Uh-oh, software engineer posting on his semi-defunct blog for the first time in nearly two years. What’s wrong?
I read a book last year called The Staff Engineer’s Path, by Tanya Reilly.
It’s a pleasant enough read though hardly earth-shattering in what it illuminated as it’s all pretty common yet good advice. I guess the advantage is in how it is structured – for example sections on leading big projects, or influencing others – though I’ve read it in full, I suspect I will be coming back to it during my career.
I don’t think I’m too far away from being a staff engineer, plus the project I’ve been on for the last two years is a nicely rounded piece of software. Oh and marry that with being in the middle of a 3 month spell off the booze and the usual new year new me thinking, means I am wondering what (and when) my next step is.
And therefore I am going back to The Staff Engineer’s Path book already – I don’t have a clear destination, or even a clear next step in my career – and one suggestion in the book is to define what is important to me in my engineering career.
So this is an attempt at so.
- Financial security. I think we can all see the giant AI monster in the distance, and whilst my suspicion is that engineering is just changing and the demand for engineers will be roughly what it is now in 5 years time, it does also feel a tad ominous and maybe one should be more prudent with savings. There are multiple reasons why I’ve been at M&S for 6.5 years now – my appreciation of stability is one factor.
- Learning. One motto for me could be “never stop learning”. One of the main reasons why I find engineering so fascinating is that it is ever-evolving, and we have to continue to learn to keep up with modern standards. Being able to learn something new is key to my enjoyment of work – ideally I’d like to work with super knowledgeable staff/principle engineers who can enhance my thinking/planning.
It’s also no co-incidence that a lot of my spare time away from work is spent in some kind of learning mode, whether that being reading about stock markets to improve my investment selections (going well thanks!), time on Duolingo learning Spanish (peudo hablar suficiente para un conversacion basico en Español) or, erm, doing more engineering – I’m currently trying to build my first ever API.
I’m not sure whether this means I should jump into a b/e role, or heck even something more AI-adjacent because I really love f/e problems, but I have also enjoyed doing more infrastructure-ish stuff over the last year so maybe. Then again, do I really want to go from expert to non-expert in a field? - Teaching/mentoring. As much as I love learning, I also really find teaching/mentoring satisfying. Not something I really get to do in my current role. I was once a mentor for a graduate and that was great – apparently I was pretty cool at it, so I heard.
- Interesting product. I wouldn’t say this is the most key thing ever, but working on a product that you can understand the importance of, or even be interested in using, is quite appealing. I’m not sure I’d want to work on a platform instead of a product – though again, it could be a valuable different step in my career.
- Fun! Yet challenging. Do I need to expand on this? Most people know what fun is and what a challenge is…I feel like I need both to sustain a good level of motivation.
- Changing the world. Well I’m old enough to remember the utopian days when tech was going to save the world, spread information, democracy and freedom across the world – solving all the problems of humanity, and now we have a handful of Big Tech companies with vast troves of data, in bed with authoritarian governments across the world, making huge profits from our data whilst being run by some pretty ghastly people. Yeah…
I still kind of have the dream/delusion that tech can be a force for good, so at some point in my career I’d like to pursue this, but also know it probably won’t pay so much so it will have to be once I have paid my mortgage off, or something like that. And heck, maybe AI is doing everything by then, and I just go become a charity worker in a hot, sunny country or something.
I’m not sure I’ve changed my career direction by writing this, but I do feel like it’s consolidated in my mind what’s important to me, by spending a couple of hours before work thinking about it.
I still wonder if I need more breadth of experience to get promoted – should I try to become full-stack, should I work on a platform team instead of product, should I become a product engineer…or work on the AI/data side of things more?
All could be useful in my development, but I remain most passionate about the end user experience, and the performance/accessibility side.
