Dont run away from something, run to something
- career and life advice from a mentor
I’ve noticed patterns with how I handle career development.
When I felt stagnant in my last role, I became more open to finding other roles. I replied back to recruiter cold messages for more info. I searched job boards for interesting companies that were hiring. I took interviews. Eventually, I got an offer and accepted it.
What I didn’t do a great job of was looking for ways to make my current role better. Where was that stagnant feeling coming from? I had a supportive manager, and was working on a project that “moved the needle” for our organization. On the surface, my career prospects looked great. I found out after I gave my 2-week notice that I was on the cusp of a promotion going through to become a senior data engineer.
I think I was missing a values alignment. The project that brought me close to promotion also served to divest from a product that was built by people I had worked closely with in the past. Leaders that had mentored and supported me in my career. I had emotional investments in that product and team. Human connections. Work friendships. They built orchestration tooling that our team relied on. It felt I was betraying them to be the only team using that product, while leading the project to migrate off of it and onto something new.
The decision was made to stop investing in that product and move away from it. The data pipeline our team ran on that platform had grown very complex and hard to maintain at the the scale it had grown into. There were options to extend the product features to better support our team needs, but my management chain did not have the political will to do that work. I had to stop questioning the decision and direction in order to stay in that role. I had to be a team player and march together with our small group of engineers who were piloting the new tooling together with a high impact project. So I stopped questioning it openly while seeds of doubt remained in my mind. The project was successful and marching ahead full steam with more and more engineers contributing to the new orchestration platform and codebase.
I didn’t talk to those mentors about my conflicted take on the project. I avoided confronting the issues that had me feeling conflicted. I chose to disconnect myself from the interpersonal, emotional, and tactical aspects of work. I was experiencing cognitive dissonance about the work and my role in it. It felt like I was out of options to deal with it. So I focused on the tactical aspect of building the new platform, without resolving the others.
Stagnation was a term I had somehow anchored on. It implies standing still. Feeling stuck, even anxious. There was motion all around me, and I was moving forward too. But part of me was still stuck in the past and wondering about the present and future.
Deciding when to stay the course and when to move on is hard. Back to my job change, I wasn’t seeking out a new job yet I was at an inflection point where I was open to change. Opportunity found me and I gave up some real money and upward mobility to take it. I decided that the money and status wasn’t worth staying. It was in the middle of pandemic lockdowns and I got offered a permanently remote job with a good base salary, with a company that was helping people who were struggling with the pandemic, myself included. That was important to me and the work felt more impactful and interesting.
Did I run from problems in my old role? Did I run to something new? Was there some of both? Did I bring any unresolved baggage from my old role into my new one?
Where do I want to be a few years from now? I’ll face many new challenging and conflicting situations like this one. I hope to be able to handle them better and with less cognitive dissonance. To catch that stagnant feeling early and really understand it.
Do I want to be an individual contribtor or a manager in a few years? I’m not sure, and I feel it depends a lot on the company. I’ll be better prepared for either if I can better prepare myself for these types of scenarios in any role.
Soft skills are the hardest and most impactful skills to learn. Career development is multifaceted. There is no single path.