i am, and i need to make sure i’m very clear here, an idiot.
i’ve been working for my current employer for just over 10 years. i am still pretty much at the same position i started with. It’s not a huge deal in my life, since i make good money, working with good people on interesting things and am able to both tell people what i do, and sleep at night knowing i am not screwing them over. Heck, it’s an open source company, so it’s possible to audit everything we do, and frankly, that’s pretty unique.
Still, it’d be nice to get a kudo every so often or at least some sign of progress. Part of the problem comes because every so often we have a reorg, and i get a new manager, and i basically have to start all over again. Myself and someone i’ve worked with even created a “New Manager On-boarding Document” that lists various things to do (like, make sure your github credentials are in order, here’s some groups to join, here’s the slack channels and calendars we use, etc.). It’s mostly pre-emptive because then we minimize the disruption that occurs whenever there’s a new boss. New boss arrives, and mentally classifies me with my various peers, and starts to either question all the things i currently work on or “help optimize” things which usually results in me continuing to do them because stuff breaks otherwise.
i tend to work on some fairly long lived, highly critical, but not super showy projects. That means less “Hey, we launched Shiny New Thing in three months then forgot about it!” and more “here’s a system that people have relied on / will rely on for years, can you make it better?” Not super glitzy, but solid work. Sometimes, it’s even the less shiny, less new Thing that got thrown over the wall and now it’s my problem. So, after a regime change, we’ve got a new reporting structure, and either old boss goes on to new things, or i get re-assigned to new boss and things get reset across the board and i have to spend time mitigating the impacts of the change.
Because of that, i’ve actually gotten fairly OK at understanding larger corporate psychology. i’ve tried to consider how folks at each level tend to think and operate and why they may make the sorts of weird decisions they do. Re-orgs, for instance, often have less to do with fluffy corporate goals, and more with just plain workload. Your move to some tangentially related org is probably due to Current Boss being overloaded and New Boss having room. This is true up the chain, so things get all sorts of screwy at times. Bosses who have more than 6 or so direct reports have a HUGE amount of work just on dealing with having that many reports. Think of the review process alone. All bosses will find as many short cuts as possible, and frankly that’s encouraged. The “self assessment” isn’t for you, it’s for them. It’s a cheat sheet you hand them to determine why you should continue to be employed, and usually it’s cut and pasted into their review, with maybe a few additional “points to work on” to justify why they spent more of their raise budget on someone else.
This is something i’ve told peers for literally decades now. It’s why i keep a document outlining all the things i’ve done over the year, so that i have a reference when doing my “Self Review”. i forget all sorts of crap and there’s zero expectation that my boss would even remember a fraction of it.
Ah, right, the “idiot” part. i’m getting to that.
So, like i said, your boss is mostly your boss for organizational reasons, and while there’s a notation about “career growth” unless it’s something that’s fairly low bar (like signing off on a conference ticket or picking between two programming languages), they probably don’t have a lot to offer.
So why the hell was i expecting them to figure out i’m ready for a promotion?
Yeah, like i said, i am an idiot.
i was recently reminded of this fact by someone far smarter than i, when he noted that he had to put together his own doc talking about why he qualified for a change from IC3 to IC4. It was like being hit by the back hand of Captain Obvious. Of course, being introverted, talking about myself is a bit like riding porcupines bareback, so not something i willingly want to ever do, but it’s something i absolutely need to do for any form of career growth.
i sat, feeling both dumb and dumbstruck at that revelation. Mind you, i am also a HUGE advocate of stating things that seem obvious to you because there’s always someone to which it’s not. i am the lucky someone in this instance. So, yeah, make sure you do that if you don’t already. If nothing else, keep a longer list of the accomplishments you’ve done over your career at X so that when you’re ready to put together that document detailing your accomplishments, you have them at hand.
Because, yeah, i didn’t do that.
Because i’m an idiot.
