"For a long time, I felt that I needed to progress. And because I've been an external, I also preferred to be an external contractor for a lot of the jobs because I had a quite short attention span. I tended to hop around quite a lot and fix a problem, move on to the next problem, and I really enjoyed that."
"As you grow up the ladder or ascend the ladder, that doesn't work so well. You need to have a bit of stickability. You need to be able to stay in a job and show that you can do that and grow into a leader role, right? These are the things that we're taught or that's the thing that maybe I assumed. We got to a point where I was able to do that and find a role eventually."
Richard Bown has thirty years of software engineering experience across telecoms and finance, progressing through team lead, tech lead, and head of engineering roles before returning to an individual-contributor DevOps position. He preferred external contracting due to a short attention span and enjoyment of fixing discrete problems and moving on. Climbing the management ladder required stickability and longer tenure to demonstrate leadership capability. Management was idealized as a goal, influenced by diverse managerial experiences and a desire to do some things differently. Eventually Richard achieved a leadership role, then shifted back to hands-on engineering as a DevOps IC.
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