Positioning

I was recently promoted to Director of Engineering and, after taking some time to reflect this weekend, I realized that it looked like my career trajectory was basically entirely luck. I called and messaged an odd dozen of my friends in the industry and, oddly enough, it seems to be that way for a lot of people. I realized there had to be more to it. Here’s a bullet list of my career history: • June 2011 - In grad school (for stats), I got a job as a Systems Analyst at $22/hr. At first this was just doing analytics in R, but I learned SQL. The DBA in that department left and I took on a few of his projects, optimizing stored procedures and fixing issues here-and-there in the database. • December 2013 - I was laid off. I had now graduated, so I had no insurance. It soon became apparent that rent and student loans were gonna burn through whatever savings I had pretty quickly. In February, I took the hit to my ego, moved back to my hometown (which was a lot cheaper CoL), got certified as an MCSA in SQL Server, and started going to local database meetups, looking for jobs. • March 2014 - I got an interview for a job from one of the people I met at the meetup I was attending. I got it, making 55k as a DBA, partially off the back of my prior experience and the certification, but mostly by asking good questions and selling myself. This was a pretty laid back job, SLAs were not very tight so I got to spend time learning by trying to make our backend systems more efficient and resilient. I started reading about DevOps and quickly became enamored by the concepts. I built automated deployment pipelines for our database schema changes. I started writing tooling and automation around our compliance requirements. I got experience with AWS when we migrated our relatively simple setup there. I spent 5 years at this job, getting cost of living raises every year while desperately trying to pay off student loans. They could afford to pay me more, but they didn’t, so I eventually got fed up and left. • April 2019 – One of the people I met networking in the local DevOps meetups had an opening for an SRE at his company, and asked me to apply. I interviewed there, and it seemed like a great group. The company was a startup division of much larger firm. The interviews were laid back, we just talked shop for an hour. They asked me how much I was making and I said “It wouldn’t make sense for me to move for less than 115k”. This was, of course, complete horseshit, but not technically a lie. I defined what “made sense for me” after all. They offered me 115k + bonus, and I took it. • September 2020 – By now, I realized that, while I loved the team I worked with, this job was basically the logical opposite of my last job. It was fast-paced, frenetic, and we had to work hard and be really creative in order to hit milestones. I was learning a ton, and had been promoted, but I had started to feel the beginnings of burnout. In addition to my job, I had been leading brown-bags to teach people how to use the self-service platforms we were building, and consulting internally on other projects. My boss quit suddenly, and I was asked to take his position in the interim. I did, and after taking a crash course on corporate accounting and doing two jobs for a month from hell, I was asked to take the position permanently. I’m now doing a lot better, things have started to stabilize and we’re working on several projects to improve our workflow, which are a lot of fun. This cannot be overstated: soft skills are key! While continuous learning is required for any career advancement, it wont help you get lucky. Soft skills enable you to put yourself in a position to take advantage of opportunities you would not be able to otherwise. I got my SRE position easily because the company was in a really tough spot and needed the expertise then and there, and I had gotten to know someone working there who fought for me. I got a promotion off the back of an unexpected departure because the company needed someone now, and I had developed relationship with upper management by offering to volunteer to do internal consulting and knowledge sharing for other product groups. I had realized that the reason I did not get a significant raise or promotion at my second job was because a lot of my work was not visible, just tinkering in the database layer and automating the boring parts of my job, and I wasn’t going to make that same mistake again. I learned to speak clearly with confidence by pacing around my room at home and practicing presentations, doing mock conversations, even practicing joke delivery. It might sound odd, but none of this comes naturally to me, so I had to learn somehow. This had the knock-on effect of giving me some real confidence, when I realized that people were actually listening to me. I pushed to make as much of my work visible to upper management as possible, and where that wasn’t possible, I started going out of my way to do stuff that was more public; teaching, mentoring, organizing internal knowledge-sharing communities, etc. Helping other people is genuinely one of the best things you can do for yourself. You never know when an opportunity will come your way. If you care about advancing your career, you should be prepared to seize it. Network, practice your soft skills, and deliver as much visible value as you can. EDIT: upvoting all the r/humblebrag comments since they make me giggle. This sub helped me out a few years ago when I was bored and frustrated at my last job. I’m just paying it forward.