[r3012]

> How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level?

I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.

[ceras]

This doesn't really match my experience for my own career or as a manager. Plenty of great engineers don't have a plan beyond "learn and get better," including those that have traditionally-successful careers (e.g. director+ at top tech company).

I'd expect that to matter more if you're, say, trying to be a founder - I can see that benefitting from intentional planning. But for careers at big companies, "learn and get better" seems good enough (and if that qualifies as a plan, I don't think I've worked with anyone that doesn't have a plan).

[shalmanese]

There’s also a difference between not having a plan and not being able to articulate your plan. Articulation is a skill that needs training and people who rarely need it are rarely good at it. I can take people who have strong plans and train them to articulate it in a few weekend sessions but someone who doesn’t have a plan requires multiple years of work to develop a plan.

[madrox]

"Learn and get better" is absolutely a plan and a great basis to build on, though it's nice to know if there's something in particular they'd like to learn. I've never encountered a candidate who will say they want to learn but not have an idea of what they want to learn...just candidates who have an idea what they want to learn but are afraid of saying the wrong thing in the interview.

[mbg721]

Then if you're hiring entry-level employees, you need to be prepared to accept a naive and unrealistic plan. If they have a plan that sounds like an experienced person's plan, maybe they did their homework and got lucky, maybe they know somebody and got interview coaching, but it's unlikely that their destiny from birth was exactly your job opening.

[madrox]

I think hiring managers tend to be pretty realistic about this (can't speak for recruiters). All we want to hear is that the candidate has a sense of how they want to develop themselves. The best entry level candidate story I've ever heard was from an intern who expressed a desire to learn how to biuld movie animation pipelines. We were an app dev team, but I was able to offer enough insight and experience that we helped him get his next job at WETA.

A candidate's intrinsic development goals become the basis of how managers can best motivate and retain employees. Without this, employees quickly stagnate and fall back to doing the bare minimum of their role. This is true of all levels and not just entry level.

[gammabetadelta]

setting career goals seems pretty silly

though im nearly 20 years into my career i barely can predict where i'll be in one year, let alone five

for the first 10 years my only goal was to make more money and not hate work

not a great goal from a hiring manager perspective

as a hiring manager, i ask what folks like to do and see if that aligns with what we need them to do

[travisjungroth]

Ok, you've said what you did in the beginning of your career and what you now do when it comes to career goals. Did this work? Do you consider yourself successful? If so, do you consider yourself successful in spite of or because of your lack of career goals?

I don't know you, so it's hard to draw much from what you're saying.