How to Navigate your Career 🗺️
A thorough guide to equip you with the right tools and mental models
2024 is closing, and it will go down as a tough year for engineers.
Combined with the equally challenging 2023, in the last two years we dealt with the end of ZIRP, layoffs, the economic downturn, up to the latest series of returns to office.
Of course, this was also the year of the full-scale explosion of AI. And let’s be honest: for engineers, AI so far is a mixed bag.
On one side, there is the promise of more productivity. New tools are good and the impact is real. On the other side, though, there is the expectation of more productivity, which is often overblown and cast onto engineering teams from clueless leadership.
I feel that all these things, together, make it harder than ever for engineers and managers to navigate their own careers. How should you think about your skills? How do you stay relevant?
We wrote a lot about this in the last few months, from the evolving role of engineering managers, to the rise of product engineers, to my own predictions about AI just a few weeks ago.
Today, we will put everything together in a guide to help you design a great professional journey.
So here is the agenda:
🎯 Skills vs impact — how to figure out if you are on the right track
🎨 Generalists vs specialists — getting broad vs getting deep
💼 Startups vs Big Tech — should you trust the clichés?
🔀 Changing Jobs — should you stay or should you go
🎽 IC vs EM — how to navigate the big crossroads
🍀 The Four P’s — a useful framework to think about your career
🤖 How to use AI for good — to super charge your career, instead of hampering it
And more! Let’s dive in! 👇
🎯 Skills vs Impact
What do you need to grow your career?
Because of the way schools and universities work, we are conditioned to focus on skills. We study things: this or that language, the latest framework, system design, kubernetes, you name it.
Skills matter, but they are a very small part of why people get promoted and have successful careers.
By and large, people get promoted by displaying impact. This is widely acknowledged for managers, but it is the same for individual contributors, too. Your tech skills are just as useful as the value they create for the business.
So, counterintuitively, the healthiest way to think at your skills is… almost not thinking at them at all! If your track record is a collection of home runs, nobody cares that you know this or that language — or, at least, good companies don’t.
This rings especially true today, as AI provides engineers with a kind of "universal basic proficiency" across various tech. Some hard skills may become more commoditized in the future, but the ability to create real value will always remain vital.
So, focus on doing great work. That’s it.
Displaying impact makes people trust you, which expands your influence. In turn, influence and trust enable you to take on bigger responsibilities, which enable even higher impact, in a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle.
Chasing impact is healthy for two main reasons:
⚔️ It challenges your comfort zone — higher impact usually means more ambitious initiatives. As long as you go after bigger things, your growth is less likely to stagnate.
🎯 It treats your skills as a means to an end — skills are meant to increase your leverage. As long as you frame them this way, you will likely make the right calls about what you want to learn. E.g. you will likely embrace AI (to chase higher leverage) instead of being afraid of it.
So, it’s great to want to improve your skills, but always ask yourself: how does this help to create more value? That is, what skills enable impact? Let’s talk about autonomy, ownership, and the infamous T shape 👇
🎨 Generalists vs specialists
Maybe this is a bias from my time as a founder, but I strongly believe in chasing ample autonomy in any job you have. High autonomy creates ownership, which in turn amplifies impact.
I have found that autonomy is enabled by two factors:
🔨 Adequate skills — e.g. as a developer, being proficient on the whole stack so that you can own features from top to bottom.
❤️ Healthy culture — a working process where people are given the opportunity to own meaningful tasks.
So, I am a believer in chasing full-stack experiences, especially early in your career. When I say full-stack, it’s not just about the tech — it’s about doing more, like:
Making meaningful decisions about the product
Talking with customers
Being on-call for your code
Collaborating with designers
Going wide early in your career has fantastic benefits:
📈 Efficiency — for most skills, Pareto applies: you can go from 0 to 80 in just a few years, and then it takes 10+ years to get from 80 to 100. So it’s a better deal to build a few 80s first, before committing to 100%-ing one.
➡️ Direction — getting in touch with different things helps you figure out what you really enjoy and want to get better at. You develop a more balanced perspective and avoid bias.
🔑 No lock-in — when you specialize too early in something, you risk getting cornered into a local optimum that is difficult to escape. You have all your eggs in one basket, which also makes you less resilient to changes in the industry.
I got stuck for a long time as a PHP contract developer because the market was so hot and in the UK the tax treatment very favourable for contract vs permanent, but I always knew I wanted to get back into management, having led a team at a startup back in 2011-12. But it was never financially worthwhile! It was only Brexit + BoJo's November election + IR35 changes that killed the contract market dead long enough I felt I had to get a perm job. I'm not sure what the lesson is here; I was definitely stagnating in my last couple of dev jobs and it really turned out to be a boon to be forced to change.
— Kendrick Curtis — VP of Technology at Codacy
So, if to you this seems like an ode to generalists, it kind of is, especially in your early years.
To build your own T shape, it is more effective to go after the horizontal leg before the vertical one, which also informs you on which vertical leg to build later.
So what jobs should you chase for this?