New highlights added February 5, 2025 at 2:20 PM

  • Every company values engineers who ship (i.e., who successfully execute on the company’s plans and goals). The straightforward recipe for this is to successfully lead small projects, which will build a reputation for you to be assigned and deliver on larger projects, and so on until you’re trusted with high-impact work. This means working on things the company prioritizes. If your company has recently pivoted to the enterprise market, you need to be working on enterprise projects. If your company has recently had a slew of embarrassing incidents, you need to be working on availability. (View Highlight)

  • As a staff software engineer, you will be judged by success and failure, not by effort. That’s how senior company managers have always been judged, so they are unlikely to be sympathetic about it. (Incidentally, senior engineers are also judged like this, but many don’t know it.) That means that your projects have to succeed. If you’re technically weak, it’s probably a dealbreaker: projects almost never succeed unless someone bends their will to making it happen. If you want the staff promotion, that person has to be you. (View Highlight)

  • But in my experience, you do not get to staff by being a great mentor or leader. You get to staff by delivering value for the company. (View Highlight)

  • You need to have shipped projects that the company cares about - don’t spend time on your pet projects instead! (View Highlight)


📂 Articles | Последнее изменение: 05.02.2025 14:20