How can one build one's career outside work without annoying one's current employer?

Question

My company doesn't have that many developers. THere is just one lead who manages 18 of us in a company with a total white collar workforce of maybe 70. Salary is also limited to increases of just 3% a year. Basically, if you want to advance, you need to leave within a two year period. They survive by having good pay at any given experience level, but also have a low average tenure (currently just 10 months) because of the pay and lack of upward mobility.

I joined about a year ago ago and am thinking about my future as I learn all this information about low tenure and few increases. Waiting to become lead isn't an option as the current lead is someone who would have a hard time moving to an equivalent job because of his background. He lacks the traditional cs degree and only his current job title reflects that he does development so he will be there for a long time.

Because much of our work is quite simple and the salary/advancement issue, I want to spend more time developing myself professionally. Conferences, blogs, resume driven development, and all that good stuff. Stuff some node.js into some older projects as a microservice or something.

The problem is, each developer works on their own project or projects. The bus factor for most things is 1 as management wants us to each be responsible for something. When people leave, that makes management irate as then a system is untended for several weeks. As a result, they check our Linkedins regularly to see if they have changed.

What can one do to professionally develop without pissing off the current employeR?

Answer 1

It would depend on what your employer considers to be indicators of departure.

This is a hard question to answer because what annoys a particular person or group of persons is quite individual. I know of managers who think Calibri is lazy as it is the default font or who hate when their subordinates present PowerPoints which are not highly customized. Managers are a subset of the human population, with a chance at having all the eccentricities a person can have.

resume driven development

Unless your manager is exceptionally cynical, proposing new technologies is just going to seem as though you are proposing a different engineering approach. This is especially true if they are the non-traditional developer who has never had to think of job-hopping because of compensation.

I am an exceptionally cynical person, a developer, and someone who already knows what resume driven development is and that has never occurred to me when someone has proposed something new.

blogs

You could try some blogging. StackOverflow.blog is accepting pitches and is a decent place to start. I had a great experience working with Ryan on my post. Regarding your employer seeing it, my post had a link to it on every Stack Overflow page for two days. My life is full of developers who use SO daily and nobody I know in real life saw it. Even if they do see it, most blog topics don't immediately make people think that a person is leaving their job.

conferences

Conferences are more difficult. For the short term, these may not be an option anyway because of coronavirus. Hopefully, someone else can provide advice here because I hate them as an introvert and need to be dragged to attend them. The other challenge is that these are usually on company time.

Unless your manager is paranoid and cynical, you should be fine.

Answer 2

What can one do to professionally develop without pissing off the current employer?

Then make sure they don't find out (a piece of generally good advice for anyone job hunting)!

And luckily for you, there are many ways to "fly under the radar" as LinkedIn is something you can usually omit in your job application as it's rarely a hard requirement for devs to have one. So do all the usual things you would want to do, but only update your paper resume with it, the one that you will be sending around. If you want to go step further, write the blog under a synonym (perfectly normal thing to do) and then link to those articles in your CV, so anyone reading the paper copy will know about those articles while your linked-in checking boss will have no clue.

Make sure to not link back to your LinkedIn account in the CV, and also be prepared to explain the drift. For that honesty is the best policy - I've not updated my LinkedIn as I don't want my current boss to find out that I am jobhunting.