Earning Trust

Unattractive work, leadership, and credibility

👋 Hi, this is Ryan with this week’s newsletter. I write about software engineering and career growth. Thank you for your readership, we hit 68,000 readers this week 🙏 🎉

In a previous article, I laid out what got me promoted to Staff. One of the items aside from my main project was a larger responsibility I took on to drive infrastructure preparations for my org. In this post, I’ll share the story behind how I got that opportunity and takeaways from it.

If you find the post helpful, please share it with your friends and coworkers. Enjoy!

---

Subscriber Question: “How did you run infrastructure preparations for your entire org? Did you just ask for that responsibility? Was there not someone already coordinating that??

How were you able to build expert-level infrastructure leadership skills in 6 months?”

My director trusted me with Staff-level scope even before I was at that level. The story behind how I got that opportunity is a good example of how this can happen naturally.

My first year at Instagram, I volunteered to help out with my team’s holiday preparations process. The idea was to make sure there were no issues during Instagram’s peak holiday usage. As you can imagine, no one was eager to take holiday oncall shifts so it was easy for me to get involved.

The following year, I felt confident I could drive the process for my team. I volunteered and again, because this work was unattractive but impactful, it was mine for the taking.

When I ran it, we had the quietest year yet (in terms of SEVs). Although I drove and owned the preparations, it wasn’t all me. Many of my teammates contributed to the effort. After, I shared our process and the great results we had with my org.

At the same time, in other areas outside of my team, my org of 70+ engineers had poor reliability during the holiday season. A year later, my director was looking for someone to prevent this from happening across his org again. Guess who he reached out to? Because I had solved a similar problem and had a good track record, I was an obvious choice to ask.

I wasn’t an expert in these new areas but I had been around long enough to know who was. I created a proposal based on my experience and ran it by a few other domain experts to make sure it was sound. Once there was alignment on the high-level plan, I drove a weekly meeting with relevant people and made sure we got everything done.

The work we put in was well worth it since there were no issues again, but this time for our whole org. This was just a small part of my Staff promotion but there are some interesting takeaways from this story:

1. “Boring” work is often an opportunity - People weren’t eager to take on this infra preparations work. However, it was impactful, and where there is impact there is opportunity for career growth.

2. Visible results build trust and credibility - If you do good work and people know about it, opportunities start to come to you. You increase your luck. My director came to me because he knew about my track record.

   • Related reading: How To Promote Your Work

3. You don’t need to know everything - If you know how to build alignment and coordinate work, you can rely on others to help you fill the gaps. This is why I am a big fan of building the skills of a “tech lead" (they scale well).

   1. Related readings:

      1. The Tech Lead’s Playbook

      2. Scaling Yourself

      3. How To Influence Without Authority

      4. How To Drive Meetings

---

Announcements:

• Guest post applications - I’m looking for software engineers that are interested in writing for this newsletter. If you want to become a better writer and reach 68,000 software engineers, apply here.

• Subscriber Q&A form - If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future post, you can submit it anonymously here.

• Grow to Staff (IC6) panel footage - I uploaded footage from two talks I did with several other Staff Engineers from Netflix, Pinterest, Meta, Google. We talk transparently about what got us promoted and take questions from the audience:

  • Feb 2024 panel

  • Sept 2023 panel

As always, if you liked the content, you can find more of my stuff here:

• LinkedIn

• Twitter

• Threads

Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman