Episode 421: Hitting the level cap and getting credit for behind-the-scenes work

Aug 12, 2024

The hosts dive into the intriguing dynamics between managers and top engineers, revealing secrets behind their career conversations. They explore how highly skilled contributors communicate their value and navigate workplace challenges. The significance of peer reviews focused on strengths comes to light, along with discussions on enhancing recognition for teams' efforts. With humor, they address the ongoing relevance of command-line tools in engineering productivity, ensuring that the technical aspects remain engaging.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ADVICE

Focus On Team Growth

For max-level engineers, career conversations focus on elevating the whole team's impact rather than personal skill growth.
They discuss tooling, processes, and architecture that boost multiple teams and move the business forward.

ADVICE

Showcase Team Value Clearly

Managers must actively articulate and demonstrate their team's value to the business frequently in understandable terms.
Use presentations and metrics (like alert reductions) to reveal behind-the-scenes greatness and impact.

ADVICE

Embrace Skepticism To Defend Team

Managers should scrutinize their team's purpose honestly to defend resources effectively and welcome skeptical views.
Becoming your own skeptic or finding a debate partner strengthens your case for your team's necessity.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

I’ve been wondering what kind of career conversations happen between managers and the “max-level” engineers on the team. We’ve all been on a team with those really good staff/principal engineers who are super nice, have great people skills, and seem to have an answer for every technical problem. When I’m asked to peer review some of these people, I basically have nothing to say because they seem perfect. Yet even as individual contributors, they have the same manager and still have the same 1 on 1s with them. What exactly do they talk about? How are their career conversations held? I’m always curious what exactly the landscape looks like for these engineers and what exactly is “next” for them since they seem to have reached the level cap.
Hello peeps, I’m an engineering leader in a midsized company. I oversee a couple of teams and things in general have been going well. However:

One of the teams tackles an extremely complex problem space and is usually up to the task, delivering things that almost seem like magic if you take a closer look. Now, due to the nature of this team’s work the value is not perceived as such by upper management, being questioned (almost pestered) if this is the right thing to do and even doubting if the resources should be allocated to it at all. The way that I see it is, that since this team has been quietly delivering greatness (delivering quality, meeting deadlines, not breaking things), there are not perceived as hero’s (like other teams would when then put out their, sometimes, auto inflicted fires).

What can the team do to rise awareness about the criticality and impact of their work? This is important so that the team can have resources and doesn’t get pulled away from their current work. Also, is this a good time to quit my job while we are waiting for the AI bubble to burst?

(Disclaimer, I’ve found an approach and am currently enacting it, but wanted to hear your thoughts on the matter)

Optional: Shoutouts to S, a long time listener and early Patreon of the show.