Career vs Job
Hey!
Welcome to another week. My wife and I had a day off this weekend and visited Big Sur because we barely traveled around California. We're mostly city dwellers.
I hope you had a great time as well!
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Now that the reviews are in full swing and we're sending feedback back and forth, I've discussed the topic of career vs job with several people.
While we know what career vs. job are, some people tend to conflate both! This mixing creates unsaid expectations; you might expect to be constantly promoted or solve complex problems.
Career (noun): an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress.
I've met people who have kept the same job in a single place for their whole career. This is less of a thing now, especially in tech, where job hoping can get you a salary increase, a job title, or something you desire.
I've also met people who found their niche and keep changing jobs to keep working at that same niche, e.g., growing engineering teams from 1 to 10 or 100, but not beyond that, dealing with acquisitions and mergers, etc.
In any of the cases, it goes back to understanding what you want and what progress looks like.
We always dread the question, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years"? Perhaps not CTO, in my case, but I look for a larger scope of problems and teams to work with, which might take many shapes!
Another important thing for me is living through the consequences of important decisions I've made. Not making significant changes like "we'll build an internal infrastructure platform on top of Kubernetes" and jumping ship once it's delivered. Do you know if it was successful? Did it result in the benefits we expected? Etc.
One of the ways I see people conflating your career and your current job is by getting promotions. Sometimes, I see that people get a promotion, which will magically change something of their current state, which might be different in slow-moving organizations.
In those cases, we have to wonder if the "Princess is in another castle," I help the people discuss their expectations because what they want might be in another team or company altogether. I believe in being honest with ourselves.
Your turn!
Have you thought about your career outside the context of your current job? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- Randomly checking Kickstarter, I came across this book on Mechanical Keyboards, Shift Happens
- I went back to trying to journal in a notebook and got a Rhodia goalbook! I like the paper, but it is not thick enough for my fountain pen, so I'm using a Sharpie S-Gel.
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