Don’t Put Yourself a Box

Photo by Piotr Musioł / Unsplash Don’t Put Yourself in a Box Personal Development and Career Growth Apr 26, 2024 Summary Companies need "boxes" (job classifications) to grow and function. This makes hiring, compensation, and career development tractable, and promotes fair treatment of employees. If the boxes are too large, a company can't grow. If the boxes are too small, innovation and ownership are smothered. The size of a company's boxes is directly proportional to the level of trust employees have for management. To get hired, put yourself in the box the company is hiring for. Tailor your resume to highlight those skills and experiences; put yourself out there as a “specialist” in the thing they’re hiring for. If aiming for a promotion, demonstrate how your work embodies the behaviors and impacts of the next-level “box”. Don't let those boxes define you. Your value and identity goes far beyond any job description. Hot Take Businesses can't function at scale unless they put people in standardized "boxes"; if you want to be hired and to grow your career, you need to understand that, and understand how to work with those boxes. On the other hand, you can't be reduced to a box, and if you tie your identity to those boxes in your thinking, you'll limit yourself in ways that are unnatural and harmful. This is like the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, both alive and dead at the same time. Like with quantum mechanics and the cat, whether you’re in a box or not depends on who’s doing the measuring: your employer, or you. My Box Origin Story My introduction to the idea of “boxes” came in the late 2000s, when I noticed that people at Google were having a hard time getting hired or promoted if they were doing “operational” work that didn’t involve much traditional program management. Whether they were being considered for hiring or promotion, they were told, essentially, “ You’ve done some great work, but it’s not program management; we’re not sure what role/ladder is a fit for you, but it’s not this one. Next! ” This was clearly a problem—even though they didn’t do PERT diagrams and Gantt charts, Googlers did important work in these roles, and roadblocks to hiring and promoting them created both operational and retention issues as jobs went vacant and high-performing employees felt their value wasn’t being recognized. As a member of both Program Management hiring and promotion committees at Google I had more visibility to this issue than most others; I spoke to a friend of mine in People Operations (Google’s HR), who turned out to already be well aware of this problem from repeatedly dealing with upset hiring managers and frustrated promotion candidates. Together, we hatched a plan: to create a new job ladder (job classification) for these “operational” program managers to move to, that was better suited to the type of work they did. We gathered some data, wrote a proposal, and set up a meeting with the S