Interlude 1: Micro-promotions
Warning: More than anything else in this month-long writing project; the advice here may not be fully generalizable. A lot will depend on your employer; your field; your temperament. I’ve been incredibly privileged with good employers and good life circumstances.
Micromorts
A “micromort” is a unit of risk that is best described as a one-in-a-million chance of death. They’re a helpful way of categorizing risks of different activities, and are used in decision / actuarial analysis. It’s fun to see the different average risk across different things:
Driving ~200 miles in a car? 1 micromort; you have one in a million chance of dying (in a car accident)
Running a marathon? 7 micromorts
Getting out of bed at age 45? 6 micromorts1
Giving birth? 170 micromorts
Mountaineering in the Himalayas? 12,000 micromorts
It’s fun to think about risk exposure of day to day activities! The specter of death is around every corner.
All of this is a chance, of course. But you can intuitively see how gravitating towards activities with higher micromorts heightens your chance of death (but by less than you might think, depending on the activity) or doing many risky activities gives you more chances for that fateful dice to turn up snake eyes.
The idea is extendable. I’ve seen the concept used with dating / marriage: a micro-marriage is an activity that gives you a one in a million chance of eventually getting married. Going to a mixer party is 100 micro-marriages. Going on a blind date is 200. Going on Tinder is -10 micro-marriages.2 Keep persevering.
I’ve recently started to think about the same concept in the workplace.
Intra-Generational Work Disruptions
A quick diversion: a few years ago I listened to a really fascinating podcast with then-Senator-from-Nebraska Ben Sasse on… well, a lot of different topics, all of them interesting.3
And people understand that we’re going through a massive disruption in the nature of work. This is unprecedented in human history to have people who are going to be 40 and 45 and 50 and 55 and be disintermediated not only out of their job and out of their firm, but out of their whole industry. That’s never happened before.
Bill Gates’s way of talking about it is: “This is the first intra-generational economic disruption.” Other economic disruptions when you had technological substitution creating push from the farm and pull to the city, that wasn’t one 45-year old farmer laying down his tools or her tools and moving to the city. It was 55- and 60- year old’s recognizing that their 15- and 20- year old kids were not going to have the same life they had and they were going to leave and go to the city.
We’re going to have intra-generational work disruptions and a shortening duration of jobs forevermore.
Ben Sasse, Conversations with Tyler4
What Sasse and Gates are saying is that my generation5— and generations in the future— are not just going to be faced with changing employers, but changing careers. I won’t become a software developer and stay a software developer at eight different companies over the course of my life. I might start as a software developer and, in fifteen years, need to become something different entirely because software developer isn’t a job anymore. This was something that was rare for our parent’s generation and something that just might be the norm for our children.
I think everyone has this worry while looking at what is happening with automation, OpenAI, and other technological advances. Will ChatGPT eat my job in the next five years? What will I do then? This phenomenon is not the main thrust of my post, but I think it’s a helpful concept to think about because this specter, like micromorts, shadows over our work life, even in software development.
What is a Micro-Promotion?
A micro-promotion is the same thing as a micromort or a micromarriage. It’s an action that you take that gives you a one-in-a-million chance of a promotion. You may want to acquire these for a multitude of reasons:
You want to take the next step in your career and increase your pay / responsibilities / clout
You are curious about a different job and want to move your career in a different direction
Existential dread (see above): you are worried about the state of your industry and are laying down groundwork for when it’s time to jump ship6
…and many more
Micro-promotions are generally things that you do that are outside of the realm of your normal day to day responsibilities. These actions are almost little intrusions into the field of where your career could go next. If you’re interested in management, you might volunteer for your church’s parish council as the Chair and see what that feels like. If you are interested in User Experience, you might use your next company innovation time to run some user interviews and propose some software fixes.
Micro-promotions are generally non-committal. They represent little experiments: would you like this sort of a job or activity if you did it permanently? Finding small ways to act in those roles help you determine whether a step is right for you (and whether you are right for it). You might partake in a hackathon and do exclusively front-end development instead of back-end development. You might take your volunteer day at work and go teach at a local middle school.
Micro-promotions are generally visible in some way. It is a promotion, after all, right? As you are experimenting in taking some of these steps, you want to be able to put it on a resume / end of year review / etc. and be sure that the leadership knows what you did, why you did it, and what a success it was.
Micro-promotions have a specific direction. You shouldn’t flail around doing random things in the hope that they’ll be helpful at some point.7 You should have a larger goal that you are hoping to achieve and then pick your activity towards that end.
Micro-promotions are still a chance. Most things in your career are going to be playing the long game. You might not get that promotion right away— and you might not get that new job right away— but if you keep acquiring micro-promotions and keep building your skills, you’ll gradually increase the likelihood of it happening.
It’s probably hard to think about this in the abstract, so I’m going to give you a bunch of examples from my own life.
Examples
Move from Software Developer to Scrum Master
Volunteered to facilitate our weekly “on call breakdown” meeting when we all talked about the production support issues that occurred that week and teach each other how to fix them in the future. I wanted experience in big-group facilitation, since that’s an important skill for an SM to have, and I volunteered to facilitate this meeting in order to get it.8
Launched an “agile community of practice” where interested parties would gather for an hour every other week and talk about agile topics. We had a variety of presenters, but it was a lot of work to get the group going.
Took some Scrum Master tests and got my certification, even though I hadn’t technically done the job yet
…and many more
Move from Agile Coach to Product Manager
Began to pick innovation topics almost exclusively about product improvements and pulled together teams of volunteers that I could help “manage”
Took some Product Owner tests and got my certification, even though I hadn’t technically done the job yet
Leaned into Product Coaching and read books on the topic
Gave lots of presentations on product backlog management / goal writing / etc.
Said “yes” to every opportunity to help stand in for my Product Manager (when I was a coach) while they were on vacation
…and many more
Move to Homeschooling
Did a “summer school” program focused on math and reading for one hour a day. This let me see whether my kids would take to the idea and was a low-risk experiment to run, since we could stop it at any time
…aaaand that was it actually9
A lot of these activities are a mixture of “see whether I like the gig” and “get experience in doing so.” These activities were also not sure bets. I looked for a long time when trying to move from software developer to Scrum Master. I failed the first time I tried to move into Product and it took me around three years in total to get here. There were a lot of micro-promotions acquired in that time.
In general: you want to be alert to different opportunities and say “yes” whenever you can get away with it.
Advice to Employers
The biggest caveat to all of the above advice is this: are you in an environment where such things are possible?
This is a question for the employer. Is that an environment that you are actively curating for your staff? Or are you locking everyone into their current role without giving opportunities for learning or advancement?
I think that good employers, especially those that boast about a “promote from within” culture, need to make sure that they are providing the kind of space necessary. That doesn’t mean that you need formal training programs for anyone hoping to move jobs, but it does mean that you need to provide space to do so.
Explicit time for innovation, hackathons, mentorship programs, “days of development”, job shadowing, self-improvement budgets, “lunch and learns”10, these are all great ways to give your employees space to be proactive.
There is definitely a balance to be found here. I believe that, in certain states, it is illegal to require employees to perform duties that are not explicitly in their job description / their contract. But you also need to give your employees a chance to experiment and to learn, especially if you want to grow from within.
Last Call
It’s always a tricky thing to give anonymous advice over the internet, but I want to close with a final piece of advice: if you think you want something, you owe it to yourself to try:
So if you listening to this right now, no matter how old you are, how young you are, whether you on a school bus headed to get your education, or you driving home from work pissed off at your boss, just please do what you love in life.
So many people always say, “Oh I would do this but” or “I can’t because” and you already lost… you gotta do it man, you gotta do what makes you happy.
Logic, Last Call11
If you believe that a different job / a different lifestyle / a different path would make you happier, then you should work towards it. But you don’t need to pull a mid-life crisis “quit your job and start painting”— you don’t need to jump into the deep end all at once. Sometimes you just need to put a toe in the water and see whether it’s a good temperature for swimming.
So look for those micro-promotions, and make / take those opportunities when you can.12
National Novel Writing Month 2024: 30,623/50,000This is a horrifying statistic, but I guess that’s what happens when you hit your 40’s.
Being happily married with four kids, I’m endlessly thankful I don’t need to contend with the barren wasteland that is modern online dating.
You can listen to or read the transcript here: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/ben-sasse/
I typed that whole paragraph out instead of copy / pasting it so it’s fair to add it to the word count, right?
Millennial
I’ve “acquired micro-promotions” for all of these reasons, including the last one! We’ll talk more about that when we talk about the state of the agile industry.
You can still do random enrichment activities! Just do them because they are fun and because you are interested in the process of learning more generally.
The meeting was normally facilitated by the software developer who was just finishing up their on-call rotation. Developers famously love meetings and especially love leading meetings, so it was no trouble to convince everyone to cede facilitation duties to me.
If the experiment hadn’t panned out, it would have been real trouble to give facilitation duties back.
I was homeschooled myself and have lots of friends who homeschool. The process of homeschooling was not a mystery to me.
The question was not so much “could I do it” (I was pretty sure I could) but rather, “Could I do it and also work?” and “Could I do it and would the kids react well to it?”
Thankfully, the summer school experiment more or less answered both questions.
Interestingly, during the COVID pandemic, a few leaders in my company pushed really hard against the term “lunch and learn.” In an environment where a lot of us found it hard to step away from our computer, it being literally in our bedroom / kitchen, it created the implication that you should be working during lunch.
Now, in the physical workplace, especially in a salaried job, it’s sort of… happens that way anyway? Maybe you leave the premises for lunch; co-workers come with you; you end up talking about work. You maybe eat lunch at your desk, there being no where else to go.
But in remote work, it’s very healthy to get away from your computer for a bit and it’s very healthy to log off at a certain time. I was very impressed (and thankful!) for these leaders for trying to lead by example. Not only did they push back against the term, they asked those of us who were scheduling these kind of learning hours to avoid the lunch hour.
The song is kind of meandering and personal to Logic so I can’t really recommend it for any casual listeners: but this last section I found pretty meaningful when I heard it. This song, more than any specific advice, convinced me to try to homeschool this year. (It also has a lot of explicit language in it, if that’s not your thing)
The final caveat: I also know that I’m incredibly lucky / privileged / blessed in this regard. I’ve moved “careers” three times in the last ten years (all in the broad umbrella of software development) but I’ve been able to do that because I have a wife with stable income and several employers who were willing to invest a lot into their employees in terms of development and time for innovation.