Recently I’ve had a few request by recruiters to connect and talk about opportunities. So I figured this would be a good place to document my thoughts and save myself from a bit of spam mail. I’d like to clarify I’m not really looking for a new role. I like the people I work with and the opportunities I have. The leadership I’m under trusts me and have my back on decisions I make.
But like most people I can’t just choose not to work and I if one that better fits my career goals and has the right opportunities I might consider leaving my current position. So what are those things for me?
Lead / Decision Maker
As a developer / technical person it really pains me to see money being wasted on programs that add little to no value.
In a previous position I watched a big name come in an absolutely mess up a product that was pretty much done and just needed a branded skin. But a VP level saw the demo and brought it back to square one. The product only ended up adding 1 feature I can recall from the process, not even a major feature very minor part. This reset ended up wasting 6-8 months and in that time we could have worked on just the skin / styling and gotten the product out and gotten the best feedback possible for real users!
My desire is to be in the early decision making processes to avoid wasting time, money, and to improve system adoption by making sure people use what companies already built or paid for.
Business Partners
I want to work with teammates, not silos. The thing that drives me crazy is silos and people operating outside their role in major projects (minor decisions that have little to no impact don’t bother me).
Teammates know who is strong in certain topics. I’m a developer, If you ask me to design something I can do it but it’s not my strength. If the company has a designer I’m going to talk with them and make the best version of their vision with the resources I have available. I would expect the same from the people I work with. If a coworker is thinking about how a system works together I would want them to talk to me about it, not to tie us to a third party that does what one of our systems already is capable of.
I want to avoid silos because they drive me nuts. I hate when people don’t have a clue what other people are working on. It leads to ineffective work or people doing double work after realizing that what they did originally won’t work.
In a previous position I was in our Marketing department and transferred over to IT. Because I had spent years with my feet in both worlds I had connection inside the company in both departments but neither could really name people in other departments. What I did was start a little group that would meet to play games over lunch with people from both departments. People started to get along and would chat outside of the group so people within these two departments started to understand who did what. This saved time on projects since people could directly talk with people who did specific things.
People Leader
One of the things I do really miss in my current job is being a people leader. I actually do miss looking at applicates resumes / portfolio sites to find people who are absolute gems. I miss guiding people and working with my team to create opportunities for growth.
When I hired people in the past I didn’t expect them to stay forever. I told them upfront that I wanted a certain amount of time with them and to tell me what their goals were so I could find projects to help them advance. One person I gave an entire site translation for a new market, one owned a client relationship management platform’s front end code, one I worked with to create a hybrid role that empowered them to work on native apps.
I also loved the old Google mentality to make paid time to work on their own ideas. Not everything out of these projects related directly to the company but the morale boost out of it was well worth the time. At one point we were having weekly meetings with the CTO /CIO about the passion projects people were working on. I loved that it got people who wouldn’t typically have a chance to have those meetings easily get to talk about their code and helped people feel comfortable speaking to high level leaders.