to open up a small SW startup i 5-10y time for development in this field, but that requires a non-indifferent amount of expertise whose growth would be obviously stunt from sitting idly for years to come, especially for someone with so little experience such as me.
I do not want to turn this into a meaningless rant, so I'm asking again for HN opinion on this: what would you personally do in this case? I feel like I'm being irrationally capricious and ungrateful for leaving a cushy job in these trying times and markets, OTOH I fear that developing no experience for several years to come is going to leave me stranded when I'll eventually try to scale up into new roles or future endeavors, nevermind the expectation of an extremely dull day to day experience.
Another thing is, I really like the space sector and would love to stay in it, but the feeling I get from working in it and hearing from other people that have been doing it at different levels of seniority is that you either get startups that do not know what the hell they're doing at frantically try to spin up some working satellite with hopes and strings, or immovable giants in which you're parked in some role and hardly move anywhere. Considering how much I love working with low level stuff, PCBs, CPU architectures and so on, maybe this is not the right call for me, and I should be better off working in some other fields...
Thanks to anyone that takes their time to respond, appreciate it immensely.
1. "OTOH I fear that developing no experience for several years to come is going to leave me stranded"
I believe so too. If you do 4-5 years of "technical writing involving no coding at all nor a particularly deep knowledge of the technology", that's IMO bad if you plan on going back to writing software. You have 5 years experience now, in 5 years it will mean that you haven't coded for half your career. If you want to keep on coding for a while, look for a job now. It doesn't mean it's urgent; you just don't want to stop coding for years.
2. It seems like it's your second company, and the first one was a startup where you burned out. I just want to let you know that not every company is toxic or dysfunctional. There are a ton of stable companies that are interesting and allow you to have a healthy work/life balance. It does exist, don't lose hope and keep looking! It seems like there is no rush, so you are in a good position.
3. "I really like the space sector and would love to stay in it"
My opinion here is that as a software engineer, it's easier to change domain than to compensate for years of non-coding. I.e. I believe it would be better for you to find a nice software engineering position in a different domain for a while and eventually come back to the space sector than to stay in the space sector and stop coding for 5 years. You will learn useful things in another domain, while if you don't code in your domain... you still don't code. Again, not that it is bad to not code, but you seem to be willing to keep coding for a while in your career.
Again my opinion: as software engineers, we will regularly have to choose whether we want to go into less technical roles, typically management. It's always possible to go from more technical to less technical, but once you do, it's very hard to come back. If you want to stay on the technical side, you have to do it now (I mean, in the next year, not in 5).
Thank you for taking the time to write this. As a matter of fact it's my fourth work experience, I basically spent 2y per company, spending the first year at the first one doing something not related to embedded coding, but your point is still perfectly valid.
I'm glad the doubts that were described in the post amount to a tangible risk in term of career according to others, too.
And yes, totally onboard with what you said with basically not coding for a duration equal to my current career duration - I feel there's so much out there I ought to learn and bash my head against that it's honestly crazy to think the managers would not find something weird with such a proposal.
> started a new role within a highly dysfunctional organization with no clear responsibility or supervisors
This is an absolutely awesome place to be. You can either get by doing hardly anything or you can do anything you want.
Which are you going to pick?
I don't think I can do either in my current position.
> either get by doing hardly anything
I have no interest in doing that, plus it would be unfair to those who may depending on whatever (little) work of interest I can accomplish as of now and would antagonize my team members.
> you can do anything you want
Lack of supervisors != lack of project and organizational perimeters in this case. I can't just start working on whatever I want by leaving the daily responsibilities behind, despite how clueless everyone seems to be regarding those, nor can I just take any decision I'm confronted with on a whim.
> I can't just start working on whatever I want by leaving the daily responsibilities behind
Why not? Are they organized enough to have good oversight and fire people who aren't keeping up with their work?
> nor can I just take any decision I'm confronted with on a whim.
Why not? Who's stopping you and what's the consequence of doing this?
> Are they organized enough to have good oversight and fire people who aren't keeping up with their work?
In that there exists a CEO, CTO, and a manager above me who all can get reports from my peers? Yes. Do they care about the project or my role in it? No they have bigger fishes to fry. PM and project leader couldn't care less about my satisfaction but they sure as hell won't like it when they ask my team to provide statements that make no sense or technical decisions which we know are senseless but that will make their life easier. Can we refuse to comply? No.
> Why not? Who's stopping you and what's the consequence of doing this?
PM that asks me to do A in way X is sure as hell not going to like me doing B as Y, and it doesn't matter whether B>A in terms of quality/performance/whatever or Y>X in terms of efficiency/scalability/whatever, because they had A|X in mind and need to check some boxes.
Mind you everyone in my team is aware of that; they simply can't do otherwise, because ownership of these kind of decisions is discouraged and when it isn't, everything is thrown to the gutter for the nth time that PM changes and requirements have to be remade from scratch.
OK I guess you're screwed then. Good luck.
Thanks I suppose
I mean the reason I blew you off is that you didn't answer any of my questions.
I see this often and if you've convinced yourself that you have no control in this situation you should find a different situation. Or you should realize that you can do different things and have some control of your situation. Up to you.
> they sure as hell won't like it
What will they do if they don't like it? Does your company fire people often?
> Can we refuse to comply?
What specifically would happen if you refuse to comply?
> they simply can't do otherwise
They can't? What would happen if they did do otherwise?
Overall, someone not liking you at work is not a real consequence if it makes you happier. Plenty of people you've met in life don't like you and it doesn't bother you that much does it?
If you think the organisation is dysfunctional and the job is not what you want to do and offers no growth then you know the answer: time to look for another job.
Layoffs may be coming anyway. At least by looking now you can go in with less pressure.
True that, also the notice period I'm contractually obliged to follow is in the phase where I could leave at any moment, whereas waiting for the trial phase to be over would force me to wait 6 months to leave.
My fear is that, coming from a similarly dysfunctional place, I'll just put in hopes and efforts for a better workplace and end up somewhere even worse, at which point I'll have to slow down in order not to change 3 jobs in such a small amount of time.
Also, sometimes I just feel ungrateful for whining this much, especially considering I have a family (not my own, mind you) to support and cannot allow myself to simply be without a job (and a well paying one at that) for long periods of time - I would love to have some objective measures for saying the role is not worth it, but of course that is not feasible in reality, and that deeply bothers me.
> whereas waiting for the trial phase to be over would force me to wait 6 months to leave.
Where I come from, the notice period is here to protect the employee: if you get fired, then you know you have a salary for those months. But from the employer's perspective, as soon as you resign they want to see you go; what's the point of keeping an unmotivated employee for 6 months? Are you sure that you would be "forced" to wait 6 months?
> My fear is that, coming from a similarly dysfunctional place, I'll just put in hopes and efforts for a better workplace and end up somewhere even worse
I understand that feeling, I started with a messy startup and followed into a toxic one. Now I am in a healthy environment that I didn't know could exist! I just want to tell you that there is hope, it exists! Keep looking.
> Are you sure that you would be "forced" to wait 6 months?
You're right, I'm still not sure about that. It's just been my experience so far (i.e. that of the employer requesting to oblige the notice period in full when leaving past jobs).
> I understand that feeling, I started with a messy startup and followed into a toxic one. Now I am in a healthy environment that I didn't know could exist! I just want to tell you that there is hope, it exists! Keep looking.
Pretty close to my own experience then, except for an extremely messy corp in between :P I'm glad it worked out for you!! Gives me hope to find something better myself :)
You have to give 6 months notice to resign? Wow...
Yeah sucks and that's why I'm so reluctant to risk staying, because in the worst case I'll be having to stay a full year where I would have otherwise just stayed 6 months and a day
> no internal SW development made because of de-risking, and everything will be outsourced instead.
Could you argue that your org needs to be automating testing that deliveries meet functional and performance requirements?
that is something that is already being taken care of in other projects, and it will indeed be necessary especially for this one, but that does not seem to tip the scale in favor of keeping development in-house; on the contrary, plans to outsource that and the development of a test facility are also being made.