What is the biggest lesson that employment has taught you?

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You don't have to run the rat race to get promoted. You don't have to be at your desk at 7am and leave at 7pm to put on a show. Just be competent. Most people are not. You'll eventually get promoted once you are old and white enough.
- Getting promoted isn't a race. It's a marketing campaign. The squeaky wheel gets the grease sadly. I hate it but that's the game. You can be great but if the right people don't hear about it it won't bring a reward.
  The funny thing is it's a loss for the employer since it means people spend time self-promoting themselves and their achievements instead of just doing things well.
  
  Some leadership will actively not promote you, even block attempts by you, if you're at the top of your role and consistently outperforming peers, why would they let you move up? You make them look good right here.
  
  Had a sup that did that to me. It sucked. Glad I'm not working for her anymore.
  
  Getting promotions and raises is rare. Haven’t seen that happen very many times. However, many people have told me that the best way to get a raise is to switch to another company.
  
  I worked at “AT&T wireless” back in the day when dirt was new. This guy would say “ squeaky wheel gets the grease.” One day after he said that our team lead said “Or gets replaced.” Then they walked his ass out.
  
  Yeah. I always tell newbies "nobody ever got a promotion for work their boss didn't know they did." Sadly if you produce 100 units of value and the boss only knows about 10 of them the guy who did 20 units but won't shut up about it looks 2x as valuable even though he's actually doing 1/5 the work. Trick is to be doing the most work and have people see it
  
  If we take it from the other side, it's difficult for management to understand how well you're doing if you're not communicating it properly, especially if your job is highly technical but they aren't. Technical experts who would understand your work alone don't necessarily make good managers.
- I must not be old enough because I've never been promoted even though I'm practically white as a ghost. Every promotion I have ever received is from getting a new job at a new company and ending up making significantly more money that way.
  
  How long do you work for the same employer though? What field are you in?
  I've worked for the same employer for 12 years and never got a promotion because there was only one way up and a pool of over 1000 employees to pick from, then switched to another job and got a promotion under a year...
  
  Around 3 years per employer, so it's a bit on the shorter end, but not too far from the average for my field.
  I'm a programmer. Not a ton of competition per team, especially when I usually work on smaller teams.
  
  Oh yeah if you're "just" a programmer (in the sense that you don't have other formations) you might have to do management courses on the side, that's what my friend had to do to land a permanent promotion...
  
  It's true management would likely get me promoted faster but honestly I always wanna stick with the programming side of things. As I get more experienced I will keep getting larger salary bumps, but it's almost definitely not gonna be from promotions but rather from switching jobs lol
  
  May I ask, what is the most important thing to show in a programmer CV?
  Im a junior programmer. I would say im good at the job. I can easily create new software and also find problems in other codes and fix them. However I have no idea what I would say in an interview. Its not like I learn code by memory.
  
  Unfortunately in your case, the most important thing is experience. You just need the years for employers to want to hire you, and with this year in particular, the competition for jobs is insane because of all the layoffs. Make some cool personal projects, that sort of thing can help.
  
  in rough order of important:
  experience
  personal projects or project you contribute to (e.g. a decent sized code base in Github). if you're early on, this can be school projects.
  ability to answer programming concepts in an interview settings
  school/grade prestige.
  I have no idea what I would say in an interview.
  if you have no previous job, then yea. It's rough. The first job is always rough, and even in software that's no exception. You will want to talk about decisions and features you worked on in personal projects for that stuff. And of course, really nail down your fundamentals; they really drill you with those interview questions as a junior.
  If you have a job, then talk about that. Maybe there's some NDA, but you can talk about some problem in general terms and what you needed to do to solve it. You're not expected to do anything crazy as a junior, so your answer relies more on you knowing how to work in a team than novel architectual decisions.
  Personal example: my first job was at a small game studio and my non-BS answer would be that I simply did bug fixes for a game. Nothing fancy, probably something an intern can do.
  But interview spin: doing those bug fixes
  helped me learn about Unity's UI system, I can talk about specific details if the interviewer cares (and don't feel too bad if they don't. Even a super experienced engineer won't be able to talk about every sub-topic of an industry)
  I talk about where I encountered decisions and when I talked to my lead about what to do. e.g. One bug ended up coming from code that another studio owned. While it was a one line fix, I reported it to a lead who would then create an issue to pass on to that studio. Frustrating, but it shows you understand the business politics of the job, something school can't teach.
  I never did it at that first job, but there were moments where deadlines get moved forward, and you think of a compromise for a feature due to the lack of time . That shows your ability to identify the Minimum Viable Product and to understand the problem, both the bad and good ways to solve something (sadly. in games you may have to hack solutions quite often)
  Best of luck
- Most probably you will never be promoted anyway.
- Just be friends with the manager. That's who I found was promoted the most in my career.
  
  tbh its pretty common in IT to find your squad (and your squad leader) and follow ‘em everywhere.
  
  Except it's often a boys club with its toxic behaviors, which not all people will fit in.
  
  Not been my experience but no doubt it exists in the field
- Fully agree. You can be lazy AF, as long as you get a few key assignments done or overfulfill them. Everybody will be like 'ooh, he so good' and forget that you don't do shit for 95% of the time.
- It should be noted that this is advice specific to white men in Western countries 😆 but yes, it's true.

597 comments