Alex Toth Upholding and helping professionals to pragmatically apply theory to real problems and grow into leadership.

The Stinky Job Advantage

Become the respected, trusted expert you aspire. Gain, authority, impact and status.

Early morning. Quiet still . Your kid complains of a monster under their bed. You check under the bed.

Indeed, there is a monster. But what surprises you most is that it’s the exact same monster that used to live under your bed when you were a child.

In engineering, that monster has a name: Impostor Syndrome.

It’s that creeping sense of insufficiency. The self-doubt when you first look at a massively complex systems architecture and think, ‘I have no idea what I am doing.’

I know that monster well. I almost let it paralyse me.

But I found a way to turn that into career leverage. The kind that gets you promoted, builds undeniable credibility, and drastically increases your income.

A word of warning: this only works if you're willing to put in the work and take the pain of uncertainty!

If you're not willing to then now is the time to close this email and get on with your day. No hard feelings. Save yourself the time.

Still here?
read on ..

Early in my career I noticed something: there were always messy, painful problems lying around that no one else wanted to touch because they were too tedious or ‘outside the standard process’. Not the exciting, glamorous work.

They stank! ...
Still. There's value in these:

At one point I felt I couldn't stand to just act like a cog being told what to do and I decided to attack the monster head-on!

David J. Schwartz writes about thinking big and notes that action cures fear!

So I started volunteering for the unclaimed messes. Starting to do the work that others avoid kick-started my career.

Our manual diagnostics testing was a soul-crushing bottleneck that took two full weeks to execute. No one wanted to fix it. I raised my hand.

I didn’t know everything about the problem I tried to address. I had no idea what the solution could look like. But I went in anyway and figured it out on the fly. I built a custom automated tool in CANoe (which I later called the ACTTer tool) and I reduced that two-week manual grind to 20 minutes.

I did the exact same thing later with Requirements Engineering. I saw chaos in how we captured stakeholder needs so I brought in the EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) framework.

All those acronyms don't matter don't worry. Point is that I started to do something about it.

IMPERFECTLY!

I wasn’t a genius who knew all the answers upfront. I'm still not one, just a mediocre operator who just takes things one by one and fixes them to make his life easy.

I just tackled the problems one by one, building a system that accumulated many undeniable small wins. Like Scott Adams suggests in his framework of systems over goals.

You can undeniably achieve these exact same results.

With the double advantage of raising your credibility and expertise, but also self-confidence!

Competence comes after you volunteer, not before.

You do not need to wait until you feel ‘ready’ or until you have another degree. When an opportunity for something new appears you must jump on it.

You will figure it out in the trenches. By taking ownership of the problem you become the ‘expert’ by default. The person management looks out for counsel and entrust with leadership responsibility. Remember: there's no one else. It's an easy picking without competition.

Your reputation grows exactly in proportion to the size of the problems you are willing to solve.

Actionable Tip: Look around your project right now. What is the one tedious task or chaotic process everyone complains about but no one claims?

Stop waiting for permission. Claim it tomorrow. Fix it. Document the win. Make sure it’s visible during your next appraisal.

What opportunity do you see hiding in plain sight at your job right now?

Hit reply and tell me. I genuinely want to know.

And if your immediate thought is:

‘That’s not doable in my company,’ or

‘I don’t have the authority’

reply and tell me why you think that’s true.

I constantly consult with other experienced engineers to cover my own blind spots. I see it so often: a massive career roadblock can usually be solved by exposing an obvious small detail in a 5-minute conversation.

Let me be your sounding board. Hit reply and let’s clear up the confusion.