On mid-career and team dynamics

As you enter your mid-career, the scope of your impact begins to increase. If you’re moving towards technical depth, you can end up making decisions that affect the budget and infrastructure of your company. If you’ve headed towards an organizational focus, you can make process decisions that impact the lives of people across your organization.

I’ll discuss differences between those types of work in the next post, but regardless of the specifics of your role, as a mid-career engineer you are going to be more of a leader within your organization. This is true whether or not you have something like “team lead” in your job title, and also whether or not you want to be a leader. People in your team and throughout your organization are going to look to you for examples for how to behave.

Your behavior will start to impact norms and expectations. A straightforward example of this is around availability and working hours. If you are responding to Slack and email during off-hours and weekends (when you aren’t on-call) or never take a sick day, your peers might start to think that they should be responsive 24/7 as well. If you’re often snarky and sarcastic, people around you might start adopting the same sort of attitude.

As your career progresses, you will likely be expected to act as a mentor to more junior folks in your organization, either in a formal or an informal capacity. This means that you’ll have to level up your communication skills — being able to share knowledge effectively is crucial to being a senior engineer. You’ll also be setting norms within these mentorship relationships, so you need to pay attention to how you act and how that impacts people around you. If you interrupt people in meetings, you reinforce a dynamic where that is ok, making it harder for people with less sway to get their voices heard. If you consistently dismiss the ideas of some people on your team, you make it known to everyone — and especially to under-represented colleagues — that you aren’t going to collaborate with or be an ally to them.

Due to changing power dynamics, the way you’ll receive feedback will change as well. On the one hand, in a mature organization, you this might mean that you are held to a higher standard than you used to be. An organization that doesn’t tolerate “brilliant assholes” will see behavior such as interrupting, talking down to people, or other microagressions as a sign that you need to level up your core skills before being promoted further.

On the other hand, the more senior you get in an organization, the less comfortable people might be giving you direct feedback. This can be especially true if you’re a member of an over-represented group or otherwise have a lot of social capital within your org. If people don’t feel comfortable telling you directly how your behavior impacts them, this can lead to bad habits or toxic work environments that persist far longer than they should. The industry is starting to recognize that writing good code doesn’t make up for bad behavior, but that progress is slow, and power dynamics mean that you won’t always get told if your behavior is causing problems, making self-reflection even more important.

One of the upsides about having a broader impact is being able to use your leadership position as a force for good, helping to normalize positive behaviors that you might want to see in a work environment. This might look like:

Modeling good decision-making: Every engineering team is going to have disagreements to resolve and decisions to make. You can help to model healthy decision-making behaviors, facilitating discussions to make sure everyone gets a chance to speak and that different voices and experiences are heard. Too many teams default to “whoever yells the loudest” or “whoever has been at the company the longest”, and those sorts of dynamics mean missing out on valuable contributions and ideas from other team members.
Impacting team and organizational processes: Having a broader impact can happen at a structural level as well as a technical one. You can do a lot of good within an organization by looking for ways to use your influence to mitigate systemic problems. For example, helping to revamp a skills matrix or streamline promotion processes so that more people have chances for career growth, or fighting for pay equality throughout the organization. If you’re in a position where you have a lot of privilege or social capital, you can use that to benefit other people around you.
Demonstrating positive behaviors: You can deliberately model behaviors that you’d like to see more of in your organization. For example, when you join a team or organization, you can use your status as a new person to ask questions, to ask for help, to say “I don’t know”. In an industry where so many people can end up struggling with things like impostor syndrome, demonstrating that it’s ok not to know everything can be powerful. Showing people how you learn — how you approach a problem, what kinds of questions you ask — can be helpful for more junior people around you as well.

One important thing to note is that more conflict resolution will fall on your shoulders. As a junior engineer, if you had a disagreement with a peer (technical or otherwise), you could often look to a manager or more senior engineer to resolve it. When you’re more senior, there might not be someone else with enough knowledge to make that kind of call. This is especially true when considering complex issues that don’t have one clear answer. You will also run into cases where you have to tell people that they’re wrong — and to be told that you’re wrong as well. Being able to communicate and disagree well and to keep your ego out of your engineering will be hugely valuable when navigating conflict.

Here is another area where conscious and unconscious bias can make things harder if you’re an URM. You may find yourself in a position where you’re expected to act like a leader, but people around you don’t take you seriously as one. You might not be given the benefit of the doubt, instead having to re-prove over and over that you know what you’re talking about. Asking questions and saying “I don’t know” can feel a lot riskier when you don’t have the benefit of presumed competence. There’s no quick fix for this kind of structural problem, but I’d encourage everyone — managers in particular — to ask yourselves who you’re treating like a leader and who you aren’t.

Interpersonal dynamics are different in your mid-career. There are still lots of ways in which you are still going to be learning and growing as an engineer. Power dynamics can get more complicated, with different factors like industry tenure, organizational or team tenure, and career history all factoring into how you work with people and how decisions get made. But you are also in a leadership role — people will often look to you for examples of how to behave — so it’s critical to make sure the impact you’re having is a positive one.