The title might be a little dramatic, but I poured my heart into this article. I had to make some drastic decisions and big changes with regards to my career trajectory - and if I can inspire others to be true to themselves, then I'll be happy.
> meetings, on-sites, and bureaucracy - leaving very little time for actual work which produced any kind of real artifact
All those things are actual work, they just produce different artifacts, eg an aligned team and correct decisions and proper risk assessment diffused through an org. Again, nothing wrong with choosing the career you want, but I think this perspective is simply wrong.
You're absolutely right. I guess those artifacts don't resonate with me - and I did mention there's nothing wrong with enjoying this in the article. Good catch, I'll see if I can't reword it a bit :)
It definitely resonates. I am afraid of there being an upper bound to the amount of management work I can do without burning out. And yet I still get promoted every year and continue up the ladder… interestingly I have the exact same rationale for this: that I need to be untouchable by the time I’m 50. So your article is a nice reminder that all that is something I made up and keep telling myself.
I'm fortunate to be in a company where there isn't a stereotypical push for senior dev to "switch to management." I'm happily doing the IC thing but feel like I am on the other end of the pendulum swing a bit, in that I feel like I maybe should look into the management path before I get too old and out of date. The main thing that stops me is that so far I've been able to adopt and learn new tech reasonably well (or so I think!) so I suppose as long as that continues I shouldn't mess with what ain't broken. :-)
Thanks for doing this. It’s hard to talk about this sort of thing with yourself, much less the world!
I’ve been fortunate to be able to reboot a few times within an organization, most recently running a division with hundreds of people then pivoting to a small, strategic group with a specific high priority mission. It’s good to reboot sometimes and good to be able to tamp down the ego aspects of advancement that often keep us doing things we don’t like.
You already are. Thank you for describing how these thoughts can pull you in the two directions and that you could prevent to let them tear you apart in the end. I hope you found mentor(s) who you could reflect the path forward with without having to burn bridges. In fact a sequel how it turned out would be interesting.
Good for you for recognizing what you need and shooting for it. Like you say in the article, you're one of the lucky who have taken that shot and had it work out for you, and I feel like I'm in a similar boat.
Our first kid was born two weeks before California shut down (the first state to do so) for the pandemic. I was stuck in a shitty job with shitty bosses who expected the world (eg, made me lay off 75% of my team in 2019 and proceeded to insist I produce more than before, while telling me to expect "More of the same!", with a perverse enthusiasm, in the coming years when I asked what our long-term plan was, but I digress - shoutout to Apto Solutions!). We had no family living near us, so it was just the two of us raising our first kid in the middle of a lockdown while I worked in-office and my wife tried to somehow simultaneously work FT from home while caring for a newborn. That wasn't tenable, so we uprooted to a more affordable region that had us surrounded by family in early 2021. I did the stay-at-home-dad thing for the better part of 2021 until it was time to get back into the swing of things.
My first interview was at Intel, through a staffing agency, and it sounded goddamned miserable as a new-ish father - rotating shifts (so I'd be required to do graveyards and swing shifts every few weeks), no office (the team I'd be working with said that they had to come in every morning and find whatever conference room might be available that day to post up in), the expectation that on my off days (yes, even vacations) I would need to respond to all emails and messages within one hour (so, how do I fly on a plane or hike in the woods on my day off?), and at the end of every week you had to present your numbers for the week to Intel staff in a way that sounded a hell of a lot like, "Please justify your existence to us and convince us that we should keep you here". It sounded goddamned miserable.
My next interview was the opposite - for a company in the education sector that promoted a healthy work-life balance and a focus on family. So, I leaned into it hard - I told my now-boss during the interview that I was coming out of a very rough, stressful and unreasonable working environment and that I have no desire to put up with anything like that ever again. I said that my primary focus has to be my family, and that I refused to "take home" any stress or work, that I would put 110% into my job while I'm in the office but 0% outside, that my phone would be set up to not notify me of anything afterhours, and that at that point in my life, I had zero desire to climb the corporate ladder and would be more than content sitting in the same position for a good chunk of time.
I thought for sure that their rhetoric around work-life balance and such would be bullshit, but I got the job, and it's exactly like they described. The flexibility and support for all of us to prioritize ourselves, whatever that looks like, is amazing, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here. I can shut off at the end of the day and, in three years, I've yet to take work home with me in any sense of the phrase.
And now that three years have passed and my kids are a bit older, I've been candid about taking more on and maybe moving up the ladder a bit (within reason/my sanity), and they've been very supportive of it.
All that rambling is to say, lean in to whatever it is that you know you need. Reach for it, ask for it, insist on it. It might not always work out, but you may get lucky and end up getting it, and boy is it damn sweet if you do.
The dangerous thing to me was not the email, it was asserting the misunderstanding that additional years results in inutility.
"Up or out" doesn't have to mean up the org chart. It can mean up your value through mastery, which you clearly feel you have within a set of disciplines.
It took some number of years to become "the best" at those things you described being good at. Whatever activities you were doing those years that made you the best, keep doing them … applied to adjacencies.
Later in life, after people have been good at some things for a while, it's an ego boost. They forget what it felt like to be not good at things, and that that was OK. They become inhibited from learning by both ego pain of doing something badly, and mental pain of reformatting brain and behaviors to fit in new learning.
If at 40 you have 20 years of getting good at things, at 60 you can have another 20 years of getting good at additional things. Innovation and mastery of systems comes from multi-disciplinary, multi-system understanding. The additional years can make you more useful, not less.
Arguably, it boils down to: do you like learning, and do you like what you do. If yes to both, there's no reason you can't keep accumulating ability to deliver value.
It went well yeah, it's a little bit at the end that I should have spent more time on :). We're stopping the climb up the management ladder and are identifying other resources to handle those responsibilities.
Far too few people ever recognize their breaking point, and just continue trying to push forward because that’s the capitalist manifesto - growth at any cost.
You learned from your own breaking point, and intentionally chose an alternative path that fit you better. That by default makes you more self-aware than many.
