Your career is your own responsibility. It isn’t your manager’s responsibility.

Bleak. This flat and fast structure assumes that ICs are all senior devs, able to be largely autonomous. Who supports the junior engineer who is struggling?

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.

> If you work in tech, your manager might still care about your career. They just might not have enough time to do much about it.

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.

It's very unlikely that your manager has any real organizational incentive to care about your career. It's rare for direct-report-career-growth to be more than one line item near the bottom of the list that they are being evaluated on. Across all of my jobs I've only had one manager that was interested, some even seemed to actively get in the way.

> To help guard against discussion about career growth getting lost entirely, Spellbook conducts annual and midyear reviews of its employees, Stevenson said. That allows for "really deep conversation" about workers' careers and how to level up and advance, he said.

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.

Never did; they only really care about theirs.