Reading this @nat newsletter, and it reminded me that one of the things that bummed me out the most when I was at Netflix was when they introduced levels: https://www.simplermachines.com/bookmarked-links/?ref=simpler-machines-newsletter

@norootcause @nat
"Individual credit or great software"

It's not just great software, but a great life. I've done a lot more things than software, and never worried about getting individual credit beyond being informally recognized by my peers.

What's driven me is to learn more and develop new skills to give me opportunities in the future.

That's worked well for me, and still is. I'm not following a linear ladder in a single line of work.

@norootcause @nat
"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." -- Harry S Truman

@gdinwiddie @nat I’ve also heard something along the lines of “do you want to be right, or do you want to make a difference?”

@norootcause @gdinwiddie @nat

“True leaders are those we hardly know exist.
Next best are the loved and admired.
Then come the feared,
and finally the despised.

When people are not trusted
they become untrustworthy.

Hesitate; guard your words.
When their work succeeds,
let people think they did it.”

(From my unfinished translation of the Tao Te Ching, https://github.com/jorgearanda/tao-te-ching/blob/main/17.md, several chapters aim at the same point)

@norootcause @gdinwiddie @nat A common adage in consulting: do you want to feel vindicated or be effective?

The two do not always (and often don’t, in consulting) overlap.

@norootcause @nat It reminds me of the weird feeling I get at the consulting org I work at because we do not have levels, and compensation is mostly only based on tenure and years of experience.

It's like, mmh, I have no ladder to climb? And I'm happy at my current gig?

The only way to climb anything here, really, is to shoot for engagement in higher-status roles - team lead, architect and the like - but that path rings false to me.

It's weird to already be in a terminal position.

@alpha @norootcause @nat
Yes, being effective at consulting within an org is often invisible to those higher up. It's not great advertising, but it sure feels good when it happens.

@norootcause @gdinwiddie @nat "When I stopped trying to be someone and started trying to do something, it was amazing." —my mom

@cvennevik @norootcause What's weird about it for you?

(I think you're getting at something important)

@nat @norootcause I think what's weird to me is the sense of "...so where do I go from here?" I don't have a clear path to progress.

Part of the weirdness is that I'm tuned into the software dev community, and people have Titles, like Senior and Staff and Principal. And I think, "they've achieved something! they've made it somewhere!"

And I'm already done?

@nat @norootcause It's exacerbated by my young age - not even 30, not even four years under my belt yet - and by the feeling that even my skills have stopped progressing.

I've been here long enough to learn the ins and outs of the system. It doesn't surprise me anymore. The only way I learn new things is by trying to introduce them.

I want to get better, I want to progress, and all in all I just feel a bit... stranded?

@nat @norootcause I care more about the skills than the titles, but a ladder to climb would still give me A) something to distract me, and B) something to push me towards more challenging work, to have myself and employer ask what I have to work on to get a Bigger Title.

Not sure that would make me any happier. But this feels like a weird space to be in. It's not the one my online peers are in.

@cvennevik @norootcause Thank you! This is really interesting.

It points out a blind spot I have when I'm talking about ladders -- I've never been in one place long enough to start to feel "stuck" -- or even like I'd really "mastered" a particular system. I've spent a lot of time in roles that were maybe *too* challenging.

I was very ambitious and very *successfully* ambitious and then very deliberately got off that ladder because it was too much too fast.

@cvennevik @norootcause The point about comparison with other folks out in the industry who are doing Staff and Principal roles is interesting, too. That was a big factor in my being very ladder-climby that I haven't thought about much.

@cvennevik @norootcause I do think there's a thing with consulting *specifically* where --

The folks I know who are happiest with it and have done it for a long time and stay in it, or in product environments with strong consulting features, really love Doing the Work, the way that a monk loves Meditating. They're motivated by going super deep with a Practice, and have something that helps them get through these dead periods where it doesn't feel like much is happening skill-wise.

@nat I love Doing the Work, but unfortunately, I think part of that includes “day two” type operations, which made me pretty unhappy with a bunch of what I saw at Labs. I’ve pretty much stopped caring about ladders at this point, but I also don’t mind (and somewhat expect) to be getting my skill improvements outside of work.

@alpha "which made me pretty unhappy with a bunch of what I saw at Labs"

I want to hear more about this. I suspect I know what you mean but am not sure.

@nat @alpha Not to answer for Alpha here, but I frequently felt frustrated nothing I did ever went into production and never faced the cold, hard reality of real users. Never needing to do a green/blue deploy or worry about database migrations absolves you from a certain discipline which is professionally satisfying to master.

@ratkins @nat Yup, that’s one part of it, though IMO the benefits you get from blue-green deploys aren’t actually that important, but you may as well do it since usually the cost is quite low. (I think most companies don’t actually need zero-downtime or instant rollbacks as long as deploys are fast enough.)

But there’s also that a lot of the process is built around the assumption that you can change course before having committed too many resources, when that just wasn’t happening due to not being in front of users.

I think also an over-reliance on interview-style UX and the idea “saving development time with UX” as opposed to metrics exacerbated this, and we sorely neglected the option of making it cheaper to just build the damn thing instead of testing idealized prototypes.

@ratkins @nat IMO, a lot of the Labs UX discipline majorly whiffed on the map not being the territory since they focused so much on being ahead of development, resulting on testing with design tools and not the actual product.

@alpha @ratkins @nat WHOA THERE. Not testing w/ the actual product???? This wasn't my experience.

@cobyalmond @ratkins @nat It’s sort of impossible not to for features that don’t exist yet? I think it’s valuable to do that sort of research, but we sorely neglected the option of “build it [cheap] and find out”.

I didn’t like that this resulted in developers losing the skill/muscle memory of building that sort of functionality, the feedback loop for engineering approach/cost for different alternatives taking longer, and the map not being the territory for user experience.

@alpha @ratkins This makes sense. It's not exactly what I had in mind but it fits with it.

I would occasionally hear things that were going on in Labs projects and think... "it sounds like they're pushing all the hard parts to the end?" re: getting into production and dealing with operations.

@alpha @ratkins On one particularly memorable occasion a Pivot with a bunch of Labs experience joined my team and tried to get me to stop working so much with the Release Engineering team to get our features actually shipped and focus on writing code on our component and I was like, "My job isn't to write code, it's to get stuff *shipped,* and right now that means getting this tile config stuff right."

@alpha @ratkins "That's the TPMs job, you should let them do it."

"Just because it's a cross-team issue that doesn't mean it's the TPMs job, if we tried to make the TPMs do it then we'd just be making them ferry technical details in between us and RelEng and I don't know how you expect that to work better than just going over there and talking to RelEng ourselves."

@nat @ratkins Ha, that in particular is a huge pet peeve of mine that I probably mentioned in all my interviews when asked about what I was looking for in team culture. I hate telephone and having people in the middle just passing messages back and forth while losing fidelity on both sides the whole time.

@alpha @nat I like to think I justified my salary in a couple of jobs just by going downstairs and talking to the users on a couple of occasions.