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Donât Put Yourself a Box
Order From Chaos, Today!RemoteAugust 5, 2026
Skills
product-management
Job Description
Photo by Piotr MusioÅ / Unsplash
Donât Put Yourself in a Box
Personal Development and Career Growth
Businesses can't function at scale unless they put people in standardized "boxes"; if you want to be hired and to grow your career, you need to understand that, and understand how to work with those boxes. On the other hand, you can't be reduced to a box, and if you tie your identity to those boxes in your thinking, you'll limit yourself in ways that are unnatural and harmful.
This is like the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, both alive and dead at the same time. Like with quantum mechanics and the cat, whether youâre in a box or not depends on whoâs doing the measuring: your employer, or you.
My Box Origin Story
My introduction to the idea of âboxesâ came in the late 2000s, when I noticed that people at Google were having a hard time getting hired or promoted if they were doing âoperationalâ work that didnât involve much traditional program management. Whether they were being considered for hiring or promotion, they were told, essentially, âYouâve done some great work, but itâs not program management; weâre not sure what role/ladder is a fit for you, but itâs not this one. Next!â
This was clearly a problemâeven though they didnât do PERT diagrams and Gantt charts, Googlers did important work in these roles, and roadblocks to hiring and promoting them created both operational and retention issues as jobs went vacant and high-performing employees felt their value wasnât being recognized. As a member of both Program Management hiring and promotion committees at Google I had more visibility to this issue than most others; I spoke to a friend of mine in People Operations (Googleâs HR), who turned out to already be well aware of this problem from repeatedly dealing with upset hiring managers and frustrated promotion candidates. Together, we hatched a plan: to create a new job ladder (job classification) for these âoperationalâ program managers to move to, that was better suited to the type of work they did.
We gathered some data, wrote a proposal, and set up a meeting with the SVP responsible for all engineering at Google. The SVP had been in quite a few meetings Iâd presented to before; I knew him to be not only a brilliant and capable leader, but a genuinely nice guy, too, so I had no worries about the meeting. Imagine my shock then, when this âgenuinely nice guyâ started yelling at us, telling my partner and I that we were going to wreck Google culture!
I vividly remember what he said: âDONâT PUT PEOPLE IN BOXES!â He told us Google needed some job classifications, but that our culture required those classifications to be both broad and vague so both employees and their managers wouldnât be blocked from doing whatever needed to be done. The worst thing we could do, the SVP told us, was to make the classification âboxesâ so small people could say âthatâs not my jobââwhich is precisely what he saw us proposing to do!
A year or two before this Google had shifted from having just three job types (over-broadly, they were âengineersâ, âtechnical people that donât do engineeringâ, and âeveryone elseâ) to having around around a dozen (one of which was my ladder, âTechnical Program Managersâ). There had been a lot of debate about whether those boxes were already too small⦠but the senior team had decided 12â15 job categories were acceptableâenough large boxes to make hiring, career development, and compensation more efficient, but not so many that jobs were defined too narrowly. We left his office dejected, but also enlightened: it said a lot to me that this SVP thought it so important to Googleâs culture, a lesson Iâve never forgotten. (Times have changed though; Google now has many more job ladders, including at least 5â10 âoperationalâ ladders broken off from Program Management well beyond what my friend and I had proposed).
Why Companies Need Boxes
Why do we need âboxesâ (job classifications) at all? Wouldnât the world be better if everyone just did whatever they saw that needed doing? The value of boxes to corporations comes down to two things: scaling and trust.
Scaling
If youâre in a small startup, you want employees who can wear many hats, and who wonât feel limited by things like job titles. Because there are so few employees, and because you know everyone personally and need everyone you hire to have an outsized impact, you can afford to put a lot of energy into every individual hiring decision. Compensation planning is pretty lightweight and customized, both because there arenât many people to deal with, and because you want to compensate people based on their contribution to the business, regardless of what their title is. Everyone is a âspecial snowflakeâ.
That changes quickly as your startup growsâyou cross a line where it becomes infeasible to treat every hire as a unique individual, with bespoke hiring and compensation. This is where âboxesâ become necessary: you have to put people into categories, with standards for how hiring, compensation, and career progression work for each boxâitâs the only way you can scale the company. The alternative to this would be to allow an increasing number of managers to continue bespoke hiring and comp within their own areas⦠which leads to the second issue, trust.
Trust
Because startups are so risky, the ability of potential employees to trust the founders is a big dealâif they donât appear trustworthy, theyâre not going to attract the kind of people they need. As the company grows, the number of managers that both employees and senior management need to trust grows, too. At some point it becomes too much: employeesâ willingness to âhave faithâ that managers will make fair and appropriate decisions drops lower and lower, so much so that everything will fall apart without the enforced fairness of standardized boxes.
ð¡
The size of the boxes in a company are directly proportional to the amount of trust employees have in management
Labor unions are the endgame for this sort of trust problem. One of the big rallying points for companies trying to avoid unionization is always to try to convince employees that management has their best interests at heart, and can be trusted. As a rule, unions have close to zero trust for management, andâas a direct consequenceâunions often push for the smallest âboxesâ possible: boxes for very narrow roles, subdivided by seniority, and sometimes further subdivided by location. They see this as the best way to ensure fairness in an environment where management canât be trusted at all. This is the ultimate version of the cultural harm my SVP was worried about.
Boxes and Hiring
Scaling and trust drive companies to put employees into standard categories, or boxes. How do those boxes affect hiring, and, understanding this, how can you better âsellâ yourself as a candidate for jobs?
Most companies above startup size need to hire for boxes, for the reasons given above; itâs just too much work to do anything else. It would be wonderful if recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers had the time to carefully read and savor every resume that came in, and then spend time meeting with every candidate to pull out nuances that didnât come across clearly in their job histories. Thatâs not the world we live in, though; there are too many candidates to get through, and too few hours in the day.
The usual practice is for recruiters to work with hiring managers to identify standard requirements (boxes, again!) that can be used to screen out people and reduce the number of candidates they need to go into more depth with (hiring managers will usually never see any of those dropped candidates). Those standard requirements are typically based on a template used for all jobs of the same ladder and level, extended with custom specs tailored to the particular role being hired for. In the language Iâve been using in this article, the job requirements are a very clear âboxâ, and the screening process only lets through candidates whose âshapesâ fit that box, like a childâs sorting toy.
Source: Flickr user rosipaw, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
When there are lots of candidates for a tiny number of jobs, the recruiters donât magically get more time to handle the extra candidatesâinstead, they often deal with the overload by tightening the screening criteria even further: that is, by making the boxes smaller.
Behaviorally, the shift from â
Donât Put Yourself in a Box
Personal Development and Career Growth
- Apr 26, 2024
- Companies need "boxes" (job classifications) to grow and function. This makes hiring, compensation, and career development tractable, and promotes fair treatment of employees.
- If the boxes are too large, a company can't grow. If the boxes are too small, innovation and ownership are smothered.
- The size of a company's boxes is directly proportional to the level of trust employees have for management.
- To get hired, put yourself in the box the company is hiring for. Tailor your resume to highlight those skills and experiences; put yourself out there as a âspecialistâ in the thing theyâre hiring for.
- If aiming for a promotion, demonstrate how your work embodies the behaviors and impacts of the next-level âboxâ.
- Don't let those boxes define you. Your value and identity goes far beyond any job description.
Businesses can't function at scale unless they put people in standardized "boxes"; if you want to be hired and to grow your career, you need to understand that, and understand how to work with those boxes. On the other hand, you can't be reduced to a box, and if you tie your identity to those boxes in your thinking, you'll limit yourself in ways that are unnatural and harmful.
This is like the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, both alive and dead at the same time. Like with quantum mechanics and the cat, whether youâre in a box or not depends on whoâs doing the measuring: your employer, or you.
My Box Origin Story
My introduction to the idea of âboxesâ came in the late 2000s, when I noticed that people at Google were having a hard time getting hired or promoted if they were doing âoperationalâ work that didnât involve much traditional program management. Whether they were being considered for hiring or promotion, they were told, essentially, âYouâve done some great work, but itâs not program management; weâre not sure what role/ladder is a fit for you, but itâs not this one. Next!â
This was clearly a problemâeven though they didnât do PERT diagrams and Gantt charts, Googlers did important work in these roles, and roadblocks to hiring and promoting them created both operational and retention issues as jobs went vacant and high-performing employees felt their value wasnât being recognized. As a member of both Program Management hiring and promotion committees at Google I had more visibility to this issue than most others; I spoke to a friend of mine in People Operations (Googleâs HR), who turned out to already be well aware of this problem from repeatedly dealing with upset hiring managers and frustrated promotion candidates. Together, we hatched a plan: to create a new job ladder (job classification) for these âoperationalâ program managers to move to, that was better suited to the type of work they did.
We gathered some data, wrote a proposal, and set up a meeting with the SVP responsible for all engineering at Google. The SVP had been in quite a few meetings Iâd presented to before; I knew him to be not only a brilliant and capable leader, but a genuinely nice guy, too, so I had no worries about the meeting. Imagine my shock then, when this âgenuinely nice guyâ started yelling at us, telling my partner and I that we were going to wreck Google culture!
I vividly remember what he said: âDONâT PUT PEOPLE IN BOXES!â He told us Google needed some job classifications, but that our culture required those classifications to be both broad and vague so both employees and their managers wouldnât be blocked from doing whatever needed to be done. The worst thing we could do, the SVP told us, was to make the classification âboxesâ so small people could say âthatâs not my jobââwhich is precisely what he saw us proposing to do!
A year or two before this Google had shifted from having just three job types (over-broadly, they were âengineersâ, âtechnical people that donât do engineeringâ, and âeveryone elseâ) to having around around a dozen (one of which was my ladder, âTechnical Program Managersâ). There had been a lot of debate about whether those boxes were already too small⦠but the senior team had decided 12â15 job categories were acceptableâenough large boxes to make hiring, career development, and compensation more efficient, but not so many that jobs were defined too narrowly. We left his office dejected, but also enlightened: it said a lot to me that this SVP thought it so important to Googleâs culture, a lesson Iâve never forgotten. (Times have changed though; Google now has many more job ladders, including at least 5â10 âoperationalâ ladders broken off from Program Management well beyond what my friend and I had proposed).
Why Companies Need Boxes
Why do we need âboxesâ (job classifications) at all? Wouldnât the world be better if everyone just did whatever they saw that needed doing? The value of boxes to corporations comes down to two things: scaling and trust.
Scaling
If youâre in a small startup, you want employees who can wear many hats, and who wonât feel limited by things like job titles. Because there are so few employees, and because you know everyone personally and need everyone you hire to have an outsized impact, you can afford to put a lot of energy into every individual hiring decision. Compensation planning is pretty lightweight and customized, both because there arenât many people to deal with, and because you want to compensate people based on their contribution to the business, regardless of what their title is. Everyone is a âspecial snowflakeâ.
That changes quickly as your startup growsâyou cross a line where it becomes infeasible to treat every hire as a unique individual, with bespoke hiring and compensation. This is where âboxesâ become necessary: you have to put people into categories, with standards for how hiring, compensation, and career progression work for each boxâitâs the only way you can scale the company. The alternative to this would be to allow an increasing number of managers to continue bespoke hiring and comp within their own areas⦠which leads to the second issue, trust.
Trust
Because startups are so risky, the ability of potential employees to trust the founders is a big dealâif they donât appear trustworthy, theyâre not going to attract the kind of people they need. As the company grows, the number of managers that both employees and senior management need to trust grows, too. At some point it becomes too much: employeesâ willingness to âhave faithâ that managers will make fair and appropriate decisions drops lower and lower, so much so that everything will fall apart without the enforced fairness of standardized boxes.
ð¡
The size of the boxes in a company are directly proportional to the amount of trust employees have in management
Labor unions are the endgame for this sort of trust problem. One of the big rallying points for companies trying to avoid unionization is always to try to convince employees that management has their best interests at heart, and can be trusted. As a rule, unions have close to zero trust for management, andâas a direct consequenceâunions often push for the smallest âboxesâ possible: boxes for very narrow roles, subdivided by seniority, and sometimes further subdivided by location. They see this as the best way to ensure fairness in an environment where management canât be trusted at all. This is the ultimate version of the cultural harm my SVP was worried about.
Boxes and Hiring
Scaling and trust drive companies to put employees into standard categories, or boxes. How do those boxes affect hiring, and, understanding this, how can you better âsellâ yourself as a candidate for jobs?
Most companies above startup size need to hire for boxes, for the reasons given above; itâs just too much work to do anything else. It would be wonderful if recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers had the time to carefully read and savor every resume that came in, and then spend time meeting with every candidate to pull out nuances that didnât come across clearly in their job histories. Thatâs not the world we live in, though; there are too many candidates to get through, and too few hours in the day.
The usual practice is for recruiters to work with hiring managers to identify standard requirements (boxes, again!) that can be used to screen out people and reduce the number of candidates they need to go into more depth with (hiring managers will usually never see any of those dropped candidates). Those standard requirements are typically based on a template used for all jobs of the same ladder and level, extended with custom specs tailored to the particular role being hired for. In the language Iâve been using in this article, the job requirements are a very clear âboxâ, and the screening process only lets through candidates whose âshapesâ fit that box, like a childâs sorting toy.
Source: Flickr user rosipaw, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
When there are lots of candidates for a tiny number of jobs, the recruiters donât magically get more time to handle the extra candidatesâinstead, they often deal with the overload by tightening the screening criteria even further: that is, by making the boxes smaller.
Behaviorally, the shift from â
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