Managing Your Career Using the 80/20 Rule

by Tina Darmohray
<tmd@usenix.org>

Tina Darmohray, editor of SAGE News & Features, is a consultant in the area of Internet firewalls and network connections, and frequently gives tutorials on those subjects. She was a founding member of SAGE.

I get tired of repeating something I've already done. For me, the "fun part" of any day is the time that I spend on figuring things out. Basically, I like problem solving; give me something that doesn't work (yet) and some time, and I'm happy trying to figure it out, configure it, and get it to work. It was like that when I was in school, too. I preferred problem set assignments to labs, reports, and lectures. I think it's because I like to see quick results or at least feel I'm actively working toward them. In a work environment, this translates to avoiding meetings. Somehow I never feel like anything gets "done" in them, and I find that frustrating. I also love to teach. I like to watch the "lightbulbs go on" on the faces of the attendees; it's cool.

Maybe I've just rattled off more specific preferences about how I spend my working day than you normally might expect to hear. (Maybe you'd add that I must innately enjoy analyzing things!) But I've developed this list over the years, out of necessity. I use it as a career management tool. I apply it to try to ensure that I get to do or learn what I'm interested in. It keeps me from taking jobs that aren't a "good fit."

I had worked as a UNIX system administrator the first four years out of college, when I took a position as an SE (what the company called their presales technical support engineers). According to the feedback I got, I was good at it. Over time, I realized that I really just didn't like the job content. I liked the people, and the challenge was OK, but I just couldn't find the little "problem sets" to solve on a daily basis. The bottom line was that 80% of what the job required wasn't what I really liked to do. I was living for that 20%, which usually took a backseat to the other tasks I had on my plate. When an old colleague called me up and offered me a large network (complete with an Internet connection) to manage, I realized that I couldn't pass it up.

I learned an important lesson through that brief career digression, which I've refined since then: it's important to manage your career so that you get to do what you're interested in! Sound simple? It can be. You just need to measure each opportunity you have against what you want to be doing, including what you want to be doing in the future. That way, you guarantee that you're spending most of your time on things you like best or preparing for the job you want to become qualified for.

Start your own career management by creating a list of the things you like to work on. Include things that you don't do now but want to learn. Then apply the 80/20 rule to every new opportunity. Break the prospective new job down into its job content. Don't glamorize any aspect; if anything, be more critical than usual. This should give you a realistic list of what tasks make up the job. Now step back. What would you be spending 80% of your time on if you took that job? For example, if you really want to write code for a living, taking a help desk job where "you're also encouraged to create shell scripts to enhance your productivity" wouldn't be the job for you. You need a job where 80% of it is writing code and 20% is interacting with users, not the other way around.

This measurement becomes even more important when you realize that, in every job, there will be about 20% of it that you "never get to." As likely as not, in the previous example, the users are going to keep you too busy for you to ever write a script! So remember, for a job to be a good fit, the things you want to do should fall into the 80% area of what it really takes to do that job.

I've found that systematically measuring every new job using my 80/20 rule makes career decisions easier and more clear cut. And, probably most importantly, I make better decisions. I might turn down more opportunities by religiously using this process (because it doesn't allow you to "read into" any position something that's not really going to be there), but at least I don't wind up headed in the wrong direction.

Try it for yourself and let me know what you think.