Be Honest with Yourself

There’s no better way to wind up in an unhappy situation than to lie to yourself. What are your needs? What are your skills? What do you want in a job? What do you want to avoid? What really matters? Do you really need a given salary? How much time can you spend commuting, away from your spouse and kids? Can you actually do the job you have your eye set on? It’s easy to fool yourself into accepting false answers when you’re itching to get a new job. Far too many people wind up in ill-fitting jobs they hate because they’ve lied to themselves about what was important and what they could do.

Lying up front won’t change the reality of your situation when you finally get started at that new job. If you really hate working with Java, convincing yourself that maybe it’s not so bad isn’t going to help you when you’re up to your elbows in it a month into the new gig. If you’re not actually a Java expert and you’ve fooled your boss into hiring you based on that premise, the outcome isn’t going to be pleasant.

Over the years I’ve had dozens of conversations with people asking for advice about their careers or whether a certain job sounds like a good one. Typically, these conversations go like this:

Steve:

Hey, Andy, I’ve got a second interview coming up with WangoTech! They really seem to like me, and they pay well. I’m finally going to be making what I deserve.

Andy:

Sounds cool, but I didn’t think they had an office out here.

Steve:

Well, it’s down in the city, which is a good hour from Mayberry where I live. But I can listen to recorded books in the car, so that won’t be so bad.

Andy:

I guess not. But it’s a programming job, right?

Steve:

The ad says that it’s for a “system administrator with programming skills,” so I might not be doing programming right off. But I’ll get some programming chops in, y’know?

Andy:

I guess there’s a chance. What kind of shop are they like? I know you love your BSD. Can you at least run a Mac and OS X?

Steve:

(sigh) I don’t think so. When they showed me around, it looked like all Windows everywhere. One of my first jobs would be to convert the intranet sites from Apache to Microsoft IIS. My boss-to-be said that the CTO back at corporate felt that open source was inherently unsafe. But I could probably have a little server as a skunkworks project.

Andy:

Back at corporate? How big are they? Your current shop is, what, a dozen programmers and two sysadmins?

Steve:

Yeah, WangoTech is a big company. There’s corporate and then three branch offices. The branch I’d be in has only 100 programmers. But that’s the smallest branch, so we’d sort of have that startup feel!

Andy:

So, what I’m hearing is that you’re considering taking a job with three times the commute, doing sysadmin work instead of programming, and it’s in a big, corporate, all-Windows, open source--unfriendly environment.

Steve:

I guess it sounds bad, but I’ll finally get paid what I deserve.

Andy:

But I thought you liked it where you are now. Why aren’t you paid what you deserve now?

Steve:

My boss is just an idiot. He doesn’t really respect me, and he doesn’t think that my skills are up to snuff. My last review I got a 2 percent raise, and that’s absurd. I’ve gotta get outta there.

Andy:

It sounds like you don’t want that job but rather a different job or, more precisely, a higher-paying job with more respect.

Steve:

Yeah, I guess. But this one sounds OK, doesn’t it?

Andy:

I guess it could be, but I’m not you. I will point out that every downside I’ve mentioned has been countered with what seems to me to be a half-hearted explanation of how it won’t be so bad. Were I in your situation, I wouldn’t be so optimistic about that. You really think you could do well administering Windows and Exchange Server all day?

Steve:

Well….

If you’re not able to have this sort of inner dialogue with yourself, find someone who will be a good sounding board. It could be your spouse, a friend, a co-worker, or even your parents.^[2] It should be someone who will honestly but compassionately listen to and challenge your plans, without giving you the answers. You’re looking for guidance, not someone to tell you what to do.

This inner honesty is crucial to assessing your goals and wants. As technical problem solvers, we’re accustomed to searching for the facts of a problem so that we can accurately solve and diagnose it. Without accurate facts, we solve the wrong problem or make the original problem even worse. Without being true to yourself, you do the same thing to your job search.