Will Larson (@Lethain) has written two books (An Elegant Puzzle & Staff Engineer) & many articles about Career Growth for Engineering Leaders. I have read all of them!
Below are his Best Pieces of Advice for a Remarkable Forty-Year Career in Tech.
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1️⃣ Collect People. Not Jobs, Companies, or Frameworks.
Collect People? WTF?
Jobs don't last forever, but your career and the people around you in the industry do.
It's uniquely valuable to start to reflect & collect people you admire and genuinely love to work with.
2️⃣ Stay longer at places where people get you.
Move quicker out of places where people don't get you and where you are wasting a lot of your energy and are mostly accumulating frustrations.
Learn what you can learn everywhere you go, but don't stay where you aren't valued.
3️⃣ Be Self-conscious about your Weaknesses, Real Experiences, and Limitations.
Don't confuse theoretical knowledge with practical experience.
You want to get hired for what you can actually do.
If you oversell yourself too much, you're setting yourself up for failure.
4️⃣ Always have a Portfolio of Options for your next move.
Generally, you should consider a portfolio of options and pick among them rather than comparing your current situation and a new one in isolation.
5️⃣ Build a Reservoir of Prestige.
Even if you enter the industry without much prestige, this is something you can deliberately build over time by working at increasingly well-respected companies, writing online, maintaining relationships, and speaking at conferences.
6️⃣ Be discoverable.
Heavily invest on your Personal Branding and Online Presence after 10+ years.
Getting access to most exceptionally interesting jobs depends on first being widely discoverable.
7️⃣ Don’t stay comfortable for too long.
Growth compounds and stagnation too.
If you stay somewhere that you’re very comfortable for too long, then you’re missing out on so much future growth.
Push yourself to change jobs every 3 years during the first ~10 years of your career.