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by steelframe
589 days ago
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Forgive me if I seem presumptuous in my advice here. You've done things in your career that I can only dream of doing. What I can say is that I've somehow managed to survive a quarter-century in a string of Big Tech companies without dropping out (yet). It sounds like you may have been looking at the currents and picking the one that seemed best one to swim in. I found there's often -- but not always -- another option: build a dam. In other words, change it up. Alter the landscape. Seek to change the business in a way that nobody's been willing/able to do before. Looking back at my career I found I was happiest and most successful when I was able to tell my boss what I was doing vs. waiting for my boss to tell me to do something interesting/impactful/etc. When that option doesn't seem to be presenting itself, it's probably time to move on. But I've found it's often worth giving it a try first. A couple of times I needed to earn the right to create my own destiny by pushing through some grunge work, but once I established a degree of trust with my management chain, that was capital I could "cash in on" by proposing something big, new, and interesting. It never ceases to amaze me to see how boldness often gets rewarded. I just saw a co-worker of mine draw blood from a stone (funding-wise) by proposing something ambitious and controversial last week. Suddenly they're a TL of a new team this week. They've built a reputation for "just getting it done," so management has confidence in their ability to execute and drive results. Whenever I'm starting to feel stuck in a rut, that's when I open a blank document and start hammering out a design for something new. I'm not even thinking about promotion when I do that. But somehow, somewhere down the road, either a promotion or a bigger opportunity with another company has always come of it. |
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Hey steelframe! Good to see you here again!
This is good advice and something I wish I'd recognized earlier at Google. For the first few years there, I was under a manager who had 20+ direct reports, so he probably didn't have time to think of the best projects for me.
I probably would have been better off figuring out my own high-impact project rather than focusing on fighting short-term fires that kept popping up for my team.
In certain ways, I solved this with the founder route because I get to skip the "earning the right to create my own destiny" phase, but in other ways, there's inescapable grunge work like legal compliance, taxes, vendor issues, etc.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011696