Get Out of Your Lane: A Developers Climb
Before moving forward there needs to be a preface with this article. My focus while writing this is to help developers who want to find their way eventually into a management, director, VP, or greater role within a company. There is a tremendous amount of documentation on how to become a better programmer but a lack of information on how to climb the corporate ladder for developers.
As a developer you are so easily trained to stay within your own lane. You go to your 9–5 job and you’ve been hired to do X task on Y platform. Stay in your lane, do your work, and as a team you’ll reach whatever goal the company and management teams have set. For your own personal growth this is UNBELIEVABLY TERRIBLE. The only growth you’re enabling yourself to ultimately have by doing this is vertical growth. Vertical growth only gets you climbing the corporate ladder in the lane that you’re in so perhaps you will grow from Jr. iOS Developer to Sr. iOS Developer at some point in your career. If that’s your goal in life and you are content with always being a single lane developer then great. But if you have bigger ambitions and you’re hungry to get to the top of the chain then staying in your lane is the absolute worst thing you can do.
Okay, but you have to do it to keep your job… that’s fine and I understand your point. Which brings me to my next point. Invest in yourself. The only time you may have available to get out of your lane is after dinner at home. DO IT! Don’t go home and sit on your couch to watch an episode, or four, of some pointless brain-dead TV show for a few wasteful hours. Go sit down at your desk and challenge yourself by learning something new. Find a way to make yourself shift into another lane. If you are an iOS developer then go learn a backend language like Node. If you happen to be a backend engineer then learn more about server technologies. The tech stack can be gigantic and I promise that there is always something out there for you to learn in another lane. If you want to be a high level exec climbing from the development track then you need to know what languages, technologies, hardware, and types of employees drive the most success and efficiency to a business. Sitting on the couch isn’t going to get you where you want to be.
Most developers fail in their corporate ladder climb by not realizing the importance of horizontal growth and instead burrowing themselves into that single lane of verticalness.
There have been countless nights sitting at home that I have developed easily a dozen fully functional websites, CMS’s, and applications — potential companies — only to challenge myself by learning new languages and tech stacks so that when I enter into a room to talk to other developers I can comprehend and communicate bidirectionally. I can walk into a room full of company execs and tell them their options for speed to market and successful platform for their anticipated growth. Obtaining that vast amount of horizontal growth and knowledge when it comes to a high demand field such as computer science has an insane amount of value that most people do not realize. Strive to be the type of person who can listen to the needs and then be able to quickly formulate a plan to execution as to why method A is greater than method B and realize the importance of knowing the WHY and being able to explain it at every level. Answering the HOW is for developers, answering the WHY is for management. Slowly shift between the stack so you can at some level entertain conversations about server technology, database systems, backend, website frontend, mobile frontend, and everything in between and around it.
Most developers fail in their corporate ladder climb by not realizing the importance of horizontal growth and instead burrowing themselves into that single lane of verticalness. Broaden your horizons and strive to know more.
Your challenge after reading this article,
- Get out of that single lane you are in right now and invest time into yourself for horizontal growth. Success comes with knowledge and knowledge comes with practice and time. Try making an application or website from scratch and include a new piece of the tech stack you’re unfamiliar with.
