The Power of 'No'
How saying "no" helped me get the job I really wanted and changed my whole career.
I’m sitting across from the CIO in a large conference room. It’s after 6 PM and the office we’re in is winding down. I’ve been interviewing here for 3 weeks. I like them and think they like me, and it’s time to discuss the job offer.
Me: “I think the company is awesome, but I don’t want the job and you don’t need another manager. “
I slide an 8x11” piece of paper across the table.
“I think this is what you need….and I think I can help”.
The room goes quiet as he picks up the paper and reads it. The situation is polarized at this point - I will either walk out of here with a new job, one that I made up from whole cloth the night before or we’ll part ways.
How did we get here?
I’ve always identified as an Engineer, and like most engineers, I’ve railed against management. I studied Computer Science because I wanted to make video games and work on computers. The idea of managing people never entered into it.
Despite this after about 5 years out of school I found myself managing a team in the technology group of a large bank that you have definitely heard of. They provide city bikes in New York City and you can ride them to their big green “field” in Queens. I did this for 7 years and they were very good to me. In my time there I got promoted and my team grew to over 100 people. But as an engineer, I felt my tech chops slipping away.
The Side Gig(s)
To maintain my chops I did a lot of programming stuff on the side. I wrote a few tech articles for MSDN Magazine and that turned into writing a programming book for Wiley publishers based on a little eCommerce company called Amazon and their emerging web services platform (ISBN 0470097779). I knew I couldn’t get as technical as I wanted in the bank so I went looking for a new gig.
Amazon was an amazing place but I didn’t want to move to Seattle so that was off the table. A friend (DV) was working at a company in Newark that was an Amazon subsidiary. He invited me to their happy hour and I met a few other folks there (TO’D and DR). They were welcoming, kind, and super smart. They were working on interesting stuff. So I interviewed there for a random manager position, after all that’s what I’d been doing at the bank right?
Interviewing for the Job I didn’t want
There were two full rounds of interviews, maybe ~16 sessions altogether, including tech-screens and coding exercises. I remember I messed up the recursion problem at the whiteboard and there was one other problem I screwed up but I went home and just emailed them a working solution in Javascript that night. That still bugs me to this day.
By the time they were done, I was fairly convinced the company didn’t know what to do with me. I was too technical to be a manager but I had too much management experience to be an IC (individual contributor). Or maybe they just didn’t like me?
Every Problem is an Opportunity in Disguise - John Adams
After about 3 weeks I had spoken to every part of engineering and some of the business leaders and had been noting things down that I felt the company needed. This list was holding the business back in a significant way. These weren’t particularly great insights so I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t solved them.
E.g. Customers used separate credentials from their Amazon account, even though the company had been an Amazon subsidiary for 4 years. They had a home-grown DRM system that protected their content but that meant very few devices could actually play the stuff. Content had to be delivered dynamically instead of using a CDN. They didn’t stream anything and the list went on and on.
What are you willing to compromise on and what is really important for you?
I asked about these issues in the interviews; “why aren’t you streaming your content?” It was no one’s fault. The tech team was focused on the short term and the business didn’t understand where Amazon/industry was going or what engineering could offer. No one was thinking strategically about the engineering roadmap and what was possible technically. It was a vicious cycle.
Good news for me though! These were things I either knew how to do or I could figure out with the added bonus that delivering this stuff could be really fun.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
No one knows what you want better than you (even when you don't know what you want). I wanted something radically different from what I’d been doing at the bank. I felt like the biggest value I could provide in this situation was to solve these problems and I knew I didn’t want the job I’d interviewed for.
Looking at my list I realized it described a different kind of role. This stuff needed an individual contributor along the lines of a Principal Engineer to envision, design and engineer the solutions. They didn’t have any people like this and they weren’t hiring for one so my path was clear - I would stay at my job in the bank. Just kidding!!! I would write up a new job description, pitch it to the CIO, and see what happened.
Tough Questions
If you want to feel great about your job you need to ask some tough questions.
Figure out what you really want. Or don’t want. What are your “non negotiables”? What are you willing to compromise on? I was willing to give up leading a big team and title because I wanted to be closer to the tech. What are you willing to compromise on and what is really important for you?
“Know thyself”. Think deeply about what it is you’re good at. I’m not a great manager. I’m not that great an engineer either but I’ve had good success by connecting the dots. And dealing with Ambiguity. I can muddle through pretty much any situation and that’s something I’ve realized through running ultra marathons. You gotta keep moving forward. What are YOU good at? What’s your super power?
Find a Problem and Solve it. Look around. “Be Useful” as Arnold Schwarzenegger says. Don’t wait to be handed a problem - ask questions. Dive Deep. Look across disciplines. Connect the Dots. Your job is not to just solve problems. That’s table stakes. Identifying the Problem itself AND the Solution and then figuring out how to deliver it. This is where the real value is created.
This last one is important. It’s not realistic for a CIO to present me the perfect list of problems that match my skillset and then appoint me as the person to solve them. They’ve got a million other things to do. Instead I presented a neat package of value to them wrapped up as a job description. All they had to do was approve it. Let’s head back to see how it ended…
Back to the Boardroom.
After a long silence, the CIO put the paper down, looked up, and said
“This is great, we need all of this”.
We shook hands and he recast the role based on the one page I’d drafted. I joined a few weeks after that and spent almost the next 8 years working on these problems and many more.
That was the beginning of a transition back to being an individual contributor. I was back coding again and it felt great. As an IC I could learn the Amazon internal developer systems and tools. I built relationships across Audible and Amazon. I lived the developer process. It gave me a unique insight that other leaders didn’t have. It made it easy to identify and prioritize areas that were slowing teams down because I was experiencing them firsthand!
A simple example: Early into the gig I split up our monolithic Java codebase into modules. This was thankless work but it cut build times down massively. All the while I was getting to know people and slowly building trust, credibility, consensus and support for major step-function changes in our business which we would eventually deliver.
After a few years, I ended up back as a manager but with a completely different set of tech-chops, and the experience I’d gained as an IC paid off in spades.
Career Paths are never Straight Lines.
What has YOUR path been? How did you arrive where you’re at? Do you know what you want? I definitely didn’t and probably still don’t. I got incredibly lucky. What I want is something I have only a few fuzzy notions on but I have very strong feelings on what I don’t want.
Avoid Lock In.
It’s so easy to get stuck into a trajectory - you’re either an IC or a Manager and you stay within the guardrails or risk losing a step. You take what’s offered or stay where you are. But you can be an active participant in your own career.
We each create our jobs every day. You don’t have to stay where you’re planted. Keep an open mind and look for the biggest problem. Don’t be afraid to deviate or blaze a new trail. When you look back you’ll see you were on the right path the whole time.