10 Reader Questions About Career Politics, Investing, Job Hopping, and AI (among others)

Answering some reader questions on various topics. I love questions!

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 specific leadership advice.

I recently wrote an article answering some reader questions. People said they liked both the format, and the type of content. I received quite a few emails and questions in response to that article, and other articles. I decided that I’d take a swing at doing it again! I pulled out a list of questions from my emails & article comments, and started answering. Once my article got a bit too long, I stopped, and counted the questions. Exactly 10. Funny. Unintentional, but nice.

As a side note, I do reword the questions I receive. Usually to make them more brief, or less personal.

Eiffel Tower, Paris on a recent trip. Photo credit: My wife Inga

Welcome to those of you new to Scarlet Ink! Each week I send an article to all subscribers. Free members can read approximately half of each article, while paid members can read the full article.

For some, half of each article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member!

1. What can you do when colleagues try to take over (or take credit for) your projects?

This is one of the most common office politics issues when you work at large corporations. Someone says, “I hate office politics!” they often mean a version of this situation. This is a problem of incentives. When career progression (raises, promotions) are based on being in a flashy role on a flashy project, those positions become valuable. They’re valuable to you personally because of the visibility they bring you. This artificial situation exists at all large companies I know. Once you have this artificial situation in place, our careers benefit by looking valuable, not just being valuable.

In these political situations where someone is stepping on your toes, you can feel that you’re stuck either fighting your co-workers, or moving onto another project. That is a lose-lose situation.

Let’s talk about a specific hypothetical example. Dave was told he would be the tech lead of a critical, highly visible project starting soon. Yay for Dave.

But Jim is Dave’s peer, and also wanted the tech lead role because he thought it would accelerate his promotion timeline (it probably would). And Dave says he’ll start on this new project in 2 to 3 weeks, once he finishes his current work. Jim says to himself, “I’m better than Dave, it’s frustrating I wasn’t given this role. Heck, I am faster and better than Dave is. I can start immediately. Everyone will see how good I am at this. And I’m not doing anything wrong because I’m helping.”

So Jim starts meeting with stakeholders on the project, saying he is just getting things moving forward. And then he creates a tentative tech design, to unblock everyone. And he sets up the production environment, and does a quick demonstration on how the new project will function. How nice of Jim! Dave wasn’t paying attention, but Jim just spent a couple of weeks establishing himself as the center of the project.

Dave and Jim’s manager shrugs and says, “Hey Dave, it looks like Jim is actually doing the tech lead role already, and has made great progress. Let’s move you to something else.” Ouch.

There are good reasons for the corporation to require some form of proof that Dave and Jim performed important roles on important projects before their promotions. But this requirement means there are also incentives to play games with the system. I know there are plenty of problems with this situation, but I can’t change the reward system at your company. Instead, I provide some recommendations on how you can deal with the issue.

I wouldn’t recommend you blindly implement anything. Instead, think carefully about what might work in your situation. And be prepared to be honest with yourself. You’ll see that most of these are simply “do your leadership position better so you don’t need to worry about losing it” solutions.

Lead harder and faster

In the situation above, Jim is rewarded for moving quickly. This feels fair from the outside, except that it was done in a subtle, slightly malicious way. The project didn’t need to start early. And Jim really did want to take over the leadership role. His motivation wasn’t fully honest.

If you’re Dave, how could you have avoided this? Well, you should have known two things. Jim wanted the tech lead role, and Jim is not busy while you are. This means you’re essentially creating a vacuum by leaving the leadership role vacant. Finders keepers.

If you view these leadership roles as special, exciting opportunities, you should move like you’re excited. When I’ve seen people lose leadership roles, it’s frequently because they’re moving at a comfortable pace, while their co-workers are moving with ambition and energy.

You might need to do some work to get your project moving forward swiftly, even if you’re not quite ready. If your leadership position is valuable, you need to act like you’re super excited to have it.

“Jim, I’m wrapping up my project, but could you please start on these 3 tasks I just wrote up? Thanks!”

Get your project off the ground and moving forward energetically. One big weakness of your leadership position is if you’re not leading quickly enough.

Create leadership communication

In the Dave and Jim situation, Dave didn’t step into his role, either by actions (starting on tasks), or by communication (meetings, email announcements).

Dave was said to be the tech lead, but if he’s not leading, he’s not really in the role.

If you want to be an official leader, communicate that way.

• Create a mailing list, and blast a regular 'Project X status update.'

• Create a meeting invite to kick off the project.

• Contact all stakeholders, and give them a rough project schedule.

There’s a spectrum from under-communication to over-communication. You always want to be on the right side of that spectrum.

Does this look ok in everyone’s emails? In the past, I had issues with some images not displaying properly.

Immediate confrontation

Imagine you’re moving forward quickly, but someone still appears to be trying to step into the leadership role. I’ve seen this a few times over the years. People occasionally step over the line with their personal ambition & greed.

The moment you see something strange (like a separate project plan you didn’t build), ask them why they're deviating from your project plan.

"I already have an overall project plan. Please delete this separate one, and put any missing information into my project plan."

When people successfully step on your toes, it’s frequently because no one calls them on it. We’re all too polite to want to interrupt the person being “helpful” to ask them to please not wander off on their own.

I know it seems goofy to be this territorial. But you have two choices in these situations. Move on to another project, or fight back.

Consider that it’s seriously your fault

I've taken over projects (and had engineers on my team take over their co-workers projects) because the owner wasn't owning well enough.

Engineer 1 says, "I wrote up a project summary with all the remaining tasks and a new estimate of our launch date."

Engineer 2 says, "But I'm the project lead, don't take away my job!"

Engineer 1 says, "We're 2 weeks behind on our project, and people keep asking for updates. You didn’t send an update for two days. I gave up waiting and wrote it myself."

You can only justifiably be defensive if you're doing the job well. You can be given a leadership position, but that only gets you started. Keeping it is up to you. You need to get things done quickly, with high quality. You need to regularly communicate, react to new situations, and lead your way out of it.

A leadership position is legitimately lost if there’s a competency gap that needs filling. And that’s healthy for the business because getting things done is the reason we all receive regular paychecks.

Whoops. This answer ended up a bit long. I'll be more concise going forward.

2. Should I get certificates in certain tech things before interviewing at big tech?

No.

Ok, maybe that’s too concise.

I’ll say that in the literal thousands of resumes I reviewed while at Amazon, I literally never heard another employee say, “Oh look, they’re certified in X.”

We look at your experience in your last few years of work (that’s 95% of it). We look at historical jobs if you’ve been working for longer. We look at personal projects. We sometimes look at college degrees if you’re inexperienced or in a very special field.

It’s entirely possible that some hiring managers or recruiters care about certificates. Perhaps certain roles or departments focus heavily on certifications.

This was my experience. Perhaps if you are missing a vital skill for a new job you want, and there’s a certificate program available for that skill, it’s possible it would help you a little. Maybe. Not that I’m skeptical or anything.