Land a Job: Define Your Role
As I wander through another period of my web development career where a job change seems appropriate, I still feel confused about what direction I should be heading. With about a decade of experience so far, I thought at some point I would settle into a type of role and be done scrapping around for any job related to bullet points on my resume.
However, I still go through sequences of replying to recruiters, searching for jobs online, stalking future coworkers via Twitter, perusing relevant LinkedIn profiles, and trying to attend local tech meetups and conferences. I wish I could just email some people in my network and have some credible leads almost instantaneously, but life doesn’t work like that…at least my life doesn’t work like that.
So, I’m back here writing it out: something that always seems to clarify my approaches and turns generating “next steps” into a worthwhile and useful endeavor. Like all blog posts, I start out with some headings and notes. For this post, my mind immediately went to “job role” when thinking about how to sort out my job searching options.
Know Your Role!
“Know your role” can be used akin to “stay in your lane” and end up leading down a not-so-great path; however, here we are shouting the phrase in a positive light in order to prevent you from mindlessly searching the internet for your next job.
Any recruiter, hiring manager, future boss…heck even your current boss will ask you what your ideal role is supposed to be. I always encourage companies I work for to imagine the perfect workforce while ignoring current employees' wishes and desires, but my managers usually talk to me like they want to align job roles to the current employees.
The problem lies when you are performing work duties that your job description doesn’t include and/or you want to perform work duties that your current job role doesn’t include. How do you align what you do with what HR thinks you do? What if you think your role should not exist in your current team?
Is Your Job Description Useful?
At my current job, I started working as a “Front-end Developer”. Initially, I was working with React and Next.js to build out a static frontend for a marketing website where the content came from a headless CMS. I started using Storybook to demo components and even put the start to a component library on NPM so I could pull it into many projects that were sure to come and be “oh so fun” to work on.
Two years later, I rarely do any front-end development. It might be hard to believe…but I don’t even know what my current job title is…it might be even harder to believe, but I was asked to submit an updated job description over a year ago, I submitted it right away, and I still have no resolution.
Over those two years, everyone on my team has quit or been fired, and I have not been promoted or given a chance to move up in the organization. Wow. Just writing these words makes me feel like a schmuck. Imagine what it is like to live this reality every day, especially when people are constantly whining when they get paid double what I currently make.
It’s enough to make me want to pull my hair out, and unfortunately, I generally get to a state of rage most days thinking about and dealing with my current work situation.
To answer the question: No my current job description is not useful to me when trying to find a job. I don’t know what my title is, but even if I did, it would contain responsibilities that I can’t focus on, refine, and say I’m an expert in. Something along the lines of “jack of all trades, master of none”.
Are other Job Descriptions useful?
Now that I’ve determined my job description is completely useless, what about job descriptions of other companies? Can they tell me anything useful?
How about Day in the Life posts?
If stuffy job descriptions don’t work, why not ask for what people actually do during the day? That seems like a good approach as long as the posts are accurate.
I spent a little while Googling “day in the life of a software engineer” since I sometimes call myself an engineer, and I found a few posts on the topic. As I read them, I said to myself “hey, I do all of those things.” One posting had a breakdown of common/nonstandard duties along with an interview with a current software engineer.
What struck me about the list of nonstandard duties is how many of those I tend to perform. I guess when you work in a small team, all the specialized division of labor breaks down, and most posts on generic job duties probably won’t apply.
The other problem I noticed is that none of the answers to “day in the life” questions ever give you an actual day in the life of anyone. I've never seen a journal entry or recall of a particular day, and that’s just what I’m looking for.
Maybe I will start such a site and allow anyone to post their actual “day in the life of” entry complete with their job title, company size, and a few other pieces of metadata. Hopefully, this application would help curious job seekers sort through what you actually do once you a developer-like job. Hint: it’s likely not what’s in the technical interview.
What’s your Moth Story?
You also should think of “your story”. A lot of people start out conversations with the phrase: “Tell me a little bit about yourself”. They don’t want to hear about your childhood or school triumphs. They don’t even want to hear about jobs you might have had before doing anything technical. What they’re after is a good story that shows purpose, drive, and fits into the current job role your discussing at the moment.
While you can come up with multiple stories for multiple types of jobs, why would you want to take that approach? After all, your life is simply one story and not a collection of alternative universes you can switch between at the snap of a finger.
I used to make this mistake and generate resumes for each type of career path I thought I wanted to go down. After 10 or so years, however, the idea of trying to create multiple resumes for different job paths sounds exhausting. More importantly, it sounds like a waste of time.
I can generate a decent story full of embellishments out of past work, but there’s only really one path that makes sense for me to attempt. That path has to include my prior roles in a positive light and has to lead to whatever job I am currently applying for.
It includes being hired without taking any real technical interview and being thrust into pushing code to production within the first few weeks of my first-ever web development job. Sure, I don’t include the fact that they didn’t give me a technical interview or the lies interviewers told me about traveling for work, but I make sure to emphasize the fact that I was able to succeed in a less than ideal environment and that perseverance makes me a great asset to any technical team.
When I think about a good story, I end up back in my car listening to the Moth Radio on NPR. Those storytellers know how to create a decent story arc, keep the suspense, and have a great payoff at the end. Just the same, you should develop a career story worthy of Moth Radio and practice telling it back to yourself. Your ending should always be in the future well after you’ve landed the job telling your interviewer all the great things you will accomplish at their company.
Why not look for startup stories?
Since I’ve worked in small teams that don’t fit “day of the life” and I already have a story to tell, why not look for people in startups and see if my story aligns with theirs?
“Runway.” I’ve never heard that word used in a job interview context except for startup companies, and I’ve never liked hearing what the runway entails. Some recruiters will tell me “well you can just get another job if it doesn’t work out” assuming it’s super easy for everyone who does anything in “tech” to get a job right now. That same recruiter ghosted me right after wasting an hour of my time on a company with “two years of runway…likely.”
“Hussle-porn.” Hussle is a disease that startup founders often catch and if not treated right away, it can spread to their whole company. Most doctors will tell you the prognosis is not great and that the only cure is getting the hell away from anyone engaging in hussle-porn.
If you can’t tell, I’m a little jaded…
Maybe a Career Ladder Can Help?
If you don’t take anything else away from this post, then you should remember that a job posting is only good for when that role is being hired. Period.
Once you start a job, someone else might quit. Replacing that coworker takes time, and if they were doing any important work, then someone needs to cover for them. That someone might be you, just temporarily…but then hiring takes longer or someone else quits and…yada yada…you are now stuck with new job duties without your title or salary changing.
You should ask for your position’s career ladder before accepting any role. Looking at the ways your position can move up or across departments will give you a better sense of what might be ahead. Then, when a fork in the road presents itself, you can try to adopt new job duties that fit the ladder you want to climb.
I did not ask about a career ladder at my current job, and it’s something I definitely wish I had asked about in the interview. Granted, I needed money to pay rent when I accepted my current role, but if I did ask about a ladder, they would probably have had a hard time describing to me the road ahead. You should take any vagueness in the answer to mean that the company has not thought properly about career development. Any company that takes this seriously will have ample documentation for you to look at.
I kept seeing GitLab mentioned for career handbooks, so I’ll leave you with this section on career development that mentions considerations for job advancement.
And then once I have a better idea of the role I should be pursuing, I’ll write another blog post in my “Land a Job” series.
