Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Team. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and my goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. And today's episode is for everyone at every stage in their career who is trying to grow. If you are trying to grow in your career in any way, this doesn't necessarily just mean trying to get a job. It doesn't mean only that you're trying to get a promotion or that you're trying to make a lateral move. All of these things can be included if you are trying to grow and especially, especially if you have hit some kind of roadblock, right? So what normally happens in our careers, and I've seen this story over and over, is we progress along kind of a predetermined path, right? So this predetermined path is, you know, career. Ladder, for example. And so you walk down the career ladder or up or climb or whatever the metaphor is that you want to use. And the reason why I'm so loose with that metaphor is because most people are doing it kind of haphazardly. They don't really necessarily have a clear plan. They don't really know why. Why is it that you, A, deserve that promotion or B, even want that promotion? Most people. Most people will cite very obvious or easy answers, right? You know, these are kind of fill-in-the-blank answers. People say, well, of course, if I get a promotion, I'll get paid more. All right. Well, if you haven't asked yourself why you care about that, then that's a worthwhile exercise and we're not going to cover in today's episode. But the insight that I want you to take away here is most career progression for most people, especially early in their careers, most of that progression happens. And that's kind of by happenstance, right? It happens because once you get to a certain level, your natural experience begins to accumulate. You begin to develop domain expertise. You know, you have natural skill accumulation, skill development that happens just by way of experience, right? And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. For most people, the latter is kind of designed that way, right? Our career progression. It is designed to respond to our natural growth path as we continue to kind of cultivate understanding of the domain and understanding of our skill set, even building our skill sets. You know, most people who are past the early part of their careers are not rapidly building new skills necessarily. They're developing relationships, for example. They're developing, you know, the ability to work across the organization. They're developing relationships with other parts, other departments, you know, cross-functional relationships. So all of these things kind of factor into why people naturally progress without necessarily having to sit down and make a plan for it, right? Most, you know, junior engineers don't sit down and come up with a master plan for how to become a mid-level engineer. That sort of just happens, especially it's going to happen if you have a reasonably good people manager that's on your side. That's helping you grow that direction. Okay. So, and my apologies with my throat, I'm getting over a little bit of cold. So where does this lead us? As you continue progressing in your career, there will at times be roadblocks, missing rungs on the ladder, potentially, right? There's something in the way of you progressing. Again, not just through promotion, but let's say maybe. You know, you're taking on a certain position in the org, right? Getting to work on a particular project or in a domain that you care about. And so because of this, we can end up getting blocked on things that we want to that, that we actually do want to do. We're no longer on autopilot. We actually want to go and accomplish that. We want to go and work in that area. Maybe we want to work on that particular team or with that particular tech, right? So there's something that we want in our careers. We end up getting stuck. We end up getting roadblocked. What do we do? Well, most of the time, what people end up relying on is the same thing that they've done before, right? Let's just continue gaining experience and hope for the best. And so we do kind of a scattershot approach, right? We try to read kind of the tea leaves of what does my boss really want me to do? How do I make him happy? You know, how do I make, you know, my boss's boss, how to make her happy? What do I do about, you know, kind of progressively getting better? Maybe I'll read some blogs, right? Or maybe I'll practice on the weekends. I'll build some side projects. Maybe that'll do the trick. And so we come up with the scattershot approach. And by the way, this is often what people do when they're looking in job search, right? Especially folks who have been laid off, they'll go with a very broad kind of broadcast net. And so we come up with a scattershot approach. And by the way, this is often what people do when they're looking in job search, right? The intuition here isn't necessarily bad. It's kind of what we've learned, right? If all we ever did before was a bunch of activity that got us to where we are now, then why wouldn't we continue on the same path? You know, a bunch of activity previously got us a promotion. It got us a job. You know, learning a skill got us a job. And so maybe learning a skill is going to take us to the next level, right? You know, doing a bunch of extra work. Maybe got you some. You're going to need some respect early on in your career, so you're going to work nights and weekends to try to, you know, make ends meet on this, on this new problem that you have. Of course, the problem with this approach is, especially as you get later in your career, the options, and the kind of, like, automatic progression, and how things kind of land in your lap, doesn't happen as much. And there's a bunch of reasons for this. of them is, especially if we're talking about promotion pathways, the higher up the chain you go, the fewer positions there are at that level, right? So most organizations are kind of designed this way, that there's the most, most of the positions are further down, right? So in the first or second or maybe the third tier, and it's kind of a wider, you know, pyramid shaped, right? And so as you go further down, there's more of those positions available. As you go up, there's fewer and fewer of those positions available. So no matter how good you are, you know, no matter how high performing you are, if the role doesn't exist, then you don't necessarily have the option of moving into that role. And so everything you did before no longer works, right? This is the key insight I want you to take away. Everything that you intuitively, know to do is not necessarily what's going to work when you run into this kind of roadblock. And again, not just promotion pathways, but all of these other possible growth paths that you care about in your career. Okay, so if the growth path is kind of blocked, and you don't really have, you know, an intuition for what this is, you're going to have to go back and look at the growth path. And if you don't have an intuition for what this is, then you need to come up with a new way of thinking about this problem. And more specifically, you need to be able to define the problem more clearly in the first place. And so if the problem is not well defined, then your scattershot approach may have absolutely no bearing on the problem itself. That's the key, most critical thing to take away here. If you haven't defined the problem, then you have no way of actually knowing whether the actions that you're taking are going to progress you where you need to go, where you want to go. And so for example, in that previous, that previous example, as you climb the ladder, and fewer and fewer of those roles exist at that level. So that might actually be the core problem. You may be more than qualified for that next level. You may be, you know, even overqualified, maybe, everyone wishes that there was a role there for you at that level, right? The organization does, your boss does. Everybody wants that role for you. It just doesn't exist. So what do you do about that? Right? Recognizing that problem means that you can now start working on that problem instead of becoming even better and even better and even more qualified. And focusing on your own skill set, for example, you can start to look broadly at what's going on and be more effective in trying to solve that specific problem. So instead of, you know, again, you know, going and reading blogs on the weekend, you can start to look at, okay, how do we expand the scope such that another one of these roles becomes necessary? And how do we expand the scope such that another one of these roles becomes necessary? Right. Right.! doesn't really make space for that. So then you have to shift your mindset into thinking, okay, well, is this problem even, even solvable, right? In the, in the sense that can I solve it with this traditional path or is there some other pathway I need to take? Especially if, for example, your goal is to get promoted, but the reason your goal is to get promoted is because you want to work, you know, with a certain group of people, or you want to partake in a particular activity or, you know, whatever the reasons are, potentially shifting your, your, your problem statement so that, or, or shifting your goal so that the problem statement can shift with it, right? The problem statement now is I have to convince somebody to let me do those things instead of giving me a position where I'm kind of expected to do those things. Right? Those are subtly different, but they're meaningfully different because in the second example, if you're convincing somebody, then that's a totally different process. And if you already have all that credibility built up, then it's very possible that you'll be able to convince somebody even without the role that you can kind of go and do the things that are associated with the role, right? Similarly, you could end up getting the same kind of, you know, compensation that that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that role is, uh, has defined for it. So there's a lot of potential pathways here. Um, but first you have to start with that clarifying the problem. And my guess is if you're listening to this right now and you found yourself at that roadblock, my guess is that most of you, probably 90% of you, if not more, have not taken a step out of your own context. You haven't taken a step away from the self-improvement kind of never ending cycle of self-improvement and, you know, perfection and all of these things where we try to make ourselves better and better and better. Take a step outside of that cycle and try to see the problem from the outside in, try to see it like, uh, uh, you know, an external consultant might try, try to look at it as if you were looking at somebody else's company, somebody else's job, somebody else's situation. What advice would you give them? Would you tell them, well, you just need to continue reading blogs on the weekend and maybe we'll see you next week. And if you do, I'd love to hear from you. And if you one day somebody will notice, probably not, right? Uh, probably there's much better advice that you would give to that person and that you can right now, write down in a journal for yourself, right? So the key takeaway here, the key takeaway is that in almost every circumstance, in almost every circumstance where you're hitting a roadblock, where there's a missing rung on the ladder, there is a problem that you need to define. Better. Let me say that again. In almost every situation where you are blocked, where you're not able to move forward, there's some kind of growth path that you want to follow. And you can't, for some reason, you can't figure it out. Uh, you're, you're kind of relying on that default growth path. You know, you're trying to do your job as good as you can to show that you're worthy. There is a problem that you need to work on defining better. That is the first step in solving this. The first step towards moving past that roadblock and onto the next thing. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of developer team. Hopefully this is, uh, this resonated with you. Um, we're coming close to the end of the year. This may be the last episode of the year, or there may be one more, uh, or one or two more in the next couple of weeks. Uh, but, uh, this, this time of year, I'm always appreciative because we're, we're rounding the corner, uh, to another anniversary of developer team. We've been around for ever. Now it feels like. I think 13 years is what we're coming up on. And, um, you know, there's many of you who have listened for years to the show and I'm incredibly grateful for you. I'm incredibly grateful that I get to do this. Um, you know, that, that I'm afforded the opportunity and the time to do this. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your team.