Career Limiting Move

Any change in job or company that lowers the chance you will continue to work in your current career.

The common usage (in Silicon Valley) is different:

A CareerLimitingMove is an action you take that decreases the likelihood your getting a promotion or a good job assignment, or which increases the likelihood of your being sacked or demoted

The JargonFile has this definition:

CLM /C-L-M/

[Sun: Career Limiting Move] 1. n. An action endangering one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one's job: "His Halloween costume was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for best CLM." 2. adj. Denotes extreme severity of a bug, discovered by a customer and obviously missed earlier because of poor testing: "That's a CLM bug!" -- EricJablow

I like the Japanese version which admittedly is more extreme: SeppukuMonoDa. Which is translated literally as a suicidal move or thing. -- MichaelChean

Examples include:

Disagreeing with your boss.
Disagreeing with your boss in the presence of his/her boss.
Disagreeing with your boss's boss.
Not wearing the same clothing as everyone else (IBM was this way. As late as 1985, I could tell how long someone had worked there by the color choices in their outfits)
Writing UnitTests that detect your boss's bugs.
Suggesting that a bug that crashes the product should delay shipment. :-(
Requesting permission to communicate with a customer.

This might be something like "not paying careful attention and adhering to the social structure and pecking order of the PowersThatBe". Just as an anecdotal example, in my workplace everyone is every now and then expected to be in violent disagreement with the boss and the yelling is entertainment for the rest. This tends to be quite baffling for newcomers :)

At a production meeting last year ...

Owner: After all our company philosophy is to deliver jobs on time.
Employee: Actually I think our company philosophy is to lie about delivering on time.

True story:

The setting: A meeting of salesmen and engineers to discuss what to do about discovering, after the business was won, that a major component was missed on the quote. The objective is to figure out how to recoup the cost.

Sales type guy: What 'story' are we going to give the customer?
Engineer: Why don't we just tell them the truth?
Sales type guy: When do you want to stop working on the project?

The implication, of course, was that if we tell the customer the truth (we overlooked something), the customer would be unwilling to bend and we'd be forced to cancel the project because at the quoted price it's a loser. And if the project is canceled, the engineer won't be needed to work on it. Thus, CLM.

Contrast PersonalSafety

CategoryEmployment