NE: You sure you want that job?
A thousand bees in the third edition.
Hello! Welcome to the third edition of Nuanced Experiments. Hope you’ve had a fulfilling week. This week our house was swarmed by bees 🐝 ! About a thousand of them decided to get settled inside a vase in front of our house and stayed there until a local beekeeper moved them to a local apiary. In the process, we learned a lot of bees. They’re actually pretty amazing. Ask ChatGPT for some honey bee facts next time you get a chance.
Here are my insights for the week!
1. Tech Career Insight: Proactively own projects
Work with your manager to find projects you can own, even when you’re not asked. This will help you practice leadership, cultivate accountability within yourself, build trust with others, expand your skills, and it will make you stand out particularly when you don’t have a ton of experience. Best of all, it can sometimes be more fun to work on something that’s 100% your baby.
Caveat: I recommend you choose projects that are not too ambitious, or that require you to learn too many new things at once. And remember to consider how you can more manage expectations by overdelivering.
2. Idea: Ask yourself if you want the successful version of your career.
This was a question the creator Khe Hy posed in his latest RadReads blog entry:
Do you want to own the successful version of career?
What is the successful version of your career? What does that “success” state look like to you?
If you’re in tech, is it being senior/staff/principal engineer? Is it a director, manager? Is it a freelancer? A consultant? A CTO? A startup founder? A bootstrapped entrepreneur? A creator? Just doing what you’re doing today?
Think of the tradeoffs and overlaps around freedom, money, time ownership, prestige, client management, stakeholder management, values, autonomy, skills breadth, skills depth, etc.
One practical way to do this is to identify the people you admire in tech, and see if you can learn more about what their day to day looks like.
For a personal example, most of the managers I’ve worked with have their calendar full of meetings (easily 70%+ of the week). After several years experimenting with tech lead roles myself, I also realized a formal management track that necessitated a busy meeting schedule probably wasn’t my ideal success state. For many people it can actually be the ok or even ideal. Your sweet spot is specific to you. Remember that there are no wrong answers here.
Caveat: There are many things that you’ll want to experience to actually be able to tell if you like them or not, but hopefully this thought experiment can help you accelerate learning of any curiosities you may have.
3. Nuanced Experiment of the Week
Two actionable things you can consider trying:
Find a micro idea for a project you can propose to your team and carry it through.
Schedule a 1:1 with someone with your ideal “successful” career state and ask them what their days and weeks are like. See how that conversation makes you feel.
That’s it for this one. Thanks for reading. See you on the next one and have a fantastic week.
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