Spreading Yourself Too Thin
We just finished Mental Health Awareness month, and I’m sure during that time the topic of balance came up for many of you. I’m not going to talk about life balance in this post, however. Instead, I’d like to share my thoughts about career composition balance: how to meet technical vs managerial vs product demands, and when to stress each area. This is applicable at all points in your career, but particularly important as you move up the ladder and try to map your path. Do you advance in management, and give up “keeping your hands on the keyboard”? Or do you grow as a technical expert, but not contribute to leading and developing the business and its people?
As appealing as it might sound, you cannot do it all and be good at everything all the time. Trust me, I’ve seen people attempt this. I’ve tried to do it myself. You end up diluting your strengths and peanut-buttering your impact. If you are strong in strategy, or excel in org efficiency, it would be near impossible to deliver that AND write beautiful code or create a killer design. In fact, I’d argue it doesn’t make sense to try. As technologists at heart, we like logic. It’s not logical, or efficient, effective, expedient to have a software engineer do org design. (Caveat: there are times when it is necessary to make an exception to this logic, such as early stage start-ups and sole proprietorship. We’ll talk about how to manage that in another post another time…)
You might be thinking there are alternatives to peanut buttering your impact. You can climb both ladders at the same time (nearly) if you flip between roles on the technical and managerial ladders frequently. But that means a lot of job change, and changing jobs is hard. Too much job change ultimately slows down the growth rate of your career. And if you are under-represented, that career growth might already be slower (we’ll talk about that later, too). Another option might be to craft a unique position that contains some responsibilities from both ladders. If you can do it, this is great … when the economy and your company is booming. But it is hard to explain when it’s not and you find yourself looking for the next role.
My suggestion is to strive to understand what you are good at, but also what brings you energy and joy. This is where you will have the most impact. Is it working with people? Or working with physics (be that bits, voltages, forces, vectors/tensors, etc)? Think of your strengths as your brand or byline, and the force that helps you up the career ladder.
