careers

src/docs/goals/careers.md

@@ -12,41 +12,50 @@ the goals of Auxiliary Engineering is to give senior engineers a new archetype
 which feels challenging, rewarding, and well aligned with their long term career
 success and ambitions.
 
-## Influencing without Authority or Dependency
-
-## WORK IN PROGRESS NOTES
-
-- On Dependency
-  - When someone has unique strength in an area, it's too easy to lean on that
-    person
-  - In the short term, dependency can satisfy one's ego, and it's generally the
-    path of least resistance
-  - In the long run, dependency feels bad, and it also bakes a lot of risk into
-    a team
-  - In a 3 month engagement, the end of the project is always looming on the
-    horizon
-  - This makes it easy to challenge knowledge dependency early on, and prevent
-    single points of knowledge failure from forming
-  - Expectations
-
-- Breadth of influence across the organization
-- Regularly shaking up their problem domain
-- Being in a position to identify the meta opportunities and having autonomy to
-  drive innovation
-
-- Senior talent enjoys working on a variety of projects
-- Similar to high-end consultant
-  - Feel more connected to results than a consultant
-  - But it's not a 0 sum game like consulting
-  - There's no incentive to build dependency.
-- Building strength without dependency
-  - There's an explicit goal to NOT build dependency
-  - Healthy knowledge sharing
-  - Feels impactful. One sees the results first hand
-- Large business impact
-  - Moves some of an organizations most talented engineers around the company
-  - Able to influence a large number of projects in healthy ways
-    - Influencing as part of a team, not an outsider disconnected from
-      implementation / results
-  - Avoids "powerpoint" architects. Keeps principal engineers writing code
-    - This helps keep them marketable. It's good for their career.
+## Diversity by Design
+
+Providing a fresh problem space with some familiarity on how to solve it can be
+refreshing for individual contributors. By delivering value in many areas
+through their direct involvement, a shared goal in Aux Eng lies in providing
+technologists with a meaningful degree of influence. That influence comes
+from understanding many of the diverse problems in a software ecosystem.
+Especially in senior technical tracks and leadership roles, this kind of
+exposure and influence in an organization goes a long way in building a career.
+
+A shared goal that benefits both the platform an engineer supports, and the
+engineer itself, is the ability to recognize patterns in a software ecosystem.
+Finding opportunities to shake up the expectations technologists hold about a
+platform or implementation allows for stronger practical innovation. Put
+another way, exposure to diverse problems and people creates pattern
+recognition to build better tools — a benefit to both the platform and the
+career of the recognizer.
+
+## Practical Practice
+
+As platforms (and _careers_) mature, it's easy for individual contributors to
+get bogged down (or caught up) in doing stuff that isn't code or practical
+work. A lot of strategy and planning can take over their schedule, and it's
+easy to become disconnected from the technical problems being solved. Mentally
+and socially, it is exhausting to switch between high-level thinking and
+low-level implementations.
+
+It's our goal in Aux Eng to provide a structure that leaves deliberate time for
+planning and implementation separately. Given that the practice requires a
+subject matter expert to be effective in running an engagement at all, this
+feed into the happiness of the contributor, and is a secondary goal for the
+program. We want our people to feel like they're involved in the organization,
+solving real problems. We also want them to avoid being a "PowerPoint
+architect" who barely has the chance to actually play with the software and
+systems they build.
+
+Through direct involvement, as well as the planning of said involvement, we
+grow the seniority of our individual contributors. We retain senior engineers
+more effectively with these programs by allowing them to "just code again".
+Not only just code, a large part of engagements is coding and working
+with other teams to see how they code, problems they're solving, and how
+it applies to work a core team does. By providing pair programming back to
+exhausted technologists, Aux Eng gives the opportunity to write and read
+code while solving real problems in engagements.
+The knowledge sharing from our senior technical staff, and the satisfaction
+they get from being able to practice their craft is a win-win-win for the
+platform, the contributor, and the team engaging with us.