“There comes a point where you have to do more than just develop and implement features.”

“You can be a people manager or you can be an expert in one area or the other, the choice is yours.”

(from https://taetaetae.github.io/2019/07/07/review-first-half-2019/)

These are thoughts I’ve had for quite some time, since I started working. As a developer, your primary job is to “write code that works as intended”. But at some point, you need to be able to do more than that, you need to be able to do plus alpha.

The first time I had this thought was when I was just starting out as a developer. The code I encountered at work was at a completely different level than what I was used to as an amateur. My self-esteem, which I had prided myself on writing some code in college, was shaking like a leaf. At that point, I thought about the company’s expectations and my current level several times a day. I flogged myself with thoughts like, am I really worth the salary I’m getting, how many mistakes are acceptable for a new employee, shouldn’t I be able to shed the rookie tag in six months and be able to pull my own weight, etc. And at the end of the day, I always asked myself. “Did I do a day’s worth of work today? If I hired me, would I pay me this much money today?”

By the time I made my first job change, I was even more deeply troubled. What role am I supposed to play here, what expectations does the CTO have of me, and where am I meeting them? These thoughts were sometimes nourishing and sometimes draining to my self-esteem. All the while, I was constantly thinking about the expectations I had to fulfill and my value.

If you asked me to break down the kinds of people an organization needs, I’d say there are two main types. People who make decisions about where we need to go, and people who actually pedal to get there. The former usually has the status of “chief,” while the latter might be more of a practitioner. And most of them start from the bottom and work their way up the rungs of the ladder to deputy, manager, director, and so on, taking on the authority and responsibility to make increasingly important decisions. I wonder if the weight of authority and responsibility is the weight of increasingly higher salaries.

Most people can do the work of a single person when they’re new. Add a couple of years of experience to that, and you’re pretty much a veteran. However, this efficiency from a practical perspective does not continue to increase linearly. Depending on the nature of the job, the slope of the increase in practical skills will gradually decrease with each year of experience. This doesn’t mean that companies freeze salaries for employees after a certain number of years. By offering higher salaries and higher titles each year, the company expects an individual to have a positive alpha that goes beyond simply being efficient at their job. What this means will vary from company to company, job to job, and organization to organization. It can even be different for different individuals within the same organization. Each must sharpen their weapons and prove their reason for being within the company.

There is a certain anxiety that if I don’t continue to find and hone this weapon, the normalcy of our lives will one day be lost like the sand between our fingers. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that the cost of maintaining my daily routine was not small or insignificant. However, thanks to the many workplace experiences, this kind of daily struggle doesn’t seem so strange anymore.

The weapon I’m sharpening for now is the technical domain. Simply being able to write clean code that reads well and does what it’s supposed to do should be a given at this level of experience. On top of that, having knowledge and experience in a specific technical domain is probably the best weapon to have at this point in my career. I found that domain to be cloud and monitoring, which is how I ended up at my current company.

I’m constantly thinking about what my next weapon could be. One way to think about it is to look for things I don’t have that I need, but I also realize that the answer might be more about building on my strengths rather than filling in my weaknesses. I hope to have my own answer to this question in the next year or so.