Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 147: How to grow in a flat organization and how to get references when job hunting in stealth mode?

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work in a flat organization. There aren’t really any titles, and very few managers. There is no common “climbing the ladder” here. What are options for career growth that will help me feel confident that I am progressing in my career? How do references work? I’m starting to look for a new job which means potential employers are going to be asking me for references. I’m not ready to let my boss know I’m thinking of leaving and aside from my current coworkers I don’t know who would attest to my ability as an engineer. I work for a small company (under 50) in an even smaller firmware department (about half a dozen). What am I to do?

It takes more than automatic code formatting skills to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering, episode 147. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for soft developers. The winter season is coming to an end. I am a soft developer right now. Yeah, exactly.

I know exactly what you're talking about. okay what is this show for it is for software developers about non-technical topics automatic code formatting feels like a win for the world but i do wonder if kids that grow up in the future will have lost an essential part of their character that only comes from arguing about race placement what are the second order effects here of them not having this hardship that builds their character don't be so hasty to solve all problems yeah we have some wonderful patrons that we want to thank thank you to chris hogan the agile ventures charity matthew wodewicks zach grannon david jackson sean clayton nick cantar and sonic the

hedgehog thank you so much to those folks who are supporting us at the level where we shout them out every episode and thank you to uh everyone else who has supported or even will support in the future if you would like to contribute financially to the show you can do it on patreon you can go to our website softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and we will spend the money wisely it's tax season so we'll use some of it to pay for taxes that's right but the rest of it goes to server costs and editing and design and stickers and all the all the other costs associated with the show thank you very much all right i'm excited about something friday no it is friday but that's not what i'm excited about what we're going to start a new segment on the show where listeners

can highlight their managers who do something great we're calling it great managers you know we talked about what to name it and it's hilariously straightforward i love it we were like yeah that's right we're just kind of creativity juices are really flowing yeah so so how how would folks do this what do they do so if if you if your manager has done something great and you'd like to highlight them uh either anonymously or by name you can send us send us a story you know my manager is great because dot dot dot fill in the blank go ahead to our website the same place where you ask questions click on the ask a question button softskills.audio and just fill it in there you can leave as much detail as you like and you can

keep yourself anonymous if you like and we will read it on the air so anyway this is just our way of trying to highlight what a great manager does yeah i really like the idea because there's a lot of negative examples out there in real life or from stories you hear with other people and i think it's good to have some positivity thrown in there if your story is about yourself then we will read it but we will make fun of you a lot on the show actually we probably won't read it we'll make fun of you privately so make it about other people please should we get into our questions yeah let's do it i'll read the first one if you give your permission i give my wholehearted permission all right with your blessing this comes from the listener a listener named nick who says

i work in a flat organization there aren't really any titles and very few managers there is no common quote climbing the ladder here what are options for career growth that will help me feel confident that I am progressing in my career? That's a good question. For some context, Nick stated that he works at a pretty small startup. Well, he didn't say pretty small. He works at an early stage startup.

Okay. So that could be part of why it's flat. It might just be a small org that hasn't needed hierarchy yet. But that is a valid question. If there's not hierarchy in career paths and career ladders, how do you advance your career?

Yeah. At an early stage startup, the way you advance your career is by having a front row seat to a total flame out think about the experience slightly tongue-in-cheek you do get a lot of experience in a lot of ways that you wouldn't get at a larger company with a more defined ladder and part of that is great it's there might be no one else who knows the thing right and so you just get to figure stuff out that you might be radically unqualified for but you're the only one yeah

exactly but there's there's no one else that's actually you shouldn't discount that because that's really good. I think at other companies that are more established and have specialized people who do things, you might get passed up for some of the stuff. So now you're going to become the database expert. You're going to become the operations expert, the alarming expert. You know, you're going to define the paging system. You're going to, you know, there's so much you're going to do and grow. And it might not be quote career growth necessarily, but it will be growth. Maybe a little harder to quantify. Yeah. It turns out all you need to do to become the operations expert is read the docs for like 10 minutes and then

you've now become the person that knows the most i'm the head of ops yeah that's a fun situation situation to be in oh yeah another option is to just oh go ahead no no you go ahead you can just change your title on linkedin i've worked with folks that did that where we were a flat org and then i looked at someone's title said senior software developer huh okay i guess i am too then the good and the bad of flat orgs is they're not truly flat there's some hierarchy it's just implicit and the implicitness means that it's easier in some ways and harder in some ways to exert technical influence and to grow. If you are good at doing stuff, I feel like in a lot of

startups I've worked at, things are decided by whoever does it and whoever puts the most effort or implements things the fastest or cares the most. So if you can push hard in that way, then you just de facto decide things. Not by bowling over people or being rude or anything. It's more like if you're the person that cares really strongly and you say, we should do it this way, You're, you're kind of like, you're not as much asking permission as saying like, does anyone object? And then you go do the thing if nobody objects. And that's an opportunity to exercise a lot of, a lot of judgment and that, that can grow your career. I also feel like, so that's kind of grow by doing, you just do stuff and you do broader things as time goes on by just keep on doing. You can also wait for it to expand. In my experience, startups that are flat become, if they're successful, larger companies that are not flat.

And at some point, hierarchy inserts itself if the company grows and it's successful. Yeah. And generally, if you've expressed a desire to grow your career, to be in some kind of leadership role, and if you're in a de facto leadership role when it's flat, that can sometimes get recognized when the organization puts hierarchies in place. You just described my last job. Was it? yeah that's exactly what happened to me that happened to me at my flat startup too when they

became not flat flat startup i don't know why that made me think of flat stanley but that could also not happen too like you could just watch the hierarchy get put in around you and you not participate in it yeah exactly so i you know i really like how you said this is a good opportunity for you to practice exerting influence on an engineering organization when there isn't a formal structure in place because those skills i think are immensely valuable even if you are in a position that formally recognizes your leadership role because it turns out like even with the title to get people to do things requires these subtle influential skills beyond just like the badge that says well i'm the senior you know or i'm the principal architect chief yeah that's an interesting

point especially if you don't want to just explicitly tell people what to do all the time if that's your style then having the badge can support that but it won't work very well yeah that's a really good point i also really like what you said about waiting for the company to expand and and then adopt a non-flat structure so it sounds like that's happened to you and it's definitely happened to me in my last company when i started i was one of only three engineers who are local here and we were in a garage like it literally had a garage door with a conference room table or sorry like a folding table um and then you know over time the company got more and more successful we ended up hiring over 50 engineers who um and we moved into a bigger

building and then before you know it the opportunity came there where we needed a formal manager and so i volunteered it worked out great you know and in in the interim it was like wait you didn't have a formal manager until there were 50 engineers we had let me think well we okay I skipped a few steps we did have two okay we did have two people who were in management roles one of them left and I volunteered to step in and fill the hole um okay and then that's how anyway that's what happened there but in the interim I had also been serving in a technical leadership capacity and and so there were all these opportunities to grow that happened just because basically you know the rising tide and I happen to be there and it's kind of a cool

opportunity yeah and that's in some ways that can be easier than climbing the ladder in an established org that isn't experiencing rapid growth like that because the they probably have a lot of policies and reviews around it and there's probably yeah just more ceremony and less like we hired 15 new people and we need someone to help control this chaos like you yeah yeah you didn't look away so true i mean i feel like with all these things where where i tell stories about how things worked out in my life i want to insert a disclaimer about how my experience is not everyone's experience and and there's there could be some implicit bias that affects people differently but i i do think there are lots of opportunities for growth at startups sometimes

that growth could come at your next position if you stay and and hierarchy never gets put in place or it gets put in place and you you don't climb that ladder there's still that's where paying that's where the focus on technical influence and and just focusing on getting stuff done that startups let you do yeah that's where that can pay off you can say like i i wasn't made a an engineering manager or whatever but i built this giant system and ran it or i yeah i architected our i don't know our resilience infrastructure or whatever it is exactly like i think what you're doing here is you're building your portfolio not so much with titles but with experiences that you can draw on later and you can always make the titles whatever you want like like i've learned

i will say this though if if you're the kind of person who wants discrete quantifiable title transitions that help you understand your career mobility or your career progress a startup is probably not the right place for you because really the startup is just going to be especially an early stage startup it's like it's all about survival it's all about building a market it's it's all about hyper growth people's careers take a back seat to all of that stuff and the what i've heard from multiple startup founders is look after we're hugely successful your career will take care of itself but while we're getting on that success path we don't have time for anything except building this business and so that means you have to be willing to throw

your whole self into that and career development and titles and promotions and you know moving up the ladder and all that stuff it almost always sound like explicit mentorship and and yes i think i get what you're saying yes mentorship also tends to take a back seat in these environments yeah there's there's technical mentorship around getting stuff done faster but yeah i see what you mean all right have we solved the problem have we answered the question yeah i mean i guess i guess the answer is build your portfolio embrace the opportunity to do cool interesting work that another company with more formal ladder you might not get to do and then watch for expansion opportunities and make sure your manager knows that if you have a manager yeah sorry you mean

your CEO. Make sure the decision makers know that you're interested in growth and exactly what that growth looks like, whether it's like leadership, whether it's just more responsibility. Make sure they know that so that as the tide rises, you know, the company expands and grows, that you're in the forefront of their thoughts. Yeah, I like it. All right. Good luck, Nick. I will read the next question. This is from an anonymous listener. How do references work? I'm starting to look for a new job which means potential employers are going to be asking me for references i'm not ready to let my boss know i'm thinking of leaving and aside from my current co-workers i don't know who would attest to my ability as an engineer i work for a small company of under 50 people

in an even smaller firmware department of about half a dozen what am i going to do oh no i mean what am i to do what am i going to do sounds more despairing than yeah the actual question what am i gonna do what am i gonna do what am i to do that's very formal that sounds much more collected and under control you have a bootstrap problem yeah yeah so this is you say the only co-workers or the only people you can have that could serve as references are your current co-workers or boss so this is an aside have you had your references checked you know it's interesting you would ask yes in some cases i have but in other cases i've shared references and they never got a call i don't think i shared any references in my last

job search and i can't remember them ever getting checked if they did i don't think the references told me i think i've been checked before when i've been someone's reference but it's been a pretty small fraction of the percentage of time i've been references where you have imagine those words make sense and then that's what i said so someone put you down i've been a reference a lot more often than i have been checked okay okay i think that's true for me too i've maybe only gotten a couple calls in in my life for reference so yeah if you're feeling lucky just put your boss and then there's a name for that what is it reference roulette that would also make sure that you um there's a book called rim world where one of the plot

points is that one of the main characters is lucky in an absolute like attribute sense they're they are lucky and stuff happens to them controlled by their luck and so there's this huge process of selecting someone who is lucky that they they do a bunch of random events to try and winnow out people that aren't lucky so you could be applying that to yourself of like time to see if i'm i'm lucky or not or like i only want to get a new job if i'm lucky so like you could you could push that pretty far by putting your worst references down like yeah this guy hates me let's put him on the yeah yeah and if you don't get the job you just say something about how it wasn't meant to be because your luck was against it right and there's something better yeah until finally someone

doesn't check your references until someone's lack of diligence helps you get a job oh the story of employment yeah i think you're right that there is kind of a bootstrap problem where usually you give references of people that won't be mad if they find out you're leaving right like like your previous job and the james and i were joking about this before where it's like you always have like this off by one error when you get references from someone because they won't give you references of their current co-workers so they go to their previous job which is like years ago they were a different person they didn't have half the experience they have now and so you have these old references if you have a trusted co-worker that you're okay

sharing the news that you might be looking for a new job with i've i've seen that work before too where they're not gonna blow up your scene not gonna tell anybody yeah it's good to have someone like that anyways uh that you can you can talk to about work without uh having to present a good narrative all the time but that might be a way around it if one of your co-workers if you feel like they can be trusted with knowing you might leave and if they can't be then you strike them from your references if you tell them they go tell your boss you do not include them you're like never again i wonder if this is a regional thing i don't know where the question asker is from or what industry they're in but i feel like i don't i don't feel like it's an absolute hard and fast

requirement to include references at every job application yeah maybe if you're newer in your career it helps too because your your experience doesn't uh speak for itself quite as much you could this is something you could bring up with your recruiter too where you could say look i don't have references right now i'm newer in my career and the people that i work with i'm not comfortable sharing that i'm leaving so can we make this work without that and just see what your recruiter will be like oh yeah sock puppets yeah i've got some of those let me just uh get all these fake linkedin profiles connected with you reference bots yep oh there has to be someone making money off of that oh yeah that's a startup idea for sure yeah

you know one time at my second job out of college i had actually been at my first job a short period time. And my second job, I had been there about five years. So a good, good long time. And I was looking around for a new job and I did get a request for a reference, meaning that I was applying for a job and they asked me for a reference. And so I shared, I asked one of my coworkers who I trusted and shared their name. And then after I asked that coworker, not long after that coworker came to me and said, Hey, could you be a reference for me? Cause I'm also applying so you never know that's just the incentives you want for references exactly mutually assured destruction it's like when romans would exchange hostages back in the day

to sign peace treaties it's perfect yeah yeah i'll be your reference i'll tell them all about all of the good stuff you did and none of the bad stuff you did yeah i mean it's not super helpful to say uh solve this problem at your next job after the one you're looking for a reference yeah but i mean what else could they do besides trying to find a trusted co-worker that would be my go-to in this situation where i didn't have references from previous jobs you know maybe maybe you went to school with someone who could act as a reference a classmate your brother-in-law on linkedin who's in sales who endorses you for html solid reference oh man yeah maybe just refer them to your linkedin endorsements and say really do i need another reference look how many people say

i'm good at wordpress farm them out to twitter how so what do you mean i mean just ask on twitter if anyone wants to be a reference i'm not looking for a new job in case my employer is reading this But this is for later when I don't work here anymore, which will happen a long time from now. Yeah, I mean, this is like a five-year plan. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that I have any good advice besides look for someone you trust at your current employer. Well, all right. This is also where there's some advice that gets trotted out about contributing to open source.

And there's some positives and negatives associated with it. but this is one good thing about it where it's if you can make it work it's easy to not have it reflect poorly on your current employment where where if you have the time to do it outside of work or whatever then you're not going to get pushback or weird questions if you suddenly start like contributing to the linux kernel or something that that'd be a pretty positive thing and that helps you develop relationships with folks and on large enough open source projects or if you do it enough you you work with those folks just in a different capacity so that could be a source of references but that's that's a that's a pretty large investment with a longer payoff uh so you

should do it if you want to do open source and optionally you could get some references out of it yeah not like go spend your nights and weekends for the next year doing open source so that you can get a reference yeah that's risky yeah okay i'm ready for your good advice dave i was gonna to say the same thing. So I'm out. The thing is, though, recruiters are used to this situation because there are so many people who are new to the industry. They're on their first job, ready to move to their second job. And the recruiter has a strong incentive to not block that process because they often only get paid if you take the leap. And so if they can figure out a way to get you hired without necessarily collecting a reference, I think they'll

probably do it. So it's probably not that big of a deal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it feels like worst case it might limit your opportunities a little bit or there might be some jobs that you just won't get into because you don't have a reference yeah but that's what the next job is for that's right well there's a lot of other worst cases your your your reference could backstab you yeah and reveal all the illegal activity you've been doing and then you get swatted it could go pretty dark that probably won't happen though yeah well good luck with your job search hey we'll be your references oh yeah we'll tell them about the question you asked tell them you were eloquent tell them you you said what am i

to do which really impressed us yep and there was like no grammar errors yeah it was very good it was send them our way plus one would would work with again yep what should people do if they want their own questions answered or bad references okay go to our website at softskills.audio and click ask a question and don't forget we're looking for stories about great managers if your manager did something great send us a story with the same button click ask a question on softskills.audio thank you very much for listening we will catch you next week