This article clarifies how promotions work and highlights potential pitfalls. It describes a career-growth framework based on technical skills, interpersonal relationships, and influence. As one becomes more senior, the balance between these skills shifts, demanding more focus on relationships and influence.
Tag: Career
A 3-step strategy for experienced professionals starting new jobs
My last manager commended my rapid ramp-up and steady progress throughout my onboarding phase. I chuckled silently - if only he knew my many mistakes in my past 6 attempts. This post shares some techniques for rapidly making a difference in a new domain.
The complicated parts of leadership: Eliminate chaos
Introduction "How can I trust you? You keep telling me about a new direction every other month" My report after the 3rd organizational pivot within three months. Background I was dumbstruck – there was nothing I could say. As a line manager, I was responsible for delivering the message even though I didn't make some … Continue reading The complicated parts of leadership: Eliminate chaos
Ace Your Job Interview: Tips for Landing Your Dream Job
This post presents tips for the interview process and valuable resources, especially during this challenging whirlwind of layoffs. Most of these are lessons from my 100+ hours of interviewing at ~20 companies.
The complicated parts of leadership: Trust and Verify
In this series of short stories, I share tricky situations I've encountered while leading teams. These experiences have taught me invaluable leadership lessons and greatly influenced my management style. I hope to help others become more effective leaders by sharing these anecdotes.
Four mistakes I made as a new manager
This article relates hard-learned lessons as a newbie engineering manager. It targets new leads by clarifying leadership pitfalls to avoid.
The SOAR technique: How to get buy-in and overcome friction
You have a tried and tested approach for solving a knotty problem; however, getting organizational buy-in feels like pulling teeth. You’ve tried cajoling, begging, storming, bargaining and more to no avail. Nothing seems to work; you’re frustrated and thinking of quitting.
Lessons Learned from rapidly ramping up 3 teams in a year: Part I
How do you get a brand new team to become productive within three months? This post describes the lessons and techniques from rapidly ramping up these teams. These tips should help new members become productive within 12 weeks.
A simple framework for optimizing career decisions
This post describes a simple framework for evaluating career choices along three dimensions and helps you to choose what is most important to you.
Taking on scary challenges
You have two choices when new challenges emerge: Offer several reasons why things wouldn't workSeek growth opportunities from the challenge Let's talk about the latter option. Scenario Your team dances through complex rituals every month before it can successfully deploy a big batch of changes. Engineers dread the drain on developer productivity and attendant customer … Continue reading Taking on scary challenges
Doers, not Talkers
Excuses are easy, take ownership and drive for results
Results over Actions
Are you working on the right problems? If no, then focus all your energies on identifying the right problem with the biggest impact.
Being Deliberate
How do you drive change across difficult environments? For example, presenting radical new ideas to an unreceptive audience or collaborating with parties with opposing interests
4 tips for taking on seemingly insurmountable tasks
How to brilliantly deliver on seemingly impossible projects
The Single Question to Ask before starting anything
That is the question I like to ask nowadays at the beginning of anything: a sprint, a project or a book.
Lessons learned from running services at scale: 1
Tips for running services at scale with minimal toil
Three high-impact non-coding tasks for software engineers
There is more to software development than writing code. This post describes three of the most oft-repeated tasks I have been asked over the years. These are not strictly programming tasks but help magnify the impact.
Do you want to sleep well at night?
Do you want to sleep well at night?
Why you should step out of your comfort zone
Late in 2016, I made a conscious decision to become a full stack engineer. It was a tough decision for me because it meant a career reset and came with some risk. I would also have to learn a lot and fast too to be an effective contributor.
What it means to be a Senior Software Engineer
This post discusses the traits of the excellent engineers I have had the opportunity to work with over the years.
Efficiently shipping Big Hairy Audacious Software projects
I recently transitioned into a full-stack role - I wanted to stretch myself and step out of my comfort zone. The biggest challenge was my struggle to quell the quite nagging voice in my mind screaming 'impostor!'.
Fighting the impostor syndrome
Nearly everyone goes through moments wherein they doubt their capabilities.
Maturing as a software engineer
Looking back on my time as a developer, there are a lot of things I would have avoided doing if I had as much knowledge and maturity as I did now.
Influential Books for programmers
I try to read a lot of books. Over the years, my 'taste' for books has been refined and some of my criteria are listed below.
10 hard-learned Lessons for aspiring programmers
I have made a couple of mistakes over the years and wanted to share those pitfalls so upcoming programmers know what to avoid and what works.
CodeKraft 