October 30, 2019
I don’t write, and I often get feedback that it’s hurting my career in software engineering.
Disclaimer: I’m butthurt about struggling to advance in my career.
The following is what happens when I try to write anything (this included):
Why does this hurt my career? Because I’m a software engineer. We conflate visibility and productivity in this industry, thinking the engineer who writes Medium articles all the time must know their shit because they seem to have quite a following.
I’m not saying I shouldn’t have to broadly communicate. There’s obviously value in broadly communicating. It’s why the fucking printing press was a world-changing invention. I’m not talking about spreading the Good News here, though. I’m talking about rehashing architecture choices, workflow recommendations, production operations plans, and shit as banal as unit test coverage. Why would I bore the world or my peers with things that are trivial to search for? How could that possibly be valuable? How is that required for me to “level up”?
I’d like to explore why I don’t write, particularly for work. So let’s look at my steps of abandonment.
I think I have a good idea
We all have good ideas. We’re humans. Each of us has a unique experience and can share ideas which others haven’t had. Stupid simple. I don’t have confidence to call many of my ideas good, but I figure some probably are good.
I flesh it out into fairly broad strokes
This is actually a pretty quick process: trim it down to the bare essentials, don’t demean anybody’s work, have a strong recommendation or request of the coworker who reads it. Easy peasy.
I start writing
For larger documents or plans, where more context and guiding is needed, I go off the rails pretty easily. I get bogged down in minutiae. I start trying to cover every angle of technical attack this thing may face.
I doubt my idea
As I’m writing a defense without an attack, I start to convince myself that it’s not worth writing. That it contradicts something else I hadn’t seen. That it’s obvious, not novel. That I’m missing some piece of context that makes the whole thing moot.
I fear being bullied
I can hear it now: “well you probably just can’t take feedback very well if you always think it’s bullying.” Sure, fine. There’s nothing I can say to that. It’s just shutting down a conversation. If that’s what you’re thinking, then this isn’t for you. Otherwise, you may have experienced this. The Super Sr. Hon. Principled Engineer XIV stepping in to the idea you had and shitting all over it. Not because they have a better idea, but because they can shoot mine down without bothering to consider it. Because one of the key words I used matched a thing they own. Because I recommended using a system they didn’t write. Because they can.
I delete what I wrote
Not this time!
That’s all, I mostly needed to vent. But in the spirit of not deleting what I wrote, here are snippets from earlier versions of what I thought I wanted to say…
I’m talking about advancing a career through sheer confidence. Faking it until you make it seems to be a requirement in software engineering career progression.
I do this personally, for nerd stuff or regular-ass personal stuff. I have a handful of partial drafted things I’ve written out. One weird thing about the personal ones is the audience. The audience is always me. I can’t write advice since I’ll just doubt the value of it. I mean hey, it didn’t help me the first time around, right? So I write to straighten my thoughts, to categorize and reinterpret.
I do this abandonment process at work almost every day. Let’s say I have an idea, or a direction shift, which I need a lot of people to get on-board with before the wheels come off of the product/app/website/project/whatever. So, I say it in a chat and a couple people agree, then I say it more broadly and get complete and utter silence. I could bring it up in a meeting, but I usually talk myself down from that by pointing out what happens every time I do: people say that’s a good idea, pretend it takes 10x the engineering time it does, and proceed to politely tell me to go fuck myself by saying that this next deadline is more important.
This has trained me not to share my ideas widely. It has taught me that my ideas are bad.
So I instead have 1:1 or small group conversations about technical direction, driving everybody to a higher bar and generally getting people excited to work on the most boring stuff possible: reliability. I do this a lot at work, pointing out subtle tactical changes and creating a new vision of whatever it is I’m working with.