Careers and why they will soon be bullshit

It is not a completely unfounded fear that your role will disappear in the firm that you work in. It happened to hundreds of my colleagues at Microsoft back in 2009 when the first of a large rolling and seemingly everpresent wave of layoffs was orchestrated. I remember the hallways were painted in a shade of red that was tinged more in regret and confusion than whatever effect the consultants who came up with the colors had intended. It was the worst of times, and in many ways, it will always be the worst of times.

Liquidating roles in HR parlance is not a completely unknown concept. It is a great way to not take things personally. It is a great way to not make an enemy out of someone you sat across the table and let go. It is also archaic and dishonest. It is the HR equivalent of “It’s not you, it’s me”.

In the future, liquidating roles are going to be the way forward. We know the work responsibilities for the worker of the future will be fluid and on demand. Think of a Software Engineer as a Service. You would buy a system off the shelf, a Software-as-a-Service and hire a Software Engineer-as-a-service to implement this for your organization. The only hitch will be getting the acronyms confused.

What does that mean from a find-your-role perspective?

It might actually be way better now. Its just that all the advice about finding a career path that offers progression is going to need a rethink. Imagine having a continuous co-op that you cycle through. Instead of the upper bound being 4 years and the constraint of “You are done, get your degree and get the fuck out of here” — the constraint is interest. If you like mining massive data sets, you can continue to do so. If you like web design and want to take a stab at database engineering — find a non-mission critical project at a low paying gig so you can learn while blowing up a system. You will learn faster, the scars make for a great anecdote and you can transition to the wistful seduction of a Full Stack something.

What does that mean from a sourcing perspective?

Nothing really. Recruiting has been equal parts sales and timing. The cycling of these Software Engineer-as-a-Service and their contract lengths will determine when and how someone gets hired. Feedback cycles will be shorter. Efficiency will be project based instead of a longer career growth trajectory. Because if you do not have a defined orbit — you cannot measure velocity.

So Remote workers yes?

We know, anecdotally and through hard evidence (Too lazy to google but assume it exists) — that traditional interview techniques are a giant roll of the die. Imagine how helpful and useful it would be to have someone in the office working on a real project instead of whiteboardgasming a linked list reversal. People skills can show up, team bonding can be tested. It is a win-win-win (Hat tip Verizon). Remote workers will get a legitimate look in, you can hire someone without going through the gigantic firehose of meth-infused horseshit that is the US immigration system. And if these remote workers (Warhorses) aced their trial period — you could then have a qualified candidate that you would be way more comfortable traversing the slippery slope of the fever dream that is once again the US immigration system.

What else?

Code and concept portability become more important than having a unicorn-worthy honey badger engineer. Someone commented on an HN thread that the competency of an engineer is the skill and speed at which they take a concept in their head to one that can be worked on by someone else — in code (And comments I am guessing). Repositories like Github will gain more traction and add features. Someone has to go challenge the behemoth that is Github and it will probably be Amazon and Google coming up with their own systems. Slack will continue to dominate and have more competition in deeply vertical chat applications. Hipchat (when there is no outage) is great and being part of the same mothership that churns out Jira is a formidable advantage to have.

Things will change. It will largely be for the better and you will have one more reason to completely not understand what a career is, or a role, or a trajectory. Promotions will make less sense except pay increases and the ability of an organization to cultivate interesting projects to solve problems. Note that the problems themselves need not be interesting, its only in the approach that the nuance is fully understood. The age old conundrum of bifurcating at a manager level or a technical architect will cease to exist like the non-issue it has always been. As insanely simplistic as the problem is, this model will weed out people who don’t want to be around anyway. If leaning in and growing people is your thing — your horizons will need to be wider. It will be a consequence of your rational selection process and you will understand the importance of it.

Really, What else?

I dont know honestly, I am not peddling a product that is going to upend recruiting. There are plenty of them already out there including the tinder for jobs, a waking behemoth and the ordained incumbent. There are also just distastefully built 80s websites that do not save form data if you have made an error — those egregious websites should be the first to go. Anyway, this is hardly a revolution but a logical and fairly accelerated bet on what the job marketplace will look like if you took the average stints at a job in the bay area (18 months I think) and calculated their rate of deceleration. Also, plug into the Odesk-Elance merger — as much as it is hard to manage, the next app that will upend that system will have a unique point of view on discovery. Lots of thoughts, lots to think about.