Voxelwise

Category: Career

Play the game, don’t document the game

How you invest your time will determine where you go from here. Are you investing in the right areas?

I have posted before about my former adventures as a sports photographer. You can read one post on that journey here. The story of why I left photojournalism is probably every bit as important.

I was drawn to photography as a unique intersection between technical and creative work. How to gather light is a science. How to frame that light to create a beautiful or engaging photo is an art. I loved both aspects. I started taking pictures for the University Daily Kansan at the University of Kansas during my sophomore year.

Every weekend I would trundle out to the football field, basketball arena, or the track. Every weekend I would shoot hundreds of photos of people pushing themselves harder than ever. They were in competition. They were finding their limits. They were part of a team, and they didn’t want to let the team down. Every week I was impressed by their commitment and fire. Every week I grew more disappointed in my own drive and ambition.

It’s not that sports photography is easy. It is uniquely challenging. The light, the angles, the speed – it is as technically difficult as anything I have done in photography*. With that said, once you have your techniques dialed in then each new event is less of a challenge. It becomes “cookie cutter” where you begin applying the same formula again and again, achieving similar results. Maybe you can find some room for creativity. Maybe something extraordinary happens during an event and you are there to catch it. Those times are rare though. That is not growth.

In my junior year I had to take a hard look at where I was spending my time. It was pretty easy to see that how I spent my hours did not align with my long-term goals. I left the Photography department at the campus newspaper and signed up to work as a volunteer in a neuroscience lab in the Psychology Department. They were using EEG techniques to evaluate event-related potentials from the brain in language. The professor in charge of the lab became a trusted mentor and was a key recommendation when I applied to grad school twelve months later.

With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, it was absolutely the right move.

It is FAR too easy to get into a rhythm of work that is enjoyable but doesn’t serve your long-term interests. For many of us, this will manifest as staying in a job well beyond the point where we are still growing. We implicitly or explicitly accept stagnation. In that case, it isn’t hard to predict where you will be twelve months into the future: almost exactly where you are at today.

* Astrophotography is a whole other level, so we will leave that to the side for now…

Photo: Las Alturas Road in Santa Barbara. The switchbacks are epic, especially with a wide angle lens.

Director: Other duties as assigned

At some point in your career the job description becomes 100% “whatever it takes for your team and the company to be successful”. The people that get ahead are the ones that realize this fact early.

Steve Jobs is always a controversial character when evaluating management styles, but I have always loved this story regarding his expectations for VPs:

Steve Jobs told employees a short story when they were promoted to vice president at Apple. Jobs would tell the VP that if the garbage in his office was not being emptied, Jobs would naturally demand an explanation from the janitor. “Well, the lock on the door was changed,’ the janitor could reasonably respond. “And I couldn’t get a key.”

The janitor’s response is reasonable. It’s an understandable excuse. The janitor can’t do his job without a key. As a janitor, he’s allowed to have excuses.

“When you’re the janitor, reasons matter,” Jobs told his newly-minted VPs. “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.”

“In other words,’ (Jobs continued,) “when the employee becomes a vice president, he or she must vacate all excuses for failure. A vice president is responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn’t matter what you say.”

John Rossman, Think like Amazon

There is a lot of power in the Jobs story. As a senior leader you own it all – both successes and failures. The reasons for each stop mattering. My addition to that perspective is that ownership shouldn’t start at the VP level. You should be going above and beyond to deliver results, and owning all outcomes, wherever you are in your career journey. This trait is rare and puts you far above your peers in any industry.

I have had numerous direct and indirect reports that requested a kind of checklist for promotion. “Just tell me what to do and I will do it” is a common refrain. This is relatively easy to provide to recent grads up through Senior engineers. The expectations at these levels are more straightforward, almost mechanical. At the Staff+ levels it becomes much more difficult to create that kind of to-do list. This is because managers are indexing less on your technical knowledge and project completion rate. Instead, we are focusing more on your soft skills, including communication, collaboration, and ownership. Establishing strong ownership early shows a senior level of execution, accelerating your career growth.

This same ownership effect occurs within the management ladder. While software management is already a bit like four different jobs masquerading as one, at the Director+ levels is starts boiling down to “whatever it takes”. This explains why so many Director+ job postings are oddly vague, with terms like “create a healthy team culture”, “collaborate with product management”, or “ensure technical excellence”. As a job posting there has to be a job description, but how do you capture the reality of “responsible for everything”?

One of my personal Top 50 management books is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Lief Babin.  You can distill the entire book down to a single view: you always have some control over a situation, so stop giving excuses and pretending that there was nothing you could do. The individuals who get ahead quickly are the ones that internalize this fact early.

Photo: The Cessna 152 that I did most of my flight training in. I have a lot of fond memories in that plane, including my first solo flight. On any plane the pilot-in-command (PIC) is the individual directly responsible for and the final authority regarding operation of that aircraft. No excuses.

Scrutinize advice from the lucky

Never accept career advice blindly.

Sometimes I get asked to do something like a brown bag lunch talk on careers and career advice. The above comic is always the first thing that I show the audience. If I leave them with nothing else, I want them to not simply follow the advice of some schmuck like me just because I/we have achieved some measure of “success”. If I can get the audience to think critically about my presentation then I have succeeded in the most important goal.

I like to think that I am reasonably good at what I do. After ten years in academia and twelve years in industry I have learned a few things that make me more effective as a researcher, engineer, and manager. Still, a significant degree of luck has also shaped my career path. Here are a few, off the top of my head:

1) Having my grad school interview schedule changed at the last minute and randomly meeting the person who would be my future advisor.

2) Finding a great postdoc position because I literally ran into a professor at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in New York and he said that his lab had a job available.

3) My first software manager deciding to take a risk and hire me even though I had no formal training as a software engineer.

4) Getting my first software management position because the CEO happened to remember that I organized large research projects as a postdoc.

5) The startup I joined getting acquired by a FAANG nine months after they almost ran out of money and laid off 30% of the company.

Hard work is always necessary. A little bit of luck can make all the difference though. Survivorship bias pops up when only the successful people are around at the end. Put another way, the people who have gotten lucky are much more likely to be giving presentations than the people who never got a fortunate nod from the statistical universe. Always know that.

Comic from XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1827/

Associated explainer: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1827:_Survivorship_Bias

The Punctuated Equilibrium

Always be at the top of your game.

Performance across teams always tends to increase as review season comes around. Individuals know that they are about to be evaluated by their manager and, consciously or unconsciously, they ramp up their output. I see it as an attempt to put their best foot forward and a chance to capitalize on recency bias. All in all, it is a very smart move.

But it is not a smart move. You need to be at the top of your game, always.

Opportunity is a random process. You never know when the unexpected will happen and a previously satisfied business need is now a business need unsatisfied. If that happens during review season, and your stats are up, then what an amazing coincidence. If it happens outside of review season, and your stats are off, then you have missed an opportunity.

Like many, I have often thought of career progression as a linear march. You continuously move in a straightforward fashion toward the next level, occasionally getting promoted. With more experience, I now see career progression as a kind of punctuated equilibrium. Things are relatively stable until such time as they are not and dramatic change can happen very quickly. The goal, your goal, is to always be well-positioned for those periods of change.

I feel this is important because this randomness has shaped, and perhaps defined, my personal career. The first time I became a software manager was when my then-current supervisor decided to leave the company for a new gig at Apple. He went to the CEO’s office and tendered his resignation. After some discussion, and an attempt to retain him, the CEO asked “how should we handle your replacement?”. My supervisor responded that “Craig has been really crushing it lately and has relevant experience”. The rest is history.

Anticipating your question, no, this was well after that year’s review season.

Time and again I have observed people who have missed opportunities because they weren’t positioning themselves to be prepared for it. There is a lot of power in acting like you belong at the next level because you never know when that opening will appear.

You will always have a down day here and there where nothing seems to click. That is natural and can’t be avoided. Don’t let off the gas though, even if it looks like opportunities are sparse. As Robert Abelson famously said “chance is lumpy”.

Photo: Lightning strikes the Santa Ynez mountains north of Santa Barbara, California.