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Transcript
Rey: I started coding in 1999. I was 12 years old at the time. That was the first programming book that I read cover to cover. That was my first programming language (Visual Basic). It’s not very popular today, but today I have no shame in saying it. I’ve been working professionally in tech for 17 years, working since I had my first full-time job at a serious company. It took me 15 years to become a staff engineer, which is my current role at Eventbrite. You might think 15 years to become a staff engineer is a long time, and you’re right, that’s a problem. That’s hopefully what will not happen to you if you listen to this talk, and how you can help others grow faster as well.
This talk is for those who want to grow in their career, who want to climb that ladder, but it’s also for those who want to help others grow. We’re going to discuss growth, basically. We’re going to discuss the ladder. I expect most of the people to be on the second part, but there might also be some on the first part. Again, the topics are the same, so there’s really no difference.
The Plan – You Trace Your Own Path at Your Own Pace
I thought a lot about what drives growth. I also did a lot of research. I also talked to a lot of people preparing for this talk. What I came up with in order is that, the first factor, and probably the most important one, is ambition. It’s really hard to grow in your career if you don’t have that ambition. In second place, I find that capacity is important. Being able to perform, being able to learn new things, all of that. In third place, you might be very good at both. You might be excellent at your job, but you need an external factor. You need that opportunity. There’s nowhere for you to grow. It’s really hard to do that. The reason why I put ambition first instead of capacity or curiosity, or whatever, becomes really clear when you think about the definition of ambition. The one I like from the Oxford Dictionary says that ambition is a strong desire to achieve something, typically requiring determination, effort, and drive.
If you read between the lines, what this is telling you is that a person with ambition will be able to develop that capacity as needed. They will do that through determination, effort, and drive. They will learn whatever they need to learn. I want you to put yourselves, for a moment, in the shoes of a person who’s very early on their career, just starting, just accepting their new job. Probably the company offered them a position and told them, “Yes, this company is growing. You’re going to grow really fast. It’s going to be great for you”. Things don’t always go that way. Sometimes we find that the first years of our career look more like this. This is very typical. It’s not terrible, but if you want to accelerate growth, you should try to avoid this. You should start by identifying the problems. What is causing this type of growth in your career that’s not really fast because it’s not really directed?
Typically, it’s one of two things. It’s either a lack of focus on execution or a lack of direction. When we go to high school and college, they tell us that we should strive for perfection. You want to have that perfect grade. You want to have that perfect opinion from your teachers about your work. As soon as you get into business, you need to completely change your mindset. Perfection is the killer of execution. This is very well put in the Amazon Leadership Principles as bias for action. That’s one that I really like. In the early years of someone’s career, it’s very important to help them make this shift of mind, make this shift of paradigm, and to start focusing on execution over perfection, without dropping quality, of course.
Secondly, if someone is having trouble finding their direction, there are ways to help them. The best thing is for them to do research first on their own. Then, the second turn, to seek for mentoring. When I talk about research, you can read a book and you can read a blog, that’s good. You should also do your own research. If you think, I want to be a staff engineer in five years, or I want to be a manager, you should look probably within your company and ask yourself, what does a manager’s life look like? What does a staff engineer do? How do these people work? How did they get there? Is that really what I want for my life? That’s the type of research that will bring things a bit more down to earth and make them more achievable.
You should also look at blogs and books to get the theory behind that. Again, when someone is coming out of college, seeing things in the real world makes a real difference. It’s important to do that part as well.
Again, put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s early in their career and they’re having trouble growing. Typically, they ask themselves, why are we not growing? What’s happening? Many people will come up with these answers. The market is terrible right now. I miss the golden era. We all did. There’s always some nostalgia to some golden era that never existed, really. That doesn’t matter. This can be real, but they can also be seen as just excuses. There are also people who will come up with these types of responses, “I haven’t been directing my efforts efficiently, or, I have poor time management skills”. If you look at it, these ones on the right hint much more introspection and sound much more personal. The ones that I put here are real life examples from people close to me, from people I’ve mentored, and even some of my own. This is a very popular framework. Some of you might have recognized it already. This is known as the victim-player framework.
Essentially, what it says is that what you cannot control makes you weak, but what you can control makes you powerful. We have the idea, mostly when we’re young, to think about showing weaknesses is what makes me weak. In real life, it’s quite the opposite, showing your weaknesses is what makes you strong. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on the victim-player framework. I’m going to give the quintessential example of it, which is how two different people might react to a traffic jam. One employee can say, “It’s a very big problem. It was totally unpredictable. There is nothing I can do now. I’m just stuck here”. An ideal employee would probably call their boss and tell them, “Boss, I’m sorry. I had a big problem today. I’m at a traffic jam. I’m going to have to take the first call from my car. I hope that’s not a problem. I can stay up and make some extra time today if necessary.
Also, I’ve realized that this is a recurring pattern, and I’ve already made a decision to start taking the train instead, because it’s becoming unacceptable”. This is someone taking ownership of that situation. Of course, this is a very typical example, but in real life, you know how it goes. This is also very similar to other concepts. They’re all the same thing. It’s also called being proactive or taking agency, not being the victim. It’s the same thing. It changes over time. The concepts are slightly different, but they’re all aimed at taking control of what you can, essentially.
I mentioned I included a couple of my own here. Today, I have no shame in saying that. I’m not ashamed of my first programming language, which you already know. I started working when I was 20. Early on in my career, I noticed that I was having issues with my work. Mostly, it was very hard for me to have a meeting with people outside of my company because my social anxiety was terrible. It’s really hard for me to speak publicly here today. Also, I couldn’t execute anything over a long period of time.
Obviously, I was job hopping a lot, which is sometimes normal in the early stage of your career. When I was 23, I was doing a lot of introspection, and I had the good luck of having a great manager at the time who provided me with a safe place where I could feel confident talking to him. It took me a lot of time. I didn’t have the tools at the time to identify this. It took me three years. When I did, I came up to him one day and told him, “I think my depression is setting me back”. He told me, “Yes”. However, his response was great.
After that, we came up with a plan together. He spent months working with me in order for me to get better. I’m better today. He continued to make sure that I felt safe at work and that there wouldn’t be any retaliation or anything. He took care of the projects. He paired me with some other people and everything. He was a great guy, Gustavo. Shortly after this, there was a meeting at a bar with work colleagues. Someone else got a promotion. Of course, I didn’t because I was doing terrible. This was back in the day when we worked at offices and we had to wear suits and everything. This was a very traditional company. This person had bought a new suit and came to the bar. Someone told him, you look great. Someone else said, a man who takes care of himself is a man who can take care of others.
That phrase at that time really resonated with me because that’s when it hit me, like, how am I expected to lead a team if I cannot put my own life back together? I talked about that a lot with my boss at the time. I got my shit together, basically.
That started working better. If you think about my manager’s reaction at the time and why he helped me, it wasn’t just because he’s a great guy, which he is. It was also in the best interest of the company. When people don’t grow, many people will blame their company for their bad career path. They will say, the company is holding me back and things like that. Truth is, companies usually don’t do that. It’s very rare for a company to do that. It’s in the best interest of a company for their employees to do well, to thrive. They will help you.
Companies don’t want to deal with low-performing employees. Companies don’t want to put you on a performance improvement plan or anything like that. It’s very expensive for the company to do that. It’s more profitable to have employees who are doing well. Managers are expected to help them do well in order to achieve that, in order to have a well-functioning team that starts providing value, at a good pace.
Once I made that click, that’s when my career really took off. That’s when I really started growing. I had good mentoring. I was lucky to have that. The best advice I got was to keep it at your own pace and keep it consistent.
A very typical example for this is comparing the workplace to physical exercise. It’s easy to go out running for 10 minutes. Most people can do that. It’s really hard to do that consistently two or three times a week, or once a day for one year, two years, or five years. Will you go out every day? Will you go out even when you have a congestion? Experts say that it’s totally fine. Will you go out even on the cold days, when it’s raining, when it’s snowing? I don’t run as much. I cycle a lot. That day was cold, my friends. I can tell you that. This sounds very obvious when we talk about exercise.
For many people, it’s not so obvious when we talk about our professional career, and it should be. It should be just the same. It’s really obvious when you really think about it. When you plan for your career growth, you should acknowledge that you will have highs and lows, and that you will have good days and bad days. That your ambition is important only up to a level, and you should not overdo it.
I talked a lot about me during the time from the perspective of someone who is growing. From the perspective of a manager or a leader who’s helping someone, we should also identify that. That person who tries to run a marathon on day one. That person who attempts to lift 100 pounds on day one. That’s totally impossible, of course. In the work environment, it’s sometimes quite obvious as well. Think about that person who only cares about the title specifically or their salary.
That person who doesn’t care about the project, doesn’t care about the company. Especially the person who doesn’t care about the team, who doesn’t empathize with the human beings around them. That person is a ticking time bomb to any team. They might be good in the short term, they might put out good work or whatever, but that will be very bad for your team and for the company in the longer term. There’s a great talk on this topic by Simon Sinek called, “Performance vs Trust”. The way he puts it basically, if you put trust in one axis and performance on the other one, performance being how much work they output and trust being how much trust they inspire to their colleagues, to their teammates, of course, nobody wants these folks, and of course, everybody wants these ones.
The way he frames it is that you should choose always people from this category over people from this category. It sounds obvious, but sadly in the workspace, it’s not so obvious all the time. There’s a reason. He goes on to saying that promotion cycles typically tend to favor these individuals. The reason for that being that promotion cycles should be objective and they should be based on real hard data. It’s easy to measure performance, but it’s really hard to measure trust. How much trust does a colleague inspire? How much do they empower their team to be better just by feeling safe? It’s hard to do that. This was called out on the keynote by Lizzie. TAPPs is one framework to do that, there are many others. It’s one way to measure it.
The truth is, this can be measured and this can be measured as well. It’s not impossible. It’s more costly and you should do that investment in order to find these folks. The people from this category can be grown into being here in the short-term or in the mid-term. If you find someone here, it’s almost impossible to get them here. That was also mentioned by Charlotte. It’s really hard to change the character of a person. You can change their capacity. You can help them grow. You can teach them things, but you cannot change who they are.
Growth Strategies
We’re going to talk about a few more concrete growth strategies. The first thing I’d like to mention for this is that, any employee attempting to grow should understand the roles and expectations of their company. There’s a lot of resources online to do this. Levels.fyi is a great page. There are public career ladders that you can look up. Eventbrite has given me the permission to make our own career ladder public for the purpose of this talk. You can look it up later. There will be links at the end. I’m not going to go through the career ladders here. It’s a very big topic. If you’re interested in growing, please do your research. There’s a lot of interesting resources on this topic.
On strategies, I think one of the most important ones is to keep perspective in mind. When you’re working on your day-to-day, you should be asking yourself, what is best for me? What is best for my team? What is best for our customers? Also, what is best for my company? This is ambitious for someone who’s just starting on their career. They’re not going to change their company on day one, of course, but having that perspective is important, understanding how their work connects to their company goals. You should also ask, how and why? How does my company’s business model operate? Why is my team focusing on this project in this quarter? Things like that. Why am I being asked to prioritize this task over this other one, which I feel is more important? If you have that ambitious perspective, if you understand your leaders, you will be able to grow faster in your career. This was also mentioned by Dan, on aligning your goals with your leaders’ goals.
Another strategy, of course, is to find your role models. This is probably the most popular ones. There should always be people you look up to, people you admire. You should try to work with them. Maybe observe how they work. See what they do that you cannot do as well yet. You can approach them and ask them how they learned it, how they built the skill, and how you can build it. They might recommend that you read a book or that you pick up a habit. Maybe you can just ask them to mentor you. Ideally, these are people inside your company, but they can also be people from outside as well.
Another thing you should do, of course, is to identify your strengths and weaknesses. We all have strengths and weaknesses. We should do that introspection to try to identify them, but that should always be validated externally because we all have blind spots. That external input is super valuable. As mentors, as leaders, we should make sure that those are clear as well. We should have those uncomfortable conversations with someone. Tell them, your tickets are terrible, you never put enough information. Or, you’re not testing your changes and the team has to cover you all the time with tests. Things like that. Sometimes people don’t do this knowingly because they’re lazy. Or sometimes they’re just not aware of it because it’s one of their blind spots.
If you don’t discuss it with them, it’s quite unfair to judge them on it. You should make sure that those are clear and discussed always. Of course, you don’t have to be good at everything. I really like this type of chart. This was made popular by soccer, particularly soccer video games. It’s great at showing how different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and they all come together to form a team that does well. In this case, they don’t play together. That’s not the point. That’s actual feedback given to me in 2020. I remember really being appreciative of the manager who gave me this feedback. It was so visible, so tangible. Like saying, “You’re having great productive impact. Your throughput is awesome, but you’re doing a lot of rework. You need to work on that. You need to improve that so that I can promote you”. This type of feedback is really valuable. As we grow in our career also, things like the playground opens a bit and things become more vague. This was mentioned in the ambiguous role of a principal as well.
As a staff, you can choose where you want to put your effort. You can choose to be an architect, but you don’t really need to choose only one archetype, as he phrases it. You can choose to be the solver who sometimes acts as a tech lead, or you can shift your time 50-50 between being a tech lead and the right hand. Those are all valuable. There are no rules on how to act. You should find your own place by finding your strengths and finding what your team needs and what your company needs, and how you can apply those strengths.
On the next topic, you should always know yourself and acknowledge that you will have highs and lows. Nobody is perfect. It’s important that even at your lows, you find ways in which you can stay productive and in which you can stay valuable to your team and to the company. Coming back to strengths and weaknesses, it’s important to act on improving your weaknesses, but also, you should maximize your strengths. If you focus on what you’re strong in, what comes naturally to you, that’s what you should do when you’re going through a low. “This work is easy for me, I’m going to focus on this while I’m here, because that’s how I can be valuable to the team. Once I’m better, I’m going to focus on fixing my weaknesses and everything, and that’ll be ok. Right now, I’m going to focus on what’s easy”. You should discuss it with your manager, of course, to make sure that he’s aligned. You should be open if you’re going through a low.
Another thing is what energizes you and what drains you. A typical example is social interactions. Human beings are social beings by nature. We need that oxytocin. We need that serotonin. Different brains need them at different levels. Some people get them at work, and some people don’t. Some people, when they go through a technical topic, a really difficult challenge, they need to discuss that challenge with someone else. After discussing it, they come out energized off the meeting and are more productive for the following hours. A bunch of other people come out of the meeting totally drained and need some time to recuperate. That’s perfectly fine.
Another example is how people act under pressure. Typically, this is during incidents. I am the type of person that’s energized by an incident. I’m fueled by it. I love the team that comes together, the strong dedication and collaboration. Some people just loathe it. They don’t like working under pressure, and they like to pace their work more slowly. As a recent example, a short time ago, me and a colleague, another staff engineer, we were both transferred from one team to another. That basically creates a lull. The whole team starts forming, storming, norming, performing again, and we were both out of our domain. We didn’t know what we were doing, basically.
The other guy goes to our manager and says, “I’m going to take it slow. I’m going to take my time to learn. I’m not going to be productive during the time that I’m learning, but that’s going to make me more productive in the future, and I think it’s a good investment”. The manager says, “That’s great. Thank you”. I come up to the manager and I tell him, “I need that feedback. I need this action. I’m going to take the on-call for a while. Let me deal with the incidents. That’s how I can be valuable to the team fast. That’s how I can provide value with what I know. Also, that’s a way for me to learn fast”. The manager says, “That’s perfect. Thank you”. He was very appreciative that we were both open about our strengths and weaknesses and that we found ways in which to apply them to the team. Two different persons, two different approaches, both were perfectly valid, the right one for each person.
Let’s talk a bit about opportunities. It’s very important to recognize opportunities and to know how to act on them. The typical opportunity, the ideal one, like the Holy Grail, is company growth. Of course, if a company is growing, they will shape up new teams. There will be opportunity for you to grow within them.
Another opportunity is an open position above you. If a tech lead or a manager leaves the team or leaves a company, that position is open, and you can offer yourself to fill it. That’s sometimes a double-blade sword because there’s typically a reason why they left the company. You should make sure that whichever challenges they were facing at the time are challenges that you can deal with better than them, if those were the reasons why he left. It’s typically good to discuss that with the person who’s leaving instead of with the people who remain around you. Another opportunity is challenging times. This is the most difficult one, maybe. A lot of companies have been through layoffs lately, and that can create opportunity for growth, even as challenging as it is. There is the concept of anti-fragile.
The typical example is in the film Superman vs. Batman, where we have Doomsday: each time you hit him, he becomes stronger. A flower vase is fragile, if you hit it, it breaks. Doomsday, you hit him and he becomes stronger. As an employee, some people, when they get hit through going through a challenging time, they come out stronger. Those people are super valuable to a company, and it’s really hard to find them. It’s one way in which you can change a challenging time into being an opportunity.
Finally, if you don’t have opportunities, you should try to create them. You can propose initiatives for your company or for your team. You can maybe ask to be transferred to another team or choose to leave the company. Or you can do things outside of your day job, like coming to a conference, for example. This topic of creating your own opportunities was perfectly covered by Pablo, on finding your dinosaurs. I suggest you look that up as well.
Another thing you should do if you want growth is to find ways to make your work be visible. The first thing, you should always keep a track of your work. When you’re beginning your career, this might sound unnecessary, but once you’ve worked 5, 10, 15 years, it becomes really hard to remember what you were doing 2, 3 years ago. Sometimes it’s good to keep a document. Julia Evans has a great article on this. It’s called the brag document, where you brag about your own work. This is also very valuable when companies are going through change.
Typically, your manager can change, sometimes in the same year, you have two or three managers, and they lose that context of what you’ve done. It’s very hard to transfer that from one manager to another. It’s much easier for them if you provide them with a brag document, where they can track that work with a paper trail. Another thing is to publish your work. This topic was also covered by Pablo. Make sure that your contributions are seen. Aaron Francis has a great article on this, publishing your work, and how it increases your luck.
Leaders – You’ve Grown, Now What?
Finally, let’s talk about leaders for a bit. Once you’ve grown, what can you expect? When we think about staff engineers and principal engineers, one way to define them is how they can impact a large group, like broader than a team, and sometimes how they can impact an entire company. One way we typically do that is setting guidelines on how the company should work, or how the team should work, or the pillar, or whatever you call it in your company. You can work in establishing team boundaries and structures. You can work to define the software development life cycle: how we do PRs, how we do testing. Giuliano from Mercado Libre mentioned at QCon, absolute freedom is not good for companies. We should give the teams those guidelines, and we as leaders should be the ones doing that. Also, we should strive to identify when there are new patterns or new necessities. Once we have set those guidelines, something can fall through the cracks between them, and some team might choose to go on their own path.
At Eventbrite, the way we approach this is by setting a golden path. We don’t have a strict guideline on what teams can do. We give them a golden path, and we say, if you use these technologies and this software development life cycle, your life will be easy. We will take care of your problems for you. If you choose to strive out of that, you’re on your own. You’re a lone wolf. You need to take care of your own infra, your own platform, and everything. It’s not forbidden, but it’ll be more work for your team. One thing that we need to do is to maintain that. One team might be a lone wolf, but if we have two, three, four, five teams doing the same thing, it’s not lone wolves, it’s now a new pack. We need to put them back into the golden path by saying, this pattern that you’re using is now part of a golden path because we see it becoming a new necessity that our company will have.
Another thing is that when we grow to become leaders, you remember that person looking up to their leaders? Once you become this person, you are the person they look up to. Your work must not only be good anymore. Your work must be exemplary because people will look up to you. They will imitate you. They will copy how you work. Sometimes we feel that given our growth, we have great judgment, and we know when to cut corners, which changes we can push without testing, or whatever, which risks we can take, which corners we can cut. We do have that judgment, and we can make those calls, but we should be very cautious. It might be best not to make them only for the sake of being exemplary.
If you choose to do that, some people might imitate you and choose to start cutting corners at their own judgment, and their judgment might be not as good as yours. That creates a challenge for the company. It’s best if you choose to never cut corners so that you instill that way of working in your company, because it permeates into company culture without you knowing it. You should always be aware of that when you’re a leader.
Finally, and most importantly, we must stand for our peers and subordinates when we feel like they’re being treated unfairly. Sometimes, as team leads or tech leads, we see how things operate within a team, and someone from above might not have that visibility, and unfairly blame someone for something that wasn’t really their fault. It’s our job to come up to them and tell them, “You’re misunderstanding the situation. This person was not at fault here. There was a fault at the process. We should look into that instead of blaming the person”. Remember, be ambitious, stay focused, be efficient, find your opportunities, and most importantly, take care of yourselves.
Questions and Answers
Participant 1: I feel like when you grow in your career, you take on tasks which you didn’t really do when you were more junior. It’s like novel tasks. Have you seen opportunities, if you look back at your career, on how to maybe develop those skills when you don’t necessarily have a chance to put them in practice?
Rey: Yes, it’s hard. It’s good to try to jump the gun, and be ready before those necessities come. It’s good to try to develop those necessities for yourself. I think it comes back to the early part of my talk, not aim for perfection, and aim for execution instead. I will not focus on what I will need in the future, I will focus on what I need today, and start being great at that. Once you have that covered, you can start looking into that. Without having the actual necessity and without having the opportunity to apply that in a productive environment, it becomes really hard to develop that on your own.
The obvious way to do it is for tech skills, try to have some pet projects or whatever on the side that you can test new technologies or whatever. I wouldn’t put too much effort into developing something that you might or might not need. If you were to do that, I would frame it like looking at your role models and looking at how they work. Because you can confirm that those are skills that are actually needed in your company. How do you develop them? The best thing to do is to ask them directly how you can develop those skills.
Participant 2: As you mentioned, someone got hit, but then they got stronger. Do you think you’re that kind of person, or what traits does this person have?
Rey: I cannot tell you which kind of traits this person has. I sometimes can identify them, but I cannot put it into words yet. It’s not a skill that I have developed. I wouldn’t say that I’m that type of person all the time, but I have had opportunities where I came out stronger off a challenging situation. My whole team was let go at once and I was the only member who remained there. That was very challenging, but it was also very accelerating to my career growth. I think anybody has the capacity to do that, given the right environment. Environments, when they’re challenging, people around us can help us to mitigate that challenge and come out stronger.
Participant 3: What made you change teams and what advice would you give to someone considering that?
Rey: Sometimes it’s your choice and sometimes it isn’t. If there’s a topic that’s of your interest, you should discuss that with your managers, your leaders, and tell them, I would like to work in this team in the future. It doesn’t need to be this week, it doesn’t need to be this quarter, but I would like to aim my career in that direction. Sometimes companies go through big reorgs and it’s not your choice to end up in one team or another, but it is up to you to make the most out of it. It comes back to the big team player framework. How can I make the most out of this situation? It’s challenging because you don’t have the domain expertise, you don’t have the knowledge, but you need to acknowledge that it’s going to be a rough patch in your career where you need more time to learn, but that it can also be an opportunity if you can make this team succeed by now having you, and how you can do that.
Participant 4: When you’re just a junior engineer and you’ve been in your company for a good bit and you start to recognize some inefficiencies across the organization and the processes, do you think at that level you can already start to plan these initiatives and try to influence direction, or is that something you really have to wait for once you can achieve that level and have that influence? I’m curious on your perspective on that.
Rey: I think it really depends on the context. It’s not the same thing to do that at a company with 10,000 employees against doing that at a startup with 20 employees. If you’re a junior at a startup, you’re very well empowered to make those initiatives. Large companies tend to favor diversity of voices lately and tend to try to listen to anyone. There’s the opportunity to do that, but it’s much harder to come up with a real idea that will actually change the company if it’s so big. I think you can always do it, but it’s going to be much easier if the company is smaller.
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