There are many reasons to change jobs. Some are better than others. But the best is when your peers or your boss don’t engage you for your best work.
Let me start with a story. In 2009, I was a technical director at NetApp. At many other companies, this role is analogous to a senior technical leader with a pay grade that is equivalent to that of a director-level manager.
At the time, NetApp was engaged in a multiyear effort to converge the operating system of the company they had acquired Spinnaker and their platform OnTAP. After the first unsuccessful attempt with the product known as OnTAP GX, the technical and business leadership of the company rallied around a strategy that eventually became what is now known as OnTAP 8.0.
This effort required vast amounts of synchronization. At one point, I was the architect for the data protection portion of the business. The overall architect for the effort sent me an email with a detailed task breakdown of what the data protection team needed to accomplish over the next two years. As I looked at the list I had some concerns with some of the details and the overall general direction, and so I flippantly responded with a “this is so detailed that I’m not sure what value I’m going to add. Why don’t you just send it directly to the management team in the product managers.” And so the author of the email took my response and forwarded the email with his comment, “you’re right.”
After that, it took very little for me to want to leave NetApp.
Over the years I have wondered why this particular exchange was so critical in my leaving NetApp. NetApp was at the time treating me well. I would’ve made more money at NetApp than I did at Zynga. I had a five-week vacation at NetApp. I was well respected by the then CTO and chief science officer. My boss at the time and I had some differences of opinion, but those differences of opinion were resolvable. And the problem space remained interesting.
So why did I leave?
I left because at the end of the day that other architect did not want to engage with my best self. He was not interested in working with me to come up with the right answer. He just wanted me to do exactly as I was told and to take accountability for his decisions.
In short, what I heard him say is, “I don’t need you to think. I need you to do exactly as you’re told and to make sure that the things I need done are done.”
Over the years, I have seen this pattern play out again and again. Sometimes with me on receiving that message or the author of such a message. What I have concluded is that if you’re engaging someone to solve a critical business problem and you talk to them in a way that demonstrates you do not see value in their abilities, then you’re asking them to leave.
But there is another insidious problem that also can occur. If you’re trying to engage with another team where you happen to know a lot about how that team’s systems are built, it is tempting to bypass the current architect and just tell them to do this and this. The problem is that what you’re doing is not engaging the team to be able to solve your problems. And what this kind of communication does is discourage precisely the people you need. The people who want to have a scope to think and to imagine possible solutions. They decide to not want to work on your problems.
If the problem is small in scope, then this is not necessarily a bad thing. If the problem is significant in scope, this is a calamitous decision. You’ve traded off the delivery of a small set of critical capabilities at the expense of a deeper understanding of a hard, complex problem. You have reduced a team that could potentially add value by understanding the problem and thinking about it hard and long for a team that will do exactly as they’re told and no more.
“But that wasn’t the goal,” I have said on more than one occasion.
No, it wasn’t. But that is precisely what I have achieved in the past. Because the people who could think realized that there was room for them to think, only to do. So instead of looking at a problem and trying to solve it, they saw a list of activities that could be done by someone who couldn’t think as deeply as they could. At the end of the day knowledge workers have a tremendous amount of freedom to choose what problems they work on. They also have a tremendous amount of freedom to decide how long and how hard they want to work on an issue. The single most calamitous decision you can make as an architect is to engage with another architect by treating them as less than an equal.
Over the years, I have made this mistake. To those that I treated poorly, my loss is massive but nothing as compared to how poorly I treated you. All I can say is that life is about getting better and learning more new things. And maybe this goes a little distance as an apology.
Leave a Reply