On mid-career and the scope of work

When you enter your mid-career, the nature of the work you do begins to change. This often occurs naturally — as you gain more knowledge and experience, you’ll get trusted to work on bigger problems. The scope of your work will increase. While you might have been tasked with individual features as a junior engineer, as you become more senior you’ll be working on larger projects and systems.

In many organizations, you’ll be able to start impacting how engineering work gets done. I’ll refer to this type of work as having an organizational focus. For example, as a tech lead on a project, you’ll be able to influence decisions like project scope, time frames, and maybe who else you want working on the project. You might be choosing things like when different parts of the project happen or what tools and processes you use. In healthy organizations, where engineers are empowered to make changes like this, you can have significant impact by focusing on this type of big picture “how do we work” work.

If an organizational focus isn’t where you want to go, the other main option as an IC is to have a technical focus. This might be a deep focus, where you have a particularly detailed subject matter expertise in one or two areas, or a broad focus, where a range of experience can give you the ability to jump in and help with a wide range of technical problems. If you opt for technical focus, you will start to become a go-to person for technical matters.

One of the most impactful things you can do at this point is to make sure that you don’t become a single point of failure. A great way to de-SPOF yourself is to actively share as much knowledge as you can with people around you. Document what you do and learn, and make sure that documentation is kept up to date and easy to find, but also make sure it’s collaborative. For example, you may have context in your head that other people don’t — seeking out feedback can help highlight these gaps and improve the documentation for everyone. Making sure that more junior team members are able to make sense of what you’ve shared not only helps level up everyone around you but also hones your communication skills. Don’t hoard information. It not only makes things fragile (and makes it harder for you to take time off when you need it) but it’s also a big sign of an unhealthy organization.

Organizational work comes with its own set of challenges, and many of those challenges have to do with social and team dynamics. In some organizations (especially ones that are coming later to this whole “devops” thing) you might run into significant pushback when trying to do this sort of work. This will often look like some variation of being told to “stay in your lane” (or silo) — changes that impact multiple teams, tools, or processes used through large parts of the org are often met with resistance. Orgs that are used to a command-and-control style of management may bristle at the idea of ICs leading this work instead, despite the latter often being more effective.

If you find yourself running into resistance when trying to make broader organizational changes, some things you can try include:

Reach out to peers: Look for other people who are interested in creating change. These people could provide ideas and direct support, or you might find folks with enough insight and institutional knowledge to help your ideas get more traction.
Talk to managers you trust: In addition to IC peers, having trusted managers in your network can give you valuable information. If you are able to connect with higher level managers and directors, you may be able to gain insight into a wider range of strategies, concerns, and potential blockers.
Make sure you’re communicating effectively: If you’re not able to garner much enthusiasm for changes you’re proposing, it’s possible the issue lies with the communication, not with the ideas themselves. Is it clear what problems you’re trying to solve and why? Are you overloading people with too much information or unintentionally skimping on important details? Sharpening your writing and public speaking skills can only help you here.
Look for allies and sponsors: If you’re an URM struggling to get your voice heard, see if you can find some strategic allies within your organization who are willing to go to bat for you and amplify and champion your ideas. It can be frustrating to not be heard on your own, but having people who will support you (and make sure you get credit for your own ideas and work) can help increase your impact.
Know when to fold ‘em: You might find yourself running into walls in some organizations. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a culture with values that are out of alignment with your own, or at a place that is exceptionally change-resistant. Don’t make yourself miserable trying to influence an organization that doesn’t actually want to change.

One important thing to keep in mind when doing organizational work is that your choices are going to impact people beyond just you. If you’re influencing decisions around things like what tools people use or which processes they follow, you have to make sure that you aren’t just considering your own wants and needs in those choices. For example, you have a responsibility to make sure your whole team can access the tools you choose for them. Don’t let your shiny new graphs be useless for colorbind colleagues, or push out tools that represent text as images with no alt text or other accessibility options. And be aware that your decisions can even end up impacting people outside of your workplace — if you’re leading a project making changes to teams’ on-call rotations, those changes can impact the family members of those teams as well.

Whichever focus your work ends up taking, the more senior you become the more you’ll be expected to understand the broader impacts of your work throughout the organization. This might mean having an understanding of capital versus operational expenses when proposing changes that would have significant budgetary impacts. You’ll need to be able to understand the concerns of the business as a whole, and be able to relate changes you want to see back to business priorities and outcomes. If there’s a new product feature you’re trying to get added, do you understand how your sales teams will be able to tie it into existing customer journeys? If you’re pushing to spend time paying down technical debt, will you be able to explain the benefits and tradeoffs to executives outside of engineering? Being able to communicate effectively beyond your role will become increasingly important as your scope increases.

If you’re in a younger company, you’ll often start coming across situations or decisions that the organization has never had to tackle before, which adds additional challenges. For technically focused people, this could be scaling to a new order of magnitude or having to start paying down technical debt. Organizationally focused work might look like planning a major reorg, implementing career leveling frameworks for the first time, or adding processes to make sure engineering work meets various compliance standards. Depending on the size of your organization, you might not have anyone to act as a sounding board or someone who has done something similar before. As a senior engineer, you’ll be expected to own the outcomes of these decisions in spite of this uncertainty.

Does this all sound kind of scary? Of course it does! You might figure out that you have a knack for helping shape cultures as organizations grow, or you might decide you want to focus on a particular technical specialty instead. You might think about going into management, or some other non-engineering role, or decide that you’d rather stay at a solid senior level of work and not worry about organization-wide changes. Those are all fine decisions. If you’re lucky, you’ll go into your mid career in an organization that can help you navigate these choices and support you during the process. If you’re looking for some additional guidance, in the next and final post I’ll discuss ways that you can think strategically about your career progression.