Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots(tidyfirst.substack.com) |
Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots(tidyfirst.substack.com) |
- Stage 1: The first few times you work on a particular type of transaction, you are completely lost. You've never seen these documents before, it all feels alien and scary (bearing in mind you are probably at an early stage in your career at this point). You need someone more senior to hold your hand through it all, and you feel like you're asking a million questions.
- Stage 2: You've gotten your head around the basic structure and don't feel so useless. You're learning a lot with every deal, which is exciting. You're still asking a lot of questions but they are more intelligent questions, and you are able to contribute meaningfully.
- Stage 3: You are by now quite experienced at this type of transaction. You can pretty much run things yourself. You love doing this work because you are good at it, you can speak confidently about it and people trust you with it. Hopefully by this stage, you have someone more junior who is just feeling their way through Stage 1, and you can support them.
- Stage 4: You've done so many of these deals that they all start to feel the same and it gets a bit boring. Hopefully by this stage the junior has moved on to Stage 2. They can at least handle the most tedious stuff, and with your support they are also getting familiar with the more complicated stuff.
- Stage 5: Your junior (not really a "junior" anymore) has moved on to Stage 3 and can take the day-to-day running of the deals out of your hands. You remain involved mainly in a supervisory role, making sure quality of service remains high and dealing with the occasional novel issue that crops up. But in general you have a lot more time now, to work on other types of transaction, and of course to go out and build out new client relationships so that the work keeps flowing. And hopefully you have a second junior moving into Stage 1 to repeat the cycle.
I've commonly run into this, myself. By the time someone gets to level four or five, they tend to associate more with people of their own level and it has been so long since they were themselves a junior that it becomes hard for them to relate. They expect competence and familiarity with the process from their colleagues, even if said colleague is a fresh new hire.
It can be pretty tough to overcome, from both sides.
I'm glad Kent Beck got that one out. I work for a Big Tech that pays (comparatively) well, and sometimes there is lot of ambiguity. Some new hires have a hard time adapting, and complain that they lack direction or have nothing to do. When these kind of companies pay you big bucks, part of the job is to be proactive at finding and solving the problems in your organization.
L4 - problem and solution is well defined
L5 - problem is well defined, your responsibility to come up with a solution or at least be able to reach out to the right people for help.
L6 - neither problem nor solution is well defined
Once you have a critical mass of threes and fives in the team you can go do something else and they can take over.
Gotta have a job that allows you that extra time to explore.
In my company we have “let yourself be nerd sniped” as an core cultural value, I think we’d be closer to 60/30/10 or something like that. But it’s hard to tell for sure because sometimes the 10 blows up into a mad 5 week rabbit hole quest with, often but not always, spectacular results. Would suck if we’d not have those because some boss said 10% fun stuff is the max. I guess it balances out over the year but attaching a number makes it a rule. So on second thought, maybe less explicit can be better?
- I find 5% for any investments very low. It is hard to get deeper into a new topic with that level. Our work has very high context switching costs.
- at the moment I work one day on another project requiring a fair amount of learning. While I learn a lot this way I found the two project setup exhausts my ability to push yet another set of things forward. There are limits to my ability to manage initiatives.
- the whole agile treadmill can be leveraged by management against self management. I found slowing down things and pushing myself to explore alternatives in my 80% block helps a bit to stem the tide.
Not keen on this mindset. I’m glad to keep myself marketable, but that’s my business. My company’s business is: am I making what you want? Good. Pay me.
IME some organizations are just not open to alternative suggestions. Some genuinely just want people to do exactly as they’re told and work within the limitations of their system without question. This is IMO the worst type of organization to work for. Even in these environments, I would hope that people speak up.
https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/
https://cloud.google.com/consulting
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/professionalservices/overvie...
He would say no occasionally for business reasons or he would come back with suggestions based on his knowledge of the future directions of the company.
Even now, if I’m coming up with what I think is a novel solution where I am responsible for the project, I’ll reach out to a coworker for a sanity check or sometimes the actual service team (ie the team responsible for maintaining the AWS service I’m using) to see if there is a better way.
For the consulting department, we are given a customer project. Depending on the complexity of a project, it will be split into “work streams”
L6 - the project lead responsible for understanding the scope of the entire project, how multiple teams work together and should be “strategic”. They should be able to suss out the customer’s pain points and orchestrate the different lanes of work.
L5 - “tactical” In a normal software development environment, I would consider this a team lead and where I am. Whatever “workstream” I’m over, I should be able to gather requirements, come up with action items and estimates, schedule meetings, present proposed solutions, implement them or find the right people for help, document the implementation, work with the customer to teach them how to use it, support it, expand it, etc.
On smaller projects, if there is only one workstream. I’m often the only technical resource.
The customer knows the business outcomes and pain points. It’s up to me to design a solution.
L4 - they are expected to be able to gather requirements and understand the problem. But need help designing and implementing a solution.
From a soft skills standpoint, an L4 consultant could probably go toe to toe with an L6. From a system design standpoint, an L5 could go toe to toe with an L6 since we do actually do system design as part of our day to day work.
Now actual development skills and passing a coding interview is a different story.
None of this is specified, there are no specs to execute up front. Much of it is defining the spec yourself and collaborating with the rest of the org to find out if other people agree with the spec.
- implementing the spec for an existing spec (L4)
- creating the spec for a prescribed product (L5)
- recognizing the need for the product in the first place and advocating to make it happen(L6)
Each level feeds the one below it.
To be clear, that’s not a judgement. I think if people want to exist within those bounds it is completely sensible to do so, and I agree that companies get more out of people who step outside those bounds.
But it’s still dull. It’s dull to describe. It’s dull to aspire to. It’s just against the idea we’re drilled in as kids to dream big and make great stuff.
But dull is fine, dull puts money on the table and means that you have more time to do things you don’t find dull outside of work.
The way I’ve found to adapt to that is to make my impacts known and learn to say “no” or “later”. And of course, as the article says, on-boarding others to unburden me.
If I tell people that I was responsible for something, it sticks and people start telling others when questions about it come up.
If I say no to people or tell them that I’ll help later , they start to value the impact of my absence.
It’s easy to be graciously taken for granted but imho it’s not too hard to control your outward narrative to change that, and in turn reduces burn out.