Don’t Put Yourself a Box

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. The alternative to this would be to allow an increasing number of managers to continue bespoke hiring and comp within their own areas… which leads to the second issue, trust.

Trust

Because startups are so risky, the ability of potential employees to trust the founders is a big deal—if they don’t appear trustworthy, they’re not going to attract the kind of people they need. As the company grows, the number of managers that both employees and senior management need to trust grows, too. At some point it becomes too much: employees’ willingness to “have faith” that managers will make fair and appropriate decisions drops lower and lower, so much so that everything will fall apart without the enforced fairness of standardized boxes.

💡

The size of the boxes in a company are directly proportional to the amount of trust employees have in management

Labor unions are the endgame for this sort of trust problem. One of the big rallying points for companies trying to avoid unionization is always to try to convince employees that management has their best interests at heart, and can be trusted. As a rule, unions have close to zero trust for management, and—as a direct consequence—unions often push for the smallest “boxes” possible: boxes for very narrow roles, subdivided by seniority, and sometimes further subdivided by location. They see this as the best way to ensure fairness in an environment where management can’t be trusted at all. This is the ultimate version of the cultural harm my SVP was worried about.

Boxes and Hiring

Scaling and trust drive companies to put employees into standard categories, or boxes. How do those boxes affect hiring, and, understanding this, how can you better “sell” yourself as a candidate for jobs?

Most companies above startup size need to hire for boxes, for the reasons given above; it’s just too much work to do anything else. It would be wonderful if recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers had the time to carefully read and savor every resume that came in, and then spend time meeting with every candidate to pull out nuances that didn’t come across clearly in their job histories. That’s not the world we live in, though; there are too many candidates to get through, and too few hours in the day.

The usual practice is for recruiters to work with hiring managers to identify standard requirements (boxes, again!) that can be used to screen out people and reduce the number of candidates they need to go into more depth with (hiring managers will usually never see any of those dropped candidates). Those standard requirements are typically based on a template used for all jobs of the same ladder and level, extended with custom specs tailored to the particular role being hired for. In the language I’ve been using in this article, the job requirements are a very clear “box”, and the screening process only lets through candidates whose “shapes” fit that box, like a child’s sorting toy.

Source: Flickr user rosipaw, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

When there are lots of candidates for a tiny number of jobs, the recruiters don’t magically get more time to handle the extra candidates—instead, they often deal with the overload by tightening the screening criteria even further: that is, by making the boxes smaller.

Behaviorally, the shift from “startup” to “big company”, and the shift from rapid growth to slow growth, show up to candidates as employers become increasingly selective. Startups like generalists; big companies like specialists. If there are few people vying for each job, hiring managers won't care as much about past experience; if there are many candidates, they’ll only be interested in people who’ve previously done the same kind job they’re hiring for. These trends are amplified when business is tough and hiring budgets are thin: hiring managers become nervous about using their scarce headcount on unproven candidates—they need people who have already shown success in exactly the job the manager needs done.

💡

I’m writing this in April, 2024, in a time of high interest rates and widespread layoffs in tech, and when there are lots of AI-based screening tools being offered that promise to save recruiters time; you do the math about the current hiring market…

Besides being lucky, there are two powerful ways to cut through “small box screening”:

• Put yourself in the box they’re hiring for. This means customizing your resume for each job you apply for, or at least for each type of job you’re going after. If they’re hiring for someone with experience doing X, focus your resume on how you’ve been successful doing X (or at least, things like X) in the past. When a recruiter or hiring manager looks at your resume, you want them to jump out of their chair and exclaim: “wow, this person is exactly what we’ve been looking for!”
• Pull a Kobayashi Maru by bypassing the whole screening process: use your network of personal connections to get an introduction to the hiring manager. This is probably the single most powerful thing you can do because it exposes you to the hiring manager as a whole person, instead of a peg that fits in a box.

Boxes and Promotions

A similar situation arises with promotions: the people making decisions about whether you should be promoted or not don’t (usually) have the familiarity with you, or the time, to make a customized decision… and doing so would create fairness issues. Instead, they look at whether you fit the next-level box. I want to talk about two parts to this: one related to the job ladder, and one related to the level.

Job Ladder

I vividly remember one promotion committee I served on, where we were deciding whether or not to promote an individual who had unquestionably performed at the next level… but the work they’d done wasn’t consistent with the job ladder (work classification) they were assigned to. They had delivered amazing business impact through striking personal initiative, leadership, and hard work… but what they’d done had nothing in common with the sort of work expected for the job ladder, or “box”, they were in. Should we promote them, or not? We debated the question for far longer than we’d spent on any other candidate we’d reviewed, called in HR support to advise us, and… we couldn’t decide. The rules were that “if you can’t decide, the decision needs to be ‘no’”, so we ended by turning down the promotion and recommending the person for a large cash bonus, instead. Our decision was appealed, and the appeal was denied, too, for the same reason: despite the great work, the candidate’s work was outside the box.

Sometimes the process and people deciding on your promotions will be more amenable to “outside the box” work, but really, regardless of who’s making the promotion decision, and what their “rules of engagement” are, your chances of success will be greatly enhanced by you being aware of the box imposed by your job ladder as you go about your work, and as you explain that work to others. To be clear: I’m not saying to limit what you work on—that’s the “not my job” problem the SVP at the beginning of the article was talking about! What I am saying is that you should proactively plan how you will describe your work in ways consistent with the box.

For example, if you’re a Program Manager and spent a lot of time creating product requirements (the work of a Product Manager at most companies), when you and your direct manager describe it to others, be sure you both talk about (for example) the work you did to understand what other work was dependent on having the requirements, how you delegated and tracked some of the work on market research, bringing it all together into a single document, how you built consensus on the requirements, communicated them to the engineering team, and then managed scope creep—all things that are part of the description of the Program Management box. This makes it easy for the people who will decide on your promotion to say “Huzzah! They did both the Program and Product Management”, instead of saying “This was great Product Management, too bad they’re a Program Manager.”

Job Level

Really, this is a topic that deserves (and will get) an article all on its own, but I think it’s relevant to surface it here: in general, higher level jobs aren’t just harder/bigger/broader versions of lower level jobs: they’re different “boxes” altogether. The next-level behaviors senior people are looking for are often behaviors that aren’t exercised much, if at all, at your current level. I think of these as “phase changes”, analogous to the phase changes water goes through as it turns from solid ice to liquid to gas as you turn up the heat: it’s always the same water, but it looks and behaves differently in each phase. Some of these transitions are more abrupt and noticeable than others, but they’re definitely there. At Google for example, there are noticeable differences between all levels, but the “phase changes” are especially acute between levels 5 and 6, and between levels 7 and 8.

The takeaway here is that you can greatly increases your chances of success by understanding what those “phase changes” are (more senior mentors can be super helpful in this)—what’s qualitatively different about the next-level box—and then work with your manager to proactively plan how you will describe your work in ways that highlight those qualitative differences.

Boxes and You

So after telling you about the importance of “boxes”, now I’m going to tell you… to avoid them!

This sure looks like a paradox, but let me explain!

We’ve been talking about how companies, managers, and recruiters use boxes, and how, because of scaling and trust, it’s just not practical for them to operate in any other way. We’d hope that they don’t make the boxes too small, and that they have good judgment in how they apply them… but boxes are a fact of life in the world of work.

The place where you should avoid boxes isn’t in the workplace, though: it's in your head. It’s completely natural for people’s occupation and organization to become a part of their identity… but it's harmful to let that go too far: you are not your job, and you are not your job title.

A lot has been written about the psychology of tying one’s identity to their job, but the thing I want to focus on here is how putting yourself in a box in your own thinking (e.g. seeing yourself as a “Product Manager”, as a “Googler”, and so on) can mean putting counterproductive limits on your own behavior, and your own thinking about what’s possible.

💡

You’re much more than, and much more capable than, the box you’re in.

From a career perspective, it’s a good practice to periodically take some time out and take stock of where you are now and how that fits with where you want to go. If you do this sort of self-assessment you’ll often decide you’re basically on the right path and just need to make some minor adjustments… but sometimes you’ll realize that the path you’re on won’t take you where you want to be, and that bigger changes are needed: maybe you should ask your manager for different responsibilities? Change teams? Change job ladders? Even change companies? All of those require seeing beyond the box you’re in.

Even though you need to describe yourself in terms of boxes to get where you are now, if your own thinking is constrained by those boxes, it will be hard for you to see that maybe the best path for you is quite different from the one you’re on. Maybe you should change teams? Roles? Departments? Even change your city, or your employer? Don’t get me wrong: I know plenty of people who’ve been in more or less the same job, in the same place, working for the same company, for many years, and they’re very happy… but it’s also common for people stay in the same role because they see that role defining them, instead of just being something they do.

How You Can Bring Order From Chaos, Today

Here are some things you can do now to apply these ideas:

• If you’re looking for a job now, describe yourself as being well inside the box your potential employer is hiring for: tune your resume to the job you’re going after. You should have a different resume at least for every “class” of job, and sometimes for each specific job. It can be hard to do it if you’re going after several types of job at the same time, but your LinkedIn resume needs to support the more focused, specialized resumes you’re using. Make sure you highlight the skills and expertise called out in the job ads you’re applying to, and talk about your skill and experience in that area. No one hires generalists, so don’t call yourself one in your resume; instead, describe yourself as a specialist in the very thing your target company is hiring for.
• If you’re working toward a promotion now, put yourself in the box you want to be promoted to. Ask your manager and mentors to help you understand the heart of the next-level box, and think about how you can describe your work, behavior, and accomplishments in terms of that box.
• Don’t tie your identity to the box you’re in. You are a complete person with a personality, skills, and experience that transcend any mere box, and if you tie up your identity with the boxes other people put you in, you will limit the paths you can take and the things you can accomplish.

What Do You Think?

I'd love to hear about your experiences with boxes! If you're a paid supporter of this newsletter (hint, hint!) you can add comments below.

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Forrest Thiessen

I'm a geek who's worked at Google building data centers, networks, developer tools, and more for 17 years. I'm interested in science, technology, space, history, scifi, law, urbanism, and economics.

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