EngineerHer

Most career advice is written for a generalist audience, and most engineers who follow it end up frustrated by how little of it actually applies. Not because the advice is wrong, exactly, but because it was built for a different kind of problem than the one engineers usually have.

The advice assumes the wrong starting point

A huge amount of career content starts from the same place: work out what you want, put yourself out there, network more, negotiate harder. It assumes the main obstacle is confidence, or visibility, or simply not trying hard enough.

That’s rarely the actual obstacle for engineers. Most engineers I work with aren’t short on effort. They’ve been delivering consistently, often for years, often while quietly absorbing responsibility nobody assigned them. The problem isn’t that they haven’t tried. It’s that trying harder inside the wrong structure doesn’t produce a different outcome, it just produces more of the same outcome, faster.

Engineers are trained to solve a different kind of problem

Engineering training builds a particular kind of thinking: define the problem precisely, gather the actual data, test against reality, iterate. Generic career advice tends to skip straight to the iterate step. Post more. Ask for the raise. Update your LinkedIn headline. None of that is wrong as a tactic, but it’s a tactic applied before the problem has been properly defined, and engineers are usually the first to notice when a solution has been proposed before the problem has been understood.

That mismatch is part of why so much career advice feels hollow when you actually try to apply it. It’s asking you to act before you’ve done the diagnostic work, and diagnostic work is exactly what engineers are trained to value and generic career content is trained to skip, because skipping it makes for shorter, more shareable content.

The specific gaps generic advice leaves

Generic advice rarely accounts for what a technical career actually involves. It doesn’t have a framework for the fact that expertise built over fifteen or twenty years in a specific domain doesn’t always translate cleanly onto a CV, or that the most senior technical people are often the least visible ones, because their value shows up in problems that never happened rather than achievements that did.

It also has very little to say about the layer we’ve spent the last few months on here, the accumulated weight of being the person everyone relies on. Career advice aimed at a general audience isn’t built to distinguish between someone who’s genuinely under-ambitious and someone who’s been quietly carrying Leadership Load for a decade. Those two people need almost opposite advice, and generic content tends to give them both the same three tips.

And it rarely engages seriously with the reality that many women in engineering are making career decisions inside a structure that wasn’t built with them in mind, which means the standard playbook, built largely around a standard set of assumptions about availability, visibility, and risk tolerance, doesn’t map cleanly onto their actual circumstances.

What engineers actually need instead

What tends to work better is the same kind of process engineers already trust in every other part of their work: define the actual problem before proposing a solution, gather real data about your own experience and patterns rather than assuming you already know them, test your assumptions against evidence, and only then move to action.

That’s the whole premise behind FRAMES. It isn’t advice designed to be inspiring in isolation. It’s a structured process, built specifically because a career that’s misaligned isn’t usually a confidence problem or a networking problem, it’s a diagnostic problem, and diagnostic problems don’t get solved by trying harder at the wrong thing.