You Don't Have to Live at Work to Become a Director of Engineering | Ep 227

You see, starting out as a junior engineer, the blueprint is simple.

Get a great job, get some opportunities, go learn new skills, start climbing the ladder.

And at the beginning, the rewards are for expanding your capabilities, those skills, so that you can take on more difficult assignments, move up to more difficult projects, be delegated a bigger scope, have more responsibility, a bit more leash, and all of that makes sense.

And it's really fun to expand, and you're willing to work hard.

You're young, you just got out of college, and you got nothing else to lose.

So you go and pour it into your career.

I remember those days fondly.

It was fun.

But eventually, you get to a level in your career where...

You're pretty busy.

You got a lot on the calendar.

You have a scope that's already difficult to juggle.

And one more project or one more meeting or one more thing just feels really hard to handle.

And going to the whiteboard, let's look at an org chart.

You might relate to an experience like this.

Here you are with a team already reporting to you.

You've got one-on-ones, you've got career development conversations, you've got project updates.

You know, you've got a big group of peers, especially with the flattening of organizations that's happening across the country, around the world.

It's amazing what I've seen.

Just got off a call recently with a leader who has 26 direct reports.

If he spent one hour a week with each of them, that's more than half of his week.

He can't afford even to do that.

So you're busy.

And then you think about the level of your boss.

And you're like, man, I really want that promotion.