Part of a Team

You’re not alone in questioning the sanity of it all. Since COVID-19, I’ve found more and more engineering peers, including myself, struggling to find a sense of contentment with big corporate grind. Political games, ladder climbing, financial justification, and unnecessary meetings have all been amplified by remote work and lack of team support and partnership. I’m a builder, a social creature, and an engineering lead. I love writing software, teaching tricks of the trade, automating build and deploy steps, crafting build jobs, automating Quality Engineering, and building out glue to remove tedious process steps and human error. I am happiest when I am building. I spiral into job dissatisfaction when I have no direction and little impact. The worst is being invited to meetings where it becomes evident you’re present to justify your existence, perhaps even competing internally against cheaper labor pitched by predatory vendors.

Here are the things I feel are needed to find some semblance of peace in a corporate environment:

• Find internal engineers trying to do the right thing and do the hard work. Partner with them. Share the engineering stories and talk about the challenges. Support them and ask them for their help.
• Avoid the talkers. There are talkers and there are doers. The doers make noise, rattle cages, and get the job done. Be a friend to the doers. Shake it up. Move fast and break things, right?
• Keep track of your successes, no matter how small. I may go a month without producing much, sitting in meetings scratching for the next deliverable I can lead or partner on. During times where the work output is minimized to a crawl, review the contributions you’ve made. I can always find peace in looking at a laundry list of accomplishments, even if the individual items are small.
• Stay self aware on your continued growth and let it be part of your satisfaction. Engineering blogs, podcasts, whitepapers, etc. However you stay up-to-date and relevant, note your growth and track it as a contribution. You knowing the new tools and and technologies make you a better engineer and a stronger contributor.
• Take comfort that technology has been moving fast, will continue to move fast, and nobody knows it all. From security, to networking, to development, to devops, to the various languages, architectures, platforms, and cloud providers, there is simply no way to know it all and certainly no way to keep up. You could be a lead in one role, move on to another role for another team, and find yourself frustratingly behind. We’ve all been there.
• Stay aware of your economic impact to the overall business. Delivering a shiny new piece of functionality which isn’t beneficial to your employer and isn’t ready for open source may get you the axe when cuts come. From having the “Great Resignation” in 2022 to the active recession in 2023, your ability to find value for your employer may be the key to staying employed. Just business, right?
• Stay humble. I’ve run into too many engineers that are absolute tyrants. They don’t play well with others. Call it “soft skills” but I commonly see arrogance. Don’t be that engineer. Be a partner, a teacher, a participant, and when the time calls for it, be a leader. Don’t be the arrogant one nobody wants to work with.
• Find time for exercise. Your health isn’t your employer’s priority, but it should be yours. From the great Socrates, “It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.”

To my fellow builders, movers, and shakers: there are a lot of us out here, grinding out improvements, automation, new technology, and helping peers. I hope you are well, satisfied, happy, and in good health. Cheers to the engineers.