Just Do Your Job
Tomorrow marks my two-year anniversary at Hudl. When I joined the company, I started out skeptical. The sports aspect of Hudl’s product — and a lot of the resulting sports-centric culture in the company — made me unsure that I’d enjoy it, not being much of a sports guy myself.
I quickly learned that whether or not we were working with sports, I loved what the product was doing to make peoples’ lives easier, and even more, I had a huge admiration for the team behind that product. Since that realization first occurred, my admiration for them has only grown.
So far, I’ve worked in a few different parts of our product team:
- Our Community Tribe, helping create the world’s largest sports community,
- Our Coaching Tools Tribe (formerly “Team Sports”), creating sport-specific tools for the athletes and teams using our product, and finally,
- Our Core Tribe, creating tools used by every team subscribed to Hudl, regardless of sport or level
I’ve also made a few career transitions, first from a development intern to a full-time engineer, and then from an engineer to an engineering lead. All of this learning across different parts of the company has given me a lot to reflect on, and I figured I’d write a bit about what’s been on my mind lately to commemorate my first two years. Get ready for a bit of a rant.
A lot of people at Hudl, myself included, invest themselves heavily in their career. People work on side projects, read blog posts, keep up with the latest trends in their profession, and look for opportunities left and right to grow themselves. That aspect of our team drew me to the company, and has been a large part of what’s kept me hooked for as long as I have been.
But recently, I’ve realized something:
Sometimes, career development just means doing your job.
This goes out to all the overachievers out there. All the 20-something entrepreneurial spirits. All the ladder climbers. This year — the year I transitioned into a management role — has made it clear how important tempering that behavior is and accepting that your team, and the work you’re doing as part of that team, are more important than any of your individual achievements.
Every day at Hudl, there’s a new problem that needs solving. Within the past couple of days, people have asked: “Who can give a talk on GraphQL to the other developers so they know its benefits?”, “who can organize the on-boarding for our developer interns this summer?”, and “who can keep our engineering chapter on Core Tribe talking about the problems they’re solving?” Until very recently, I would’ve answered those questions with: “I can! I’ll get something on the calendar”, “let me get something going with the other dev leads”, and “I’ll think through some topics for our chapter to talk through in the next few weeks.”
In short: “Me!”, “Me!”, aaaaand “Me!”.
Don’t get me wrong: every one of these questions presents a great opportunity to grow. The simple truth, however, is that I just can’t do all of it — not if I still want to be good at my job title in the purest sense, anyway. If I’m spending all of my time writing talks on GraphQL, planning on-boarding for our interns, and concerting conversations between our tribe’s developers, when would I ever write code? Mix in the fact that I’m spending roughly 30% of my time on management, and you’ve found a recipe for total lack of productivity.
My first instinct to the above paragraph has always been to say “Writing code is just writing code. I already know how to do that. Why not try something new?” But it’s so much more. Some of my greatest points of growth at Hudl have come from — you guessed it — writing code. Building a feature that scales to our expanding user base. Realizing that something can be architected better with a different approach you hadn’t considered. Discovering a new pattern to development that you can apply to other scenarios. None of those things can happen if you’re spending every hour of your workday evangelizing and taking on responsibilities outside your daily duties.
It’s easy to fall into the common trap of thinking that accepting more responsibility = advancing your career. Some management articles and books I’ve read even suggest that you say yes to any opportunity that comes your way! That’s some bullshit.
New responsibilities, accepted without scrutiny, can damage your career and cost you valuable learning opportunities in the most crucial aspect of your work: your actual role. Your every day, 40-hours-a-week role. Becoming responsible for the communication of your tribe’s dev chapter is great! But not if it means you won’t have time to be an effective and improving developer.
Let’s not forget, either, that it not only limits your ability to grow as a developer, or any other role you might be filling, but also impacts the performance of your entire team. If everyone at Hudl were as much of a yes man as I’ve been in past months, I couldn’t even begin to describe how far behind deadlines we’d be.
All this is not to convince you not to accept new challenges. Please do. A few things I haven’t talked about in this little diatribe are:
- How much I’ve learned about the importance of onboarding by spearheading our orientation mentorship program,
- The presentation and organizational skills I acquired by leading our Team Sports and Core dev chapter meetings, and,
- The relationships I’ve built with managers across the company by participating in our Management Training Forums
Responsibility is great. So is growing in what you do best — your role. So examine every new responsibility with a healthy dose of skepticism and ask yourself “can I still grow in what I do every day while I pursue this?”
Cheers to two years, Hudl. Here’s to two more.
