When I was presented with the offer for my transition to engineering manager, I remembered a phrase my father once said: “You cannot blame the mountain you chose to climb, even if you are not aware of the challenges you will face. The mountain was there, and you chose to climb it.”
When I started the transition to management, I gained insight into how ratings and compensation bands work. With that, I was able to understand exactly where I landed within the band. Although I agree with Theodore Roosevelt that “Comparison is the thief of joy,” I also think it can, at times, give us clarity. We are stack ranked, after all. Comparison is one of the foundations of performance evaluations in modern corporate America, no matter how much leadership denies it. Knowing where people with timelines similar to mine landed in the band compared to me triggered reflection about my own trajectory.
That is when I started blaming the mountain.
I started blaming the mountain for not giving me high impact, low effort opportunities. I blamed the mountain for not putting me in risky projects with safety nets. I blamed the mountain for telling me I should influence the team more, just to then be ignored when I tried to speak. I blamed the mountain for questioning my technical decisions and suggestions twice as much as any peer’s.
Note: I have already gone into detail about how gender gaps are formed in another post, so I will not go too deep into it here. For this text, I will refer to them as minority gaps, since the same dynamics apply to any minority in the workplace.
Everything I blamed the mountain for was the result of a lack of trust, the bar that is set for me before I even enter the room, and how much higher it is compared to others. As I mentioned, this applies to all minorities in the workplace, such as male nannies, female drivers, and, of course, female engineers. As I explained more deeply in my previous post, when we are evaluated against a lower starting expectation, a mistake confirms the stereotype, an a success is treated as exception.
But I cannot blame the mountain I chose to climb. I was even fortunate to be aware of the challenges I would face. Everyone told me, including my own father. Yet I not only chose to climb the mountain, I also chose to invest effort into making it equally challenging for everyone.
If you are thinking, “That is not true for everyone. I know minorities who did not face as many challenges,” you are not entirely wrong. There are people who appear not to have faced as many obstacles, who move through life and even deny that those challenges exist. But there is often a hidden detail: those people had the privilege of help. They either had someone who went through similar situations and acted as a stepping stone in a deep river, or they were fortunate enough to be seen by someone in the majority who chose to advocate for them. Either way, they still had to climb the same mountain. Not to remove any merit from them, I had a few pushes myself along the way. Mentors helped me navigate challenging times with their experience. Advocates shed light on my work when no one else saw it. I am better off than I would have been alone.
I cannot blame the mountain. That is the mountain I chose to climb. In fact, it is the mountain I choose to climb every day, one step at a time.
I therefore cannot say I am disappointed. What I feel is more like acceptance that I will not get the reset I thought I would. To get there, I need to go through this challenge once again and keep climbing the mountain I chose to climb.
As always, stay in draft, keep becoming.
Me.
