Growth and Power
There’s something missing from the many blog posts, tools, and repositories about engineering growth or mentorship, or what makes a senior engineer or staff engineer.
It’s power. We don’t talk enough about power. We don’t talk enough about having or getting access to power, about navigating power dynamics, about the implicit assumptions that we can “just” start leading projects and join meetings to discuss cross-functional challenges and be recognized as a hero who resolves major incidents and scales impact across an organization.
For people with access to power, opportunities and promotions may seem magnetically attracted to them as they do their day to day work. They’re doing challenging work and solving hard problems, and they deserve to be rewarded! So do you.
Growf
As software and security engineers grow, we are expected to work independently, mentor, lead projects, innovate and take risks, work strategically, collaborate across teams, spell words correctly — the list goes on and on.
But what is “growth” as an engineer? What makes an engineer “senior” or “estafa” or “principled”? An engineer by any other name would code as sweet. Almost every engineer codes, collaborates, mentors, interviews, and so on — and the proportions vary even among senior engineers. So what marks the growth and career development of an engineer? What’s the benchmark or checkpoint or rule by which we can measure our growth?
TLDR: Get a mentor and build your manager voltron, because our career development path is unique to each of us. Despite any career ladder or skills architecture matrix, there is no one-size-fits-all, no checklist, no experience points to gain, no universal metric. Mentors and managers and introspection provide perspective for charting and measuring growth.
Some key steps along our growth path may include:
- Working independently to complete assigned tasks
- — then coming up with such tasks and mentoring teammates in their work
- Participating in collaboration within and across teams, then leading such
- Convincing your team that yes, you can lead yet another project and don’t need hand-holding
- Developing business acumen to align your work with the business and refine your impact — first inside, then beyond your team
- Defining vision for progressively wider scope of the org and product
I have to be direct with you: these steps are going to be significantly easier for some people than for others. Access to power greases the wheels. It’s not fair, and you shouldn’t have to, but your best options are to develop some of that access to power (e.g., via sponsors) or to raise the visibility and clarity of your skills and impact to the point that they are undeniable. Twice the work for half the credit, backwards in heels, etc. — you know the drill.
Perception is Everything: Convince Your Peers
It’s dangerous to go alone. Take friends!
This is simultaneously — but differently — about personal career growth opportunities, and about promotions. Almost all of these steps apply regardless of whether you’re seeking a promotion or looking for how to get the growth opportunities you want.
Steps:
- You will need the support and sponsorship of your manager (if you don’t have this, please find another manager and ask careful questions)
- Managers must see that you demonstrated the skills needed for this promotion or project
- Managers must perceive that you have these skills (based on evidence, perhaps via your annual self-review)
- Managers must believe that you have demonstrated these skills
Career ladders and leveling rubrics like to frame promotions as being about providing various artifacts as evidence that someone demonstrated such-and-such skills. That’s unfortunately not the whole story.
The discrepancy between the skills we have and the skills that our peers and managers perceive that we have is often palpable. Anchoring bias is a common way this shows up. If you started as an intern, for some people you will always be “the intern”—that’s anchoring! You won’t move that anchor easily.
No one likes to be wrong, and they will distort reality to support their misconceptions to avoid recognizing that they may have been wrong. Did you deliver an impactful project through complex, cross-functional collaboration? —Or maybe the collaboration wasn’t that much work after all, and maybe it wasn’t complex, just another typical rollout.
Difficulty Anchor and Credit Shedding
Mekka Okereke wrote a brilliant Twitter thread about Difficulty Anchors. A difficulty anchor is a way to leverage documented evidence from an objective “anchor” in order to counter biases. To contextualize key points:
- Your manager, peers, and leaders won’t expect the same skills and quality of work from you as from folks who hold relative power
- Which mean they’ll downgrade the difficulty of your achievements or give credit to a colleague instead (credit shedding)
- An objective and widely-respected voice can provide a “difficulty anchor” by documenting why a problem is hard and important
- Document your role and contributions — and deliver on your goal
You can essentially borrow power from a difficulty anchor!
The documented anchor provides a reputable reference speaking to the indisputable demonstration of your skills and your impact to solve a challenging problem. If the documentation shows your work along the way, you have an almost iron-clad defense against credit-shedding, and against retroactive dismissal of the challenges in the problem you solved. Your anchor doesn’t need to care about you, and may not have to know that you’re leveraging their words in this way until you’re done.
If your anchor disagrees with the value of your achievement, they have to reconcile with their earlier, documented stance on the challenges of this problem—but again, no one likes to be wrong.
Demonstrate Impact: Show Your Work
If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Remember ye olde “show your work” from grade school? She’s back, and she means it.
Demonstrating our work means typically means showing evidence of how our work impacted the business. Not just any impact: we should be able to talk about justifications for intentional, strategic business impact. (Explaining “business impact” itself is a whole enchilada.)
How can you demonstrate your impact? Talk to your peers, mentors, and manager. Try explaining your work to someone in another department. Write a brag doc. Track your wins. Write annual self-reviews.
Find your balance. A rapid growth phase is an incredible experience, and your manager should applaud you for that. Out of hundreds of engineers, a dozen experience their own rapid growth with you — and while your achievements are unique, even your manager has a tiny window into your work and your impact. Until you have broad scope or high-visibility work or a VP who likes to golf with you, what you achieve may not mean much to someone outside your team, or outside your department.
It’s important to find your audience. Your manager will probably be super excited about your first feature launch — but unless it’s personally meaningful or achieves company-wide double-digit metrics, Pam from HR probably isn’t going to read our monthly achievements newsletters.
Catch-22: Gaining Trust and Responsibility
Growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We will need opportunities. The Catch-22 of growth is that we need to gain our manager’s trust to be assigned to lead impactful projects, and we need to lead impactful projects to gain manager’s trust. How do we do that?
Steps:
- Being assigned to projects where we can demonstrate skills
- — projects that are impactful and visible
- Where our individual contribution (as IC or leader) will be seen and distinguished clearly
I’ve seen engineers who are stuck in a rut. While these examples aren’t representative, the challenges they faced may resonate:
Alex was not confident in their skills, and their manager was in crisis-fixing mode, so Alex repeatedly missed out on challenging work, on visible projects, and they didn’t have opportunities to gain the trust of their manager. Even when Alex solved a problem that removed a barrier for a critical project of another team, Alex’s manager overlooked the value of their work.
Alex’s manager failed here. It shouldn’t be on Alex to confidently step up to ask for challenges, show that they’re ready, and identify good opportunities for them. Unfortunately, aspects of this situation aren’t uncommon, especially for managers under pressure. You aren’t your manager’s only nor highest priority.
Sam was in a rapid growth phase with high-profile achievements when their manager left. Sam’s new manager saw a new engineer and didn’t have the context to understand the intricacy of Sam’s work. Sam was assigned routine work almost two years before Sam’s manager recognized that multiple teams sought out Sam’s expertise. Sam was promoted, and left the team immediately for a manager that prioritized Sam’s career growth opportunities.
Sam’s manager also failed them. Another common trope is underrepresented and marginalized people being overlooked. While it shouldn’t be on Sam to identify the perception gap, raise the visibility, and clarify the difficulty of their work, Sam will have an easier time if they advocate for themselves or find another advocate. Sometimes it’s easier to find a new manager.
It’s weird that Alex and Sam both had managers that didn’t seem to prioritize them among their colleagues. It’s probably a coincidence that has nothing to do with power.
Just kidding: it has everything to do with access to power. While these situations could happen to anyone, some people experience this more frequently than others. Your manager holds power, and their reports don’t have equal access to that power. Fortunately, it’s not all in their hands, so don’t feel de-feeted. (sorry. I had to.)
Take ownership of your career growth
We can take ownership of our career growth.
The sweet spot for growth is a project that uses our skills and knowledge but stretches it. This may be familiar, but it’s important to spell out that we need to think about this and sometimes convince our peers of this. We may need to convince our manager or other leaders to bring us in on projects or let us create and drive what we come up with, in order to bring in the right balance of motivation, skills, challenge, visibility, and impact.
If you are interested in working on projects you’re excited about, getting recognition, and promotion, start by learning what your manager values — and about what’s valued in your organization beyond your manager. We should always have the general support and sponsorship of our manager. Talking with our managers to decide and share what our dream projects and career goals are will also help them connect us with those opportunities.
Every manager has different strengths. Supporting your growth may not be one of them. You may need to build a manager voltron to help you identify what you need and how to get it.
Don’t be afraid to stand up and advocate for yourself — but don’t lose sight of the risks of that either. Look, I’m sorry, but you might be walking a tightrope between stagnation and being deemed “aggressive”. It’s shitty and unfair, but on the positive side, rose-colored glasses look good on you. ✨💋
Conclusion
There is no universal metric by which to measure our growth, and no external product feature can mark the skills we develop. The real metric of our growth is the inner product of our work: the skills and colleagues we gained along the way.
Haha, who am I kidding — When power dynamics gives you the short straw, I hope this gives you some ideas on where to find the good boba, nail that project, and get the bag.
Resources
- Julia Evans: Get your work recognized: write a brag document
- Julia Evans: What’s a senior engineer’s job?
- Will Larson: Resources for Staff-plus engineers
- Guides for reaching Staff-plus engineering roles — StaffEng
- Lauren Holliday: How to Keep Track of Your Work Accomplishments
- Lara Hogan: When your manager isn’t supporting you, build a Voltron
- Lara Hogan: What does sponsorship look like?
- Chelsea Troy: Category: Leveling Up
- Things to know about engineering levels — charity.wtf
- Tor Bair: “Your Life Is Tetris. Stop Playing It Like Chess.”
- Sarai Rosenberg: Annual Self-Review Template
- Sarai Rosenberg: Interview Questions to ask Employers (spreadsheet of questions, why to ask, and what to look for)
- Sarai Rosenberg: Twitter thread of questions to ask a manager
- Katherine Street: Reignite the sweet spot in your job
- Csaba Okrona: Kill your heroes
- Hannele Kormano: Side Quests For Work: The Main Quest Can Wait (Sometimes)
- Medium — Snowflake (engineering growth tool)
- Making GAINS (💪) in Reddit Engineering — Upvoted
- Mike McQuaid: The Mentorship Diamond
Acknowledgements
I started writing this in October 2019. As you can imagine, it’s been through a lot since then. It could probably use more editing. Maybe I should move it back to the drafting table. 🤷🏼♀️ It is what it is.
TYSM to Wendy Foster and Dennis Poon for your feedback, advice, support, sponsorship, and mentorship. Our many debates and discussions on these topics back in 2019 helped me add clarity and nuance to my writing on growth.
