Sunday, August 21, 2016

The Evolving Career

For the 6-year work, I accomplished a lot. This was the beginning of my career and among my two unqualified successes. I should have left at least a year earlier. Best to leave while there is a little challenge still to look forward to and work is still exciting.

Challenging work should be distantly achievable, but put you far out of your comfort zone. I've come to associate minor heart palpitations and panic attacks with the subsequent obsession over problems that drives personal growth. If I don't have that stunned feeling of "how in the world do I do this?" I won't enjoy it. The pattern is the same: a problem is introduced, I panic, I sit back paralyzed, and as I calm down and ruminate over it, I find ways to eat around the edges of the problem with potential solutions until the path forward appears. And then full steam ahead.


The 2-month job is in fact the one I miss the most. Partly for the work I did, largely for the promise it held for me: that it could have been the capstone of my career to-date. It represented a target that was way beyond me. I grew more in 2 months than in the 3 years prior. The project, however was cancelled by our parent company. In the interviews that followed, I preferred speaking about those 2 months more than any other position. This is to me the mark of the best positions: a target worth hitting that is well beyond your current ability and will require every last bit of your ability and energy to hit.

I'm reminded of a line from Band of Brothers: "We're paratroopers, we're supposed to be surrounded."

It's one of many things I remember from playing sports in high school, the joy of "leaving everything on the field; of holding nothing back." Good work will take everything out of you, leaving in its place intense satisfaction and the permission to enjoy your rest.

One should have a mission worth fulfilling. There’s no substitute for the feeling of being unable to wait to get to work in the morning and using any excuse to stay in the afternoon. There is no substitute to having a problem to chew on throughout both day and night. Night is a rest for the brain and you hit the ground running when you get back in the office. A paycheck is not a mission. Better still, I can’t believe they pay me to do this.

Coming home exhausted and happy has a brilliant amplifying effect on the spirits of your family.

Concerning bait-and-switch offers, a silver lining once appeared in that it was very useful to add project management experience to my career, leading meetings, setting milestones and deadlines, soliciting and evaluating customer requirements and fostering the impression that your company is meeting its customers’ needs, spoken and unspoken. Leaving with additions to your skillset can mitigate the feeling of failure having wasted time in a role that didn’t fit your career goals (or even career).

Consulting for multiple clients has many benefits, not all of them technical. It’s a path for engineers to experience a wide variety of problems with the need to solve them quickly. It’s hard to beat the rate of technical growth while there are still things to learn. However, it’s also an excellent way to learn how to speak to strangers, particularly meeting new customers on a daily basis, most of whom have pressing problems, some of whom begin conversations with you (as their new engineer) amid deep dissatisfaction with the old engineer or your company entirely. Learning how to understand each new problem quickly, so you can begin to approach it is useful. Learning how to leave an irate customer with a positive impression of your visit, and by extension your company’s service is very useful. Engineers benefit when they learn how to manage people.

Writing about something is not the same thing as doing it. I lasted 3 months at a company writing about how to implement IPv6 in a service provider core when I had never touched the technologies involved. The interviewer asked if I could learn the technologies quickly? I was sure I could, having learned an impressive amount in earlier roles. Could I deal with a position that wasn’t hands on? I was sure I could, having been capable in all previous roles, assuming this was essentially a graduation to an inevitable architect role. (I’d never not been in a role that wasn’t heavily hands-on, and this was practically an abstract question for me.) The problem was I learned because those were my environments and depended on me making the right decisions so I could live with the benefits and move forward. I didn’t learn in a vacuum because someone handed me a book, to write papers for an organization that might have just as well existed on paper for all of the hands-on work I wouldn’t have with it. Paper models and diagrams aren’t engineering. Learning and writing in a practical vacuum is excruciatingly distraction-filled and slow. I was less productive than at any time prior or since. If you learn best by doing, this isn’t something that is likely to change.

I am no longer an engineer in the same sense that I’ve usually used that word. At the 2-month job, I found myself excited more at the prospect of having to recruit others to a task for which I alone, as a single engineer, was inadequate to fulfill. I liked knowing that I would need a systems/tools engineer and a security engineer to achieve the mission and I knew the skills I needed. I liked looking ahead to what and who I would need to keep up the momentum. I looked forward to sorting through the problems of how to lay out the infrastructure, examine costs, forge relationships, investigate options. I worked through a number of technical problems, but I anticipated needing to hand off a lot of technical work so I could take care of the larger picture. At the previous job I was that engineer, charged with knowing the technology. Now, that was the sort of engineer I would need to help me achieve my larger goal. Too many problems for one person. I had graduated to the scale of project that would require me to offload and I looked forward to the new class of difficulties.

It is entirely possible that I misjudged what management had in mind, that they never envisioned this growing so large. In two months, I had no official meetings and had to parse much of the information from a very incomplete scope of work and what other competing engineers envision. It is as well entirely possible that I correctly estimated the scale to which this project could grow, should the smaller pilots succeed according to their potential. Either way, I was really looking forward to steps far beyond what I was already thinking through. It represented pure, unadulterated growth and I loved it.

Good engineers are constantly exposed to new problems. Higher salaries go to good engineers. Poor engineers with high salaries cannot expect to stay that way forever, and a rude awakening awaits them the next time they have to sell their skills to another employer that isn’t yet convinced they are essential. Good engineers with low salaries can trade salary now for salary later if the experience is exceptional.

There have been a number of times when I’ve been under-paid. This is frustrating. I started feeling valued for the work I provided but as I grew neither the compensation nor the job title kept up. Government positions (local, state, federal) seem especially prone to this.

With government contracting, there is sometimes a "hurry up and wait" mentality. There have been times when I've enjoyed being paid while locked out of work when a contract changed and badges/credentials were pending reissue. But prolong the idleness too much and I feel like I'm crawling up walls.

The Los Angeles job market, when I last explored it, was miserable. I would often get inquiries for positions that offered less than I was making (and I was convinced I was underpaid) with less responsibility. This was incredibly discouraging and was the source of enormous doubt as to whether I was as competent as I believed. A poor job market is incredibly devaluing and demoralizing.

There have been a number of times when I’ve felt I was instead over-paid – that the money I am paid isn’t worth the work I am doing. Even if you believe that at another company you would actually be worth that money, this is also demoralizing. You work with the knowledge that at a later date you may be less marketable than at first. That lucrative job now costs you money and challenge later. You find yourself stagnating, and you lose the joy of doing meaningful, challenging work. This is a situation to be avoided.

You are not trading your time for money. You are supposed to be trading your time for the challenge/growth plus money. If the growth is missing, the work is wrong.

The best of all possible worlds is when you are over-paid compared to what you have done, while determined to work your way up to the point where the company is convinced they had you at a bargain. Best if the company doesn't know any of that. My preference is often that a company discovers a pressing need that you can step in and fill. Three months of hunting for a replacement network manager. I told my boss that in another two months, if we didn’t find someone better, I’ll have filled the job completely. They didn’t, and I did. Out of this came some of my greatest achievements to-date.

This is also a sign that you may be targeting the wrong position in your job search. When you pin your hopes in your management underestimating the work involved, you are likely to wind up in a number of unsatisfying positions despite the few "accidental successes" you've had. I've always thought of myself as an "engineer, plus". I'm not the most brilliant technically (I know, having met a number that are), but I can handle a wider range of higher level tasks than most of my peers. My joy has come from starting competently with the network engineering part and then breaking out past that into new worlds. I always thought that made me a better engineer. Maybe I'm not entirely an engineer after all.

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