#22 | Own Your Career

I want to discuss a topic that comes up frequently during my one on ones — taking ownership of your career.

I find that frequently people are focused on the thing directly in front of them. They are concerned with the status of their project. They are concerned with what their next performance review will be. They are concerned with when their next promotion will be. All of these are valid concerns, but every time someone brings this up in our discussions, I challenge them to reframe their focus.

Let's break down each of these examples — first, the status of their project. Everyone wants their project to be successful. Everyone wants to know they've contributed to a success story. Although I think it's imperative to take pride in one's work, frequently a project is successful or not based on external factors. Did everyone you depend on execute like they said they would? Did your customers react the way you felt they could? Did your upper management provide the proper direction and support? Some things can be done to mitigate failures, but if you're just one of many cogs in a business, chances are there is more out of your control than in your control.

Therefore the focus shouldn't be on if the project is successful but instead on personal growth. That doesn't mean you let the project fail — the exact opposite. If the project is successful, most likely you'll get the most personal growth. But even if the project fails, there is still a lot of personal growth to be obtained. Your self-value shouldn't be derived from the outcome of something out of your control but entirely on what you do control. By turning your focus internal, you are focusing on something you have more control over and can make adjustments easier.

The same is true for the next performance review. Even if you kill it for a particular year, maybe your company has shifted its rating weightings and decide to give everyone a lower rating than previous years. Maybe your manager changed, and you didn't have time to establish yourself. There could be countless reasons why you don't get the performance review you would expect. But none of that matters if, at the end of the year, you can honestly say you provide more value to your company than the previous year.

Promotions follow the same thread. Maybe your company had a lousy year, and no promotions were given out. Or internal politics awarded it to someone else again. Who cares if you grew.

Notice the trend? In the end, everything boils down to personal growth. That makes life easy, almost boring. Every focus you have should be in personal growth. I don't consider emphasizing personal growth as selfish either. When I notice my direct reports are doing this, I never think negatively and highly encourage it. If you focus on yourself to become a better employee, then your employer benefits from that. It's a win/win situation.

And here is where the counter-argument comes in: "What if my employer doesn't recognize my growth, so they are benefiting from it but not rewarding it?' That's a natural debate with a smooth response. Find an employer who will reward appropriately. If you've grown out of your current position and pay scale and can't move higher, then switch companies.

I'm not promoting job jumping either. I've been at my current employer for almost a decade, the longest I've been at a company. A lot of my employees have told me that they have also worked for me at this company for longer than they've worked at any company before. We are far from being in a perfect company, but we've framed our career adventure so that sticking with this company is a win for us just as much as it's a win for the company. And when it no longer is a win/win, I'll move on just as I expect my employees to do too.

You own your career, not your company. So take ownership and don't tie your career's success, or your happiness, to something outside of your control.

(Written 2019.05.08)

#21 | Creating Beacons

I wanted to address this how to write useful On-The-Horizon Beacons, as defined in my Life Overview.

Although I'm sure there is the entire gamut of personality types who would try to write their Beacon, the two most common ones I've found are due to people either not knowing what they want to focus on or wanting to be a perfectionist detailing every single detail.

Both sides of the spectrum struggle to put together a reliable Beacon. If someone is not able to focus, they will never take steps in any single direction. They might spend their lives drifting in the wind. However, if someone hyper-focuses on the final picture, to the point of outlining every single detail, they'll spend their life planning and never take a step forward either.

To explain how to break either of these patterns, let's discuss this topic using a map metaphor. For the sake of this discussion, let's say you currently are in Los Angeles. That is your starting state. And you're trying to figure out your Beacon, but you don't know where to place that Beacon on the map.

Now let's take a step back. Why are you trying to place a Beacon? The purpose of the Beacon is to give you a guiding light in figuring out which life path to take to bring you closer to that Beacon. Let's say I know I want to end up in Florida. Do I need to know the address of my destination? Not really? How about the street or even the city? Nope. I also don't need to know Florida. Or even the east coast.

I can start my journey knowing only EAST. With that knowledge and nothing else, I can plot my course and pick a road heading east. Even if it's not the ideal road, it doesn't matter. I could be traveling for hours or even days and still be getting closer to my destination. It might not be the most efficient path, but it's getting you closer, and it's your life journey.

And for all you know, after Day 2 of heading east, you realize Florida isn't where you want to go. Instead, it's New York. Maybe this will result in a slight course correction. Perhaps it changes nothing. Either way, you're still heading in the right direction. Then after Day 4, you're now in the same state as your destination. You're wiser and more mature. You know more about what you want. You know if you're going to be in the city or the country. You know if you're going to be close to water, or in the mountains. As you start getting closer to your Beacon, the details will start coming into finer granularity.

Even if back on Day 2 you realized you wanted to go to Hawaii instead of Florida or New York, there's no harm in that. At least you've already packed your bags started your journey. Ideally, you don't want to make too many 180 turns since that negates your progress. But even if physically you might be driving back and forth, emotionally and mentally you'll be growing from your journey.

The destination still matters, but the important taking those first steps is what matters the most. The rest will fall into place as your journey progresses.

(Written 2019.05.07)

#20 | Evolution of Engineering

Today I wanted to talk about my path as an engineering manager. It's a story I've told to countless team members before to help frame their career advancement in a way that enhances the appeal of engineering management; a path most engineers I know avoid.

A lot of engineers get into engineering so they can build things. This desire to create is the passion that drives them to work countless hours. This desire is what inspired me to become an engineer. I love building things. I love being able to look at a finished product knowing I made it. I built legos as a kid, and now I engineer things for a living.

Although there is nothing wrong with staying on the technical path, I know quite a few engineers who purposely avoid the managerial path. There are always different reasons why, but a frequent one I hear is they want to keep their hands' dirty building something.

I too was a reluctant engineering manager. I'm an introvert who prefers to put my head down and bust out code. The thought of having to deal with everyone's drama, both personal and professional, is not appealing. However, at the time, the only path to career advancement was through management. The company was very focused on headcount. The more headcount you had, the more "important" you appeared and the more compensation you received. So off I went into the managerial path.

I can't say it was a smooth ride to start. But at a certain point, I changed my perception which changed the game. I quickly realized I didn't want to get bogged down in the weeds of people management. It wasn't rewarding enough. Plus it had a low ROI where I might put in a lot of effort to help a single person advance to have them eventually move up the ladder or move on to a different company. Instead, I focused on the culture, environment, and process. In other words, I started engineering the team.

For example, I have team members in the US and team members overseas. If someone complained about communication problems with their overseas counterparts, I analyzed the environment. I could have looked at trying to coach a single person on how to increase their communication skills, but that gives a very low ROI. Instead of trying to correct individuals, I would look at how could we change our tools or processes to promote communication.

This thought process led to holding the majority of team discussions, including daily standups, in IM so everyone could catch up to the conversation on their own time and contribute. No one was left out. All team status or staff meetings were moved to a wiki so that both the US and overseas could remain informed. This change ensured everyone was treated equally and could get the same updates. When doubling up engineers to work on a task, I would purposely assign one from each time zone to force them to collaborate. This assignment forced people to break out of their comfort zone and break communication barriers.

Additionally, I encouraged everyone to send their peer code reviews to someone in a different time zone instead of the person sitting next to them. This encouragement taught them to seek out new team members on their own. Even peer code reviews had guidelines on how to review to avoid divisive and confrontational language and promote collaborative and constructive dialogue. I could go on, but every part of the team was thought out to encourage communication.

Not everyone warmed up to this culture, and some people left. But the people who stuck around have become highly collaborative across time zones, cultures, and consider all their teammates as close peers. Over the years continue growing; we continue to hit growing pains; we fall into our old traps, but we've managed to remain highly collaborative throughout it all because we engineered the team that way. It naturally falls into place more than it falls apart.

Communication is just one example, but I engineered every possible aspect of my teams in this manner. Once I viewed management as engineering a team culture, I became highly engaged. It became an exciting challenge to look at tendencies and patterns that emerged, and through modifications to the team setup, change the natural outputs into something desirable. This process became my primary focus; I go to work to make sure they can work well together and deliver at the highest level of productivity possible. Team engineering became more rewarding than software engineering ever did.

It didn't stop at engineering the team. At this point, I've engineered multiple high performing and versatile teams. My attention has been freed up to move even higher. I now engineer the system. Figuring out how everyone's finished projects interact, how each team interacts with each other, how different disciplines (engineer or product manager) interact, how different personas (employees or customers) communicate, and even how our products interact with the customers and how it should grow. In other words, I'm turning director responsibilities into an engineering challenge too.

It turns out, a change in perspective can take an undesired pain point and turn it into an exciting engineering challenge.

(Written 2019.05.04)

#19 | Assembly Line vs New Build

It's been a while since I've written, almost a full month. My buffer of written posts is now gone. How did this happen? Things got crazy at work. The best way to describe it is that I had to move one of my teams away from the assembly line mentality and into the new build mentality.

Now you might be wondering how software development relates to manufacturing. Even though we aren't building a tangible item, the manufacturing plant concept is still applicable.

Let's first jump into the assembly line aspect. Using Kanban, an Agile methodology, the process of pushing work from analysis to production release, is already visually laid out. For my own Personal Control Book, I have a trimmed down version of a Kanban board (as detailed under Organizing Focuses & Projects). I only have three states: Queued, In Progress, and Completed. These relate to different stations in an assembly line. Queued would be equivalent to a pile of raw materials ready for assembly. Then there is only one actual work station: In Progress. Completed is the final product, let's call Widgets. Each Trello Card is an assembly that will turn raw materials into a completed Widget.

When we start a new project, we can quickly build our assembly line with the three work stations. We then brainstorm to create our raw materials for the Queued column. We then take all of that raw material and start creating widgets. We complete the project once we create all widgets.

In theory, a different person manages each work station. A task-delegator manages the Queued work station, moving tasks to In Progress and assigning out when they are ready. A task-doer handles the In Progress work station. Once they complete the job, they move it to the Completed work station. Then a task-validator oversees the Completed work station, ensuring satisfactory completion of all tasks.

In a Personal Control Book, a single person plays. In a team environment, different team members manage different work stations. If there is a clear contract for moving one task to another, everyone can work quickly and efficiently on their work station without knowledge of the entire assembly line. All assignments are broken down into small and manageable bites so that any skill level (from junior to senior) can manage any work station. This process turns even the most highly complex process into an easily managed process. Everyone can go into cruise control as they flex their habit muscle. Everyone works smarter instead of harder. The same concept applies to the Personal Control Book; if I break the work into these bite-size tasks, I can work smarter to accomplish something hard without putting much using much effort.

I prefer to break down both my team's work and my work in this manner. Assembly lines are easy and fast and productive and rewarding. Who doesn't want to produce more output with less effort?

But then we find ourselves with a New Build. New Builds happen when the assembly line doesn't exist yet. Maybe we don't have our workstations (Queued, In Progress, and Completed) yet. Or perhaps we will use the same workstations, but the type of work completed at each work station is drastically different than usual. There is no familiarity. There are no pre-defined habits.

A New Build is what one of my teams is going through at work right now. They are building a brand new project. It's using similar technologies that all of our other projects use and the workstations are the same, but the work done at the workstations is drastically different.

In this case, significant hand-holding is needed to move a task through the process. In both an Assembly Line and a New Build, we create something new. But in the New Build situation, we create a new gadget while also building the Assembly Line. The result might seem the same, but twice as much effort is required to get there.

It took me a while to realize what was going on. I kept getting frustrated that everything was taking longer and progress kept stalling. I didn't recognize the New Build because the process was the same. Once I realized we were in a New Build situation, I changed my expectations and my focus while massively simplifying the process into more granular tasks. I delegated the responsibility to advance tasks to someone else so I could focus solely on building the Assembly Line. Until the Assembly Line is completed and running smoothly, each job will stall and require manual intervention to start up again.

After a month of New Build and experimenting with roles and responsibilities of the new team, I think I finally have the Assembly Line built and the right people at the right work stations.

It feels good to turn the complex into bite-sized tasks and watch progress fly by.

(Written 2019.05.01)

#18 | The Path to a Higher Education

Every quarter I do a re-evaluation of my financial standing and strategies. I just completed it this weekend and noticed the levels of my kids’ college funds. The middle kid’s account level was starting to look a bit hefty, so I decided to do some investigation into if I should slow it down or even stop it. What I researched shocked me.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t the first time I’ve researched this subject, so I wasn't shocked by the numbers. But it’s the first time I’ve examined it with the new Boredom goggles. I didn’t realize the ludicrous nature of the situation before. It’s scary how much college education has become the new “Keeping up with the Joneses.” It used to be about having the biggest home, the shiniest car, or the most featured gadget. Now it’s about what college “experience” your kid is given (NOTE: frequently not earned). No wonder the nation has an ongoing massive college admittance cheating scandal.

Let me document some of the findings I unearthed this weekend, mixed in with some of the research I’ve done in the past.

The first step in planning college finance planning is to break college expenses into thirds. The first third will be paid in the past and is done by the parents from the child’s birth to adulthood (18-years-old) on a monthly payment. Present efforts fund the second third. Parents pay for this portion through their regular monthly income while their child is in college. Considering the first third is spread over 18 years with compounding interest or returns (depending on if you’ve done savings or investment accounts) while the second third only contains four years of contributions, that means the first third is a slow accumulation while the second third is a frantic spend-fest.

Then the last third is paid in the future in the form of a loan taken out either by the parents, by the child, or both. Since college loans are the new mortgage, this is spread out over decades. Although there is interest associated with it, there are also tax advantages that offset the real costs. Therefore I imagine this is another slow burn.

Okay, we have our buckets. Now how much do we fund? Boiling everything down to averages, I saw the following recommendations for covering 33%-50% of college expenses (which fits into the 3-bucket approach).

• In-state public institute: $100 / month
• Out-of-state public institute: $250 / month
• Private institute: $500 / month

Buckets: check. Allocations: check. Next up defines where to make the allocations. Typically 529 plans are the first vehicle of choice. Tax advantages on gains and some states let you take tax advantages on contributions. Transferable if the initial benefactor decides not to go to college. Downsides are that there are restrictions on what expenses this money can cover. Besides 529 plans, I’ve also seen a couple of child custodian accounts. I don’t recall their names, but from what I remember, they are very similar but have a few key distinguishing factors. Then, of course, there’s just an earmarked account in the parents’ name reserved for the child’s education.

At this point, I’m just like holy ****. Can this be any more complicated?

I need a 4-year STEM degree to figure out my kids’ college experience with the roadmap starting at their birth with the first 529 plan contribution and lasting potentially into their 50s with their final student loan payment. How did the act of planning for a college education become so moronic? It's like our life's purpose is to figure out how to pay for a college education, instead of our college education's purpose is to help figure out our life's journey.

I’m not sure what my next steps will be. There has to be a way to hack this system. The FIRE community, among many others, has figured out some very cost-effective hacks to decrease or remove college expenses. But hacking implies complex maneuvering to beat the system. Is that honestly the best way? Instead of the “experience” of college spending four more years in a party and alcohol invested, high consumption, arrogant dominated atmosphere, how about swapping or preluding that with the “experience” of traveling the world for even a year moving from city-to-city earning a living wage while finding out who they. Instead of putting in four more years in a classroom setting, emphasis your kids to put themselves out there and start a High School business which they can grow to profitability before graduation.

I’m not saying higher education isn’t beneficial; it’s just not the end-all solution that we make it out to be.

I have some ideas now that I would like to try implementing, but I'll kick this re-evaluation down the road a bit more. My contributions are inline for the in-state/out-of-state contribution levels in a 529 plan, so there's no pressing need to minimalize this yet. Being that these costs can be a bit part of my Financial Independence path, I’ll want to tackle this eventually. But there’s still time, and there is more simplification cleanup needed in the other parts of my financial life.

(Written 2019.04.06)