Why Lulu Keeps Turning Down Promotions
Lulu Young is a software developer and she loves what she does. She lives in Roslindale, a close-in suburb of Boston, in a beautifully renovated duplex. When I met her there on a rainy spring day in 2011 to talk about work and control, she needed little prompting before diving into one of the more detailed autobiographies I had so far encountered in my quest. I can tell you, for example, that she scored a 5 on her AP chemistry test in high school and that landing her first job involved a chance encounter with an old employer at a Bertucci’s in Wellesley Hills. Here’s what I wrote in my notes not long into the interview: “This is someone who has put a lot of thought into her career.”
This thoughtfulness evidently paid off, as Lulu turned out to be one of the more confident and contented subjects I have encountered in my interviews. At the core of this contentment is control. Throughout her career, Lulu repeatedly fought to gain more freedom in her working life, sometimes to the shock or dismay of her employers or friends. “People tell me that I don’t do things the way other people do,” Lulu said. “But I tell them, ‘I’m not other people.’ ”
She succeeded in these fights, as you’ll learn, because she was wary of the first control trap, which was described in the previous chapter. That is, she was careful to ensure she always had enough career capital to back her up before she made a bid for more control. This is a major reason that I want to tell her story: She provides a great example of control done right.
Lulu’s first job after graduating Wellesley College with a mathematics degree was at the bottom rung of the software-development career ladder: She was working in Quality Assurance (QA), a fancy term for software tester.
“So your job would be, for example, to put text in bold and then make sure it worked?” I asked her, as she explained this first job. “Whoa, whoa, let’s not exaggerate the amount of responsibility they gave me!” she joked in response.
This was not a great job. In fact, this was not even a decent job. It’s here that Lulu could have easily fallen into the first control trap: Finding yourself stuck in a boring job is exactly the point where breaking away to pave your own non-conformist path becomes tempting. Instead, she decided to acquire the career capital required to get somewhere better.
Things played out as follows: Lulu began hacking the UNIX operating system that ran the company’s software. She eventually taught herself to build scripts that automated the testing, thus saving the company time and money. Her innovations attracted notice, and after a few short years she was promoted to senior QA engineer.
By this point, Lulu had built up a legitimate store of career capital, so she decided to see what it could buy her. To regain some autonomy from a succession of micromanaging bosses who had been tormenting her, she demanded a thirty-hour-a-week schedule so she could pursue a part-time degree in philosophy from Tufts. “I would have asked for less time, but thirty was the minimum for which you could still receive full benefits,” she explained. If Lulu had tried this during her first year of employment, her bosses would have laughed and probably offered her instead a “zero-hour-a-week schedule,” but by the time she had become a senior engineer and was leading their testing automation efforts, they really couldn’t say no.
After she earned her degree, Lulu quit the company and brought her QA automation skills to a nearby start-up that had just been acquired by a major firm. “I had this spacious office with three computer screens,” she recalls. “Every week the office manager would come by to take our candy order. You would tell her what candy you wanted, and it would show up on your desk…. I had a lot of fun.”
After several years, the parent company of the start-up decided to shut down the Boston-area office, so Lulu, who had just bought a house, decided it was time for something different. When she reentered the job market, she generated several offers, including one to manage the QA group for a large company. This would have been a big promotion for Lulu: more money, more power, and more prestige; the next step on a ladder to becoming a hot-shot executive VP.
Lulu turned it down. Instead, she took an offer to work with a seven-person start-up, founded by an old college friend’s boyfriend, that had jumped at the chance to acquire someone with such proven skills. “I didn’t really understand what they did, and I’m not sure they had it all figured out yet either,” she told me. But this is exactly what made it appealing to Lulu: tackling something brand-new, where there wasn’t a detailed plan in place already, seemed interesting—a pursuit where she would have a lot of say over what she did and how she did it.
By the time this company was acquired in 2001, Lulu was the head software developer. Given this career capital, when she began to chafe at the new owner’s regulations—a dress code, for example, plus insisting that all employees work between the hours of nine and five—she was able to demand (and receive) three months’ leave. “There will be no way for you to contact me during this period,” she told her new bosses. The leave, it turned out, was also an excuse to train her staff to work without her. Soon after her leave ended, Lulu left and, in a bid for even more control, became a freelance software developer. At this point her skills were so valuable that finding clients was no problem. More importantly, working as a contractor also gave her extreme flexibility in how she did her work. She would travel for three or four weeks at a time when she felt like getting away. “If the weather was nice on a Friday,” she told me, “I would just take the day off to go flying” (she obtained her pilot’s license around this time). When she started work and when she ended her days were up to her. “A lot of those days I would take a niece or nephew and have fun. I went to the children’s museum and zoo probably more than anybody else in the city,” she recalls. “They couldn’t stop me from doing these things, as I was just a contractor.”
I interviewed Lulu early on a weekday afternoon, and the timing didn’t seem to matter at all. “Hold on, let me make sure Skype is turned off so no one can bother me,” she told me soon after I arrived. Taking an afternoon off on a whim to do an interview is not the type of decision she could have gotten away with if she had followed a traditional career path to become a stock-owning, Porsche-driving, ulcer-suffering VP. But then again, stock-owning, Porsche-driving, ulcer-suffering VPs probably enjoy their lives quite a bit less than Lulu.