[QuercusMax]

When presenting the three projects, I gave pros and cons about each one, like "you'll get to learn this new piece of technology" or "a lot of people will be happy if we can get this working". Absolutely no reaction, just "I don't care, pick one".

This guy claimed to want to get promoted to Senior, but didn't do anything Senior-shaped. If you're going to own a component of a system, I should be able to ask you intelligent questions about how you might evolve it, and you should be able to tell me why someone cares about it.

[watwut]

I am honestly totally fine with person like that. Sounds like someone easy to work with. I dunno, not having preference between working on three parts of the system is not abnormal. Most people choose randomly anyway.

Just pick the two you like the most.

[johnnyanmac]

>not having preference between working on three parts of the system is not abnormal.

I suppose it depends on the team and industry. This would be unheard of behavior for games, for example. Why you taking a pay cut and likely working more hours to just say "I don't know, whatever works?". You'd ideally be working towards some sort of goal. Management, domain knowledge, just begin able to solve hard problems.

Welp, to each their own I suppose.

[ryandrake]

Yea a lot software developers I’ve worked with, across the full spectrum of skill levels, didn’t have a strong preference about what code they were writing. If there is a preference, it’s usually the parts they’ve already worked on, because they’re already ramped up. Strong desire to work on a specific piece of the code (or to not work on one) might even in some cases be a red flag.

[QuercusMax]

What I'm talking about is like asking "do you want a turkey sandwich or a ham sandwich" and getting the response "I don't care" - about everything. Pick something! Make a choice! Take some ownership of the work you're doing!

[johnnyanmac]

Why would having an idea of where to direct their career be a red flag?

[ryandrake]

I didn’t say anything about career direction. I’m talking about what project or part of the project. I have worked with developers who insist that they only want to work on this very narrow section of the code, and won’t consider branching out somewhere else, and that kind of attitude often comes from people who are difficult in other ways to work with.

[johnnyanmac]

You implied it here:

>Strong desire to work on a specific piece of the code (or to not work on one) might even in some cases be a red flag.

I understand an engineer should compromise. But if you want to specialize in high performance computing and you're pigeonholed into 6 months of front end web, I can understand the frustration. They need to consider their career too. It's too easy for the manager to ignore you of you don't stand up for yourself. Some even count on it and plan around the turnover.

Of course, if they want nothing other than kernel programming as a junior and you simply need some easy but important work done for a month, it can be unreasonable. There needs to be a balance as a team.