I mentor half a dozen engineering leaders. Half of them have very specific career goals they are looking to achieve and the other half are tremendous leaders who just want to have feedback on their growth.
I have observed some patterns of career growth over twenty years of managing and leading people. I do not know if these things are universal truths or if there are textbook studies that confirm or deny these things but I want to talk about transformative career opportunities and how to find them or create them.
You will have more growth opportunities and a faster career trajectory at a smaller company. There are many reasons for this. Larger companies generally have an established hierarchy and existing engineering leadership at the top. The existing engineering leadership has an obligation to help you grow professionally. They also have their own jobs and careers to think about. If you are an exceptional engineer who learns quickly, you might run into a ceiling because there is no room for you at the table due to scarce thinkers in leadership, or just due to the need to follow career growth processes which often include time in role. I have found several talented engineering leaders who were “stuck” in this situation. Most of the hard problems might already be solved at a large company. The ability to build a large scalable system is different from the ability to add features to a large scalable system. Every once in a while you will get the opportunity to participate in a refactor or rewrite but these opportunities are few and far between.
Growth opportunities in smaller companies vary from organization to organization and there are some things to look out for. If the business is growing, then the engineering organization will need to scale up to suit. If the business is not growing and the products are largely the same year-over-year, then there is no need to grow the team and generally there is no need for people to develop “next level” skill sets.
So what do you do if you do not have a transformative career opportunity at work?
There are a couple of things you can do.
Change employers – If you have spent two or more years at a company and it is not clear what your growth opportunities are, you might want to hit the reset button. I will confess I did this too much early in my career and if you are like me, you might have to spend fifteen minutes in every job interview explaining that.
Change teams – Sometimes there are different organizations within your own company that present career growth opportunities. There are rules about how to switch teams in most companies and you should certainly talk to your manager prior to getting too committed to changing teams. That might even be the catalyst for your manager to find something that will enable you to grow in your current role!
Join an internal committee – You may have internal technology groups or task forces that exist at your company. Many companies have different groups for managing the state of their platform, or have mentorship groups dedicated towards cross-team learning and promoting growth. Getting involved in one of these shows you are dedicated to your employer and should help you get visibility for growth opportunities!
Join an open source movement – If you are not able to find a new opportunity then you can also consider contributing to an open source movement. There are a lot of projects out there and some of them need help. I have seen a number of engineers grow professionally by doing this and I approve of it. It is not something I have done myself but it bears mentioning because I have hired people with strong open source contributions.
Write your own software – I will start by adding a caveat that some companies and jurisdictions have rules against this. I think that is unfortunate and if you feel like you want to write your own software, then I would recommend moving to a new location or changing jobs to give you the opportunity to do this. This is the thing I do the most. I have written a significant number of independent projects. Some of them have even launched! You learn quite a bit through the end-to-end software development cycle and this is one of the things I look for in a resume.
Do a consulting gig – The previous warning on companies and jurisdictions applies here. If you do not have any big ideas of your own, you can always find someone who needs urgent help or discounted labor because they cannot hire an entire engineering team. You can help someone build a prototype or repair an existing system to get some professional leverage and get paid for it at the same time! If someone does not have a large budget, you can always discuss equity in the project or ownership of the code. The latter is valuable if you want to use the code in the process of looking for more opportunities as a demonstration of your skills.
You might notice that all of these things sound hard or time consuming. This is true. Growing professionally is easy at first and after a certain point the number of professional openings at the next level decreases. You can always sit around and wait for that opportunity to appear in your current job. The problem with that approach is that you might find someone who has made more of a time investment into their career growth. You might get passed over by someone who is demonstrating that they want it more through some of the items above. Your recourse at that point will be to look for that next-level role elsewhere, with the understanding that if you have spent multiple years in your current role, you might only be eligible for career sidegrades instead of career upgrades. I caution people against doing this. Which brings us to the last thing you can do.
Retain a mentor – Hello and welcome to the sales pitch! If you are struggling with any of the above things and want to grow professionally, then you should consider finding a mentor. Some companies will have a Mentor Program. Some companies will give you a learning and development budget to hire a mentor. If neither of these things are true then there are some people out there who mentor out of the kindness of their heart for free. If none of those things are true for you, there are a dozen or so places you can go, present company included, to hire a mentor at whatever frequency makes sense for you at whatever price is affordable. You do not have to figure this stuff out alone!
So there it is! No begging for Amazon nickels this week. I have zero billion of those already. I have some limited capacity for new mentees and I am happy to spend an hour or two discussing it with you as a courtesy. That is right. If you are willing to give this car a test drive, you might be able to drive it home today. I always tell people I am willing to spend a few hours a year with them for free and any time after that is stealing time from my children. They are open to bribes and if you need to meet quarterly or monthly (or even weekly) then let’s talk Hard Cash Money. I don’t even need to go in the back to talk to my manager—I can either help you or I can’t.
