Flying Under the Glass Ceiling

Note: Most of this post pertains to the Software Career Soldiers, the people who work in big software companies, the code factories.

The Peter Principle of management is stated as, "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence".

I have a corollary to that: Every employee is competent only upto the limits of his assignment/organization.

I also refer to this as Flying Under the Glass Ceiling.

Over the years I have seen many bright people stuck in assignments which use only a fraction of their potential. Most of them do a great job on their assignments. But I always wonder what more they would have done if only they had the opportunity to do something bigger. Would they have been successful if they were on a bigger and better assignment? Would they have achieved more for themselves and for the company? Are these people flying under a glass ceiling which limits the heights to which they can fly?

What if the guy who is so good at testing other people's solutions, was in the team which actually designs solutions? What if the extremely bright and creative guy was on a team designing user interfaces, instead of slogging on a job which monitors nightly batch billing processes? What if the guy who is always fantasizing about future technologies and spotting innovative opportunities, was actually working in the innovation department instead of the application maintenance department?

In big technology companies, in the code factories, people are randomly assigned different tasks with little or no regard to their inherent skills, competencies, interests. This is especially true at the junior levels, specifically with fresh graduates. Bright young people are picked up from colleges and randomly assigned their first projects and tasks. For many people, this first assignment sets the tone to the rest of their careers. It will define the path along which their careers and lives will go.

It is amazing that young people don't usually have a say in this crucial first step of their careers. No one looks at them and their resumes to assess what skills and interests they have to match them with suitable assignments. The assignment decisions are probably arbitrarily made by someone (in HR), who knows the candidates as little more than fresh names to fill body count requirements of projects.

In the initial year or two of the career, there may not be a big difference in the pay scales and the market values of the people who are doing different types of entry-level tasks, in different technologies. However, as more time passes, the type of experiences and technology skills that are on a person's resume make a major difference in how much s/he is paid in the company, what the person's market value is, what opportunities s/he has in the industry, etc. They have a major bearing on his/her career's quality and life experience.

So, every step, every task, every assignment, every year in the career of a person is highly important in determining the rest of his/her career and life. One can never afford to take on or dismiss anything simply because it is just the first assignment in their career or just a short assignment. As such, it is very important to take an active part in decisions and choices that affect one's career. It is also important to be aware of what is happening in one's own project, department, company and industry.

When we are young, we may not be so worldly-wise. We may not have the smarts needed to negotiate with supervisors, managers and HR people to give us the kind of assignments which help us achieve our short-term and long-term career goals. We may not even have well-thought career goals. When we are working in a big company, it is easy to get comfortable and complacent in the structure, order and process inherent in such organizations. We may even be lulled into a false sense of security thinking that the big company has so many diverse projects, so many different activities going on, and it would be easy to change over to something exciting if we get bored with what we are doing now. And perhaps, most common among tech-workers, we may get so caught up in the work we are doing right now, we may not give much thought to our long-term career objectives. Five years may pass in a flash, and we may find ourselves in a place which is far removed from what we had dreamed of or what we really wanted. Affecting a change at this stage might be tougher.

An army needs brilliant strategists and tacticians who can conceive winning battle plans. It needs smart and effective leaders to execute those battle plans and ensure a win. It needs specialists for special assignments behind enemy lines. It needs skilled people who can do reconnaisance on the enemy from the forward-most positions of the battle lines. An army also needs cooks, drivers, guards. Everyone cannot be a battle planner or field commander or a commando. The cooks, drivers, guards are also important to win the battle. This is true in all industries including the technology industry. As far as your company is concerned, as long as the battle is won, the profits are rolling in and there is no screw-up, nobody might really care if you are assigned the task of a battle planner or a commando or put on guard duty. When there is a screw-up, they could simply fire you and replace you with somebody else. So, it is imperative that you take an active interest in deciding what type of assignments you work on and what turns your career takes.

Every assignment we work on, every project we are assigned to, every company we join comes with its own glass ceiling. There are limits to how much one can achieve, how much one will be challenged and encouraged. This is not bad in itself. This is the nature of things. When we sign up for an assignment or join a company, almost nobody will tell us where exactly the glass ceiling is. So, it is upto us to carefully assess at each step where the glass ceiling is and ensure that it is high enough that we can fly as high as we wish.

When it starts to appear that you could fly higher than the glass ceiling, it is time to look for another place where the ceiling is higher. When we feel that we are not challenged enough, our competencies are not used effectively, our assignments do not require the best of us, we should do something about it. Nobody else will.

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