I Got a Grind, Won’t Stop, Hustle Won’t Quit
In my limited professional career, I’ve tried identifying steps I could do to be a successful employee and I sometimes still feel as clueless as Day 1. The easiest answer to wrap my head around is that being good at the daily grind and knocking out your tasks will be rewarded, but I think this only gets you so far.
The next logical thought is that I must not only be good at my job, but must constantly strive to work at the next level before I’ve been promoted to that level.
From there (and at higher levels) it’s easy to see how soft skills, higher level design skills, and politics start coming more and more into play. While some of this can be learned or improved with practice, it’s also where the path starts to diverge from your typical IC performance and more into how you’ve improved the org. or people around you which is filled with ambiguity.
Gaming the System
All that sounds normal though right? Pretty typical? While I think the points mentioned are for the most part common knowledge, it’s hard to exactly predict success, especially at higher levels. Given the neurodivergence of employees and different skillsets each employee brings to the table, it’s hard to define. I think there are certain pointers, however, that I believe contribute to long-term success
- Establish positive professional relationships with those around you
- Try to manage up and take care of paint points for your manager
- Do good technical work without expecting rewards and it will be noticed (eventually or, hopefully?)
- Don’t be a heads-down hard worker as you’ll just be seen as the guy/gal who is dependable and gets work done but nothing more, and the work will pile on
- Your promotions and scope increase depends more on visibility and joining a growing team/org
- Taking credit for other’s work sometimes can get you ahead even if it could be considered immoral/unethical
- Be assertive, don’t allow yourself to be a scapegoat for higher-ups mess-ups
- Know your personal brand
- Pick a career path you even somewhat enjoy and are good at, or at least better than most, to position yourself for success
While the pointers above are my personal scatter-brained opinions, they illustrate the lack of definitiveness of how to get ahead in your career, and sometimes the oxymoronic advice you may receive. At lower levels, it’s easy to see how just doing good technical work and getting along fine with coworkers is the easiest path to IC promotion. It’s intriguing to me, however, to see the politics happening at higher levels and how decisions are made, and how these ultimately may affect your career trajectory.
I’ve seen incompetent engineers get a MBA and suddenly become a rockstar TPM/PM when a company is willing to give them a chance in that capacity. I’ve heard/seen former all star employees join a different team and suddenly they’re not meeting expectations and are considered a bad performer. I’ve seen toxic members get promotions, literally driving the rest of their team away, because there was a mentality of there’s nobody else to go with. I’ve seen whole teams quit and their managers successfully deflect the blame while being major contributors to the problem. Ok so what? We all have our own sob story and injustices right? These examples at a surface level appear to have little in common with one another, but all demonstrate how success is very subjective and environment-dependent.
Navigating the Workplace
As a fresh grad, I used to have a mentality that all it took to get ahead to be a successful employee was to do good work. After only a couple years experience I slowly started to realize this was far from the truth. I think this is powerful because if you can recognize people’s motivations who you work under, you can help position yourself to also align with long-term visions of those above you. Knowledge is power.
I’m sure I could come up with 100 more pointers to help succeed at work but they all sum up to the same driver. Success in the workplace is fragile, uncertain, and even to a small degree, luck. If you’re underperforming, there’s always something you can do to improve your odds for success by strategically positioning yourself. If your org. isn’t promoting people because they don’t think you’ll leave or think you’re replaceable with some guy off the street, consider walking away with a better opportunity. Company loyalty died 10+ years ago (see numerous COVID layoffs from traditional companies as a prime example). I think this outlook is quite the opposite of jaded. I view it as more of a new-age game to be played by employees, and if you don’t want to hop on board for playing the new-age game there’s a chance you could be affected by layoffs or dramatically underpaid for your skills/experience in the market.
While I understand it’s not everybody’s top priority to climb the corporate ladder or chase after higher compensation, I think these thoughts have helped me to develop a more mature outlook about what I want from my day-to-day work and what I want for my career. Knowing more how corporations work allows me to plan out exactly what I want from my career, and how I can excel at it. I’ve had periods where I’ve questioned my own competency, and it’s refreshing to think about what I can do to be an effective employee and how I fit into the bigger picture. I better understand the tradeoffs for what it takes to be a “good” employee and can adjust my ethic more to accommodate this vision.
Would Elon Musk have been able to work his way up the corporate ladder? At times he seems to lack political correctness or be overly demanding to subordinates which might ding him as a common Joe in the corporate world. Would Jeff Bezos have been as successful at Shaw if he stuck around? It’s hard telling as he was from all records a good employee but definitely didn’t seem to be on pace for running the firm. What about Bill Gates? Apparently, he was difficult to work with at times as well. Although starting and running companies takes different skillsets than navigating a corporate environment, it’s not always obvious what it means to be successful and can depend just as much on context, and positioning yourself for the right opportunities. It’s easy to pick up tips for success from various people like these celebrity businessmen, but a flap of a butterfly’s wings in an alternate timeline might have stalled them out from nothing more than middle management. It’s astounding to think that some of the most powerful people in the world may have never reached their full potential because they would continue to be limited by corporations’ varying views of success and getting ahead.
While no two companies are alike in what they consider “good” employees, these common trends aim to reveal awareness. I think success in the workplace is ultimately defined by what you want from work, but when it comes to my own success, I still find it difficult to know how I can translate all these tips/pointers into everyday victories.
Plowing Ahead
I have worked to understand my world view of how corporation’s work to prepare myself to continue to navigate these murky waters. I expect hurdles along the way, but if I continue to edit my world view, based on experiences and advice I feel confident that I can continue to succeed in the workplace, or at least better define my own vision of success in the work place. Maybe one day I’ll have the luxury and privilege of deciding the corporate rat race is no longer for me, but until this point I will continually work to improve my chances for success, partially for personally growth and partially because it is the easy laid out path. I would encourage anybody reading this to understand their company’s view of success and how it aligns with their own world view of success so they too can position themselves for success, however they have found that to be defined.
