Keep your career sparkling

One principle that accelerated my career from internship to directorship with 5 promotions in 10 years!

I had an accelerated career at Google from internship to directorship with 5 promotions in 10 years! Whenever I talk about this fact, I’m asked all the time how I did this while also managing parenthood, hobbies and everything else.

On the day I announced my decision to leave Google to my team, I was flooded with a lot of questions about why I am leaving. I was at a loss for words to describe why because I wasn’t leaving to run away from Google. If you’ve read my LinkedIn post, you can tell I very much enjoyed my time at Google and still endorse it as a great place to work! Then why was I leaving??

The answer to the “why are you leaving” question is the same as the one asking for the secret of my accelerated career. To understand this answer, let’s look at an interesting fact about my Google career:

I did not hold the same job for longer than a year!

Surprised? Let me illustrate looking back over the last 5 years:

• 2020 - Senior manager growing a brand new team in India during the pandemic when no travel was possible and everyone was WFH. First time managing an org across 2 continents (Seattle US, Bangalore India).

• 2021 - Promoted to eng director and switched from GCP Compute to Google Workspace. Also started exec MBA at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

• 2022 - Eng director balancing working parent duties with exec MBA and Google director job.

• 2023 - Eng director stepping up to manage all of Workspace Engineering Productivity (~100 FTE in 2 sites → ~200+ FTE in 5+ sites) while still balancing working parent duties with exec MBA.

• 2024 - Outgoing eng director transitioning duties to my successor and preparing for my next adventure.

The Learning Zone

The key point I want to illustrate with this snippet of my career journey is that it is very easy to get habituated to our lives and especially to our careers which then turn into just jobs. To keep learning and growing, you have to keep changing things and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and into the learning zone.

The Hidden Brain Podcast Episode "Making the World Sparkle Again" talks a lot about this. What the podcast mentions about life in general is especially true for careers.

Keep your career sparkling by introducing changes in your job at regular frequency.

I find the yearly frequency appropriate to evaluate and make changes to my career.

Why? Because I believe in using change as a learning agent. You can do this with the learning zone model.

Too many changes too fast might put you in the panic zone. Too few will leave you in the comfort zone. Learning doesn’t happen in either of those.

A year is the right time-frame to stay in the career learning zone. It also nicely coincides with annual review cycles and career development conversations with your manager(s) in most companies.

Now maybe you are wondering why didn’t I just find another opportunity within Google? If you noticed, even in this brief career snippet, you can see that I have done that many times already. In my 15 years at Google I worked in 6 different product areas on a combined total of 15+ products. I knew that this time I needed something even more different to keep challenging myself and keep learning. Hence the big move!

TL;DR

• Habituation is a human trait. Getting used to things is important for our brain evolutionarily so it can focus on the new and the unexpected.

• In your career journey this means you will end up flat-lining your learning if you stay in the same job/role for too long.

• You don’t have to make big changes to your job - introducing small variants regularly can keep you learning and your career sparkling.

• The Learning Zone is sandwiched between the Panic Zone and the Comfort Zone so it is important to pick the right frequency to introduce changes in your career.

• A yearly frequency coincides nicely with most annual review cycles and should keep you well into the Learning Zone.

Readers, what change will you make in your job this year to help you grow?

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