Early Career Advice (2024)
Kasey’s Early-Career Advice for Graduates (2024)
- Location > Company/Role Geography sets the constraints of and biases who you will meet, what opportunities will be available, and generally whether you will enjoy the wind of a growing economy at your back, therefore: Do whatever you can to get to the right city for your career as soon as possible, including taking a less desirable job to pay rent.
- Careers are built on networks Great work is rarely found by blasting out resumes to job postings, because people want more trust than that. Trust happens through referrals from trusted acquaintances, but networking to actively find work will backfire, therefore: Be interested and interesting. Always be meeting new people, ask good questions, and actively listen. Work on interesting side projects. Let interesting people find you by writing online.
- Learning sucks - and has compounding returns Growth doesn’t happen when you’re comfortable. It happens when you push yourself and constantly prove to yourself what you’re capable of, therefore: When choosing between two or more options and it isn’t clear which is superior, always choose the option that will be harder or make you more uncomfortable.
- Your career isn’t a ladder, it’s a jungle gym You become a stronger and more adaptable thinker by diversifying your experience. It creates more opportunities for intellectual arbitrage. You can transfer skills from less desirable roles to more desirable roles, therefore: Do a lot of things. Don’t worry about the fake boundaries set up between roles or “staying in your lane”. Be opportunistic. However…
- Legibility is a shortcut to trust Trust is a scarce resource. So is time. Nobody has time to figure out if you’re trustworthy or good at what you do, so they look for quick demarcations of quality, therefore: Get very good at telling your story, then get good at adapting it depending on the audience so they immediately see your value. Acquire credentials when the cost isn’t too high.
- Well-connected people connect people The phrase “you should meet my friend” is the renewable energy that makes the professional world go ’round. The village provides, but you must nurture the village, therefore: Create spaces for interesting people to gather. Host parties. Create study groups. When you meet great people, bring them into the fold.
- The future belongs to humans who leverage Al If Al continues to progress-and I think it will-the successful careers of the future won’t be built inside companies but by entrepreneurial individuals that know how to create value out of intelligence, therefore: Start building now. Understand how to systematically identify latent needs and how to leverage new tools to create solutions with limited resources.
career growth
Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path - Keavy McMinn
So what does the more strategic work of a very senior engineer look like? It might include:
- Tackling technical challenges that span multiple technical and organizational systems.
- Researching and identifying the problems that could be worked on, a year or two from now.
- Developing prototypes to further explore and support ideas that come from that research.
- Ramping up strike teams to help build a thing.
- Looking at the big picture including cultural, product and technical challenges, to help inform choices that would be best for the org, perhaps with a 2-5 year view.
- Forming strategies, writing proposals and pitching them across the company, for new architecture, systems or approaches.
- Talking to engineers, technical writers, product managers, interface designers, sales people, lawyers, execs, competitors, peers, and users. Getting people onboard. Marketing ideas. Moving things forward.
- Acting as an advisor with internal teams, or in customer-facing groups.
- Sometimes being the voice for change, sometimes being the voice for not change. Always weighing up trade offs, always listening.
- Being slightly independent of the normal cadence of regular engineering project work. Probably having little guidance or oversight. Possibly being somewhat isolated. Being OK with that.
- Using that position of independence and power to support and influence other cool/hard/interesting challenges in the organization.
- Not being afraid: to question the status quo, to push back on decisions you think would be harmful, or to tackle challenges in unknown territory.
… and some interesting comments on HN.
In my experience, many companies legitimately don’t really know what to do with very senior engineering staff. And how many distinguished engineers or principal engineers or technical fellows do you really need for your relatively straightforward technical challenges anyway? The IC track often fails to work in practice for the simple reason that technical work at an extremely high level is just not needed at many companies as much as engineers want to believe. Very senior ICs are also difficult to manage in the sense that the more you pin them down to specific work or projects the less you benefit from their skills. But sometimes all you need is to be able to assign someone to a specific project that isn’t all that glorious or interesting or hard but is valuable and needs to be done by a certain time. – nilkn
Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer - Dan Heller - Medium
- Improve your writing: Crisp technical writing eases collaboration and greatly improves your ability to persuade, inform, and teach. Remember who your audience is and what they know, write clearly and concisely, and almost always include a tl;dr above the fold.
- Own your project management: Understand the dependency graph for your project, ensure key pieces have owners, write good summaries of plans and status, and proactively inform stakeholders of plans and progress. Practice running meetings! All this enables you to take on much bigger projects and is great preparation for leadership.
- Own your education: Pursue mastery of your craft. Your career should be a journey of constant growth, but no one else will ensure that you grow. Find a way to make learning part of your daily life (even 5 minutes/day); get on mailing lists, find papers and books that are worth reading, and read the manual cover to cover for technologies you work with. Consistency is key; build habits that will keep you growing throughout your career.
- Communicate proactively: Regular, well-organized communication builds confidence and goodwill in collaborators; knowledge-sharing creates an atmosphere of learning and camaraderie. Share knowledge and set a regular cadence of informing stakeholders on project goals, progress, and obstacles. Give talks and speak up judiciously in meetings.
- Find opportunities to collaborate: Good collaboration both increases your leverage and improves your visibility in your organization. Advancing your craft as an engineer requires you to have an impact beyond the code you write, and advancing your career requires, to a certain degree, building a personal brand at your company. Cross-functional projects and professional, respectful collaboration are critical to both.
- Be professional and reliable: Think of yourself as a professional and act like one. Come to meetings on time and prepared, then pay attention. Deliver what you say you will and communicate proactively when things go wrong (they will). Keep your cool and express objections respectfully. Show your colleagues respect and appreciation. Minimize your complaining; bring the people around you up, not down. Everyone appreciates a true professional; more importantly, it’s the right way to behave.
- Reason about business value: Reason like a CEO. Understand the value of your work to your company and take responsibility for reasoning about quality, feature-richness, and speed. Your job isn’t just to write code; your job is to make good decisions and help your company succeed, and that requires understanding what really matters.
- Unblock yourself: Learn to never, ever accept being blocked; find a way by persuasion, escalation, or technical creativity. Again, your job isn’t just to write the code and wait for everything else to fall into place; your job is to figure out how to create value with your efforts.
- Take initiative: The most common misconception in software is that there are grown-ups out there who are on top of things. Own your team’s and company’s mission. Don’t wait to be told; think about what needs doing and do it or advocate for it. Managers depend on the creativity and intelligence of their engineers, not figuring it all out themselves.
Some good points made about jobsearch especially in the Bay Area by Gopal V. not my sock : me/advanced-imposter.html
TOREAD: How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
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