Optimizing your career: A minimization or maximization problem?

Reframing the productivity advice you usually hear

We use computers to save us time. Applying the same approach to our careers is not usually the best idea.

There are many approaches to career growth. Most people look into the shortcut that saves them the effort of doing hard skills. There are hundreds of “Learn x framework in 5 minutes” YouTube videos. They help on exploring topics, but you are not learning something to make an impact in your career. If you are reading this, you are out of that group. (Really, reading in the 21st century? You are already ahead in life).

There’s also the hardcore productivity tribe, looking into minimizing the time of each action. I’m one of them, I have so many shortcuts in my keyboard that I can’t type in a coworker’s keyboard without messing up.

When it comes to my career, my approach is not about finding the shortcut to skip a necessary step. Neither it’s about minimizing the time I have to spend until the next promotion. Instead, I think of my career as money.

In investment, this is known as the compound effect. It’s about time in the market, not about timing the market. For our careers, we can maximize the time we are doing critical growth activities by starting early. This is the concept of career capital and deliberate practice from Cal Newport’s book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You“: Do the crucial actions for growth (deliberate practice), consistently, starting early. Over time your career capital will compound.

If we focus on minimizing the time for promotion, we’ll be disappointed when external situations cause a delay. Over the span of an entire life, I believe luck gets balanced. But if you zoom in a period of a few months, it will be completely unbalanced.

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I was very lucky early in my career. I applied to Amazon and passed my interviews in the last month before they stopped hiring new grads during the summer. If I hadn’t applied then, I estimate 3 months of delay in joining. But a more realistic scenario is that I would have looked for any other job, probably worse, and I wouldn’t have applied again in years.

I was also lucky in timing for my first promotion: I had the chance to get a project in next-level scope in Q4 2022, just before the annual performance review cycle. Delivering this project gave me visibility for a few other reasons. After that, there was a re-org in Q1 2023, I had to ramp up into projects from another team and I didn’t take the next big project until Q2 2023. If I hadn’t taken that first project, I could expect a 6-9 months delay in my promo.

While we don’t control these timing situations, we do control our actions: Joining engineering programs, acquiring more responsibilities inside our team, interviewing, or becoming the “go-to” person in some system or feature.

The earliest you start your crucial growth activities, whatever this means for your level, the more career capital you’ll generate. Just taking these actions the month before you talk to your manager about preparing your next promotion package is not enough. You need time to make an impact and reap the results.

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.” - Albert Einstein

🥉 If you look for the shortcut, you are looking for immediate gratification instead of long-term career gains. Some smart people call it hyperbolic discounting. I call it “snacking instead of eating your veggies”.

🥈 If you look into minimizing the time for promotion you are putting your attention into something external. You’ll be disappointed when there’s a setback and you have no control over it. The smart people call it internal and external locus of control. I prefer to say that “I like stoicism”.

🥇 When focusing on maximizing the growth actions you can take to build your skills, every second adds to your career capital. You are building an army of highly-skilled neurons ready to fight for your career.

As a parting thought: We talk about the career ladder because there’s no elevator taking you from the basement to the 10th floor.