Ask HN: Pigeonholed into role with no coding, what do I do?
by thawawaycold | 2025-04-08 05:51:42+00:00
Hi HN,

this is a follow-up post to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282410

TLDR of that post: 5yoe embedded engineer, started a new role within a highly dysfunctional organization with no clear responsibility or supervisors after a semi-burnout within a startup, felt extremely discouraged. Company is in aerospace development.

It's been little over a couple months since I've started and things have not improved yet. Sspposedly a lead engineer is going to start working with my team soon; however due to continuous changes of plans, lackluster collaboration coming from other teams and still no clear directions for the future of the project the morale of the other members of my team is that of extreme gloom, and there are days I find it very hard to bother doing what I'm being paid to because 1. I feel like fighting an uphill battle against not only work activities but also my own peers and 2. the feeling is almost always that we're simply doing busywork that will have to be redone in a few weeks/months time.

Keep in mind that all of this is simply technical writing (requirements) and involves no coding at all nor a particularly deep knowledge of the underlying technology, since it's iteratively monkey-pasted until it appeases some subjective and still unclear measures of the main customer, which also seems to have its own internal strifes regarding variability of staffing, which eventually leads to repeated re-thinking of the overall project. Worst of all is that we have to closely follow suit because some deadlines are approaching and if the project team does not manage to respect those basically the whole company is royally f*cked in the hindquarters.

Due to the overall situation, we (the SW team) received recent news from the project manager that for the foreseeable duration of the project (4-5y more or less) there will be no internal SW development made because of de-risking, and everything will be outsourced instead. I will personally not delve into why I think this is a dumb decision, but it is what it is; only that at this point I really don't understand which reasons I have to keep working here, aside from the relatively cozy position (which btw does not differ much from previous positions I held). I have plans to open up a small SW startup i 5-10y time for development in this field, but that requires a non-indifferent amount of expertise whose growth would be obviously stunt from sitting idly for years to come, especially for someone with so little experience such as me.

I do not want to turn this into a meaningless rant, so I'm asking again for HN opinion on this: what would you personally do in this case? I feel like I'm being irrationally capricious and ungrateful for leaving a cushy job in these trying times and markets, OTOH I fear that developing no experience for several years to come is going to leave me stranded when I'll eventually try to scale up into new roles or future endeavors, nevermind the expectation of an extremely dull day to day experience.

Another thing is, I really like the space sector and would love to stay in it, but the feeling I get from working in it and hearing from other people that have been doing it at different levels of seniority is that you either get startups that do not know what the hell they're doing at frantically try to spin up some working satellite with hopes and strings, or immovable giants in which you're parked in some role and hardly move anywhere. Considering how much I love working with low level stuff, PCBs, CPU architectures and so on, maybe this is not the right call for me, and I should be better off working in some other fields...

Thanks to anyone that takes their time to respond, appreciate it immensely.