Are we expecting too much?

Let's do some maths:

(67-x)/2 = y

So if I told you to substitute 'x' for your current age, what do you get for 'y'?

For me, at this current moment in time 'y' would be 12.5 since I am 42.

That is the number of positions and pay rises I would need to occupy me until my retirement age. This is based on a very reasonable expectation that I would be promoted every 2 years.

12.

Are there any career ladders that have 12 steps in them? Nope. Is the top one the 'Supreme Lead Senior Manager <whatever>'? There aren't even enough adjectives to describe these roles.

Also bear in mind I have already been doing this for 25 years so if you are just starting out you have an even bigger number.

How are you going to fill the decades of when you reach that top role and your retirement? Does the tech industry even have a track record for this? How about another game.... name the oldest person doing your role in your organisation. Are they 60? How about 50? 40? 30?

It is a probability that we will not be with our current company until we finish working. Looking across the tech sector, 3 years seems like a pretty good run. I have seen some data that suggests 2 years is more likely.

Why not be honest?

In your time with your current company, what do you want to achieve? What do you want to learn? Who do you want to be taught by? Who can you teach and what could you give back? What stories do you want to take with you? Which people will you want to keep in touch with? What great ideas will you emulate? What experiments will you convince people to run with? What improvements will you leave behind? What new habits will you form?

How long do you think that will take?

We all walk in to a company and totally ignore the end.

Expecting organisations to somehow create roles and an ever increasing pay packet is simply too much. They are often just a chapter in our total story - when we understand that our time together will end, we can choose to treat that time with the importance it deserves and make decisions that benefit both us and others.

People leaving us stronger, better, more confident is surely an outcome we should look for and even celebrate.

Clearleft had a lovely way of seeing this:

"Our passion for the digital community and our innate collective desire to make a meaningful contribution towards enabling design to thrive beyond our studio is something that continues to excite and motivate us. The success of ex-employees is one part of that which continues to make us all proud."

Lets start setting an expectation that the time we spend together will be full of mutual learning and value and when it ends we will both be better, wiser and still friends.

Diversity in thinking about Diversity

There has been a lot of talk of diversity in tech. This has been building for a while which is awesome, specifically around women in tech. I can still remember when it was inconceivable that you could be a software engineer without a degree of some kind. Although the movement is glacial, there is movement which is one reason to be cheerful.

I had a pause to think about diversity recently. I have worked in all male teams and there is definitely a different energy. When there is a mix it feels different - it's not something that I can explain but I can recognise it even if I can't explain it.

What I am a little worried about is that thoughts about diversity seem to stop at gender. What about other types of diversity, which we seem blind to?

How about age? How many 50+ do you have in your team or organisation? Given that we will be working into our 70's, what does that say about our industries view on experience? Where do all the 'old' developers go? If you were to band your developers by age, what would that look like? Are we happy with the diversity of ages that we would find?

I am currently working in a team which speak over 10 languages between them. Lots of people have a different cultural background. This is a great bit of diversity to celebrate! Each person has a different way of communicating, thinking about problems and working with people. I can see differences in how people pair, discuss and even get annoyed. We can all learn something from differing ways of interacting with people.

Where I really started to think was when I thought about neurological diversity, covering conditions such as Autism. I think these are currently labelled incorrectly under disability in most organisations.

Neurodiversity helps us understand that people with Autism, who see and experience the world differently to most people, have natural variations in their physical neurology. I don't identify this with disability. By pulling these into the light of diversity, we quickly see problems with our workplaces.

From the outset, neurodiversity is hampered by our recruitment processes. We typically have a process and for most with Autism this would be a big challenge. There has been some fantastic thinking about by Microsoft, which is well worth a look.

Is it 'the' way it should be done? Probably not - but it's represents people thinking about the barriers in place that are stopping a more diverse workplace. There is a beautiful saying that if you have met one person with Autism, you have met one person with Autism... each person is different so no one approach will work universally.

Most of us find interviews stressful, so thinking this same process would be fit for someone with Autism feels very unfair. At worst, could it be purposely shaping our workplace by stopping certain types of people from being able to join our organisations in the first place?

If we make it though that barrier, I think our workplaces are actually quite hostile. We often work under time pressures, in noisy environments which you cannot control and mandate ways of working that some people may find hard or even distressing. For people who are stressed out by the workplace alone, is it fair to add commercial pressures? What does our responsibility as people manager look like in this scenario?

Taking this further, what about career progression? Do our current methods of assessing people for promotions in an organisation work in a workforce which is purposefully neurodiverse? Certainly matrix style assessments could be so explicit that they effectively rule out career progression for certain people, obviously taking us away from a fair employment culture.

So the next time you hear about embracing diversity, maybe ask a few questions about what people think this is and where is stops for your organisation.