Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

Only somewhat related, but in my line of work (corporate law), where we work on a lot of different kinds of transactions, I find that my experience of working on a particular type of transaction can be roughly divided into five stages:<p>- Stage 1: The first few times you work on a particular type of transaction, you are completely lost. You&#x27;ve never seen these documents before, it all feels alien and scary (bearing in mind you are probably at an early stage in your career at this point). You need someone more senior to hold your hand through it all, and you feel like you&#x27;re asking a million questions.<p>- Stage 2: You&#x27;ve gotten your head around the basic structure and don&#x27;t feel so useless. You&#x27;re learning a lot with every deal, which is exciting. You&#x27;re still asking a lot of questions but they are more intelligent questions, and you are able to contribute meaningfully.<p>- Stage 3: You are by now quite experienced at this type of transaction. You can pretty much run things yourself. You love doing this work because you are good at it, you can speak confidently about it and people trust you with it. Hopefully by this stage, you have someone more junior who is just feeling their way through Stage 1, and you can support them.<p>- Stage 4: You&#x27;ve done so many of these deals that they all start to feel the same and it gets a bit boring. Hopefully by this stage the junior has moved on to Stage 2. They can at least handle the most tedious stuff, and with your support they are also getting familiar with the more complicated stuff.<p>- Stage 5: Your junior (not really a &quot;junior&quot; anymore) has moved on to Stage 3 and can take the day-to-day running of the deals out of your hands. You remain involved mainly in a supervisory role, making sure quality of service remains high and dealing with the occasional novel issue that crops up. But in general you have a lot more time now, to work on other types of transaction, and of course to go out and build out new client relationships so that the work keeps flowing. And hopefully you have a second junior moving into Stage 1 to repeat the cycle.

&gt; If you’re doing what you’re told to do, they are paying you too much.<p>I&#x27;m glad Kent Beck got that one out. I work for a Big Tech that pays (comparatively) well, and sometimes there is lot of ambiguity. Some new hires have a hard time adapting, and complain that they lack direction or have nothing to do. When these kind of companies pay you big bucks, part of the job is to be proactive at finding and solving the problems in your organization.

I agree in principle and practiced this for many years. But I moved into a role where there is simply no time. I work too much just to keep up with the normal workstream and while I maintain the list, there is no chance I get to it which is even more depressing.<p>Gotta have a job that allows you that extra time to explore.

I like this a lot but I think the number can be different depending on the company.<p>In my company we have “let yourself be nerd sniped” as an core cultural value, I think we’d be closer to 60&#x2F;30&#x2F;10 or something like that. But it’s hard to tell for sure because sometimes the 10 blows up into a mad 5 week rabbit hole quest with, often but not always, spectacular results. Would suck if we’d not have those because some boss said 10% fun stuff is the max. I guess it balances out over the year but attaching a number makes it a rule. So on second thought, maybe less explicit can be better?

A few observations<p>- I find 5% for any investments very low. It is hard to get deeper into a new topic with that level. Our work has very high context switching costs.<p>- at the moment I work one day on another project requiring a fair amount of learning. While I learn a lot this way I found the two project setup exhausts my ability to push yet another set of things forward. There are limits to my ability to manage initiatives.<p>- the whole agile treadmill can be leveraged by management against self management. I found slowing down things and pushing myself to explore alternatives in my 80% block helps a bit to stem the tide.

Aside: has anyone ever subscribed to a substack blog from this banner or do we all just press continue reading?

I wholeheartedly agree with this but want to add that the 80&#x2F;15&#x2F;5 split aren’t set in stone. It’s more like risk tolerance. The more you spend on the riskier activities (not exactly what you’re asked to do), the higher the chance of failure but the greater the reward. You can drive your team or organization in a completely different direction.

Fully agreed, though the exact proportion may or may not be applicable for the particular position. I&#x27;ve progressed in my career by doing exactly this and see how it has benefited me relative to those who don&#x27;t do it (or just aren&#x27;t interested in it). I&#x27;ve been lucky to have managers that have supported this by checking me when I&#x27;ve taken on too much and urged me to assign tasks to more junior team members (which in itself turned from the &quot;other&quot; work into my main work). It results in a healthy team where all those who are willing have the opportunity to grow and expand their skillsets.

&gt; If you’re doing what you’re told to do, they are paying you too much.<p>Not keen on this mindset. I’m glad to keep myself marketable, but that’s my business. My company’s business is: am I making what you want? Good. Pay me.

Very good and simple pattern. Not only for yourself but also for organizational design.

I only read the headline, so I&#x27;m going all-in on Clojure&#x2F;Datomic off the bat at a new job. Half kidding.

This is interesting!