I’m having a bit of existential career crisis right now, but this has bothered me off and on throughout my career. I feel like it’s not something I can ask people who know me because they won’t want to offend me, but obviously strangers can’t give me feedback because they don’t know me. But maybe you guys can offer tips on how to probe the people I know for hints.
I honestly want to know if I’m a “Milton” so that I can change it. I’m referring to Milton, the character from the movie Office Space. The mumbly guy who was always getting shuffled around, laid off without being told, and nobody liked him so everybody treated him like dirt. I don’t mumble and I am fairly assertive so I’m not like him in that respect. But I suspect that there’s something about my personality that makes people dislike working with me. I can’t figure out what it is because I’m nice and professional to everyone. I don’t wrap my ego around my work and get defensive when given criticism. I have better than average organizational skills and my current boss calls me “old faithful” because I’m the only one on the team who reliably sent her status reports as requested. I always get better than average performance reviews.
And yet… in my 20+ years as a software developer/engineer I was never once promoted. Not even a rank promotion, like dev level 1 to dev level 2 for example. I’ve stepped up through title ranks by changing jobs. Now that I’m 54 (people don’t know my actual age, but they know I’m sort of up there, in the senior career area) I think I’m starting to get suspicion about why I’m not in management.
I feel like I’ve always been passed over for choice projects, but don’t know why. When I was younger, I was usually passed over because Bob had the new skill they wanted for the project and I didn’t. That’s sort of fair enough. But lately I DO have experience with new tools, and they know it, but the new work is being given to someone with more seniority than me but is clueless about the new technology. So I’m stagnating in terms of skillset, which when combined with my age makes it really hard to find another job.
There is one lady on my current team, a development lead, with an odd personality. In any meeting, if someone makes a statement, three seconds later she will ask that very question that the statement answered. It’s like she doesn’t listen. She’s so reliable at this quirk that you can almost play bingo with it, several times per meeting. I wonder if I have some kind of personality quirk like that, that bothers people. How do I find out?
The thing about Milton was he was a doormat, and everyone walked all over him without even a second thought. Everything you’ve written, save for the non-mumbly talk, describes Milton.
DCnDC, just to clarify, you’re saying that what I wrote sounds like a doormat person? Ok, how can I change that? I do try to assert myself, as I said. But I get pushback/have no political clout. I think I end up getting a reputation as a negative person because I complain.
Note, though, that I never complain just to bitch. I always offer solutions. Sometimes the solutions are accepted/acted upon. Sometimes not.
I was once told I didn’t have the personality for management. It was never explained to me. Given how I witnessed how other managers behaved, I could understand that.
I later realized that part of it was because I never made waves and I was very competent at doing grunt work. I was “Employee Of The Month” several times. And yes, I was “Old Faithful” to a fault.
Management didn’t want to promote me because they knew they’d never find somebody else like me to do the work I was doing. My lack of ego had a lot to do with that.
It sounds like you actively avoid “The Office Politics Game.” Do you have a friend at work, or is everyone just a coworker? People treat people they like better. People take people they like more seriously. It’s not fair, but it’s just how it is. Having others speak well about you goes a long way in how people further out see you.
Just to clarify what my goal is, I don’t necessarily want to go into management. I just want interesting and gratifying work to do.
The issue of whether I have an abrasive personality likely impacts what projects I’m given and what teams I’m put on. I don’t think I am abrasive because everyone seems to like me and I’m complimented on my work a lot. But I wonder how much is people just being polite. It’s possible I’m a touch insecure socially. I do hear coworkers talking behind each other’s backs and wonder what they’re saying behind my back. I don’t really care, except for the appearance that I’m being passed over for the better assignments.
A large part of my insecurity on this is that I started job hunting again and realized that my current skills are rock bottom. I don’t have experience with any BA/BI tools because I haven’t been assigned projects to work with them. Same for SQL. I’ve touched them all on occasion, but not enough to claim any expertise with them. And that’s not impressive with potential employers.
Have you let your boss know that you want a management track? Some managers of tech people work on the assumption that “techies” don’t want to be managers. Letting your boss know your desired career path and asking how to get there will go a long way in making it happen. You have to take the lead in managing you career.
Just to show how ridiculous my situation is (to explain my insecurity), I am seeing a pattern in my career. When I was a developer, I got sidelined into supporting legacy systems. When I asked to change teams, I was told “we need you here on this team”. That made me less marketable, and got into a vicious cycle of each change of employer I got put onto the legacy systems.
Now that I’m a business analyst, I see something similar happening. In the current gig, I was hired as a BA and after a year they reorganized and I ended up on a particular team. This particular team requires deep experience in the niche business domain. The funny part is that I don’t have that experience but at the same time I can’t seem to get off the team because “we need you here”. I’m not doing well on the team because of my experience gap, but the team is so dysfunctional that it doesn’t really matter. So here I am, stagnating some more.
Take with two grains of salt, I’m a stranger offering a stranger advice
I have some staff who are absolute salt-of-the-earth-everything-is-on-time folks and I’m not in hurry to promote them exactly because they are absolutely reliable, the workhorses of the team I don’t want to lose. Could this be your situation?
I’m with the previous poster – have you expressed an explicit desire to move up? If you haven’t, give it a try.
I did express a desire to move OFF the dysfunctional team. It didn’t work at the time, although there seems to be some confusing activity to slowly migrate me off. Confusing because I’ve been told that I still report officially to the manager of the dysfunctional team, but have a dotted line report to a manager of another team. Also I’ve been getting 99% of my work from the other manager even though my dysfunctional team manager insists that this is only temporary and I’m not being taken away from her. (I don’t believe her.)
I do think it’s possible that I’m the salt-of-the-earth worker that you describe. But if it leads to me being passed over for good projects, learning and career growth, I don’t appreciate it.
IMHO the best idea is to bring this up with your supervisor. Let him/her know that unless there’s some issue you’d like to move up, and if there is some issue you’d like to know what it is so that you can work on it. If there’s something they want you to work on, make sure it’s measurable and that you can get feedback on your progress.
If you’re in fact a capable worker and you hint that this might make you look for another job, then this would get the best results. (A lot better than asking random posters on a MB, certainly.)
If you’ve never gotten promoted even once in 20+ years of software development, then yes, that’s something highly unusual. In my time working in software, you run into cases like it once in a while. People who aren’t actively bad enough to be fired off projects but having some kind of glaring flaw that makes nobody else want to go to bat for that person and push them up the career ladder. Software tends to attract a lot of odd ducks so the reasons why are myriad and a lot of them don’t speak badly on them as a person, just how they fare in corporate America. Sometimes, it’s because they’re just kind of passive and too timid to assert themselves, sometimes because they are missing some core social skill, sometimes because they’re incredibly naive. But a common factor is that they also don’t take constructive criticism well enough that trying to help that person ends up being more drama than anyone is willing to take.
My best advice to you is to find someone at your workplace you trust, take them out for drinks and ask them to lay it out for you straight. In cases like this, pretty much everyone around you knows what the problem is, they just don’t want to say it to your face. The key is you need to make them confident enough that you’re a) not immediately going to start arguing and being in denial or b) bite their face off and form some weird vendetta against them for being the messenger.
This is a bit misleading, because the OP has in fact moved somewhat up the ladder via job changes. So it’s not like she’s still at the same entry level position after 20 years. How big of a disconnect there is between her experience/skills and current position is unclear, but it’s like what you think when you say “never gotten promoted even once in 20+ years”.
I disagree with this, especially since - again - it’s not as glaring of an issue as you presented it. IME, in cases like this, many people don’t know but will gladly speculate if you ask them.
The only people who would know are her supervisors or anyone else in the annual review/promotion meetings. I’ve participated in these meetings for many years now, and I can assure you there are many people who are unjustifiably held back simply because there are other people around who are more compelling cases (my company limits the number of available promotions, and people who are “flight risks” or are someone’s protégé etc. will get priority).
From the manager’s perspective, they would have zero motivation to promote ‘old faithful,’ especially to a position where less grunt work would get done.
I don’t know if this applies in the corporate world, but I know that a lot of my professional success has been a result of just sort of taking things over because they needed doing, not waiting to be asked, or even asking if I should. Right now, a major part of my job and the reason I make a lot more money/have a lot more status than my career path suggested I would is that I just sort of took over college access counseling because no one would do it. After a while I told my boss I was going to call myself the “college access chair” and she was like “ok”.
I guess what I am saying is that trying to follow the exact same ladder as other people doesn’t work because they are already on it. The key for me was not to do the job others are already doing, but to figure out the thing people don’t even know needs doing and become the expert there. We have this little girl working here who keeps wailing about the lack of formal leadership roles and how she will never get one, but she never takes on informal leadership roles: she has no projects. She never innovates. That’s fine, but she’s also never going anywhere as long as she thinks it’s about waiting until someone else tells her she’s allowed to be a leader.
But I don’t know if that translates to your work at all.
Manda Jo, I think that applies partially to the corporate world and partially not. Particularly in IT jobs. Early in my career I absolutely took on tasks that nobody was doing. I’m great at writing, so I would be the only one documenting our programs, writing both user manuals and programmer manuals. Until I noticed that nobody ever read them and management never seemed to appreciate that work that I had done. I realized at that point that you have to be careful to take on only tasks that are valued by management. Identifying what those are can be tricky.
I have a meeting with the other manager this afternoon to do sort of an informal performance review/where do I fit on this team/where can I go in the future discussion. I will include some of the feedback I’ve gotten here.
Indeed, and one of those ways that you didn’t mention was to get assigned to supporting a legacy system. There’s no career ladder there. I ended up finally breaking out of that by transitioning from software to business analysis.
As a counter point to some of what’s been offered, in today’s business environment many, many people have to switch jobs in order to get a promotion. It’s not necessarily unusual that you have to do so. You are also a woman, I believe, which makes it difficult to get promoted in a tech environment.
I agree it doesn’t hurt to tell your boss that you’d like more interesting projects. It won’t hurt to tell him which ones, if you know, and to be prepared with a plan for how you can start adding more interesting projects while maintaining some level of support for projects where they view you as essential.
You also mention that you may be viewed as a complainer. You are correct that you need to make sure that you bring solutions and present things in that way. Problem --> solution. Don’t ever vent in a meeting or public setting about issues. If you must do it, do it only with a few trusted colleagues. Never do it with management present. The issues may be real, but management doesn’t like people with a (perceived) negative focus.
It is a good idea to ask people about what any issues might be that are holding you back. Just be prepared to hear some things that you may not like. You should realize that not all of it may be fair, or even accurate. Commit yourself to not defend yourself during that meeting. You should just listen and absorb. Later you can sort through what you’ve heard and try to honestly assess what might be accurate and what is not.
I think you also have to be prepared to sell the value of what you do. And it may be “tricky”, but it’s still essential. Otherwise, you end up exactly how you have–the trusted workhorse but not someone who has really impressed anyone in any way.
One more thing about complaining: it doesn’t matter if you offer solutions if you are complaining all the damn time. It’s tiring. I work with people that love to complain about every damn thing and are all the time offering solutions. However, 9/10 their solution is impractical because they have this very narrow frame of reference so they don’t see that it will cause more problems than it will solve, and there is no point in explaining that back to them because they will just argue with you about things they don’t understand. It’s frustrating, because it implies the complainer thinks “they” are too dumb to think of something obvious, when in fact it’s the complainer who is trying to fix a complex problem with a simple-but-inadequate bandaid.
