I wrote this about a year and a half go — but forgot to publish it.
It’s interesting how my career has evolved – specifically, the role I do for the tech companies for which I work.
Everybody is good at some things, and bad at other things. Everyone has a unique personality – which is a product of their genetics and their experience. And that personality, plus the natural talents that one has, usually determines one’s career path and how good they are at that path.
I am a ‘natural engineer’. What is that? It means that I am a problem solver. If I see something that needs adjustment/improvement, I can visualize multiple ways to make it happen, weigh these solutions against each other, and pursue the best path.
If I were sensible, I probably should have followed an ‘engineering’ career path – become a fancy technical architect, or maybe pursued engineering management. My challenge was – the first time I was a manager for engineering teams, I was in a difficult situation:
- I worked for a purchased startup, where the company that bought us only wanted the technology and worldwide offices, and not the local (Silicon Valley) people.
- I became the manager of a group where the previous manager had given most people bad reviews, and the company policy was: you needed good reviews for two years to get a promotion. One of my engineers was solid, but I couldn’t promote her because she had a previous bad review – she didn’t like that.
I kept a whiteboard tally in my work office of people who had left the company – and the tally grew to 100+, which is a lot for a small startup. I eventually left the company, but had such an unhappy experience managing teams (I managed a second team at the same time), that it made me not want to manage teams anymore.
My other two ‘dork’ factors are:
- I am not naturally social. I’m generally an awkward, unsocial person – who isn’t the most desirable person for people to want to hang with.
- I am ‘secretly smart’ (I use this term a lot). I grew up in a modest state, but once won a statewide math contest (not bad) – so my brain (over)thinks things well, which allows me to evaluate situations and decide the best/sensible path. I actually use my overthinking brain to decide the best way to compensate for (hide) my dorkiness.
At the end of the day, I come across as being smart/sensible (but slightly dorky), and companies like me.
So…
I have followed the path, in the tech companies I have worked for, of being a project/program manager. It’s sort of like being a people manager, but you don’t have people reporting to you.
Without getting too deep, I’ve had a good career. Two regrets:
- College Choice – I grew up in a family that didn’t focus on college. My parents didn’t go to college. Some of my older siblings went to college (some didn’t graduate). My next older sibling got a bachelors and masters degree – which steered me toward college – BUT no one really gave much guidance/weight to which college I should go to. I paid for my own college, but (wrongly) thought that the only important result was: the degree, and not whether it was a ‘fancy’ college. My grades (and intelligence) were likely good enough to get me into Stanford? MIT? I likely would have been regarded/hired better had I done so, but I went to University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign – not a bad tech school, but not a super fancy/well-regarded one.
- Working vs Launching – The other thing that didn’t occur to me was – starting my own company. There are people who start multiple companies, one company actually works well, and they make good money – I could have done that. Especially since I was ‘early’ in the tech timeline, and could have started some basic tech companies like: devices (Apple), internet (Google), etc. I’ve worked in tech for decades, and am approaching retirement – but I still have (modern/current) ideas that I could pass down to my kids – so they could do what I didn’t (start companies). (Maybe I could be the CTO for those companies…)
In summary, I am awkward socially, but ‘secretly smart’ – and use my overthinking brain to fix/hide my awkwardness. It has worked for me. My career has been good, but it likely could have been better had I been aware of other paths that could have landed me in a better place.
Oh well, you can’t fix the past…