Photo by Piotr Musioł / Unsplash

Don’t Put Yourself in a Box

Personal Development and Career Growth

• Apr 26, 2024

Summary

• Companies need "boxes" (job classifications) to grow and function. This makes hiring, compensation, and career development tractable, and promotes fair treatment of employees.

• If the boxes are too large, a company can't grow. If the boxes are too small, innovation and ownership are smothered.

• The size of a company's boxes is directly proportional to the level of trust employees have for management.

• To get hired, put yourself in the box the company is hiring for. Tailor your resume to highlight those skills and experiences; put yourself out there as a “specialist” in the thing they’re hiring for.

• If aiming for a promotion, demonstrate how your work embodies the behaviors and impacts of the next-level “box”.

• Don't let those boxes define you. Your value and identity goes far beyond any job description.

Hot Take

Businesses can't function at scale unless they put people in standardized "boxes"; if you want to be hired and to grow your career, you need to understand that, and understand how to work with those boxes. On the other hand, you can't be reduced to a box, and if you tie your identity to those boxes in your thinking, you'll limit yourself in ways that are unnatural and harmful.

This is like the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, both alive and dead at the same time. Like with quantum mechanics and the cat, whether you’re in a box or not depends on who’s doing the measuring: your employer, or you.

My Box Origin Story

My introduction to the idea of “boxes” came in the late 2000s, when I noticed that people at Google were having a hard time getting hired or promoted if they were doing “operational” work that didn’t involve much traditional program management. Whether they were being considered for hiring or promotion, they were told, essentially, “You’ve done some great work, but it’s not program management; we’re not sure what role/ladder is a fit for you, but it’s not this one. Next!”

This was clearly a problem—even though they didn’t do PERT diagrams and Gantt charts, Googlers did important work in these roles, and roadblocks to hiring and promoting them created both operational and retention issues as jobs went vacant and high-performing employees felt their value wasn’t being recognized. As a member of both Program Management hiring and promotion committees at Google I had more visibility to this issue than most others; I spoke to a friend of mine in People Operations (Google’s HR), who turned out to already be well aware of this problem from repeatedly dealing with upset hiring managers and frustrated promotion candidates. Together, we hatched a plan: to create a new job ladder (job classification) for these “operational” program managers to move to, that was better suited to the type of work they did.

We gathered some data, wrote a proposal, and set up a meeting with the SVP responsible for all engineering at Google. The SVP had been in quite a few meetings I’d presented to before; I knew him to be not only a brilliant and capable leader, but a genuinely nice guy, too, so I had no worries about the meeting. Imagine my shock then, when this “genuinely nice guy” started yelling at us, telling my partner and I that we were going to wreck Google culture!

I vividly remember what he said: “DON’T PUT PEOPLE IN BOXES!” He told us Google needed some job classifications, but that our culture required those classifications to be both broad and vague so both employees and their managers wouldn’t be blocked from doing whatever needed to be done. The worst thing we could do, the SVP told us, was to make the classification “boxes” so small people could say “that’s not my job”—which is precisely what he saw us proposing to do!

A year or two before this Google had shifted from having just three job types (over-broadly, they were “engineers”, “technical people that don’t do engineering”, and “everyone else”) to having around around a dozen (one of which was my ladder, “Technical Program Managers”). There had been a lot of debate about whether those boxes were already too small… but the senior team had decided 12–15 job categories were acceptable—enough large boxes to make hiring, career development, and compensation more efficient, but not so many that jobs were defined too narrowly. We left his office dejected, but also enlightened: it said a lot to me that this SVP thought it so important to Google’s culture, a lesson I’ve never forgotten. (Times have changed though; Google now has many more job ladders, including at least 5–10 “operational” ladders broken off from Program Management well beyond what my friend and I had proposed).

Why Companies Need Boxes

Why do we need “boxes” (job classifications) at all? Wouldn’t the world be better if everyone just did whatever they saw that needed doing? The value of boxes to corporations comes down to two things: scaling and trust.

Scaling

If you’re in a small startup, you want employees who can wear many hats, and who won’t feel limited by things like job titles. Because there are so few employees, and because you know everyone personally and need everyone you hire to have an outsized impact, you can afford to put a lot of energy into every individual hiring decision. Compensation planning is pretty lightweight and customized, both because there aren’t many people to deal with, and because you want to compensate people based on their contribution to the business, regardless of what their title is. Everyone is a “special snowflake”.

That changes quickly as your startup grows—you cross a line where it becomes infeasible to treat every hire as a unique individual, with bespoke hiring and compensation. This is where “boxes” become necessary: you have to put people into categories, with standards for how hiring, compensation, and career progression work for each box—it’s the only way you can scale the company.