[scarejunba]

You are only valuable if you can align those well with company goals. That’s the way I see it: I try to find employers where the dot product of their desire vector and my desire vector is high and where the dot product of their desire vector and my capability vector is high. Not just the basis vectors but the actual value.

So far it’s worked. But I haven’t had the decades of experience yet to reflect on it.

[irrational]

>You are only valuable if you can align those well with company goals.

As I see it, that's my manager's job. He's always blathering on about aligning with this or with that, but I have more than enough work to keep me busy and if he wants me to work on something else, he will tell me. This has worked well for me for 2 decades and I'm more than satisfied with my benefits and compensation that I'm happy to just keep plugging along.

[scarejunba]

Haha, I imagine neither of our experiences has sufficient predictive power as to what works. Ah well, let’s hope the next decades don’t teach us both too many hard lessons about our respective philosophies.

[enraged_camel]

>>As I see it, that's my manager's job.

No, it's your job, because it's your future at stake.

Never put your destiny in the hands of others.

[bluGill]

It is the job of both of you. However the motivations are different. Over time one or the other will be more useful to follow.

Your manager needs you to bridge the gap between when the company was doing yesterday (this is what is making the money today), and what the company will do tomorrow. When your manager sees that next year they will need a skill and gets you to develop that skill they have your domain knowledge of the existing product to apply to the next thing and the whole gets done faster because of your experience and new skills.

You are responsible for yourself. If the next job is a variation on what you did today no training is required so he won't give it - it makes you less valuable to outsiders so you won't leave. Also because you are not growing he doesn't have to give you top raises to keep you from leaving - which is more money to give someone else who is better than you. The downside of this is you need to guess where the next big thing will be and sometimes you will be wrong.

[__jal]

Your manager's job is aligning their talents with company goals. When your manager aligns you with company goals, that's no longer called a 'job', is illegal in civilized countries, and isn't a role many folks seek out.

[tspike]

That's a good way of putting it.

If your goals are too closely aligned with the company's, you risk devaluing yourself for your own or the next company's goals. If your goals are too different from your company's, you risk finding yourself out of a job.