Being good isn’t enough
Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one could be rubbish for another.
Or maybe it’s that “good advice” itself is fuzzy. It depends entirely on the person receiving it. For some people it means finding work they love. For others it’s about meaning. For many it’s just getting promoted. Still, here’s what I usually say.
You have to be good at the technical work first, whatever that means for you. It’s the thing you were hired for and this has to be your first priority. And the better you are, the further this can take you. You write better code, or better reports, or better designs, and people notice. That’s enough for a while.
But eventually it’s not. Everyone around you is technically strong too. So for most of us, you won’t stand out anymore. You need to increase your impact in other ways.
The biggest gains come from combining disciplines. There are four that show up everywhere: technical skill, product thinking, project execution, and people skills. And the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to contribute to each.
Technical skill is your chosen craft. Product thinking is knowing what’s worth doing. Project execution is making sure it happens. People skills are how you work with and influence others.
Every successful effort needs all four. Try to imagine an endeavor that wouldn’t benefit from improving in these areas. I can’t think of one. If you squint, together they mean one thing: making stuff that matters actually happen. That’s how you increase your impact.
You’ll naturally pick them up over time, but slowly. You can go faster if you push yourself.
This is harder than it sounds because the less competent we are at something, the more likely we are to overestimate ourselves. It’s easy to think you’re working on what matters, or that you’re doing great technical work, but that might not be true. So how do you find your weaknesses?
I’m pretty confident you only need two things. Feedback and humility, and they work best together. Feedback shows you what to work on, and humility lets you actually hear it.
So find your weakest discipline and work on that. The fastest way is to get feedback from someone you admire and then act on it. Don’t wait for the perfect plan, doing something is almost always better than doing nothing.
Find a mentor, be a mentor. Lead a project, propose one. Do the work, present it. Create spaces for others to do the same. Do whatever it takes to get better.
And do it in the open. A common mistake is assuming work speaks for itself. It rarely does.
But all of this requires maybe the most important thing of all: agency. It’s more powerful than smarts or credentials or luck. And the best part is you can literally just choose to be high-agency. High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait. And if you want to progress, you can’t wait.
This advice is like any other, fuzzy. But it does go further than simply “work harder”. It will take work and it will be hard, but it might be the difference between effort and progress.
And in the long run, the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.
References / Related reading
The Staff Engineers Path by Tanya Reilly heavily shaped my views. I read it every year.
Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen