4 Behaviors That Make You Look Junior (No Matter Your Title)
Four tells that paint you as "not ready" without saying it out loud.
A few years ago, during my time at Amazon, I had to endure a meeting in which a mid-level engineer spent sixty minutes radiating frustration. This man kept his arms crossed, and he sighed audibly through most of the meeting. At one point, I heard him mutter, “This is ridiculous!” loud enough that those of us sitting next to him had to pretend we hadn’t heard him.
The roadmap decision, or whatever it was we were debating, was probably wrong, and he was probably right to disagree with it. But the way he manifested his disagreement betrayed him.
The company had plans for him to become a senior engineer, but less than a year after that meeting it was clear he stalled out at his level. Two years later, he left for another company.
That frustrated engineer may have never connected the dots between his behavior in that meeting and the years that followed. I did, though. This is because, as a Principal Engineer, I came into contact with hundreds of engineers, an…
