I am really disappointed. On one hand this was settling in as a good lesson learned blog post but ended up looking like the stuff you see on LinkedIn every day wrapped up as an ad.
When I was in big corps, I understood but really disliked the idea that people would do work in order to get a promotion. That's the only incentive structure they've set up, so that's what you do.
What I like about well-run small companies is that there is essentially no chance of a promotion: all we can do is do our work better, improve processes and make our customers (internal and external) happier. If you hook monetary rewards to title and responsibility treadmills, you lose all that. Hypergrowth is a trap.
Weird to have a bit of a window into the cryptic world of directorial promotions. Sounds like it’s mostly about self promotion sadly and perhaps unsurprisingly.
I think many readers here have had a pretty negative experience with a new manager parachuting in (usually as a referral from other senior leadership), immediately deciding that the team is underperforming without knowing much about the business context, technical constraints, and company culture that led to the current environment, and making big structural changes without consulting the boots-on-the-ground folks. Usually we hear stories from the engineers who are disaffected. This feels like an anecdote from the other side.
It's not wrong to wonder about your career trajectory, but it's telling to see someone pretty nakedly talk about optimizing for changing their level at a company, before they've even landed there and evaluated if they can help / how they are helping their team. I'm not naive, and I recognize those people exist and can acknowledge that they can do good work. But if someone came into my workplace with the mindset of "aggressively [seeking] to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks" and their goal was going "from Senior Manager to Director in ... 12 months", I'd be skeptical that they weren't going to damage peer relationships and optimize for being recognized at the expense of their direct reports, even if I thought they could be a valuable asset in the short term.
> and therefore aggressively sought to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks
I feel this is as close to “Management 101” as it gets, or even “employee-ing 101”, as it applies to technical roles too.
Don’t do it!
Just write down your list of gripes for the first month; use them as your list of things to ramp up on.
If something seems odd or wrong, it may be actually broken, but it’s unlikely to be so urgent that you have to go out on a limb like this.
It’s more likely that there is some context you are missing. By Chesterton’s Fence you need to spend some energy to understand why the thing was put there, before you tear it down.
Even if you are right - you will face an uphill battle because you haven’t built trust yet. So pick your battles carefully!
Relationships drive business success and recognition. The author seemingly didn’t know how to establish critical relationships as the new kid on the block. Common mistake in the technical world, one I’ve made myself.
Just a quick bit of feedback for the author: your website loads really poorly, at least on mobile.
All the content loads immediately but the hamburger menu sits over the screen and won't go away until the final 25% is done. It does this for every page I tried. Takes almost a minute.
> Another Director at Splunk told me his process: he wrote down everything good that his teams did in a doc, and then every Friday sent that out on Slack celebrating their achievements. Implied in the whole exercise was "and I am leading this group of people", but he never said that because he didn't need to. This person got promoted to Sr. Director. He had a process that he regularly followed to a T that was borne out of a deep understanding of the culture around him.
Without knowing this Sr Director, I have to wonder if this is actually the take away they were trying to offer. If a senior engineering manager isn't regularly celebrating their team's wins, being proud if their achievements and recognising the smart and hard work, providing exposure to the rest of the company, then there's something amiss.
If the take away really was "do this and you will make yourself look good for a promotion" then, yuuuuuck.
this person's whole worldview seems really gross. Like they have swallowed the entire framework of growth-oriented capitalism uncritically and reorganized themselves completely around maximizing their returns. Fortunately the world is still somewhat human, so they failed catastrophically---but they're trying. Even their attempt at reflection is a shameful ad.
NCR maintains legacy POS systems with a mostly outsourced labor force.
Splunk maintains a logging aggregator with a mostly San Francisco staff.
A manager’s job at NCR is mostly about cracking the whip to try to get your team to solve boring enterprise client technical problems, but they usually don’t have enough context to understand the problem.
A manager’s job at Splunk is to motivate a team that used to work at a hip, fast growing startup who just got their payout from an Cisco acquisition and feel like the product is getting sidelined.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 42.1 ms ] threadWhat I like about well-run small companies is that there is essentially no chance of a promotion: all we can do is do our work better, improve processes and make our customers (internal and external) happier. If you hook monetary rewards to title and responsibility treadmills, you lose all that. Hypergrowth is a trap.
It's not wrong to wonder about your career trajectory, but it's telling to see someone pretty nakedly talk about optimizing for changing their level at a company, before they've even landed there and evaluated if they can help / how they are helping their team. I'm not naive, and I recognize those people exist and can acknowledge that they can do good work. But if someone came into my workplace with the mindset of "aggressively [seeking] to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks" and their goal was going "from Senior Manager to Director in ... 12 months", I'd be skeptical that they weren't going to damage peer relationships and optimize for being recognized at the expense of their direct reports, even if I thought they could be a valuable asset in the short term.
That this is an ad actually makes the grammar issues worse.
I feel this is as close to “Management 101” as it gets, or even “employee-ing 101”, as it applies to technical roles too.
Don’t do it!
Just write down your list of gripes for the first month; use them as your list of things to ramp up on.
If something seems odd or wrong, it may be actually broken, but it’s unlikely to be so urgent that you have to go out on a limb like this.
It’s more likely that there is some context you are missing. By Chesterton’s Fence you need to spend some energy to understand why the thing was put there, before you tear it down.
Even if you are right - you will face an uphill battle because you haven’t built trust yet. So pick your battles carefully!
Without knowing this Sr Director, I have to wonder if this is actually the take away they were trying to offer. If a senior engineering manager isn't regularly celebrating their team's wins, being proud if their achievements and recognising the smart and hard work, providing exposure to the rest of the company, then there's something amiss.
If the take away really was "do this and you will make yourself look good for a promotion" then, yuuuuuck.
Splunk maintains a logging aggregator with a mostly San Francisco staff.
A manager’s job at NCR is mostly about cracking the whip to try to get your team to solve boring enterprise client technical problems, but they usually don’t have enough context to understand the problem.
A manager’s job at Splunk is to motivate a team that used to work at a hip, fast growing startup who just got their payout from an Cisco acquisition and feel like the product is getting sidelined.