Race to the Bottom

I consider myself privileged in my professional career. I may not have won the Turing Award (yet) but I’m happy with where my career is and where it’s headed. I also try to keep at the back of my mind that I can always steer it in another direction when I want, although not without significant effort.

There are a couple of values that are deeply personal to me and how I think about my career. One such value is that I don’t want to compete over number of hours or excessive face time. The reasoning behind this is simple - I view competing on hours as, for the lack of a better phrase, a race to the bottom - it’s very much like how I view businesses competing solely on pricing and reduction in price rather than value-price differentiation. Additionally, the most satisfaction I’ve gotten from work has come from projects where the stakeholders assess performance primarily based on output rather than based on face time or hours. This is not to say that I don’t see the value of, or participate in, crunch times where extra hours unavoidably need to happen. I just don’t view the ability to endure long hours all year round as the kind of competitive advantage I wish to have.

So far, I’ve stuck to that value. Choosing instead to differentiate through quality of output and always aiming to be the “he’s the guy that can reliably get XYZ complex project done” guy. It’s worked quite well. At every manager I’ve worked for, I’ve been staffed primarily on what you may consider mission-critical projects. In many cases, I’ve had managers take me off low stakes projects just so I can focus solely on the high stakes ones. When I’m staffed on these projects, there’s usually some sort of unwritten agreement that I’ll deliver the project in as minimal time as possible, with as much quality as possible.

The staffing doesn’t always come easy. In some cases, the managers do so of their own volition. However, there are other cases where there’s an interesting project, and I’m not originally on the staffing plan, and I’ve had to sell myself to the manager and convince them that I’m the person they need for the project :). When I do this, I land myself in a conundrum where I have to prove that staffing me was a great decision, and in doing so, I’m more likely to subject myself to the hours and face time that I won’t typically need if I didn’t go out of my way to ask to be staffed on the project.

One day, maybe Dario Amodei will successfully automate the entirety of my current role away and I’d need to switch careers. But regardless of what direction I steer into, I want to always compete on quality and reliability and hope to optimise my career around the teams that afford me the privilege to keep doing so.