I was listening to recent Brent Simmons episode in Gruber’s Talk Show today. Brent is the author of NetNewsWire and recently retired from Audible.
He shared a great insight around working at a large company:
Gruber:
So what else from your five years at Audible stands out to you as…Brent:
Well, one of the first things I realised that I’d never seen before in working in small places or on my own was that everybody wants a promotion. Like, that just never occurred to me. Like, oh my God, it’s all driven by promotions, right? So people lead projects, whether it’s engineers or PMs or whatever, it goes on eventually on their promotion documents. And that’s kind of like the incentive for everybody, right? Get to a new level and you get more influence, you get more money, whatever. Like, it’s promotion driven. And I talked to a lot of people and done some research. It’s not Audible or Amazon. I mean, that’s just corporate software development.That’s how it works. People want those promotions.
So understanding that has given me a lot of understanding about our industry. Sometimes when you see a lot of churn in places, the question I ask myself now is, oh, who’s getting a promotion? Who’s working to get a promotion on whatever it is, right? I’m like, okay, yeah, that’s how it works.
And that’s not necessarily bad because it leads people to come up with good things and to work well with others and all that stuff, right? The stuff you have to do to get a promotion is generally be good at your job and be good at your job with people. And that’s fine.
It’s not all bad. It’s just not every project needs to actually happen. Like anything, too much of everything in moderation and too much of a, hey, politics and being good at the internal politics is the only way to get ahead here leads to corrodes the culture.
I noticed this myself during my time at Expedia (not a knock on the company itself, but just the reality of working within a massive organisation). I often didn’t care about getting ahead on levels; I just chased the most interesting projects. It got me really far for a long time.
At some point, though, I felt the support structure break down. Part of being good at pushing projects forward is that you get shuffled around the org, which means changing managers a lot.
Once, a manager in our first 1:1 said, “You shouldn’t be reporting to me.” I mean, I didn’t make the decision, so… wtf?
Over time, I just felt like I needed to be more recognised and wanted more money. Getting a promotion became such a central thought. I talked about it with peers and my manager regularly. It felt unnatural.
After I was finally promoted to Principal Engineer, it was just business as usual. Not much changed, despite the congratulations from peers.
These roles are largely made up. It mostly comes down to whether you are happy with what you do and feel motivated. When there is alignment with the organisation, the project, and your boss, things are flying. When there isn’t, we tend to hold on to these cosmetic things put in front of us for motivation. Does any of it really matter? I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot lately. We need to get back to building and creating joy.
Checkout Brent’s App Philosophy page — just awesome.
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