The Scariness of Getting What You Want

I was sitting on my mother's couch after Christmas, crossword puzzle in hand, when my stomach suddenly dropped. The puzzle hadn’t suddenly frightened me, nor had anything happened around me. Rather, my mind had jumped forward to the end of my vacation and returning to work. I liked my job. I had successfully changed it to better align with my interests and abilities over the previous year. What scared me was thinking about the stakes of those changes: I had spent a lot of political capital crafting that role for myself and I needed to deliver the expected results.

This post explores the expectations and anxiety of getting an opportunity you want and then trying to deliver on its promise. We never know how things will turn out or what challenges will arise. The most we can do is put ourselves in good situations with good chances for success, do our best, and then accept whatever comes — good or bad.

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Desire for Change

In the summer of 2020, I left my role as a manager and shifted to a staff engineering role. I spent the next two years working with a new manager to rebuild the team, with him as its lead. We grew the team from two of us to 10, and all 10 of us continuously supported and learned from each other. I was proud of what we had built together, but with that done, I felt unsatisfied. I was not achieving the goals I had laid out for myself when I stepped away from being a manager:

 

Now I’m working to keep the parts of my role that did bring me energy, and remove the parts that did not. I absolutely love the impact I've had on how we test performance. I love all the things that we built, including our structure and processes. I love having insight into so many parts of the engineering organization and helping drive the big picture on performance testing. I love helping junior colleagues learn and grow, sharing learnings with them (so long as I don't also have to evaluate them).

Specifically, I wasn’t happy with my progress on having insight into so many parts of the engineering organization and helping drive the big picture on performance testing. So in late 2022, I set out to change my role once again.

Advocating for Change

I worked to define a new role that would make me happier. The role should have the insight and big picture impact I was missing. It should include reporting to the right level of management so I could have the reach, influence, and support to do the things I wanted. And it should include many of the things I knew filled me with energy, such as writing and sharing my learnings (blogs, papers, talks), reading and learning (research papers, blogs), and interacting with passionate people. Around this time I wrote a blog post on defining your own job. At the end of it I said:

I know what I want to do: I want to advance the state of the art of performance testing and software engineering at MongoDB, ideally through collecting, curating, and demonstrating the best ideas from the performance community and academia.

I started to pitch a role based on those things. A role in which I could interact with multiple teams, leverage the best the research community could provide us, and turn that into something real with big impact. I wrote a proposal capturing the role and talked to people about it – a lot of people.

There wasn't much appetite in my organization for a research-focused role. Everyone loved the results I had delivered using academic research, but we suffered from smaller, pressing problems that we needed to solve at that moment. Before we could invest in the larger and more interesting things, we needed to do the simpler things to solve problems today.

An Updated Proposal

I took the feedback, learned from it, and reflected. The perfect job should fit my needs and the company's needs. These conversations made the company’s needs clearer to me. I updated my role proposal to better align with both sets of needs: making our performance testing infrastructure stronger in the near term, while enabling greater things in the future. The proposal now focused on straightforward engineering work instead of research, and leaned more heavily into planning and coordination. It met my need for broad impact and the company's need for immediate results. The role would eventually enable the more advanced work I wanted to do.

I didn’t share the proposal at this point; instead, I started on the work it described. I teamed up with my product manager to write and submit a formal project proposal based on my role proposal. The project proposal laid out work for several teams for the next two years. 

Living the Change

The project was approved, with me as its technical lead. With that, I shared my updated role proposal with key people. It now described a role I was already doing.

I found a sponsor. With their help I changed teams and started reporting higher in the org chart. I was in a better place to achieve my goals for myself and for my company! Success!

Scariness

This is when things got scary. I had invested a lot of time, effort, and political capital to build this role for myself. If I didn’t succeed in the role, it would all be for naught.

I could see what I needed to do to succeed. However, there were many things I could not control. If this new role didn’t work out, I couldn’t go back to my old role – I didn’t want to, and most likely it wouldn’t be available to me if I did. No other role would be a better fit for me within the company. And, having spent most of my political capital, I couldn’t expect much help changing roles again. Essentially, my only options were to succeed or to leave. I was operating without a safety net.

Lowering the Stakes

While the differences between success and failure were stark, I didn’t want to live in fear. I worked to reframe how I looked at the situation. We never know the future with certainty, so every choice we make is a gamble. I asked myself questions about this bet: Is this a good bet? Would I make this bet again knowing what I know now? Can I live with the consequences if I lose this bet?    

As I sat on my mother's couch with my crossword puzzle, I answered these questions: Yes it is a good bet. Yes, I would make this bet again. Yes, I can live with the consequences of losing this bet.

I began to relax. The fear did not completely go away, but I could put it in perspective. Since then, I have worked hard to remember this perspective whenever that kind of fear comes back.

Similarly, I encourage you to choose your best opportunities. Whenever the future seems scary, reflect on whether you have given yourself your best chance for success and if you can accept the consequences if these chances do not pan out. If the answers are no, go make changes. If the answers are yes (I hope they are), try to keep that perspective and let go of your fear.

Thank you to Heather Beasley Doyle for her feedback on this post. I am a better writer and this is a better post due to her efforts. Heather is a gifted writer. You should check out her homepage and her writing. 

Making Sense of Disruption

I waved goodbye to the smiling faces arrayed before me on my monitor and prepared to join my next call. It was late Wednesday morning, and these were my last two calls before starting a four-day weekend. I looked forward to finishing up some tasks, cleaning up loose ends, and heading out on my annual backpacking trip. The call had been a going-away for my friend Amy. Her last day would be Friday, but this call had been scheduled for Wednesday so I could attend. My next call was my regular one-on-one with my manager, also moved up because of my time off. Things had been strained between us, so I wasn't exactly looking forward to it, but I was looking forward to getting it over with and heading out on my vacation.

I clicked the link and the video call opened. Instead of one, there were two people on this call: my manager and someone I did not know. That could not be good. Was I being put on a performance improvement plan? My boss quickly introduced the second person — she was from HR — and then continued. "David, you are not meeting my performance expectations for a staff engineer. Further, I do not see a path for you to meet those expectations. Therefore we are letting you go, effective today.”

He told me our colleague from HR would walk me through the process.

“Do you have any questions for me?" he asked.

I did have questions. I had questions for him, for her, and later, I had many questions for myself.

That Wednesday was over a year ago. Many things changed for me in that moment, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about it since then. This post introduces a series of posts about my thinking, learning, and life over the past year. The first post is out now, with the remainder to follow.

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Before continuing, I would like to briefly address “You are not meeting my performance expectations.” It’s true, I wasn’t meeting his expectations. It’s also true that I was good at my job. All my formal reviews had been good to great in my 10 years in that job. I usually received glowing reviews and was promoted twice. After being let go, I received many touching notes from colleagues who were shocked and upset that I had been let go. Many of the notes directly contradicted my manager’s story.

While it is scary to say publicly that I was fired, I think it is important to the story I want to tell. I also think sharing it may help others in similar tough times.

That said, this series is not about my dismissal per se, but rather my reaction to it and my continual attempts to make sense of it so I could move on and make the most of my life, experiencing and creating as much goodness (joy, wonder, love, satisfaction, …) as possible. This story starts well before my firing, and continues well afterwards. I have tried to intentionally live my life, regularly reflecting on what makes me happy and fills me with energy, and what does the reverse. Those reflections led me to both become a manager (lead engineer), and then eventually step away from that job. After transitioning from management to a staff engineer role, I continually tried to define my own job to be the best it could for myself and my company. Those efforts set the scene for this series.

• This series starts with me getting the role I had long worked to develop and sell. Starting that role was scary, as I then needed to deliver in that high stakes role. In this first post, I talk about framing that pressure and the nervousness of having to deliver in that new position.
• The series continues after my dismissal as I tried to give myself the space I needed to adjust. It turns out that too much free space can be terrifying, at least for me.
• Losing my job was a large shock to my sense of identity, and I have been actively reshaping my sense of self. Several posts in the series cover my thinking and shaping of my identity:
• Early in my time off, I started to grapple with the question of “Who am I?” I had let too much of my identity be tied up in my job. Losing my job disrupted how I thought of myself.
• After spending a lot of time grappling with who I am, I realized I didn’t know who I was. At least I didn’t know how to tell the story of my personal journey over the past 10 years, including losing my job.
• After continued reflection, I returned to who I wanted to be, as a unified human being. I didn’t want a professional identity and a personal identity. I wanted one unified identity, with my professional life being one expression of that identity. I expect this will be a continuing process for the rest of my life. I feel really good about my current framing of my identity.
• Finally, the period of reflection covered by this series ends with me starting my next job and moving on to the next chapter of my life.

These posts, including the reflection, drafts, editing, and discussion that went into them, are part of the larger process I’ve been going through as I’ve made sense of this part of my life — and my life going forward. Writing them has been a healing, growing, and positive part of my past year. I share it all with you in the hope that it might help you or otherwise resonate with you. If any of it does help or resonate, I would love to hear from you about it.

Thank you to Heather Beasley Doyle for her feedback on this post and her support through this entire period of my life. Heather is a gifted writer. You should check out her homepage and her writing.