> I'm guessing this guy was a serial job hopper who had no expectation of being able to progress up the ladder at the company you were at.
Sometimes folks find themselves stuck in a kind of typecast role: they're "the guy" who does "the thing" that the company needs right now-- until they don't.
In many places no one will invite typecast folks to transition to different, more interesting roles that align with their interests. Instead the person will simply be discarded when they're no longer needed for that thing they do. To get around this requires some initiative and that means not "asking for permission" to try new stuff. Sometimes it's better to just take a chance and do something new. There's a risk of cargo-culting, of course, but hey there are worse things that can happen.
Danluu, as he indicated many times, comes from workplaces where staff are paid in multiples of 100K. These are elite "end-game" jobs, not "dead-end" jobs. Such staff are very much tied-in to the performance of the company objectives (in a real sense ($$$$) not in a mission-statement sense), so yeah, these places ALREADY have resources and tech in place that are marketable in other places. There's no need for folks in those workplaces to desperately get out of some php dungeon run by a B.O.F.H petty tyrant.
In many places no one will invite typecast folks to transition to different, more interesting roles that align with their interests. Instead the person will simply be discarded when they're no longer needed for that thing they do. To get around this requires some initiative and that means not "asking for permission" to try new stuff. Sometimes it's better to just take a chance and do something new. There's a risk of cargo-culting, of course, but hey there are worse things that can happen.
Danluu, as he indicated many times, comes from workplaces where staff are paid in multiples of 100K. These are elite "end-game" jobs, not "dead-end" jobs. Such staff are very much tied-in to the performance of the company objectives (in a real sense ($$$$) not in a mission-statement sense), so yeah, these places ALREADY have resources and tech in place that are marketable in other places. There's no need for folks in those workplaces to desperately get out of some php dungeon run by a B.O.F.H petty tyrant.