Tech it From Me: A Tale of 2 Job Offers
What to do when you have competing offers and one is in-house
Welcome back to my monthly column: Tech it from me. Here, I answer questions you have about career and creativity in tech.
For advice, email techitfromximena@gmail.com with your question, name, location, and if you prefer to remain anonymous. Questions will be lightly edited for clarity.
This week: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Photo by Justin Luebke on Unsplash
After recently hitting the 15 year experience point in my career in tech, I have been trying to be more thoughtful and careful about what future roles I take on. I am currently working at a top tech company with a lot of caché, but I don't really enjoy the work or see how I will grow. I took on a role that was less in line with my skills and interests in order to work at a pre-IPO company and boost my resumé. I work very long hours and am good at my job but don’t find it satisfying. In addition, it’s an IC role, and I worry that I should be a manager by now. However, I know I am valued where I am and have been told they will work with me to keep me. My current team is hoping to offer me a role that is more suited to my skills and interests soon.
I recently received an offer at another well-known tech company where the nature of the work sounds so much more interesting, but I worry about going to another IC role where I am not managing a team. They see this growing into a manager role and it’s a new investment area of the business that is also expected to grow over time. I am not sure if these are the types of opportunities I should be considering right now for future growth.
Should I only look at roles where I am running teams or focus more on the work? Should I stay put at a pre-IPO company where I am valued even if I don't like the work? I’ve been in my current role about a year and I’m also worried about how it will look if I leave now.
Signed,
Should I stay or should I go?
Dear Should I Stay or Should I Go,
In order to determine whether you should stay or go, let’s first figure out what you’re optimizing for.
First, it sounds like in your last job transition, you optimized for The Brand. You took a role that wasn’t quite right, but felt worth it to have a well-respected pre-IPO employer on your resumé. Now, you’re bored and overworked (maybe even burnt out?), and looking for other opportunities. Tricky combination.
Is it worth staying at a job you don’t like for the shiny name on your resumé or better to switch gears? I think the answer depends on what you are optimizing for this time around. Here are a few things you could be optimizing for in your next job change, and my advice for how to think of them:
The brand
Will having a certain employer’s name on your resumé help your career? Maybe! A strong brand communicates credibility, positive perception, and signals your work is impressive, your training solid, and your understanding of how successful teams operate known from experience. This kind of signal can go a long way in getting in front of the right hiring managers and impressing your fellow peers (and future hiring managers), especially early in your career, when most folks have few connections and little experience in the industry. However, I personally think this matters less later in your career — with 15 years of experience you’ve already established yourself as an industry expert, and likely have a robust enough network that you can call in a favor to pass your resume along or get a warm intro to a hiring manager if needed. While having a unicorn brand on your resume definitely can’t hurt, by now I doubt it will make or break your reputation.
It should also be said that banking your career on brand alone comes with its own risks, since brand perceptions change over time. For example, remember all the techies whose resumés sang because they were early Facebook employees? 10 years ago, that went a long way. Now, Facebook is a corporation with 50k employees and a PR problem; while still tremendously popular as a platform, its brand has significantly degraded, and the shine on one’s resumé from working there, too. I wouldn’t hang your hat too much on company brands, which may change and evolve in ways that no longer benefit you — and which don’t speak to your actual talents.
The domain
Is it a marketplace? Ads? Drones? Content ecosystems? For some, the domain in which they work has no bearing on their happiness on the job. For others, it’s everything. This is very personal, and depends on what keeps you motivated on the job. Me, I get very bored if I’m not passionate about the domain I’m working in, and a bored Ximena is not a high-performing Ximena. That means I either need to (a) work in a space I’m genuinely excited by, (b) work in a complex, technical space that I might not be passionate about, but where I can learn a lot to keep me engaged, or (c) find a company with enough internal mobility that I can change teams if I do get bored. Are you intellectually curious about the space you’ll be working in? If not, will that be a problem for you?
The environment
Imagine you are a plant. You need light, water, and sunlight, along with a little TLC, in order to survive. You mention that in your current environment, the path to growth seems unlikely. What ingredients are missing in order to help you grow? If you change roles, will you realistically be able to get what you need to grow in this environment? Are you a desert plant stuck in the rainforest, a thriving ivy taking over everything in its path, or a flower on the verge of blooming? Be honest with yourself on this one, and whether you’re set up for a sad and withering outcome, mere survival, or, ideally, something closer to thriving. You want an environment that is conducive to your growth — meaning the right mentors, culture, and opportunities in place to support you. Your current company is asking long hours and menial work from you — two strikes against them. How about your co-workers? The culture of the company overall? If it’s a place where work is cranked out with little gratitude or opportunity for advancement, I don’t see how a change in role will help you thrive.
Consider, too, if your time in this environment is being spent cultivating skills and qualities you seek, or if, on the other hand, you may be cultivating bad habits you’ll want to break in the future. Is your current environment one in which you are refining qualities and skills you admire or deplore? For instance, if you work in a combative environment, you may have learned how to adapt your voice by shouting— or speaking up less. Are these good skills to hone or skills that work in your current environment, but are not skills you wish to continue to foster beyond that? Remember that certain environments bring out certain qualities in us, and others stifle them. What qualities are (for better or for worse) being nourished where you are? What might the new environment bring out in you?
Work-life balance
Will you get your life back at this new job or if you change roles internally at your existing company? Do you have hobbies outside of work you’d like to foster, friends and family you’d like to see, sleep you’d like to get? Work-life balance is particularly elusive in the tech world given we are “always-on” — answering Slack messages and emails at all hours of the day, and especially now that we are all working from home. The lines between work and play (remember that?) have quickly blurred, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Some companies have recognized that the pandemic productivity they once sought is now turning into employee burnout, and have adapted accordingly. Introducing: Fridays off, an extra company holiday here or there, limited hours during which an employee is expected to be online, etc. Other companies seem to be ignoring the warning signals and instead using the threat of economic uncertainty and “you should feel lucky to have a job” finger-wagging to pressure employees to work even harder. My sense from your letter is that you’ve been working hard for the last year in a job you don’t love; finding a company that recognizes its employees have lives outside the office might be important for rebooting your motivation and regaining something like balance.
The experience
This is the meat of the thing. The actual work. What you’ll be able to accomplish. The skills you’ll learn and deepen. And so on. To me, this is the most important piece of the puzzle. You don’t say much about about what each role will bring, but I suggest spending some time hammering those details out if you haven’t already — especially for that internal switch you are considering. Is the proposed role an established one, or one carved out especially for you and in need of definition? Who will your stakeholders be? What will your day-to-day look like? How will the role change in the next 6-12 months? What are some of the unsexy but necessary parts of the job? What will your impact look like? And because resumé writing is on your mind, what is the one-liner and handful of bullet points that you’ll be able to point to after a year in this new role—and are you excited by and proud of that? Compare this list with what you’ve learned about your prospective new role at this other company. Focus on understanding what the work will look like and how it may evolve over time (including into things like management), and whether that will stretch you and satisfy you.
Reader, you should go
All right, when you look at these factors, what do you see? At this stage in your career, I recommend optimizing for the environment and the experience — which likely means you should go. Why?
There is so much uncertainty in your current company. Your team wants to retain you (yay!) and offer you a role that could be a better fit for your expertise, but we don’t really know if that’s possible. (It’s not real until there’s a formal resourcing conversation, job offer, and title change in Workday.) I hesitate to advise you to turn down a job offer we know is real for one that is only a maybe.
Besides not knowing if they actually can offer you the new role, there is also the question of when they would be able to do so. I have a hard time seeing you change roles before the New Year, since now is the time for 2021 resource planning — meaning you’d be stuck in your existing role, where we know you aren’t happy, until at least January, in the best case scenario, possibly longer depending on your company’s planning cycle. Can you wait that long?
I am worried about your exhaustion, and I think we need to find an environment that is more nourishing to you. Even if the new role in your current company came through, it’s worth reflecting on whether or not you’d be really, truly up for taking that on. Will you feel recovered enough from your current role to take on this new role with gusto? Or will you have soured on the company already? Sometimes we are in a bad environment and think a new role will make us happy. And sometimes, it can. But other times, even when we have a role we like, if the environment isn’t conducive to our growth, it will be just as hard, if not more so, to grow. You’ll have the added guilt of feeling like you should be happy now, even if you aren’t, because you got the role you were hoping for.
You have a strong job offer in hand with clear potential for impact. When I hear words like “growing investment in the company” I think: future resources. When I hear “part of a new team” I think: opportunity to shape things from the ground up. When I hear:“likely the role will evolve into management” I think: they like to promote from within, and, if you do a good job, you’ll be in plum position to step into that management role you are seeking. Now, of course, you’ll want to check this company’s B.S. meter by getting specifics on what future investments and growth look like for this new team. For instance: Is it dependent on hitting certain goals, or have those goals already been hit, and now it’s a matter of figuring out how to best scale the team? Or, is there a history of promoting ICs to managers from within the company, or does past experience suggest that hiring tenured managers from outside the office is more common? (In which case, I call B.S. on their promise to you.) And what does job mobility internally look like if this area of the business folds? (Just in case!) To me, the opportunity sounds promising, but of course, you must do your due diligence and peek behind the curtains to see if it is as good as it sounds. Still, a fresh start could be good for you.
Go where your talents and skills are valued, and where your opportunity for impact is greatest. With the uncertainty of whether or not this internal role change will come through and the burnout-inducing environment it comes with, staying does not seem to be your best option. Assuming the offer at a different company is as good as it sounds, take the new role, make a big impact, and don’t worry about having one year on your resumé with a well-respected company. Better to leave early than to slog through it and have little to show for your time there years later.
What else should our letter writer consider? What factors have you used to evaluate your job prospects?