Finishing Your Tasks Doesn’t Mean You’re Doing Your Job

Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I’m Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

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Hello everyone! Brief administration note before I begin.

I've moved back to Ghost, after around 2.5 years of testing out Substack.

Changes for you? Nothing! Well, at least I hope nothing. You can still reply to newsletters to get my attention, ask questions, etc. If you have any issues at all, please let me know ASAP, and I'll investigate. You can still subscribe, unsubscribe, become a paid member, etc.

My short why: Substack is fine, but it's expensive. And I'm not convinced that it's adding as much value as it charges.

So I decided to swap back to Ghost and see how things go!

Ok, on with the show.

I have an unfortunate habit I’m trying to break. When I’m in idle mode, like when I’m waiting for the microwave, I’ll open Reddit and read a post or two.

One subreddit that pops up frequently is a hotbed of whining, /r/cscareerquestions. I really should just block the sub, because it’s mentally unhealthy for me to read all those victim rants. It’s similar to how Blind was (if you’re familiar, an anonymous internal whining app), which was mostly failing employees ranting about how life isn’t fair.

But if I put together what I heard from employees my organizations had to fire and the rants on Reddit and Blind, one common thing stands out. Let’s see if you can identify the pattern.

"I did everything they asked me to do!"

"No one told me to do more!"

"I did it exactly as I was asked!"

“I completed every task on schedule!”

I absolutely understand that plenty of managers don’t give nearly enough feedback. I can understand how someone can end up surprised by this type of ending.

However, the best employees never end up surprised. Why?

Because these types of comments scream a lack of ownership. They are a clear mark of an employee who expected to be told exactly what to do. This type of employee is not owning; they’re helping. Helping adds little value, regardless of how effectively they do exactly what they’re told.

What do I mean by helping?

Imagine you’re an 8-year-old standing in the kitchen. Your mom says, “Put away the dishes, please.” And then, unfortunately, she has to explain where the forks go and what to do when the tall glass doesn’t fit on that shelf.

Does that save Mom time? Unlikely. It’s probably easier for Mom to just do it herself while listening to her audiobooks.

Helping means that someone else needed to identify a problem. They needed to evaluate the problem and come up with a solution. You implement that solution, and then they validate that you did it the way they asked (because they’re the ones who came up with the solution, they’re the ones who have to evaluate the result).

This is the classic new engineer challenge. They’ll say that they’ve finished their sprint tasks, and then they smile and relax. “I finished all my tasks! I’m done for the sprint!” Or perhaps a bit better, “Ok, what should I do next?”

This isn’t a joke. It frequently happens with new hires.

If you expect your manager to identify problems and tell you how to solve those problems, you’re essentially a drain on resources. You’re exhausting to manage. You’re doing a small portion of the actual job. The identification of work, prioritization, and keeping the work queue are all still owned by your manager or senior co-workers. The doing of work is (perhaps) nice, but it’s only a small part of the job.

Have you ever seen this cartoon of the classic husband/wife conflict on this topic?

In that example, and using my terminology, the wife owns those home activities, and the husband helps with the execution. Owning is mentally taxing, and helping is relaxing and significantly easier. And in classic fashion, the husband inevitably says, “But what the heck, I repeatedly helped with the X when asked!” Which is just what junior engineers say when they’re eventually fired.

To provide true value to your co-workers (or spouse), what’s the answer? You need to take full ownership over things.