I Am a Technician, Not a Strategist

Wow that’s wild, 7 months passed and I wrote nothing.

Of course, this isn’t an apology for being absent, because nobody noticed. If a tree falls you stop publishing in the woods to a blog that nobody reads, does it make a sound does anybody give two fucks? No.

Luckily that isn’t the point of this blog. The point is a reflection on my career strengths.

I was recently put into a “team lead” position, where I am expected to be a leader and make strategic decisions as well as execute technical tasks such as producing code. For a long time, I’ve had a latent awareness that strategic thinking is not my strong suit, but recently it has been abundantly clear to me that I am not a strategist. I am a technician. I excel at efficiently producing high quality technical solutions to business problems. I am fast, I am exacting, I love what I do and I am very good at it.

Strategy is a lot harder for me. My leading hypothesis for this condition is that I simply haven’t practiced strategy as much. It’s hard to practice strategy in lower level IC (individual contributor) roles because nobody gives a shit what you have to say about strategy. In most corporate environments, strategy is expressly forbidden unless you have a high ranking position. Most of my career has been spent in low-to-mid-range IC positions, so it isn’t surprising that my “strategy” muscles are underdeveloped.

My challenge now is to figure out how to augment that skillset, given the requirements of my new position. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I love the strategy parts as much as I love the technical parts. I believe this is partly due to a bias towards my strengths: that is, I prefer to do things I’m good at because it makes me feel good about myself. I believe that I can also learn to love strategy work once I get better at it. In addition, I expect that I don’t want to be doing mid-level IC work for the rest of my career, so I think this is a good opportunity to grow and try something new. I have some book recs, maybe I will finally read some of them.