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! 👇