A year ago, in a promotion meeting, a senior technical leader warned us about promoting someone too soon. And he and I rarely agreed on anything, and I always learned something from our discussion.
His comment is that to be a successful technologist you need to have an area under the curve not just cross the threshold. And that time and experience were how you accumulated that area under the graph.
At NetApp, in my 20’s, I was determined to become a technical director as fast as possible. And I crossed the threshold, and they promoted me, and then it took me one more decade to learn the actual job. I was 33 years old, and I was the second youngest technical director.
And I had to have a lot of failures, and experiences before I actually could do the job properly. And I had to learn a lot from people.
For example, one thing I had to learn and then re-learn, is that in a new market all of your instincts are wrong. And I also had to learn that in all markets some things are always true, there are no shortcuts.
What I realized is that the sentences and verbs never change, but the nouns and adjectives do.
A lot of the job of strategic software architecture is not about technology but pattern matching.
And the job is to understand the details so you can map the right sentence. And that was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
For example, when I went to Zynga, I sat in meetings, and people were using words that I had never heard before used in ways that made no sense. In my first meeting with the executive team, they said: “We need new IP”. And I was flabbergasted – why would a game company need a new internet protocol? Except they meant “Intellectual property” which meant “new game franchise” which meant “new product” and that the real discussion was about how do we launch a new line of business?
The sentence, in this case, was “How do we launch a new line of business,” the noun was “new IP.” And once you realize that a game company spends all of its time launching new games, it makes you rethink what the purpose of software is.
The solution, again from experience, was that before I could do the job they hired me for, I had to learn about the technology. And so I spent several months taking notes on words and asking questions, and within a few months, I had begun to match patterns.
When I went to Juniper, after Zynga, I took the same process. First, learn the nouns, and adjectives, then do the pattern matching and then start figuring out what needs to be done.
Being able to do that job, the pattern matching, you need the ability and the experience, and so getting promoted fast is great, but it takes time to be able to do the job.
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