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.
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.
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.
10-20 years ago people would love to talk about technical topics. Ask help, give help, offer pointers, debate merits.
Now I guess we ask AI, figure it out ourselves, and/or grin and bear it?
What happened? Is it from remote work? Or everything's easy now? Or nobody wants to stick their neck out? Time constraints? Knowledge gaps?
I don't struggle, exactly, but I run up into all kinds of situations where there's no obvious best choice (everything's awesome and everything is too limited all at once), so either some tough choices need to be made or maybe there IS a better way but it's just VERY non-documented or too much of a PITA to do right away (or simply, silo'd and well-protected).
There ARE avenues to get things done. There ARE multiple valid channels to ask or follow up in. The answer is basically: do it, don't ask. And yet...
GIVEN an culture/expectation/want to be "autonomous" (heck that's what agents need to be, mostly), I think something is missing.
It's like people learned somewhere "be independent", "be autonomous", "don't require help" as somehow "virtuous" outside of the "normal" bounds.
Am I the only one noticing this? Or did something shift?
Plus you don't want to take a risk on training a new grad anymore because usually they'll leave after a couple years, which was a good thing since you'd backfill with a new grad some other company had trained/ideas circulated in the industry/early career engineers built their networks and got exposure to different tech stacks and company styles etc. that's really tough now too since nobody else is hiring and training juniors so you would be wasting time and effort training some for some other company to hire away - nash equilibriulm vibes.
So yes something shifted- the new grad/junior market is in the gutter rn. And if AI plateaus in this range of capability idk what happens as the current generation of engineers age out/retire. The juniors that aren't being trained today are going to lead to a vacuum of senior engineers tomorrow.
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.
If you care about being a good manager you should care about building your teams careers
Your manager can help, but they are not responsible for your career.