Misadventures with "Maximize Strengths, Manage Gaps"
Local maxima, middle management, and space opera
Consider saving this post for later if you like Vernor Vinge, haven’t yet read Deepness in the Sky, and dislike spoilers.
I love space opera. I have a few favorite authors including Peter Watts, Iain M. Banks, and Vernor Vinge. Watts is an absolute downer - pick up Blindsight if you are in the mood for a dread inducing exploration of human nature and our future prospects as a species. Banks likes to mix comedy with his tragedy but is no less brutal than Watts.
Thank heavens for Vinge. I’ve made my way through his trilogy, Zones of Thought, which manages to mostly avoid soul crushing endings. My favorite book of his is the second in the series, A Deepness in the Sky. This is a multi-threaded epic with deeply developed characters, big sci-fi ideas, and myriad plot twists. Core to the story is a bioweapon called Focus. Focus is used by an evil hegemony, the Emergents, to enslave their competitors. It works by growing the victim’s innate abilities at the expense of all else and then induces hyper fixation. Victims are stripped of their humanity, doing only what they do best at the direction of their supervisors to the point of exhaustion.
You can think of this as the application of Maximizing Strengths and Managing Gaps (MSMG) on steroids. It is portrayed as an act of depraved evil.
Of course, in real life MSMG is not a tool for subjugating captive populations. Focus is evil primarily because it subverts free will and fixates its victims to the point of self destruction.
Absent abuse by bad guys, MSMG is simply a heuristic which seeks to maximize potential for achievement. It does this by steering you toward the local maximum. We use MSMG because it is cheaper (easier and faster) than exploring the entire map. This works well in the short and mid-term. It’s fine longterm, too, assuming the local max is comparable to the global max. What about when it isn’t, though?
Today I will dig into some of the edge cases where MSMG fails and why I think this happens. I will do so by exploring MSMG’s impact on my own career before wrapping things up with some suggestions for what to do instead.
A brief explanation of MSMG and the thinking behind it
Before we jump into the flaws, though, let’s first understand what MSMG is trying to do and why. As mentioned above, MSMG seeks to maximize individual potential for achievement. In order to practice MSMG, you pour the majority of your investment (time, energy, and funds) into growing your strengths while putting just enough resources into your gaps in order to function or meet some external bar. Are you a full stack engineer with excellent server side skills but have no idea what you’re doing in the front-end? MSMG tells you to hit the gas on your server side skills while making sure you know just enough javascript and React to debug front-end issues when you’re on-call1. You simply get way more bang for your buck by investing in existing strengths because making progress on gaps is harder and slower than making progress on things you are already good at.
A limited heuristic
This sounds pretty reasonable on the surface. Why torture yourself making incremental progress with a thing you aren’t very good at when you could shine with the things that you excel in? As I assert above, MSMG is, at its heart, a heuristic. Heuristics are approximate and I believe that MSMG can be quite imprecise in some of its critical edge cases. That imprecision comes from a combination of the following:
Implicit assumptions about the reasons behind a given gap. Do you assume the gap is due to some innate quality? Do you assume that all the right support has been given at the right time with the right frame of mind? Do you simply assume that this will always be a gap no matter what you do?
Vulnerability to cognitive bias. Where do those implicit assumptions come from? It depends. Perhaps the assumption is well informed, perhaps not. When the assumption is implicit instead of explicit, though, we leave ourselves more vulnerable to cognitive bias.
Over-indexing on the short to medium term. Focusing on short and medium term goals can make a lot of sense depending on where you are right now. You may have financial goals, for example, that need to be met in the next few years; maximizing your strengths while making a bare minimum investment in your gaps may be the best way to get to a role where you are adequately compensated within timeline. If you are able to consider a longer time horizon, though, then MSMG may not be the way to go.
Mt. Middle Management
My spike is people management and so I have a soft spot for one of Deepness’ side characters, Anne Reynolt. Anne is revealed toward the end to have been the Frenkisch Orc, a much maligned-by-the-bad-guys resistance leader who was ultimately conquered and subjected to Focus. Focusing Anne had been a long shot. Her strengths lay in a broad set of interconnected leadership skills, in particular the ability to read people, leverage their strengths and bring out the best in them. These are thought to be incompatible with Focus but it is, to the bad guys’ pleasant surprise, successful and they are rewarded with a brilliant and perfectly complicit Director of Human Resources.
Anyway.
When I was a junior TLM (Tech Lead + Manager) I appeared to be on an upward curve for people management but struggled to push forward my first sizable technical design. This is something that all engineers were actually expected to do before taking on a TL role; I was already behind. I struggled primarily because I didn’t have any background in systems design - none in school and nothing from my time with previous employers. I was also expected to lead systems design interviews but couldn’t pass the training; I simply didn’t have a strong enough framework to determine what did and did not characterize good design.
I vividly remember coming to my manager in tears, frustrated that I could not make progress and worried that I would never be seen as technical enough for the org. My manager kindly told me that I could choose to invest in systems design and they would absolutely support me; they even offered a specific mentor. But maybe, they suggested, I would be better served by focusing on the things I was best at.
I didn’t like hearing this. I wanted to be seen as technical. In retrospect I can say that I actually was fairly technical but with a specific gap in systems design. I wish I had seen it this way back then and taken my manager up on their alternative offer for mentorship but I didn’t. Instead, I took a deep breath and chose my path. I would be a people manager first, technical lead second.
As I grew in my role it was obvious how I could maximize my strengths. I took on more people, tackled tougher performance challenges and eventually became a manager of managers. I enjoyed supporting my engineers’ growth, building healthy teams, and partnering effectively with my product counterparts to deliver real value for our clients.
Managing my system design gap was all about delegation. As I gained people I also gained engineers who were expert in the thing I lacked. I absorbed enough know-how to ask thoughtful questions and knew who to pull in for second opinions from elsewhere in the org. Operating this way sometimes felt as if I were flying blind, entirely reliant on the expertise of others, but it seemed to work. I never did become certified in Systems Design interviews; I took on Behavioral interviews instead. MSMG appeared to serve me well.
The tipping point came when I took on my first (and then second) director role. With this change my system design gap morphed into something much bigger: a technical vision gap.
Now, technical vision is not the only kind of vision that orgs and their directors need. They also require cultural and organizational vision. How do your teams work together? What defines your org’s values? How are you best structured to meet goals and withstand the stressors of change?
Some of the best leaders I know do not themselves own technical vision. They delegate this piece to a Principal or Architect while owning cultural vision and organizational vision. I did the same.
That wasn’t doing it for me, though. The cultural vision piece was important but not adequately energizing on its own. Organizational vision is important, too, but how often are you actually exercising this skill? Hopefully not too often - frequent use makes me think of frequent reorgs which can be quite damaging to org health.
So what is a director without vision?
A middle manager. I had ascended my mountain.
I found it about as fulfilling as popular culture would have you believe. I eventually left my director role behind and took on a new job at another company as a senior engineer.
The woulda, coulda, shoulda machine
It’s all well and good to say that I should have invested in my systems design gap earlier when it was a cheaper problem to solve. Can we really say what would have happened with any kind of certainty if I had?
No, of course not. I can say with some confidence that I would have been a stronger and more confident leader if I had a greater foundation for technical vision. I can’t actually go back and take the path not taken, though.
I do, however, have the privilege of having witnessed and led the career development of many other engineers. Thanks to my people management spike and its resultant career path, I have a large enough N to pull out a few stories of engineers who, under MSMG, hit an initial plateau before experiencing accelerated growth in their previously managed gap areas.
What changed? What was the catalyst for the turnaround?
A new manager.
Gaps which had been identified and managed under MSMG turned into actual strengths with a change in manager. It looked kind of like this:
Why? Was it just the quality of the manager? I will avoid going into the details for the sake of those engineers’ and managers’ privacy but no - the engineers who come to mind for me went from one strong manager to another. I do, however, notice the following:
Each engineer had one or more spikes (areas they were disproportionately strong in relative to other areas) and managed gaps
Each engineer was quite smart and driven
Each engineer experienced an inflection point in their growth relative to their gap a few months after a new manager took on the team
The original manager (sometimes this was me) had pre-existing notions around the drivers of the individual engineer’s gaps (e.g. temperament)
The new manager was an excellent teacher, was expert in the area for which their engineer had a gap, and was… well… new; they were a fresh pair of eyes.
My interpretation of the above is that if an engineer is strong and driven enough to have spikes then, with the right mentorship and fresh perspective, they can do much much better than simply manage their gap.
Does it always work? No. I have other stories of engineers fitting this description whose gaps remained in place despite multiple attempts with excellent support and new perspectives. I also wouldn’t advocate for switching managers just to turn a perceived gap into something else. Switching managers comes with its own risks and may very well result in a less desirable change in career trajectory.
There are enough of these positive stories, though, to make me believe that it is worthwhile to put MSMG to the side and bring in the right mentor to determine if a spiky engineer’s gap is truly intractable or if it is simply indicative of an underdeveloped skill.
Conclusion
MSMG can get you to the mountain range, but it can miss the highest peak. The earlier you invest in a gap, the less costly and more navigable it will be down the road.
If you have a gap and it bothers you or if you are given the MSMG talk and it doesn’t sit well, get stubborn. You don’t have to switch managers! If you feel that your existing manager is invested in your growth, ask for targeted mentorship and time.
If you are a manager, think long and hard before applying MSMG to your spiky engineer. What are the contributing factors to the gap? What implicit assumptions have you made? Question those assumptions. Find the right teacher at the right time for this person and then give them the space to explore the map.
I will close with one final point: MSMG doesn’t necessarily take into account personal fulfillment - changing the z-axis, currently defined as potential for achievement, gets you a different result.
I had my second baby about a year after leaving my director role for a senior engineering one. I then came back from maternity leave and was hit by the wave of unresolved burnout which had followed me from the previous few years. I missed being with my baby during the day and I wanted to be there for my kindergartener when he got off the bus. I had the rare opportunity to optimize for fulfillment instead of achievement or compensation and I took it. I have been on a career pause for a little over a year now and have found that I am immensely happy chasing after my toddler and writing during his naps. The time that I have gotten back with my oldest is priceless.
I do not know what the next mountain range is. Soon enough my toddler will be ready for preschool and I will be ready to re-enter the workforce. I have no idea what that will look like. I do know, though, that I intend to enjoy the act of discovery.
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