Expectations

Jobs involve, among many other things, a set of expectations that the employer has of what the employee will do in return for pay and benefits. There’s a lot of axes upon which expectations can be described, such as:

• Implicit vs Explicit: Explicit expectations are communicated to you, whether directly or via documentation that you are expected to read. Implicit expectations are ways in which you are judged that affect your job, but aren’t communicated—you’re expected to either know (if they’re obvious) or discover these.
• Aspirational vs Bare Minimum: Aspirational expectations may reward you if you meet them, but not meeting them will not cause you to be punished. Conversely, bare minimum expectations are ones that you must always meet or else you may be punished.
• Binary vs Spectrum: Binary expectations are simple pass/fail conditions that you must meet to pass. Spectrum expectations are more nuanced, and are expectations that you can “partially meet” or meet in meaningfully different ways.

These terms aren’t standard, but I’m defining them in order to set the stage for talking about implied expectations and how, as you grow and get promoted as an engineer, your behavior affects the implied expectations that your coworkers believe are being placed upon them.

Implied Expectations

If implied expectations aren’t communicated directly, how do people learn about them? By watching the behavior of their coworkers and how they are rewarded or punished. People often refer to this set of implied expectations defined by what is rewarded or punished as “company culture”.

A positive example would be a teammate who comes up with a way to speed up page load times by 10x, ships the change, and gets rewarded with a spot bonus. Seeing this happen reinforces to everyone else around them that “identifying improvements and proactively shipping them” is behavior that will be rewarded, and doing so is part of the company’s culture.

It goes both ways though—if another teammate works 12 hour days to ship a project on time, and gets similarly rewarded for “going above and beyond”, it reinforces a culture of 12 hour days and overwork. And, like most group behavioral effects, this reinforcement occurs even if leadership makes it clear that “this is not our normal expectation”. Saying that something is not an expectation while simultaneously rewarding someone for meeting that expectation doesn’t cancel out how it affects the rest of the team. At best, it reduces the effect.

Promotions are Permanent Rewards

In terms of implied expectations, promotions are a permanent reward, and being at a higher job level means that your behavior as a whole is considered to be representative of the behavior that gets rewarded at the company. Put another way: People look to their more senior coworkers to determine how they should be behaving if they want to get promoted.

If every Senior Staff Engineer at a company regularly puts up pull requests at 10pm or later, it implies to the rest of the engineers that, if they want to get promoted, they must also be working late enough to put up pull requests at similar hours. It doesn’t need to be every one of them either—senior employees have a stronger effect on teams closer to them (because those teams have higher visibility into their behavior), and even a single Senior Staff Engineer can affect expectations within their sphere of influence.

Surprise, it’s another Anti-Overworking Post

I’m assuming you care about the health of your team. The synthesis of all of the above is: If you are a senior engineer, and you behave in ways that can be unhealthy at work, you’re communicating to the rest of your team and beyond that unhealthy work habits are rewarded and part of the company’s culture, regardless of what the “Company Principles” page in Jira claims. The higher up you are, the larger this effect.

As you move up the job ladder you get hit with a lot of talk about having influence across teams, across departments, across the entire company. They’re usually talking about things like working on big projects or making large technical decisions, but setting a good example is another huge part of your cross-company influence. Even if you’re not concerned about the people (you should be but fine), healthy teams that aren’t being burned out by overwork are critical to business success, and thus it’s important that you yourself work in healthy ways to make it clear to everyone else that they don’t have to wear themselves out to advance their careers.

Okay but Management Keeps Promoting People who Overwork

Right? It sure feels like a lot of places talk a big game about work-life balance and then promote the guys who crunched for 2 months to ship a critical project without having to move the deadline. It’s so weird that they keep doing that.

Setting expectations works both up and down the organization chart. To be clear, it’s not a super-effective form of praxis, but senior employees are used as a comparison point implicitly by management when evaluating other employees. If you’re not working past 5pm, it’s a lot harder for them to notice that other employees aren’t either.

Also, the more senior you are, the less likely you are to get seriously punished for pushing back on pressure to overwork. With that privilege you should be trying to make it normal and expected for folks to defend their personal time from being encroached upon.