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Promotion Or Job Change: Which Is the Best Way To Advance In IT?
I've had a couple of management consultants tell me that if you want to move into management, it's better to change jobs or change where you work within your current company than to stay where you are. What if you have to fire one of your old friends? Not cool. Or are you better off starting your management career surrounded by people who know and (hopefully) like you? Read the rest .
Frequently people who are promoted wind up doing both their new job and their old one. There are advantages too, like a lower learning curve, but this would be the big downside for me.
Being a manager means spending more time dealing with politics and paperwork rather than technical issues and I know from experience it's a lot less fun so I don't understand why people crave management so much.
To be on the safe side though, I suggest you also type the exact opposite of your comment in the other story, to allow the anti-threads to grow normally.
I often see people leaving a company and then returning at a much higher level a few years later, something like "internal promotion" cannot beat the "go away and then come back" strategy.
Migx
According to modern physics, two stories can suddenly appear out of nowhere. One is made of antimatter, the other is made of matter.
In some cases both are made of the common element "doesn't matter".
Ugh, management. Paperwork and stress, and loss of creativity. It sucks when that is the only option for career advancement, when you really want a technical promotion path so you can do more with the skills and knowledge you actually have, rather than suddenly be expected to balance budgets and make reports!
Anyway if you are promoted to management ask for some training courses, and they should clear up professional boundary issues. I guess that if you are open and honest with the people you manage, and try not to become aloof, then things will be alright. If you want to protect your friends, then enact a 'last one in is first to go' policy (however ridiculous that is in reality). Be honest, how many coworkers have you stayed in contact with once they left the company? Is the term 'friends' correct, or are they actually colleagues with whom you might enjoy a beer or two after work sometimes?
Where is the upvote arrow?
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
No, he's currently busy filing a patent on Slashdot's new SpeedDupe(TM) technology. Then he'll sue Twitter for millions, because their users have memories just as short as his.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I've had a couple of management consultants tell me that if you want to move into management, it's better to change jobs
By "management consultants" I presume we're talking about recruitment agencies. They have a vested interest in getting people to move jobs and will frequently say anything to make their case. Not only do they earn a huge commission from placing a person with a new company, they then have prior knowledge of a vacancy at the old company and will try to fill that one, too.
It certainly used to be common, that the route to promotion was to change company. However, these days with so few places hiring and the loss of (in the civilised world, at least) job security when taking a position with a new company, the advantages may not be as great as they were - though still better than having to wait for someone in your existing company to die, before you can move one step up the ladder.
Although why a techie would want to move into management is a question worth asking. Generally management jobs pay better, but they carry greater risk. At least when you're producing stuff, or even just solving problems, you have an inherent value to your employer - they can see and count what you do. As a manager, your value is not directly quantifiable and in most cases imaginary. That makes the position much harder to justify and much easier to cut when times are tough. Management jobs are also harder to get at the interview stage, since there will be many candidates applying: none of which will have any quantifiable skills that would justify their employment. That makes the selection process a lottery (which could work in your favour, if you're not very good).
So, it's a high-risk/medum reward strategy. The "consultants" advising you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by having you switch jobs. You could, possibly, go back to a technical job if the management career doesn't work out - although you'll probably find that the position you left will be filled by someone earning less than you did, so you'll probably take a drop in pay if you can scramble back in. It's not a career choice I'd make and most management positions are incredibly dull and unrewarding.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Subterfuge. It works every time. When I started in this industry nearly 33 years ago it was your attitude and your quality of work that determined your path of promotion and success. Nowadays the people I work with are more interested in Social Networking, gossip and "Diversity." It's not just in IT but all industries within white collar environments. The smart players keep their head down, know when to throw in a political jab and to document failures and whine about the mistakes of others. Don't sell it short but schmoozing pays too.
Don't get me wrong, I still consider myself successful, it's just now I work as a consultant and get to watch this go on all the time. It never ceases to amaze me when my clients promote some of the worst folks that I've ever seen and watch the ensuing anger and confusion it causes. You see if you want to get ahead in an organization you need to not create too many waves. That's for entrepreneurs and companies that want to be progressive. By and large, most organizations just want peace and quiet with the associated slow, I mean really slow, progress that it promotes.
If you're aggressive and talented, don't get into a large organization. You'll be frustrated and upset with the politics that go on and constantly in bewilderment at why Joe down the hall who hasn't produced anything in 4 years and who's last major project was a disaster is now a VP.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Quit.
It's as simple as that.
Quit, after finding another job that is.
Promotion means shit if it doesn't produce more money. And in 20 years in the business my best raises came from the old FU to the previous employer to move on. Even the smallest job switch is still over twice the dollars of any 5 year period of "raises". Even when promotions come, or more likely some "redefined job description" BS that includes all the higher up's work (or more likely, the work of some fool that knows some higher up who's dead weight they finally couldn't tolerate anymore) but no change in status, power, or pay. 30%, 50% jumps in salary just DONT HAPPEN unless you are the CEO or similar. If you are still a tech in any way, there's little extra money room to go for.
So quit. Make sure you are always polishing your resume, and getting skills that can be written down and skip over the company specific complicated crap you can't take with you. (Hint: if you learn their proprietary and crappy system well, guess what you'll be doing for the rest of your stay there? Being invaluable at your job means no promotion. Be good but not in a way that keeps you down.)
-1 wrong.
Well, not wrong if "being liked" is the only thing you want to do. You can never get everything done with everyone by simply keeping the peace. However being a good manager includes being liked or at least thought fair, most of the time.
I know my manager makes probably 50% more that I do, but she's in meetings over half the time she's here, has boatloads of reports to file, etc. She's also salaried, (I'm hourly), so she often has to put in more than 40 hours. I hate meetings & paperwork, so I often tell her I'm glad I don't have her job, and she says I'm welcome to it any time I'd like.
If you're just looking for extra income, I'd strongly recommend checking into your local community college and seeing if they have any openings for adjuncts in technology courses. I teach a couple of computer courses and its easy money, and its also pretty fun.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I'm 33, and I've worked for a single large aerospace company since getting my undergrad degree 11 years ago. I started off as a desktop support guy making $42k, and then was bumped to $43k after a year, then to $45k after another year, then to $46k after another year. In late 2004 I was promoted to junior sysadmin and was bumped to $50k, and through yearly raises got that up to $55k by 2006, when I transferred formally from sysadmin to the enterprise architect side of the house. That got me a bump to $68k, which brought me up to the minimum salary level for that position, and then between 2006 and mid-2010 the pay rose to $74k through those yearly incremental raises.
In 2010 I was a senior architect, making decisions that directly affected the technology direction of a Fortune 50 company with $65B in revenue, making $74k a year. It was nice, of course, and the job was fun, but the compensation just hadn't scaled to the job. There were other benefits--outstanding and near-zero-cost insurance, stock, a functioning pension program, and as near a thing to stability as it's possible to get in an American job--but I wanted more money, so I left. Now I work as a presales engineer (that's "engineer," not real engineer) at one of the same vendors that used to sell to me, making $120k. I would have had to stay at the first job for another 20 years to hit the same level of salary. More, I left on excellent terms, and I wouldn't mind going back there some day.
This experience echoes that of my much-older peers at the aerospace job, where I was one of the only folks in the group less than 50 years old. All of them, without exception, had left at some point for between 1-5 years and then come back, bringing with them a large salary bump. Even in a company that gives you near-guaranteed 2-5% incremental raises, the only way to get a massive salary increase is by leaving.
Where am I? Since when is aspiring to management a slashdot thing?
I thought suits were to be distrusted and ridiculed?
Quite the opposite, I find it horribly insulting.
If the company values you, they should compensate you accordingly. There should already be policies/reviews in place to adjust your compensation equal to your value. If they are doing any less, they are, quite literally, ripping you off because they think they can get away with it.
"Joe's productivity is up and he's learned a lot since his last review....he is easily worth an additional 5%; but the economy is in the crappier and a lot of people are worried about losing their job, let's just tell him he did a good job, times are tough and give him a 2% raise. We'll tell him it's more than most people got and emphasis how awesome he is."
Assume Joe started at 50k....after five years of that, and Joe is earning significantly less than what he could make elsewhere (54 vs 60). And, they company has saved 16k by underpaying him. Joe finds another job that will pay him 60k and he tells his boss he's leaving and they counter and say, 'Well, we like you so much, we want you to stay. We'll let you do more work and we will pay you 60k.
If Joe accepts, he's still out 16k because his company underpaid him for those years. And it is incredibly likely his next review will follow the same pattern as his others. And, it's very likely he'll get additional work dumped on him along with his raise; such that he is working longer hours for the same (or less) pay.
Maybe I'm just cynical.