A Short Guide to a Successful Software Engineering Career
In my many years of being in software engineering, I’ve seen my own career and the careers of a multitude of engineers develop. In recent years, I’ve been in leadership roles where I’ve needed to provide guidance to younger engineers on how to make the most out of their career. Based on my experience, I’ve put together a framework for being successful in software engineering and growing your career.
Be an excellent teammate
- Be there for your teammates when needed
- Work hard
- Maintain a positive and optimistic attitude at all times
- Help and mentor others
Become “T” shaped
Begin by focusing and developing a level of mastery in a particular sub-discipline in software engineering such as backend distributed systems, API, DevOps, UI, data or other. Then, become a journeyman in adjacent disciplines to keep up your personal velocity and have the ability to unblock yourself without relying on others.. For example, if you’re a backend distributed systems engineer, have enough knowledge in DevOps, API, and data engineering to be able to complete a project from start to finish.
Understand the next level of abstraction
As you go about your work, look beyond the immediate work and try to understand different approaches, patterns, technologies and their trade offs in order to be able to recommend architectures and designs. You can bootstrap your knowledge by reading technology blogs, articles, and discussing technical problems with colleagues. Most importantly, before jumping into implementation, do your best to write a design document to think through a problem, the design, and get feedback from peers.
Understand the business
In order to be able to make a bigger impact, you need to be able to connect the dots between your work and how the business creates value from it. You can do this by paying attention at company meetings, asking questions about the business, and talking to colleagues outside of engineering. Set up 1:1s with product managers or grab a coffee with sales folks to understand their perspective on the business.
